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From International Socialism (1st series), No.51, April-June 1972, p.33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century
Eric R Wolff
Faber and Faber, £3
This book is an ‘account of peasant involvement in six cases of rebellion and revolution’ in the 20th Century. These range from the Mexican and Russian to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerian and Cuban revolutions. Each case history is comprehensive, though based entirely on secondary sources. Together they present the picture of a relatively stable world of rural communities in disintegration under the double pressure of expanding latifundia and the penetration of the world market; of the massive social and economic distortions engendered by the predominance of a single industry geared to the world market – Cuban sugar, Algerian wine, Vietnamese rubber – and controlled by foreign interests; and the emergence of new classes and new political parties linked to them. In the conclusion Wolf argues that the expansion of capitalism on a world scale, by everywhere undermining the traditional social forms and mechanisms which sheltered the peasantry from ‘risks’, drove it into a series of defensive reactions which fused into broader political movements based initially on ‘marginal’ groups such as ‘rootless’ intellectuals. More specifically, it was the ‘middle’ peasantry which suffered most from the encroachment of the market and the disruption of established pattern of landownership and power, and they and the ‘free’ peasants in areas remote from central control constituted the ‘pivotal groupings for peasant uprisings’.
Wolf does not however argue for the latter thesis in detail; one or two citations chosen at random are usually considered enough to establish the case. But it is doubtful that a large ‘middle peasantry’ ever existed in pre-revolutionary Mexico. In the Russian case, Lenin saw the middle peasants as a class to be neutralised rather than firmly relied upon, and in Vietnam in 1945 the majority (61.5%) of the peasants were landless. Again, the distinction between poor and landless peasants is never clearly defined, while landless agricultural labourers are simply defined out of existence; ‘a rural proletariat is not a peasantry’. Formally, no doubt, this is correct, but relations of production always present a historical complexity which simple schematic definitions inevitably avoid. Linked to this is a question Wolf nowhere considers. The massive expropriation of peasants throughout the ‘third world’ resulted in the formation of a class of landless producers forced into wage-labour relationships and thus forced to engage in forms of struggle more typical in some ways of the cities. Has this made the traditional image of the peasantry as a class defined by passivity, inertia, conservatism and self-centredness historically redundant?
If this question is not within the scope of his analysis, neither apparently is the problem of class-consciousness; at least the basic contrasts between peasants and workers are nowhere sharply defined. The conclusion of the book leaves you with the impression that the history of the Cuban and Chinese revolutions was primarily a matter of political and technical skills, and had nothing to do with the role of the working class and its relationship to the state and economy. Stalinism is therefore seen simply as the effect of certain ideological positions (p.300). These criticisms may distort the emphasis of Wolf’s book, but they at least point to the need for a far more rigorous marxist approach to the ‘peasant question’. As it is, the vacuum is filled by bourgeois sociological theory on the one hand, and theoretical ambiguity on the other.
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