In a very short time,... several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide.
M AO Z EDONG
The Agrarian Question in Marx
and his Successors
VOLUME II
The Agrarian
Question in
Marx and his
Successors
VOLUME II
Edited by Utsa Patnaik
Print edition first published in October 2011
E-book published in March 2017
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This selection 2011, LeftWord Books
Introduction 2011, Utsa Patnaik
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Contents
Utsa Patnaik ,
V.I. Lenin ,
V.I. Lenin ,
V.I. Lenin ,
V.I. Lenin ,
V.I. Lenin ,
Rosa Luxemburg ,
Rosa Luxemburg ,
Mao Zedong ,
Mao Zedong ,
V.I. Lenin ,
V.I. Lenin ,
The twentieth century was a century of revolutions which permanently altered the trajectory of future development of a large segment of human societies. In these revolutions the peasantry had a major, even leading part to play. In two large and populous nations, Russia and China, political movements based on Marxism and proletarian ideology, harnessed the revolutionary energies of the peasantry to overthrow the old regime, end land monopoly and radically refashion agrarian relations, laying the basis for a re-ordering of the entire gamut of social relations. Over a period of just over four decades, starting from 1905 (the first Russian revolution) to 1949 (the victory of the revolution in China), the economic and political map of the world was altered decisively. The basis was created for the first conscious and deliberate experiments with ending capitalist spontaneity, anarchy and inequality in economic and social relations, the first conscious and sustained experiments for establishing an egalitarian social order.
Prolonged and intense debates on the nature of agrarian relations and on the role of the peasantry in relation to the working class, took place in the course of these revolutionary movements. These debates were actuated by the need to theorise the specific class configuration and the class alliances appropriate for achieving the aim not only of overthrowing the old semi-feudal order but of establishing the conditions for transition to a more egalitarian and just society. These debates remain of immense interest because, though grounded in scholarly work, they were not abstract or scholastic but addressed the very concrete and immediate questions of the class nature of the state and the question of who were the friends and who the enemies of the revolutionary movement. This question in turn was linked closely to the analysis of the trend of development of capitalist relations and the assessment regarding the nature of the principal contradiction at a given point of time.
This volume brings together selections from the analysis of the agrarian question in the writings of V.I. Lenin and Mao Zedong. Selections from The Development of Capitalism in Russia , Lenins definitive work, his important tract on The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution ; Mao Zedongs briefer pieces on the peasant movement as it first developed in Hunan, and on how to differentiate classes in rural areas, together form the core of the volume. Extracts from Marxist writings on the national and colonial questions, and on the link between capitalist accumulation and colonial-imperialist exploitation, make up the remainder of the volume.
The volume is divided into two parts. In the of The Development of Capitalism in Russia is reproduced here, for it is an outstanding example of how the theoretical perspective determines statistical analysis. Using the same data sources the Populists did, Lenin showed how their methods of analysis relying on averages obscured the actually existing class reality of an increasingly economically differentiated peasantry and himself used an alternative method to bring out this class reality.
The also includes extracts from the first two chapters of Lenins Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution (1907), written after the first revolution of 1905 in which the peasantry seized landlord estates over large tracts of European Russia. This extremely important piece of writing started by summarizing the data on the highly concentrated structure of landholding, extended Marxs important concept of the two paths to capitalism to the Russian situation, and on that theoretical basis discussed the nature of the re-distribution which should take place in the light of the demands of the peasantry, favouring nationalisation over division of the land. After the experience of the first 1917 revolution in Russia, however, Lenins assessment in this regard changed and the agrarian programme of the Social-Democrats was altered correspondingly, from land nationalisation to land redistribution.
The of the volume brings together important post-revolution writings including Lenins Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question and his Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions , both presented to the second congress of the Comintern in 1920, at which the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy had presented his controversial decolonisation thesis. The Preliminary Draft Theses discuss the criteria for identifying classes among the rural land-owning population and is usefully read in conjunction with Mao Zedongs How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas which introduced specific modifications appropriate for the Chinese conjuncture.
Mao Zedongs historic essay on the peasant movement in Hunan is included in the of the volume, as are extracts from the two chapters of Rosa Luxemburgs The Accumulation of Capital , describing the Opium wars and the colonial exploitation of India and Algeria.
In what follows I will take up some of the important themes which emerge from a study of the documents included in this volume, and end with a discussion of the specific impact of the present phase of neo-imperialism driven by global finance on the agrarian question and the peasantry.
1. The Prelude: Agrarian Structure and Class Differentiation in the Pre-revolutionary Era
At the beginning of the twentieth century most nations were characterised by widespread petty production of peasants and artisans. Only a handful of west European countries had made the transition to capitalist industrialisation, with their rural population dwindling to a minor share of the total, and with the dominant production form being on a capitalist basis using wage labour and modern technology. The abolition of slave run plantations in the USA was less than four decades old. It was confidently held by scholars in the industrial centres that sooner or later, all other more backward countries were destined to follow the path of what was to be called modern economic growth in which the primary sector would account over time for a smaller and smaller share of both national employment and of output, as the transition of working population took place to industries and later to services. In this nave view there was a linear path of development which all countries would necessarily follow.
