5 The Agrarian Question

To understand fully the role of the peasants as a class, it is imperative to have a clear view of the economic and political contours of the countryside in the Russian empire in the pre-revolutionary years. All such investigations require attention to the writings of Vladimir Lenin. Political economy was a key component of Lenin’s epistemology, and central to this political economy were analyses of dynamics in the countryside. According to Tamás Krausz, Lenin’s early works “expose the Russian illusions concerning small-holder peasant agriculture.”1 This was clearly still the case in 1907, where in an analysis of Russian agriculture, Lenin wrote:

Not only is landlordism in Russia medieval, but so also is the peasant allotment system. The latter is incredibly complicated. It splits the peasantry up into thousands of small units, medieval groups, social categories. It reflects the age-old history of arrogant interference in the peasants’ agrarian relationships both by the central government and the local authorities. It drives the peasants, as into a ghetto, into petty medieval associations of a fiscal, tax-levying nature, into associations for the ownership of allotment land, i.e., into the village communes.2

Here, Lenin condemns as medieval not only large, privately owned estates but also the village communes, which are described as “petty medieval associations.” Yet the overwhelming trend in his analysis would be to regard the peasants as “petit bourgeois.” This chapter will provide evidence to show that the latter characterization was quite misleading and would have serious consequences both for the peasants and for post-revolutionary Russia overall.

The Patriarchal Commune

The key institution in the countryside was the mir, or obshchina—two roughly synonymous terms both generally translated as “commune.” A centuries-old institution, the mir had acquired a new role in the wake of the Manifesto of 1861, which formally abolished serfdom and granted former serfs some of the rights of other citizens. Ex-serfs received land through emancipation, but the mir was responsible for allotting strips of land to individual peasant families and, crucially, also responsible for the enormous debt incurred after the transfer of land from nobility to former serfs. Because of this impossibly burdensome debt, the peasants, while legally free, were in fact tied to the land almost to the same extent as they had been before the abolition of serfdom. Their labour was owed to the commune, and this labour was also controlled by the commune—or, more precisely, by the patriarchal village assembly, which controlled everything. The endless cycle of debt meant that there was no incentive for the individual peasant to increase the productivity of labour. It was a life of eternal toil with no possibility of eventual reward.

Rosa Luxemburg clearly understood the manner in which this patriarchal institutional structure enforced economic underdevelopment in the Russian countryside. Citing a statistic from the 1890s, she noted that “70 percent of the peasantry drew less than a minimum existence from their land allotments, 20 percent were able to feed themselves, but not to keep livestock, while only 9 percent had a surplus above their own needs that could be taken to market.”3 Her point was later echoed by Edward Carr: “By far the largest part of the population was engaged in near-subsistence farming, producing food crops primarily for its own consumption and for the satisfaction of its immediate obligations to some superior authority.”4

Without question the mir was economically reactionary. Rosa Luxemburg describes membership in the village commune—the “mark community” (Markgenossenschaft), to use her term—as “an iron chain of hunger around the necks of the peasants.” But it was also politically reactionary. Many poorer members of the mir attempted to escape from their bondage, with sometimes brutal consequences. “Hundreds of fugitives were returned by the police to their communities as undocumented vagabonds,” Luxemburg writes, “then made an example of by being beaten on a bench with rods by their mark comrades. But even the rods and the enforcement of passport controls proved powerless against the mass flight of the peasants, who fled from the hell of their ‘village communism’ to the city.”5

Lenin was acutely aware of these structures of exploitation and oppression, and he consistently opposed the “utopian” trend within Russian socialism popularized by the Narodniks, who romanticized the mir as somehow capable of providing a jumping-off point for postcapitalist communist production.6 As Krausz observes, “Lenin connected the features of the world market—today it would be called globalization—with the demise of traditional forms of village community.”7 In his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, published in 1899 (with a second edition following in 1908), Lenin forecast a dim future for the mir:

Agricultural capitalism is taking another, enormous step forward; it is boundlessly expanding the commercial production of agricultural produce and drawing a number of new countries into the world arena; it is driving patriarchal agriculture out of its last refuges, such as India or Russia; it is creating something hitherto unknown to agriculture, namely, the purely industrial production of grain, based on the co-operation of masses of workers equipped with the most up-to-date machinery.8

But if Lenin’s critique of the feudal character of the commune was clear enough, his prognosis as to its future proved abstract and unrealistic. He considerably overestimated the speed with which this traditional socioeconomic system could make the transition to modern production techniques. He was telescoping historical processes into a foreshortened time frame, a limitation that his analysis, on this point, shared with that of Luxemburg. She also anticipated the relatively rapid disappearance of the mir, but, as Peter Hudis points out, she was “considerably overstating the case … since the mir hardly went out of existence by the time of the end of the 1905 Revolution. Not only did it still exist, in some respects it rebounded in strength immediately following the 1917 Revolution.”9

Krausz clearly outlines the stubborn survival of the patriarchal mir, noting that “the imperialist world war … had thrown the already weakened institutions and structures of social solidarity into disarray, breaking the moral checks on murderous instincts and allowing the ‘obshchina revolution’ to spread quickly, mediated by the armed peasant soldier in the ranks.”10 The term “obshchina revolution” is one that Krausz borrows from Vladimir Buharayev to describe the land seizures that occurred during the 1917 revolution. In Buharayev’s description, the obshchina community was “pitiless toward anyone who did not use land for its traditional, natural purposes but expected income from it, whether merchants, banks or those who did not cultivate their land themselves.”11 In other words, it is not sufficient to simply say that peasants seized the land in 1917; rather, the peasants who seized the land did so not for themselves as individuals, but in the name of the mir, their actions serving to reassert its dominance. Those peasants who, laying claim to their individual identity, had managed to escape the mir and establish independent family farms were pulled back into the mir, their land expropriated along with that of the large landlords.

Krausz also outlines Lenin’s expectation of the relentless dissolution of the mir under the impact of the insertion of Russia into the world capitalist market. He mentions that this did not happen and that, in fact, the 1917 revolution temporarily strengthened the mir. But he doesn’t link these two contradictory points—the expectation of the end of the mir versus the reality of its stubborn survival and even post-1917 strengthening. He notes, without critical commentary, that Lenin saw only two possible paths to capitalist development in the Russian countryside: the “Prussian” path leading to “big landlord economies,” with large landowners hiring rural wage-labourers, and the “American” path of “small peasant economies,” in which landed estates would be replaced by individually owned and operated family farms, with rural wage-labour playing a minor role.12 With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that neither of the two paths envisioned by the young Lenin were taken. It was the very Russian mir that proved relatively impervious to either Prussian landlordism or the American family farm. He overestimated the extent to which insertion in the world economy would lead to change in the Russian countryside. The core institution of the countryside—the traditional patriarchal commune—would prove deeply resistant both to the inroads of capitalism and to workers’ revolution, posing almost insoluble problems in the coming decades. Petr Stolypin, the prime minister in tsarist Russia from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, tried to encourage the American path, but his experiment was cut short by war and revolution. Lenin, after the revolution, would assume that the Stolypin experiment had opened up the Prussian path, seeing the kulaks as the “big peasants” of his youthful analysis. The reality in the countryside was very different. By the end of the Great War—and certainly by the end of the Civil War—the destruction of life in the countryside had been so thorough that kulaks, understood as a class of rich peasants, had basically ceased to exist.

Petty Producers and the Family Farm

The foundation for all of Lenin’s subsequent theorization of the peasantry was laid in The Development of Capitalism in Russia and in related writings from the same era.13 In these early works, Lenin sketched out a schematic political economy with an unrealistic “class against class” projection about the future evolution of agrarian relations in the countryside. This schematic political economy later became encapsulated in Lenin’s practice of using the term “petit-bourgeois” to describe agrarian labour in the Russian empire of Lenin’s time and to capture the essence of the Russian experience. Given the overwhelming weight of the peasantry in the Russian population, it was just a small step to calling Russia itself “petit-bourgeois,” which he did on various occasions, stating: in 1913, Russia is “one of the most petit-bourgeois countries”; in 1914, “Russia out of all the capitalist countries is one of the most backward, most petit-bourgeois”; and in 1917, “Russia is the most petit-bourgeois of all European countries.”14

Bertram Wolfe suggests that “Russian Marxists, both Bolshevik and Menshevik, tended to view the peasantry with strong reserve as a backward, property-loving, potentially hostile ‘petty bourgeoisie.’”15 Wolfe goes on to identify a profound gulf between the urban left analyzing the peasantry and the peasants themselves: “Most Social Democrats knew so little about the countryside that the issues eluded them. Most Bolsheviks, too, faced the muzhik [peasant] with ignorance, and a vague, unconscious dread, or with contempt, enclosed in the formula, ‘property-minded, petit-bourgeois.’”16

But how well did that formula—“property-minded, petit-bourgeois”—actually describe the Russian peasantry? In the examples from Lenin provided above, “petit-bourgeois” is my translation from the Russian. In all three cases, the translators of Lenin: Collected Works (the standard English edition) have instead used “petty bourgeois.”17 Throughout LCW, the translators sometimes deploy “petit” and other times “petty” as the modifier for “bourgeois” when translating melkoburzhuaznyi and meshchanskaia.18 While both translations are linguistically acceptable, “petit-bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” are by no means equivalent from the standpoint of political economy. In its most typical usage, the latter word, “petty,” signifies “small” in the sense of trivial or unimportant. The former word, “petit,” like the “bourgeois” adopted from the French language, very precisely signifies “small” in the sense of “little” and small in size, which is exactly the sense in which the term is employed in political economy—to identify those who engage in production of commodities for sale in the market (hence capitalist or bourgeois), but who do so on a small or restricted scale (hence little or “petit”). That it was the latter meaning—petit bourgeois capitalism understood as small-scale capitalism—that Lenin had in mind is made clear in a major work written in May 1917, where he wrote: “Millions and tens of millions … have awakened and reached out for politics. And who are these millions and tens of millions? For the most part, small-scale proprietors, small-scale bourgeois, people standing in the middle between the capitalists and the wage workers.”19

But if that was the formal intent when employing the term petit-bourgeois—to precisely identify the “small capitalist” nature of life in the countryside—the term was often used by many, including Lenin himself, in a very imprecise manner—to develop not a point of political economy emphasizing the position of peasants in relation to capital accumulation, but a sociological one emphasizing the narrow basis of the peasant economy. Put another way, the English-language translators of Lenin’s Collected Works were not entirely imprecise in choosing the term petty on occasion. It was a sloppy translation choice that directly paralleled a sloppy method in political-economic analysis that was employed by many, Lenin among them, when they used either “petty bourgeois” or “petit bourgeois” not as a scientifically grounded category describing a small accumulator of capital (“property-minded, petit-bourgeois”), but rather as a sociological description of someone whose scale of production is “petty”—that is, trivial and unimportant.

This was by no means an imprecision peculiar to Lenin. Iulii Martov in 1917 was expressing a widely held view that “non-proletarian revolutionary democracy” was the political expression of “the urban and rural petit bourgeoisie,” with it understood that the latter (sel’skaia melkaia burzhuaziia) was a perfectly accurate descriptor for the Russian peasantry.20 But again, that section of the Russian peasantry who toiled in the communes—the majority of those in the Russian empire, the vast majority in Russia itself—could in no way merit the “bourgeois” half of the label. Their production was not for the market. It was production to keep body and soul together. They only episodically intersected with the capitalist market forces that could have allowed them to “qualify” as petit-bourgeois producers. Perhaps their labour was “petty.” It was not “petit-bourgeois” in any political economy sense.

Karl Radek, in 1922, provided a classic example of this elision between a quasi-scientific category and sociological description when he talked about “the peasants” first as “petty producers of goods” and then, without transition, as “petit-bourgeois.”21 These two categories—petty producer and petit-bourgeois—are by no means identical. If the “petty” labour being engaged in is constantly reduced to subsistence labour—as was the case for the vast majority of Russia’s peasants trapped in the prison of the mir—then the word “petty” plays merely a descriptive role and is in no way a “scientific” description of the petit-bourgeois or small capitalist. If small-scale, or “petty,” production consistently only produces enough for the producers to subsist, then that labour can in no way be called small capitalist—petit-bourgeois. Without the market, products of labour are not commodities for sale—that is, if products of labour are not transformed into commodities through being put on the market, then the labour that produces them absolutely cannot be categorized as “small capitalist.”

Lenin was not consistent in his use of the term petit-bourgeois. In 1904, in his pivotal One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, while describing what he sees as the petit-bourgeois nature of the intelligentsia, he, in an offhand way, defines “the conditions of petit-bourgeois existence” in general as equivalent to “working in isolation or in very small workplaces, etc.”22 This repeats the error of Radek outlined above. The key is not working in isolation or in a small workplace, but doing so in the context of capital accumulation—i.e., while oriented to the market. He does make precisely this distinction in May 1918, in the near aftermath of the revolution, distinguishing the class of small-scale rural capitalists from those engaged in “natural, peasant farming” in the patriarchal context of the mir. He goes on to argue: “It is clear that in a small-peasant country the petit-bourgeois element predominates and cannot help but predominate; most, the vast majority of farmers, are small commodity producers.”23 Here, his analysis in the abstract is clear and precise, but his attempt at a concrete assessment of the state of the countryside is wide of the mark. In fact, it was quite clear that small-scale production for the market did not dominate the Russian countryside of 1918.

Implicit in Lenin’s use of both “petit-bourgeois” (small capitalist) to designate the class position of the peasantry and “commodity” to designate the products of their labour is an assumption that “small capitalism”—the small-scale production of goods (commodities) for the market—predominated in the Russia of his day. The problem confronting the Russian countryside in 1918 was precisely the relative absence of a class of “small capitalists”—a petit-bourgeois class. Overwhelmingly, production remained dominated not by small, market-oriented (petit-bourgeois) family farms but by the patriarchal mir, where the local ruling elite, consisting of the male heads of households, was intent not on maximizing production through an increase in the productivity of labour but rather on the protection of petty privileges that stemmed from their right to divide and distribute the land cultivated by the mir.

There were exceptions to this picture. The dominant role of the mir was characteristic of Russia proper (what would later become the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic or RSFSR). As Carr writes: “Once the peasants … had broken up the Stolypin holdings and flocked back into the mir, an overwhelming proportion of agricultural land in the RSFSR—as much as 98 per cent in some provinces—was held in this form of tenure, and subject to periodical redistribution.”24 The same was not true in many of the eastern European regions to which Russia laid claim. In what was then Byelorussia (today Belarus), “the mir was virtually non-existent, and in the Ukraine west of Dnieper it was weak.”25 These peripheral areas did have a large class of family farmers—the “petit-bourgeois element” of Lenin’s analysis—that was better able to survive the upheavals of 1917. In Russia itself, however, these farmers were by far the exception rather than the rule.

The characterization of the peasantry as “petit-bourgeois” would have made sense had the schema of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia been accurate and had the patriarchal mir in fact been replaced by family farming—the quintessential rural institution of the small-capitalist or petit-bourgeois farmer. However, as we have seen, so tenacious was the mir as an institution in the countryside that it took state intervention from Stolypin to protect and encourage the development of a new class of petit-bourgeois family farmers. Prior to the outbreak of war, this new class was increasing in size, but still remained in the shadow of the much larger class working on the commune. With the outbreak of war, the process of transitioning to small-scale family farming was slowed considerably, and then entirely reversed in 1917, when the “land to the peasants” revolution meant the seizure, by a temporarily reinvigorated patriarchal mir, of both landlord-controlled farms and petit-bourgeois-controlled family farms.

This is complex territory. Stolypin’s reforms did find a hearing in the Russian peasantry and did begin a process of the dissolution of the mir and the emergence of a mass class of family farmers. As Donald Treadgold observes:

The policy of his Government, in his own words, had “for its one object, the establishment of small individual property in land,” the destruction of the commune and the foundation of an economic system of free enterprise in rural Russia. As his daughter writes in her memoirs: “The abolition of communal land tenure and the resettlement of the peasants on homesteads (na khutora) was the dream of my father from the time of his youth. In this change he saw the principal security of the future happiness of Russia. To make every peasant a proprietor and give him the chance to work quietly on his own land, for himself, this must enrich the peasantry.”26

According to George Tokmakoff, “a Soviet agrarian expert stated in 1918 that the yearning for a khutor was a characteristic inclination of peasants in many parts of the country on the eve of the 1917 Revolution.”27

Regarding the progress achieved by government reforms, Leonid Strakhovsky quotes Stolypin’s comments to the State Council in March 1910: “During the three years that the provisions of this law have been in operation, i.e., up to 1 February 1910, over 1,700,000 heads of families have declared their desire to obtain their land in private ownership. This represents about 17 per cent of all peasants in village communes.”28 Strakhovsky adds that, by the end of 1914, “nearly two million heads of families enjoyed private land-ownership, while an additional half million had received certificates entitling them to ownership of their communal lots in villages where there had not been a redistribution of land for the last twenty years. All told, this represented over 25 per cent of peasants in village communes.”29 Even the advent of war and the mobilization of millions of peasant lads into the army did not stop this process. “All through the war the movement continued,” writes Wolfe, “so that by January 1, 1916, 6,200,000 families, out of approximately 16,000,000 eligible, had made application for separation.” He goes on to note that “if the same trend had been continued at the same rate, all land would have been owned by individual peasants by 1935 or 1936.”30 In short, Stolypin’s program of reforms clearly made inroads among a sizeable percentage of the rural population.

Earlier, I outlined Lenin’s identification of two potential paths for capitalist farming in Russia: the Prussian path, whereby large landowners hire a wage-labouring rural proletariat, or the American path, the archetype of petit-bourgeois family farming, whereby rural wage-labour plays a marginal role. “Following Lenin,” argues Judith Pallot, Soviet historians “identified in the reform a conscious attempt on the part of Nicholas II’s government to protect the interests of the large landowners by propelling Russia along a Prussian path of agrarian capitalism.”31 Recall, however, that the 1917–18 agrarian revolution was characterized by seizures of land not by peasants as individual proprietors but rather through the mir. It is worth dwelling on this point in some detail. By 1917, Russian peasants formed three principal categories—those working in the mir, those working on the large landlord-owned estates, and those who had taken advantage of the Stolypin reform and worked on individual family farms. Let us look at each in turn.

Those working in the mir might best be characterized not as petit-bourgeois but as semi-feudal. I have already quoted Lenin to this effect, denouncing the village communes as “petty medieval associations of a fiscal, tax-levying nature” (which, interestingly, was at odds with his general characterization of their labour as petit-bourgeois).32 Feudalism is characterized by the control of conditions of work and products of labour by an all-powerful lord. No such lord existed as an individual in the mir, but the heads of households, meeting in assembly, acted as a patriarchal collective substitute for the feudal lord. Hence the characterization of the mir as semi-feudal.

No one would, in the context of actual feudalism, think of calling serfs “petit-bourgeois.” They owned no land, and what they produced was not destined for the market but was used partly for their own subsistence and partly to satisfy the conditions of work dictated by the local landlord. In like manner, no one should consider the peasants working in the mir “petit-bourgeois.” As in the case of serfs, what they produced was similarly used for subsistence and to satisfy the conditions of work, dictated in their case by the local patriarchy-in-assembly. In the patriarchal mir, there was little incentive for or possibility of an increase in the productivity of labour. The tendency was, rather, toward stagnation. Under this economic system—very much the opposite of anything resembling “small capitalist”—very little surplus was available for urban consumption.33

The term patriarchal, however, fits very well, since it captures the power structure ruling the commune—the male heads of households and their cudgels. It was, in fact, the term that Lenin employed in 1918, when he classified the modes of socioeconomic organization that presently existed in Russia, beginning with one he called the “patriarchal, that is, largely natural, peasant farming.”34 Regardless of whether we designate the mir as petty medieval, semi-feudal, or patriarchal, however, the key point in terms of political economy is the fact that it was profoundly resistant to the pressures to increase productivity exerted by the capitalist market. The commune was stagnant and unproductive, a terrible institution on which to rely for the production of surplus agricultural goods as commodities for sale to the hungry cities (and, of course, a terrible institution on which to rely for some “leap” into socialism).

The second category was landlord-controlled farming on large estates—the remnants of the old aristocratic holdings of the serf era—that employed agricultural labourers. Here, the conditions of work were very different from those in the mir. These peasants were agricultural proletarians in a classic sense, their very existence dependent on selling their labour power. In contrast to the mir, the production on these estates was almost entirely oriented toward the market. The landlords required the production and sale of a surplus to sustain their holdings and to accumulate wealth. From the exploitation of these agricultural proletarians, a considerable portion of the food surplus necessary to sustain life in the cities was produced.

The family farms, the great creation of the Stolypin era, accounted for the third category. These family farmers were the one section of the peasantry who were petit-bourgeois in an absolutely classic sense. With ownership of their farm and control over the product of their labour, they had, like the petite bourgeosie everywhere, a huge incentive to increase their production of a surplus for the market. Because the fruits of their labour were theirs to dispose of—crucially, the surplus beyond what was necessary for the sustenance of their family—the more they produced and sold, the more they could accumulate. As George Tokmakoff notes, “private ownership did encourage personal initiative and consequently output.”35 From the family farms, fostered and sustained by Stolypin’s reforms, an increasingly important portion of food for the cities was produced. Tokmakoff provides evidence of this increase in output:

Whereas in 1905, 7,278,000 puds of fertilizer were used, by 1913 this had risen to 34,256,000 puds, a five-fold increase. Mechanization also proceeded swiftly; in 1911 over 12 million rubles were spent on mechanized agricultural machinery, as compared with the nearly 7 million rubles spent in 1907. These figures reflect the government’s drive towards intensive cultivation, as well as the growing feeling on the part of individual families that land might yet prove a good capital investment.36

Leonid Strakhovsky agrees that Stolypin’s agrarian reforms stimulated the increase in production. He quotes Soviet economist S. M. Dubrovsky from his monumental 1925 analysis of Stolypin’s reforms: “Stolypin’s legislation was significant because it was staked not on the mere legalization of capitalist processes in the countryside, but on the forcing of them—that is forcing the conversion of the countryside from an extensive to an intensive agricultural economy.”37 As Dubrovsky further noted: “From 1906 to 1915 the total area of land under cultivation increased by 14 per cent; at the same time the development of productive forces in agriculture was the result not only of the increase in cultivated areas but also of a better productivity of the cultivated land, i.e., an increase in the yield of harvests.”38 Strakhovsky goes on to point out that, between 1900 and 1913, the total value of agricultural production in Russia increased by 79.5 percent. As he concludes: “Truly it was said: ‘One does not know of such a rapid development of agriculture in the history of any European country.’ Its stimulus was Stolypin’s agrarian reform.”39

This process was stalled by the First World War. Earlier, I cited Wolfe saying that applications for separation from the mir continued to increase right up to 1916. But the depopulation of the countryside by the call-up of millions of young men made this desire to acquire independent land holdings difficult if not impossible to implement. The shift toward family farming was then completely rolled back by the agrarian revolution of 1917. The land seizures during that revolution virtually eliminated, in Russia proper, two categories of peasant labour: the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural petite bourgeoisie. The mir, which was in retreat during the years of the Stolypin reform, massively reasserted itself through the bayonets of the millions of peasant-soldiers returning from the trenches. David Mitrany, in a classic 1951 study of Marxism and the agrarian question, provides a concise summary of the process:

The land settlement of the previous decade was wiped out in many parts by the revival of the mir. The total extent of land seized by the communes in 1917–18 for redistribution was put at about 70 million dessiatins (189 mill. acres) from peasants and about 42 mill. dessiatins (114 mill. acres) from large owners. About 4.7 mill. peasant holdings, i.e., about 30.5 per cent of all peasant holdings, were pooled and divided up. The effect of the agrarian revolution, therefore, was in the first place to wipe out all large property, but also and no less to do away with the larger peasant property. In fact, as we have seen, more land was taken away and “pooled” from peasant owners than from large owners, and the levelling and equalizing trend became more marked after October, 1917, and was sanctioned by the law of January, 1918, under which land was socialized.40

Lenin’s attitude to these developments was contradictory. According to Krausz, “Lenin considered Stolypin’s reforms ‘progressive’ for their destruction of the feudal chains and their acceleration of the evolution of capitalism.”41 Krausz could have added the adverb “grudgingly.” In November 1907, just as the Stolypin’s reforms were beginning to be implemented, Lenin described them as “progressive in clearing the way for capitalism,” but immediately added that “it was the kind of progress that no Social-Democrat could bring himself to support.”42 While the reform was economically progressive, Lenin considered it politically reactionary, because in Lenin’s view, Stolypin’s aim was to create a conservative, economically prosperous rural class that could act as a counter-revolutionary buffer in the countryside, a role that such a class had already performed admirably in France and England. Thus, while recognizing the economically progressive potential of Stolypin’s reforms, Lenin condemned his program as politically reactionary.

Let’s look more closely at the analysis Lenin develops. Describing Stolypin’s reforms as “avowedly a landlords’ programme,” Lenin asks:

But can it be said that it is reactionary in the economic sense, i.e., that it precludes, or seeks to preclude, the development of capitalism, to prevent a bourgeois agrarian evolution? Not at all. On the contrary, the famous agrarian legislation introduced by Stolypin under Article 87 is permeated through and through with the purely bourgeois spirit. There can be no doubt that it follows the line of capitalist evolution, facilitates and pushes forward that evolution, hastens the expropriation of the peasantry, the break-up of the village commune, and the creation of a peasant bourgeoisie.43

However, in spite of Stolypin’s reform being “progressive in the scientific-economic sense,” he argues that it cannot be supported. He claims that what it will lead to is “bourgeois evolution of the landlord type.” Such a path “implies the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (remodelled on bourgeois lines), the least rapid development of the productive forces, and the sluggish development of capitalism.” He declares that what must be encouraged is “bourgeois evolution of the peasant type,” which “implies the most rapid development of the productive forces and the best possible (under commodity production) conditions of existence for the mass of the peasantry.”44

As we have seen, these two potential paths were characterized by Lenin as the Prussian way (large-scale landlord farms) and the American way (small-scale family farms):

In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer.45

There is an important historical parallel to this policy. “Forty acres and a mule” was a phrase that, would, in Eric Foner’s words, “echo throughout the south” in the last year of the Civil War in the United States.46 It was shorthand for the policy of breaking up the former slave plantations and redistributing the land to the newly-emancipated former slaves. Too often reduced to a policy implemented by Union Army General William T. Sherman, it in fact emerged as a demand from within the African American community. On 12 January 1865, Sherman met in Savannah Georgia with twenty leaders of the African American community, seeking advice as to how to cope with the tens of thousands of former slaves now crowding the areas in which the Union Army was operating. At that meeting, Baptist minister and former slave Garrison Frazier defined freedom as “‘placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor’” and said that “the best way to accomplish this was ‘to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.’”47 Four days after this meeting, Sherman “issued Special Field Order No. 15,” which set out to implement a version of this policy in parts of South Carolina. This demand was taken up by leaders of what Du Bois called “abolition democracy,”48 among them Thaddeus Stevens, who in September 1865 said that “each adult freedman should be given forty acres which approximately would dispose of about forty million acres.”49 This policy would ultimately fail, crushed by the counter-revolution symbolized by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. But the link with the discussion here is clear—“40 acres and a mule” signifying an attempt to replace mass coerced labour—parallel to, in Russia, replacing the semi-coercion and unproductive reality of the mir with independent, small family farms.

Lenin saw Stolypin’s reforms as leading to a class of wealthy landlord farmers, who he referred to as “Junkers” (an honorific title derived from the German jung Herr, or “young lord”). Lenin was, without question, wrong. The effects of Stolypin’s reform were more in line with “forty acres and a mule” than with Junker landlords. What was beginning to emerge through these reforms was a class of small family farmers—perhaps “petit-bourgeois,” but certainly not Grossbauern. “Stolypin headed in the ‘American’ not the ‘Junker’ direction,” writes Donald Treadgold. “He neither declares for in words, nor provides for in deeds, the strengthening of landlord farming; and the chief authorities do not contest the fact that landlord farming declined more or less rapidly from the emancipation to the revolution.”50 Far from producing a class of Grossbauern, the Stolypin reform aligned more closely with the so-called American path.

Mistaken Theory, Catastrophic Practice

Lenin held on to his misleading understanding of the countryside throughout the years of what has come to be known as “war communism.” According to Alec Nove:

This term is used to describe and define the period roughly from mid-1918 until March 1921, when the Soviet government, under Lenin’s leadership, adopted a policy of requisitioning farm produce (the so-called prodrazvestka), sought to ban all private trade, nationalized almost all industrial establishments and tried to achieve central control over production and allocation of goods, partially replacing money (which was rapidly depreciating) by accounting in kind.51

There is a very big debate about the entire collection of “war communist” policies, taken as a whole. Victor Serge sees the 1918–1921 period extremely positively. He says that the label “war communism” was inaccurate and that those years should really be seen as “the first attempt to organise a socialist society.”52 He cites the work of Lev Kritsman, who says in a provocative 1926 book, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, that those years witnessed “the organisation of the natural economy of the proletariat.”53

Boris Souvarine, Tamás Krausz, and many others see this very differently. They argue that war communism, and the 1918–21 attempt by the state to “force” the country into socialism, was both impossible and extremely costly. Souvarine says that “driven by the desperate necessities of civil war and by the mystical-romantic strain inherited from anarchism,” the Bolsheviks undertook, in the war communist years, to establish socialism “by assault.” The Bolshevik-led state “destroyed all private enterprise, though they could not replace it by popular initiative; they confiscated the product of individual labour before they had created collectivist production,” and went so far as to think, by 1920, “that they could dispense with money.”54 Krausz makes much the same point, saying that Lenin identified the “nationalization and the administrative liquidation of market conditions with the possibilities for the immediate realization of socialism” and “overestimated the possibilities of socialization, of social supervision within the framework of nationalization, and underestimated the inveteracy of the market and money in a regulating role, a fact he later recognized.”55

The task here is not to evaluate the policies of war communism in their totality, but to examine only the first one highlighted by Nove—the policy of “requisitioning farm produce” (prodrazvestka). The profound misunderstanding of the political economy of the countryside in theory opened the door to a catastrophic mistake in practice that fuelled a civil war between the workers in the cities and the peasants in the countryside.

Lenin’s war communism policies were justified—as was Stalin’s forced collectivization policy a decade later—through a demonization of the “kulak.” Addressing the Moscow Soviet in April 1919, Lenin identified the biggest obstacle to the consolidation of communism in Russia as the “anarchy of the petty proprietors, whose life is guided by one thought: ‘I grab all I can—the rest can go hang.’” Lenin labelled these “petty proprietors” as an enemy “more powerful” than the counter-revolutionary generals, such as Kornilov, leading the counter-revolutionary armies.56 In fact, in order to conjure up this all-important enemy, Lenin in effect collapsed two categories—petit-bourgeois farmer and wealthy landlord (Junker) farmer—into one category, the “petty kulaks,” in whom he located the chief obstacle to the consolidation of the workers’ state in Russia. This confused political-economic analysis led to a generation of tragically misinformed policies imposed on the countryside.

More than anyone, Isaac Steinberg captures this tragedy. He makes a persuasive case for the idea that, while there were multiple engines of revolution in 1917—the peasants on the land, the workers in the city, national minorities, and the intelligentsia—it was the peasant revolution on the land that was decisive. “The supreme slogan that carried the revolution as a whole,” writes Steinberg, “was the peasant call, sanctified back in Populist days: Zemlya i Volya (‘Land and Freedom’).”57 So powerful was the wave of returning peasant-soldiers, arms in hand, determined to redistribute the land, that nothing could stand in their way. Almost without resistance from either the landlords on the big estates or the so-called Stolypin farmers on the new family farms, they swept all land back under the control of the mir, redistributing it to peasant families.

The whole process was codified into law in the remarkable January 1918 Third Peasant Congress, held in Petrograd, “which was the first to merge with the Third Soviet Congress of Workers and Soldiers. Nine hundred proletarian and six hundred peasant deputies established a unity of the Russian working people, a unity symbolized by the ‘handshake of Lenin and Spiridonova.’”58 The latter, Maria Spiridonova, was the revered leader of the Left Social-Revolutionaries, a party to which Steinberg belonged and which briefly shared governmental power with the Bolsheviks. The delegates drafted what Steinberg calls “their basic law,” including mandating pensions for all those who could not work, and the distribution of land “in such manner as to assure each family of an honorable, ample and secure existence.” The congress deputies remained in the city, waiting for the Central Soviet Executive to ratify their law. Steinberg says that on 27 January (9 February), “this ratification took place in a solemn session.”

Spiridonova’s report on the work accomplished left those present shouting with enthusiasm. “No debates! Vote! Vote!” A forest of hands shot up. And still the deputies refused to leave Petrograd until they could hold printed copies of the law in their hands. Two printing presses worked a day and a night, and then the delegates departed, spreading the glad tidings to the far corners of the land.59

The euphoria of this moment would not last. Within weeks, peace talks with Germany collapsed, and in the resulting chaos, “the Germans occupied large parts of the food-producing areas, leaving Central Russia cut off from her sources of supply.” In that context, “the Government decided to requisition bread from the peasants by force”—the initiation of so-called war communism.60 “The Bolsheviks could not have called down a greater curse,” Steinberg writes. “The village had only just passed through its highest spiritual exultation. It had not only liberated itself from the landowners’ yoke, it had also laid the foundations for economic and social equality in its everyday life.” Then, suddenly, in what can only have seemed to the peasants a massive act of betrayal, “the Bolshevik state launched something like a class war against them.”

In the village itself the Bolsheviks—falling back once more on their outmoded theory—branded the working peasants as “small bourgeois,” as men imbued with the psychology of trade, private markets and the instinct for acquisition. They organized the few remaining “paupers” to oppose the overwhelming mass of peasants; they established Soviets of “peasant paupers.” They thus set themselves to demolish the foundations of the new revolutionary village. But even that was not enough: into the village they sent thousands of specially mobilized industrial workers for “bread requisitioning.” … These bands, which frequently turned into punitive expeditions against protesting peasants, corrupted their proletarian participants and led to acts of unbelievable brutality.61

This wresting of grain from the hands of the peasants cannot be seen solely as a policy forced onto the Bolsheviks in the context of an emergency. Lenin’s “kulak” theory was informing Bolshevik (soon to be Communist) practice before the German occupation of the bread-producing regions. On 6 (19) February 1918, immediately after the historic peasant-worker congress and the “handshake of Lenin and Spiridonova,” and before his government signed the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin addressed a group of activists from both governing parties, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who were about to travel to the countryside to help to advance the revolution. It is a speech in which he repeats the view that the countryside has a large class of wealthy peasants (kulaks), the presumed products of the Prussian path promoted by Stolypin (a path not in fact taken), and assumes that this class had somehow survived the land expropriation movement (it had not). This did not stop Lenin from warning the delegates of the threat that awaited them: “Out there in the countryside, you will come across ‘bourgeois’ peasants, the kulaks, who will try to upset Soviet power.” As he went on to advise:

You must explain to the people in the villages that the kulaks and sharks must be pulled up short…. Ten working people must stand up against every rich man who stretches out his avaricious paw towards public property….

The external war is over or nearly so. There is no doubt on that score. It is an internal war that is now before us. The bourgeoisie, its plundered goods hidden in its chests, is not worried and thinks: “We shall sit this out.” The people must ferret out the sharks and make them disgorge. This is your task in the localities. If we are not to collapse, we must get at them in their hideouts.62

Lenin claimed that “every worker and peasant earning his own livelihood feels, deep down in his heart, that there is no salvation from famine and ruin but in Soviet power,” and that the peasants in the countryside would therefore clearly see that “it is not punitive expeditions but propagandists that are sent from the centre to bring light to the countryside, to unite those in every village who earn their own livelihood and have never lived at the expense of others.”63 But in fact, every subsequent intervention from city to country would be felt precisely as a “punitive expedition,” until, in March 1921, what Krausz calls the “dead end of war communism”64 collapsed of its own contradictions and gave way to the New Economic Policy (NEP).

The New Economic Policy was economically the opposite of war communism. “Private trade, small-scale manufacture, foreign concessions, even projects for mixed companies with the participation of Russian private capital, the abandonment of free distribution, the turning of state trusts into commercial enterprises—all this followed.”65 Its key provision was the abandonment of forced requisitioning of grain, allowing peasants to sell their grain on the market. However, this economic opening was not accompanied by a political opening. In fact, the political regime became even more repressive.

From the vantage point of the late 1970s, Roy Medvedev persuasively argued that the Bolsheviks should have implemented the New Economic Policy in 1918, rather than “in the much more complicated and difficult situation of early 1921.”66 In fact, well before that policy was adopted, several prominent voices in Russia had called for an end to war communism. Nikolaii Rozhkov, Menshevik and eminent historian, made a personal appeal to Lenin in January 1919—two years prior to the implementation of the NEP—for an end to war communism. A former leading Bolshevik, Rozhkov knew Lenin well.67 Now, however, he was writing to his former comrade “not because I hope to be heard and understood by you, but because I cannot remain silent, in the face of a situation that to me seems desperate. I must do everything in my power to avert the looming disaster.”68

According to Krausz, in his letter to Lenin, “Rozhkov gave voice to the most important demand of the New Economic Policy in that he recommended a free market for basic food articles, the organization of the all-Russian market, and shutting down the requisitioning gangs.”69 Indeed, Rozhkov made his case in no uncertain terms. “All your threats of blocking [barrier] units will not help,” he wrote, referring to the armed squads mobilized to stop the trade in grain. He argued that Lenin must disband all such squads and “order all local Soviets to lift all bans on imports and exports.”70 Very much along the lines of the NEP policy to come, Rozhkov argued that “without the assistance of private trade initiatives, not you, nor anybody else will be able to cope with the inevitable disaster. If you do not do it [make this policy change] your enemies will.” He went on to say: “It is impossible in the twentieth century to turn the country into a conglomerate of closed, local medieval markets. This was natural in the Middle Ages, when the population within present-day Soviet Russia was 20 times smaller. Now it is a blatant absurdity.”71

For Rozhkov, the looming disaster had two components. First, he feared that in the winter of 1919, half the population of Petrograd would die from hunger. “Under such conditions, even if you were not being directly threatened by the imperialists and the White Army [counter-revolutionaries], you would not hold onto power. You, an economist, should understand this.” Second, the emergence of “a counter-revolutionary dictator” would inevitably follow from the stubborn refusal to allow a return to free trade in grain: “There is no such clever dictator yet, but there will be. ‘Show me a swamp, and I’ll show you the devil.’”72

Rozhkov, a supporter of the Mensheviks, was isolated from the levers of power. But in these early years, Leon Trotsky was not. He was among those at the very top of the state hierarchy. In February 1920, one year after Rozhkov’s appeal to Lenin, and one year prior to the belated introduction of NEP, Trotsky put forward a proposal to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a proposal that directly paralleled that of Rozhkov’s. Noting that “the food resources of the country are threatened with exhaustion,” Trotsky argued that the seizure of grain should be ended and replaced by “a levy proportionate to the quantity of production (a sort of progressive tax on agricultural income), set up in such a way that it is nevertheless more profitable to increase the acreage sown or to cultivate it better.”73 According to Erik Landis, Trotsky’s proposals “resembled what would be adopted by the party” one year later.74 They were, however, rejected by the Central Committee, by a vote of eleven to four.75 Other senior government officials, months before their abandonment, made the case for moving away from the policies we now retrospectively put under the headline of “war communism.” One month earlier, on 20 January, at the Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets of the People’s Economy, Yuri Larin proposed ending forced requisitions and moving to a tax in kind, proposals very similar to Trotsky’s. Larin was at the time a “member of the Soviet regime’s highest economic body, the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy (VSNKh)” and “the Communist Party specialist on financial affairs.” Although Larin’s proposals received serious attention at the congress, they ultimately failed to win approval. Lenin, when informed of the proposals, “pushed for Larin’s removal” from his position on the VSNKh.76

These critics of war communism had the hard facts of hunger on their side. “Throughout this period,” writes Alec Nove, “it was in fact quite impossible to live on the official rations, and the majority of supplies even of bread came through the black market.”77 Leonard Schapiro points out that “in spite of severe repression, right up to 1920 the illegal market accounted for more food supplied to the towns than the legal system of distribution.”78 Nove cites a 1924 article by Kritsman—like Larin, in the early years of the revolution a senior member of VSNKh—reporting that Soviet citizens relied on the illegal market for up to 70 percent of their food needs.79 We have seen that Rozhkov warned Lenin that half the population of Petrograd was doomed to die of starvation.80 In other words, had war communism been successful in completely suppressing the trade in bread thousands if not millions more would have starved. But the warnings from Rozhkov, Trotsky, and Larin went unheeded. War communism would drag on until 1921, and along with it the concomitant vilification of the “kulak” in Lenin’s writings.

Perhaps no other word in the Russian revolutionary vocabulary has been so abused as the term kulak. Originally used to designate those people in the countryside “whose wealth came from usury or trading rather than from agriculture,” the word later came to signify a “new stratum of better-off peasants in the Soviet countryside,” variously identified with “rural bourgeoisie” and “village capitalists” applied interchangeably.81 But the notion of the “rich peasants,” who sometimes were considered “rich” because they had one or two horses as opposed to none, was completely out of step with the subsistence reality of the Russian countryside. Remember Tito’s definition of a kulak—“the test of being a kulak was not the size of a man’s holding, but whether he was for ‘socialism’ or against it.”82 This is a reflection not of social science but of political ideology.

More than anything else, kulak became a term of opprobrium. From 1918 until his death, Lenin hurled abuse upon what he saw as communism’s greatest internal enemy—labelling them in June 1918 as “the criminals who are subjecting the population to the torments of hunger”83 and in February 1919 as “the shameless rich peasants who fill their money-bags out of the people’s need and the hunger.”84 In an August 1918 telegram to the Gubernia Executive Committee in Penza, he argued for “a campaign of ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and whiteguards; suspects to be shut up in a detention camp outside the city.”85 Speaking to a session of the Petrograd Soviet in March 1919, he identified what he saw as a growing class division in the countryside, and argued that “the bulk of the poor peasants, and of the middle peasants who are close to them, are on our side. Against the kulaks, who are our inveterate enemies, we have but one weapon—force.”86

This anti-kulak discourse was deeply at odds with the reality in the countryside. As we have seen, the Stolypin reform had created a new class of family farmers. But as E. H. Carr (echoing many others) notes, the expropriations that had swept through Russia in 1917 were “not confined to landowners’ land. Large peasant holdings, created under the Stolypin reform or earlier, were also broken up and distributed—a process afterwards referred to as ‘a dekulakization of kulaks.’”87 The seizure of the land by the peasants in 1917 had ended landlordism. It had also virtually ended family farming of the American type, at least in Russia proper.

As indicated earlier, there were exceptions to the above analysis—in what is today Belarus and in western Ukraine, where the mir either did not exist or existed on the margins. In those areas, the family farmer was better able to survive the 1917 upheaval, unlike the newly created Stolypin family farmer in Russia proper. In those areas, outside of Russia proper, there was a “kulak target” to be found for Lenin’s vitriole—if, of course, we persist with the mistake of seeing the family farmer qua family farmer as a kulak. But as well as being a mistaken approach, in the context of these non-Russian areas, Lenin’s anti-kulak diatribes acquire an especially unsavoury dimension. They can be interpreted as serving to position the kulak as “other,” a specifically non-Russian other, against which his largely Russian cadres could be inspired to mobilize.

In sum, it is completely misleading to pin the label “petty-bourgeois” or “petit-bourgeois” on the Russian countryside. The mir exhibited no capitalist dynamic for increased productivity or production for profit. Rather, it was an institution that enforced subsistence. There was a brief emergence of a new class of petit-bourgeois family farmers as a consequence of the Stolypin reform. These farmers—freed from the mir—were in fact oriented toward profit maximization in a classically petit-bourgeois, or small-capitalist, fashion, and the rise of this class was accompanied by a general improvement in the productivity of agriculture in the Russian countryside. But—and this point cannot be stressed enough—in Russia proper, this small-capitalist class was virtually destroyed by the Great War and the land seizures of 1917, and petit-bourgeois peasants were reabsorbed into the mir. Farming in this context was petty—the land available for each family was indeed tiny—but it was not in any way bourgeois. As Carr points out, “the small peasant with his family lived at subsistence level, and grew for himself and not for the market.”88

War on the Kulaks and Socialist Consciousness

In the context of forced collectivization and the “war on the kulaks” of the first five-year plan, Trotsky displayed similar confusions as to the nature of the agrarian relations in post-revolutionary Russia. In part 3, in an examination of Trotsky’s political biography of Stalin, I review the well-known criterion central to Trotsky’s understanding of the class nature of the Soviet Union—the question of nationalized property. In fact, Trotsky develops, in that book, another less well-known criterion. The counter-revolution, in Trotsky’s view, had failed to eliminate not only the “nationalization of the means of production and the land” but also “the socialist consciousness of the masses.”89 Where might Trotsky in the 1930s find evidence for the continuing existence of this socialist consciousness, given the horrifying violence directed against the advanced urban workers?

He finds it in the context of Stalin’s forced collectivization war on the kulaks, surveyed earlier—the same forced collectivization that led to a horrendous artificial famine and that should in fact be seen as a war on the peasantry as a whole. In Trotsky’s view, “the nationalization of the means of production and of the land, is the bureaucracy’s law of life and death, for these are the social sources of its dominant position.” He then goes on to say that guarding this nationalization of the means of production and the land “was the reason for its [the bureaucracy’s] struggle against the kulak. The bureaucracy could wage this struggle, and wage it to the end, only with the support of the proletariat.”90

Millions of peasants died in Stalin’s misnamed war on the kulaks. Boris Brutzkus, a leading Russian agricultural economist, describes the brutal process of dekulakization during the winter of 1929–30:

The local authorities prepared a list of condemned families. Then at night they gathered, armed, together with the members of the local komsomol [Communist youth organization] and perhaps a few poor peasants. They invaded the house of their victim; his means of production were confiscated for the local collective farms; a large quantity of consumer goods was usually looted for the private use of the executants of the dekulakization. All members of the family were pitilessly turned out of their homes into the snow-covered streets and it was forbidden to give them any help. The head of the family was generally imprisoned. The instruction was to divide the kulaks into three groups. To the first belonged those who could be considered as active counter-revolutionaries. These were to be shot immediately, without referring their case to the central authorities. The second—usually the most numerous—consisted of those who were destined to be deported to the northern forest regions. They were transported not in passenger carriages, but in railway trucks; the wagons were overcrowded to such an extent that there was no room to sit down. There was no heating, the people were very poorly clothed, and hardly had any food; so it was natural that a great number of them, and especially children, could not stand the long journey and died at a considerable rate. The third group consisted of those kulaks who were allowed to stay in the district, but were banned from admission to the kolkhozes [collective farms]. In this third group the death-rate was also very high because of hunger and cold in the first winter after dekulakization. Many children were parted from their parents; they formed the bands of homeless children which were one of the great social problems of Soviet life.91

Trotsky gave his qualified support to this one-sided war against the peasant masses. He saw it as flowing not from the venal needs of a new ruling elite but from the progressive social foundations of a new order. “Thanks to the support of the proletariat,” he declared, “it ended with victory for the bureaucracy.”92

The Soviet state’s one-sided war against the peasantry is not evidence of socialist consciousness. To the extent that the proletariat did support what Souvarine rightly calls “the nightmare of collectivization,” they became complicit in a mass murder so extreme that some have called it genocide. It resulted in “an agricultural disaster, justly compared to the effects of a major war.”93 And in the end, the disaster in the countryside was accompanied by disaster in the cities—first in 1934, in the purge of Leningrad, and then in 1937–38, in the Great Terror—crushing the remnants of the organized workers themselves. How Trotsky could find evidence of “socialist consciousness” in all of this is unclear.

These atrocities belong to Stalin. But it was Lenin who decisively set Bolshevik policy regarding the peasantry. Lenin never abandoned his “petit-bourgeois” analysis of labour in the countryside, and it led to catastrophic errors in policy. His—and the Bolsheviks’—agrarian policy was premised on the existence of a greedy “peasant bourgeoisie,” a so-called kulak class, that was hoarding grain and starving the cities. They declared war on this group, banning free trade and sending armed urban gangs into the countryside to confiscate grain. This “war communism” was an unsustainable policy against which they were warned by many. But it was not abandoned until March 1921, in the context of mass actions by peasants, workers, and sailors in the fateful Kronstadt uprising of March 1921, to which we return in the conclusion.

Earlier, I quoted Bertram Wolfe saying: “Most Social Democrats knew so little about the countryside that the issues eluded them.”94 He was clearly correct. If chapter 4 identified a strategic confusion, manifested in the assumption that a mobilized class of rural peasants-in-uniform can substitute for a self-activated urban working class, this chapter has identified a theoretical confusion—categorizing the labour inside the patriarchal commune as somehow “small capitalist” in nature. It is one thing to observe these kinds of confusions in debates among isolated intellectuals on the fringes of politics. It is quite another when they inform the policies of mass parties and powerful states.