Engels on the Peasant War in Germany

 



        Prabhat Patnaik

AT a time when peasant masses in the country are engaged in a valiant
struggle for the repeal of the central government’s three infamous laws,
and have laid peaceful siege to Delhi, braving rains and bitter cold, it
is worth recalling Friedrich Engels’ study of the peasant war in Germany
in 1525, that also celebrated its outstanding leader Thomas Muenzer.
Such a recall becomes necessary for another reason.

There is an impression among many that while the idea of a
worker-peasant alliance was advanced by Lenin and taken up subsequently
by Mao and other third world Communist revolutionaries, both Marx and
Engels had been sceptical about the potential role of the peasants as an
ally of the proletariat in the transition to socialism. The selective
quotation of stray remarks of Marx, torn out of context, has also
contributed towards confirmation of this impression.

The anarchists have been particularly severe on Marxism on this score.
Bakunin had accused the German Communists of viewing all peasants as
elements of reaction and added: “The fact is that the Marxists cannot
think otherwise; worshippers of state power at any price, they are bound
to curse every people’s revolution, especially a peasant revolution,
which is anarchic by its very nature, and which proceeds directly to
annihilate the state.”

This impression about Marx and Engels however is /entirely erroneous/.
It was Ferdinand Lassalle the German working class leader who had called
the sixteenth century peasant uprising in Germany “reactionary” in
“substance and principle”, despite its “revolutionary appearance”. Here,
as in other spheres, such as the so-called “Iron Law of Wages”
propounded by Lassalle (that wages under capitalism can never rise above
a certain physical subsistence level), Lassalle’s views were
/erroneously/ identified as those of Marx and Engels. In fact, Engels’
study of the sixteenth century peasant uprising in Germany was meant
precisely to counter this tendency within the German Left, shared even
by leaders like Wilhelm Liebknecht, to see the peasants as a reactionary
mass with whom the working class could have no alliance.

Engels by contrast not only advocated a worker-peasant alliance for the
coming German Revolution, but suggested that the 1525 peasant uprising
had failed because it had been a series of local events with little
national coordination among these events (Germany at that time had not
been a single unified country), and also because the peasants had failed
to have alliances even at the local level with the plebeian urban masses
(who constituted a proto-proletarian class). In fact, they were able to
put up a much stronger resistance in those regions where they could have
an alliance with the plebeian masses such as in Thuringia where Thomas
Muenzer had been active.

/The Peasant War in Germany/ had been written in 1850, in the shadow of
the defeat of 1848 revolution all over Europe. In 1870 Engels wrote a
Preface to a new edition of the book where he drew a parallel between
the 1525 and 1848 revolutions and further elaborated his argument for a
worker-peasant alliance.

In the 1870 Preface, he suggested that the German bourgeoisie had
arrived too late on the scene, at a time when bourgeois development
elsewhere in Europe had simultaneously developed the proletariat to such
a great extent that the bourgeoisie even in those countries was
politically on the retreat, having to buttress its position by building
bridges with other conservative, anti-working class elements; in France,
for instance, the bourgeoisie even had to accept the rule of Louise
Bonaparte. In Germany where the bourgeoisie had not even made any
“advance” towards political power for it to make a “retreat”, it had to
have an alliance with the feudal lords from the very outset, to forge a
united front for the defence of private property, both bourgeois and
feudal property.

In this process, the bourgeoisie necessarily betrayed the interests of
the peasantry which could be served only by the proletariat coming to
power, by forming a worker-peasant alliance. Such an alliance could be
forged and would actually enable the proletariat to come to power
because of the combined numerical strength of the allies. A
worker-peasant alliance was thus historically both necessary and also
possible, for taking on the bourgeois-landlord alliance.

Engels listed out which segments of the population, in the concrete
conditions of late-nineteenth-century Germany, could constitute allies
of the proletariat. These were: the petty bourgeoisie, the low-grade
proletariat of the cities, the small peasants, and the wage-workers of
the land. Within the rural population, this list includes only two
classes: the small peasants (Engels uses the terms large, middle and
small, rather than rich, middle and poor, to describe the various
peasant classes), and the agricultural labourers (or what he calls wage
workers on the land). He explains his argument as follows:

“The small peasants (bigger peasants belong to the bourgeoisie) are not
homogeneous. They are either in serfdom bound to their lords and masters
and in as much as the bourgeoisie has failed to do its duty in freeing
those people from serfdom, it will not be difficult to convince them
that salvation, for them, can be expected only from the working class;
or they are tenants, whose situation is almost equal to that of the
Irish. Rents are so high that even in times of normal crops the peasant
and his family can hardly eke out a bare existence; when the crops are
bad, he virtually starves. When he is unable to pay his rent, he is
entirely at the mercy of the landlord. The bourgeoisie thinks of relief
only under compulsion. Where, then, should the tenants look for relief
outside of the workers?

“There is another group of peasants, those who own a small piece of
land. In most cases, they are so burdened with mortgages that their
dependence upon the usurer is equal to the dependence of the tenant upon
the landlord. What they earn is practically a meager wage, which, since
good and bad crops alternate, is highly uncertain. These people cannot
have the least hope of getting anything out of the bourgeoisie, because
it is the bourgeoisie, the capitalist usurers, that squeeze the
life-blood out of them. Still, the peasants cling to their property,
though in reality, it does not belong to them, but to the usurers. It
will be necessary to make it clear to these people that only when a
government of the people will have transformed all mortgages into debt
to the State, and thereby lowered the rent, will they be able to free
themselves from the usurer. This, however, can be accomplished only by
the working class.

“Wherever middle and large land ownership prevails, the wage-workers of
the land form the most numerous class. This is the case throughout the
entire north and east of Germany, and it is here that the industrial
workers of the city find their most numerous and natural allies. In the
same way, as the capitalist is opposed to the industrial worker, the
large landowner or large tenant is opposed to the wage-workers of the
land. The measures that help the one must also help the other. The
industrial workers can free themselves only by turning the capital of
the bourgeoisie, that is, the raw materials, machines and tools, the
foodstuffs necessary for production, into social property, their own
property, to be used by them in common. Similarly, the wage-workers of
the land can be freed from their hideous misery only when the main
object of their work, the land itself, will be withdrawn from the
private property of the large peasants and still larger feudal masters,
and transformed into social property to be cultivated by an association
of land workers on common basis”

Engels is visualizing not a two-stage but a one-stage revolution, a
socialist revolution, which means that from the morrow of the revolution
all effort is to be towards the development of socialism rather than any
initial build-up of capitalism in a period of transition. This is why he
excludes not only large peasants but even middle peasants from the list
of revolutionary allies. He suggests the nationalisation of land rather
than radical land distribution, following the break-up of feudal estates.

Obviously, the precise composition of the worker-peasant alliance and
the precise agenda of this alliance, will vary from country to country
depending on the concrete conditions. Besides, in today’s context, the
peasant question must involve liberation not just from feudal oppression
but also from big capital, comprising both domestic corporates and
multinational agribusiness. But as Engels and Marx had recognised (the
book had appeared initially as articles in the /Neue Rheinische
Zeitung/*/ /*edited by Marx who obviously shared Engels’ position), an
appropriate alliance with the peasantry is an essential condition for
the achievement of socialism.

 In
People's Democracy
https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2021/0117_pd/engels-peasant-war-germany
January 17, 2021