The following text was read by the author on 14 March 2024 at the panel discussion “Lenin beyond the centers, Lenin beyond the paradigms”, together with Julio César Guanche and Mauricio Sandoval (copanelists) and Rolando Prats as chair, held as part of the international series of events Leninist Days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin. It is presented now in a revised and slightly edited version.

Lenin and the Politics of the “Agrarian Question”

Introduction

In what probably amounts to the most succinct expression of his political practice, Lenin wrote to Inessa Armand as follows:

One should know how to combine the struggle for democracy and the struggle for the socialist revolution, subordinating the first to the second. In this lies the whole difficulty; in this is the whole essence. (1916, CW35, 267; emphasis in original)

This conception of subordinating a struggle for democracy to the future goal of the socialist revolution is clearly a dialectical formulation that emphasises becoming, process and movement. Written as it was on 25^th December 1916 it is tempting to read it as influenced by, if not directly derived from, Lenin’s detailed study of Hegel’s philosophical writings during that period. The currently academically popular references to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks would presumably emphasise this view. Moreover, it is clearly during Lenin’s development of his views on the national and colonial question and the rights of nations to self-determination that this perspective becomes fully apparent. The struggle for such democratic rights is paramount for Lenin. He stresses that:

All “democracy” consists in the proclamation and realisation of “rights” which under capitalism are realisable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (1916, CW23, 74; emphasis in original)

Nevertheless, it can be noted that it is not only in the period of the socialist revolution that he insists on such a dialectic approach to politics. This is also the case after the socialist revolution has been achieved, thus:

“Victorious socialism cannot consolidate its victory and bring humanity to the withering away of the state without implementing full democracy.” (1916, CW23, 74)

In other words, irrespective of which revolutionary process he is addressing, Lenin consistently stresses the subordination of democratic struggles to a future goal which transcends them because, ultimately,

“Democracy […] is […] a form of state which must disappear when the state disappears but that will only take place in the transition from conclusively victorious and consolidated socialism to full communism.” (1916, CW22, 144, emphasis added).

The conception he develops is thus one which encloses democratic struggles in a process, the ultimate aim of which is the disappearance of the state itself. In fact, Lenin follows Marx to the letter in maintaining that socialism is only the first phase of communism in which the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is necessary in order to enable the second phase. There is absolutely no conception of stages in Lenin’s political thought, rather a continuity is provided by democracy until the disappearance of the state itself.

The closest contemporary formulation of this idea I have found is the one provided by Alain Badiou who notes: “Democracy is what maintains politics in the realm of universality proper to its destination.” (2001, Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 245). The destination being of course the horizon of communism, not socialism as it is sometimes thought.

I propose to refer to such political thought as thinking the present in the light of becoming. And what I want to suggest is that this mode of thought has its genesis in Lenin’s thinking much earlier than 1916, during his development of a proletarian politics for the “agrarian question” during the bourgeois revolutionary period of 1905-1907. In other words, I suggest that an argument can be made that Lenin was beginning to think politics dialectically much earlier than his detailed study of Hegel.

The agrarian question in the bourgeois revolution (1905-1907)

Much has been written regarding Lenin’s theoretical innovations in the analysis of the political-economic development of capitalist rural relations, particularly on the socio-economic differentiation of peasant producers. Much less has been written on the politics which Lenin develops in relation to these political-economic analyses. Even though a socialist revolution was not on the agenda for Lenin in 1905-07, in an overwhelmingly rural Russia, peasant rebellions and jacqueries were endemic in the countryside. This was a period of bourgeois revolutions which included the modernization of feudal latifundia.

As is well known (see Althusser’s work in particular), Lenin develops his arguments in opposition to what he calls “economism”, namely the tendency to derive a politics directly from economic trends. Lenin’s arguments against economism begin to develop his understanding that a proletarian politics in relation to the “agrarian question”, if it is to be emancipatory, cannot simply be derived from an economic analysis of the capitalist evolution of rural relations in Russia.

Whereas prior to 1905 Lenin’s views largely corresponded to those of Karl Kautsky as outlined in his book Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question), after that date he begins to develop an original conception of emancipatory politics which arguably ultimately finds its developed expression in his arguments against “imperialist economism” in the context of the debates on the “national question”, In his book, Kautsky had argued for the superiority of large-scale agricultural enterprises in Prussia which were transforming into efficient capitalist concerns and hence were not only economically advanced but harbingers of “progress”. Small-scale peasant producers were remnants of backward feudalism and in the process of disappearing. He stressed that with the growth of capitalism into the countryside, the greater the technical gulf between the large holdings from the small, the latter only persisted through diversifying sources of income. Peasants were incapable of liberating themselves or participating in the revolutionary process, and that no stage of the evolutionary road to capitalism could be bypassed.

Lenin based his arguments on the detailed study he wrote in 1899 called The Development of Capitalism in Russia (CW3). Founded on the arguments of Marx’s capital, the book relied on detailed data gathered by the Zemstvo local governments. Most Zemstvo statistics were gathered by Narodnik (populist) supporters who staffed them.[1] Lenin used these statistics to critique the Narodnik argument that peasant agriculture was pre-capitalist and peasant communal relations (the mir or obschina) incipiently socialist by showing that peasant economy contained within it the seeds of capitalism which was unavoidably developing in agriculture. For the Narodniks, capitalism was exclusively a landlord and urban phenomenon as peasants were incipiently socialist. Menshevik economism also came to the same conclusion but drew, following Kautsky, opposite conclusions.[2] For the former (the Narodniks), it was the peasantry which was the foundation of a socialist future, for the latter (the Mensheviks) it was the efficiency of large landed property that provided the advanced economic conditions for socialism.

On the other hand, for Lenin, there were in fact two roads to the development of capitalism in the Russian countryside that occurred simultaneously. These two forms of development amounted of course to two quite distinct forms of accumulation. The “Prussian” or “Junker” road to capitalist development, followed by large, landed proprietors, was a form of accumulation which retained many feudal features (in particular, unfree labour) as it was undertaken at the expense of the masses of the people. Under this path, accumulation among the people themselves was restricted by forms of oppression inherited from feudalism but adapted to capitalist conditions, such as extra-economic coercion, emphasis on absolute surplus value extraction and so on. Such accumulation was one in which landlords gradually transformed themselves into capitalist farmers by slowly altering their reliance on labour-rent to one based on wage labour. It amounted to a form of the capitalist development of agriculture “under the leadership of landed property”.

Lenin argued that peasant economy also contained within it the seeds of capitalism and the class struggle. It followed a distinct road to capitalist development which he called the “Peasant or American Road”. This was manifested by the differentiation of the peasantry into a minority of rich and a majority of poor peasants with middle peasants gradually disappearing.

Peasant farming also evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The better the conditions of the “village commune” and the greater the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process of differentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic classes of capitalist agriculture. (1907, CW13, 241-2; emphasis in original)

Given that Lenin thought that the development of capitalism in agriculture was inevitable and was already taking place, these two forms of accumulation suggested two distinct political tactics among social democrats.

One alternative is evolution of the Prussian type – the serf-owning landlord becomes a Junker; the landlords’ power in the state is consolidated for a decade; monarchy; “military despotism, embodied in parliamentary forms” instead of democracy; the greatest inequality among the rural and non-rural population. The second alternative is evolution of the American type – the abolition of landlord farming; the peasant becomes a free farmer; popular government; the bourgeois democratic political system; the greatest equality among the rural population as the starting point of, and a condition for, free capitalism. (1907, CW12, 356)

Menshevik economism supported the bourgeois transformation of feudal landed proprietors, while the revolutionary Bolsheviks advocated the “peasant road” to capital accumulation during the bourgeois revolution. In each case different classes would be “leading” the revolution and impressing upon it a distinct physiognomy.

Does not the very concept “bourgeois revolution” imply that it can be accomplished only by the bourgeoisie? The Mensheviks often fall into this error, although as a viewpoint it is a caricature of Marxism. A liberation movement that is bourgeois in social and economic content is not such because of its motive forces. The motive force may be, not the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat and the peasantry. Why is this possible? Because the proletariat and the peasantry suffer even more than the bourgeoisie from the survivals of serfdom, because they are in greater need of freedom and the abolition of landlord oppression. (1907, CW12, 335)

He continues:

Let us take the Stolypin programme, which is supported by the Right landlords and the Octobrists. It is avowedly a landlords’ programme. 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 […] 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. Without a doubt, that legislation is progressive in the scientific-economic sense.

But does it mean that Social-Democrats should support it? It does not. Only vulgar Marxism can reason in that way, a Marxism whose seeds Plekhanov and the Mensheviks are so persistently sowing when they sing, shout, plead, and proclaim: we must support the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the old order of things. (1907, CW13, 243)

And he clearly explains in 1905:

The very position the bourgeoisie holds as a class in capitalist society inevitably leads to its inconsistency in a democratic revolution. The very position the proletariat holds as a class compels it to be consistently democratic […] The only force capable of gaining “a decisive victory over tsarism”, is the people, i.e. the proletariat and the peasantry, if we take the main, big forces, and distribute the rural and urban petty-bourgeoisie (also part of “the people”) between the two. “The revolution’s decisive victory over tsarism” means the establishment of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. (1905, CW9, 51, 56; emphasis in original).

The point Lenin insists on is to distinguish between degrees of democratisation:

He would be a fine Marxist indeed, who in a period of democratic revolution failed to see this difference between the degrees of democratisation and the difference between its forms and confined himself to “clever” remarks to the effect that, after all, this is a “bourgeois revolution”, the fruit of “bourgeois revolution”. (1905, CW9: 52)

For Lenin, unlike for the Mensheviks, advanced large-scale production was, in itself, of little value for the proletariat unless it was founded on productive norms which were as democratic as possible under bourgeois conditions. Through its mechanical understanding of the relation between economics and politics, Menshevism betrayed the democratic aspirations of the masses and future democratic socialist advance. It was imperative for Lenin that a proletariat be demarcated politically in the clearest manner for it to be a distinct political actor and such clarity had to be developed in relation to the agrarian question which directly concerned the majority of the population: the oppressed peasantry.

Classes will emerge from the (bourgeois) revolution with a definite political physiognomy, for they will have revealed themselves not only in the programmes and tactical slogans of their ideologists but also in open political action by the masses. (1905, CW9,18)

Lenin does not stop at stressing the effects of bourgeois democracy on the political demarcation of classes; he also maintains that the greater and more extensive the form of bourgeois democracy, such as that embodied in the peasant road, the clearer the demarcation between classes and the easier the transition to socialism. Under such conditions:

The contradictions of capitalist society – and the most important of them is the contradictions between wage-labour and capital – will not only remain, but become even more acute and profound, developing in a more extensive and purer form. (1907, CW12, 457).

And he concludes:

To clear the way for the free development of the class struggle in the countryside, it is necessary to remove all remnants of serfdom, which now overlie the beginnings of capitalist antagonisms among the rural population, and keep them from developing. (1902, CW6,148; emphasis in original)

Social democrats must then break up the large latifundia and distribute the land to the peasants:

In breaking up the medieval latifundia, capitalism begins with a more “equalised” landownership, and out of that creates large-scale farming on a new basis, on the basis of wage-labour, machinery and superior agricultural technique, and not on the basis of labour-rent and bondage. (1907, CW13, 236 emphasis in original).

 

The importance of the struggle for democracy under both capitalist and socialist conditions cannot be overstated for Lenin. Given that capitalism is developing anyway, his argument could be read as being less a question of the necessity of passing through a capitalist stage before a socialist revolution is undertaken, but rather more as a question of a necessary struggle for democracy where, among a number of reasons, the proletariat and its party could be trained in democratic practices, and the possibilities of political struggle would be infinitely more advantageous to the oppressed as people would acquire more control and greater confidence in their ability to transform the world. For Lenin, democracy enables “the transformation of circumstances and selves” to paraphrase Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach. Yet it must always be borne in mind that democracy must be understood and deployed – like any form of state power in fact – as a contingent concept depending on circumstances. It should be recalled that under socialism (the “first phase of communism” or the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) there is no democracy for the bourgeoisie but maximum democracy for the people which includes the peasantry, not just the proletariat.

Lenin’s position is clear, feudal oppression restricts the development of the political class demarcation of a proletariat and class struggle between it and the bourgeoisie more generally. It must be noted that it is not so much because feudalism is an earlier/backward mode of production that this differentiation or demarcation of classes is restricted. It is rather the oppressive undemocratic nature of social relations (feudal or otherwise) which are the main causes of this restriction. This is shown clearly by the fact that the politically reactionary aspects of imperialism (the most advanced form of capitalism) will have similar effects for Lenin after 1915. After all, “democracy corresponds to free competition. Political reaction corresponds to monopoly […] imperialism is indisputably the “negation” of democracy in general, of all democracy […]” (1916, CW23, 43). So he is drawn to stating in 1916, in a discussion on imperialism and the national question for example, that “Marxists know that democracy […] makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and this is what we need.” (1916, CW23, 73).

 

Lenin’s critique of economism, whether simple ‘economism’ or later ‘imperialist economism’ is arguably more than a question of theoretical reductionism; rather it is fundamentally a question of proposing dialectical thought as necessary for the construction of an emancipatory (revolutionary) politics. In fact, it is quite remarkable to note how the arguments he adduces for recognising the democratic rights of nations to self-determination as necessary for advancing to socialism and beyond are similar to those he advocated during the debates during the bourgeois revolution on the agrarian question. Peasants should benefit from the distribution of land and on that democratic basis should develop large scale production; nations should have the right to self-determination (including secession) and on that basis should decide whether to combine democratically. Fighting for a dialectical emancipatory subjectivity enables the proletariat to demarcate for itself a distinct political position which thinks the present not simply as an analysis of what exists but in order to enable a process, a becoming.

In 1919 (two years after the revolution) he stresses against Bukharin that the democratic slogan of the right of nations to self-determination must be retained and recognized for all nations (including the most capitalistically advanced, Germany) precisely in order to facilitate the process of political demarcation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie (1919, CW29, 165ff). Through this process of political demarcation, the proletariat continues to be produced as a political subject.

Such a process of democratising in the light of becoming has, as its corollary in Lenin’s political thinking, a supreme confidence in the independent struggles of the masses of the people themselves, without which no victory could be secure. He explains in 1917:

“Power to the Soviets” means radically reshaping the entire old state apparatus, that bureaucratic apparatus which hampers everything democratic. It means removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new, popular one, i.e., a truly democratic apparatus of Soviets, i.e., the organised and armed majority of the people—the workers, soldiers, and peasants. It means allowing the majority of the people initiative and independence not only in the election of deputies, but also in state administration, in effecting reforms and various other changes … Don’t be afraid of the people’s initiative and independence. Put your faith in their revolutionary organisations […] Lack of faith in the people, fear of their initiative and independence, trepidation before their revolutionary energy instead of all-round and unqualified support for it—this is where the S.R. and Menshevik leaders have sinned most of all (1917, CW25. 372, 374; emphasis added).

Later, reviewing the difficulties which the revolution was facing immediately after the expropriation of the large latifundia Lenin notes:

After the October Revolution we finished off the landowner and took away his land. That, however, did not end the rural struggle. Gaining the land, like every other worker’s gain, can only be secure when it is based on the independent action of the working people themselves, on their own organisation, on their endurance and revolutionary determination. Did the peasants have this organisation? Unfortunately, not. And that is the trouble, the reason why the struggle is so difficult (1918, CW28, 172; emphasis added)

 

Concluding remarks

For Lenin, emancipatory politics (or in his terms revolutionary proletarian politics) are irreducible to political economy precisely because they have a dialectical character. The distinct existence of revolutionary politics is made possible by the dialectic. It is its dialecticity that guarantees the distinctiveness of emancipatory political practice and hence which demarcates the proletariat as a political subject via its party with a focus towards enabling the socialist revolution and subsequently communism.

Why dialectical? Because 1) it understands social relations in movement and 2) because proletarian political practice must be informed by this changing moment – the present moment – as oriented towards the future attainable goal of socialism and later of communism if the correct politics – namely the utmost popular democratic practices – are followed. In the absence of this understanding, the goal will not be attained. Political subjectivity is geared entirely towards the becoming of a proletariat as a political subject demarcated from all other classes by its politics oriented towards a future of equality.

How are social relations to be understood as in movement during the bourgeois revolution? As a result of a process of splitting between two roads to the development of capitalism in rural society in Russia. Both the Narodniks (or populists) and the Mensheviks (the economists) see only one side, namely only the large enterprises as evolving towards capitalism: the first wants to oppose this evolution by emphasizing the communal character of the Obschina or Mir as the foundation for socialism, the second wants to support it as it supposedly represents the capitalist trend of the growth of large-scale enterprises. Hence economism supported the Stolypin reforms of the transformation of feudal latifundia into capitalist enterprises. It is therefore tempting to see Lenin as influenced by Hegel even at this early stage of his thinking, but I shall desist; I don’t think it matters. (Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism, published in 1908)

More importantly I think the lesson to be drawn from the above argument is that emancipatory politics is not to be understood simply as
“relatively autonomous” from economic relations (as Althusser suggested), but as a collective subjectivity that is dialectical, precisely because the movement of political subjectivity is consciously split between a politically reactionary and a politically progressive practice or set of practices which are geared towards coming revolutions whatever their form. It is perhaps also important to mention in this context that Lenin does not begin thinking from a negative critique. Although his Development of Capitalism in Russia is a critique of Narodnik perspectives through an emphasis on the growing capitalist character of peasant agriculture; it is guided by an affirmative proposition regarding the necessary democratic future of socialism. Or perhaps we could even say that the famous “relative autonomy of politics” is made possible by the dialectic. No dialectic no relative autonomy.

In brief, that which detaches the thought of emancipatory politics from the political economic change taking place under capitalist relations, is a collective orientation towards a future, a becoming, through the deploying of collective democratic politics and practices, i.e. a conscious collective dialectical subjectivity. In sum then Lenin does not advocate democracy for its own sake, for itself; in fact, he is quite clear that ‘formal democracy’ in particular, is often constricting on the process of becoming:

[…] in a certain sense for a certain period, all democratic aims […] are capable of hindering the socialist revolution. In what sense? At what moment? When? How? For example, if the movement has already developed, the revolution has already begun, we have to seize the banks, and we are being appealed to wait, first consolidate, legitimise the republic, etc.! (1916, CW35, 268; emphasis in original).

To repeat, democracy is advocated for what it enables (clearer class demarcation, clearer class struggle, more open politics, ability to train the masses in democratic practices, etc.) which is precisely that process of becoming. Hence the present is always thought politically in the light of this process of becoming. It is for this reason that Lenin can recognize later that mass rebellions against colonial domination during the period of imperialism are democratic and hence that they can be ‘bacilli’ for the socialist revolution.

The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene. (1916, CW22, 357)

My argument has been that the genesis of this way of thinking emancipatory politics, can be located in Lenin’s dialectical political approach to the “Agrarian Question”.

Notes

[1] The Narodniks (Narodnaya Volya or ‘People’s Will’ Party) or populists, constituted an established radical socialist political trend distinct from Lenin’s Social Democrats. Their politics consisted of terrorist acts directed against Tzarist political figures. Some, such as Vera Zasulich had corresponded with Marx. Lenin’s elder brother Alexandr Ulyanov was a Narodnik militant executed by the Tzarist regime for planning an assassination attempt against Tzar Alexander III. Later, their accompanying intellectual trend influenced academic writings such as Chayanov’s Theory of Peasant Economy and Teodor Shanin’s Peasants and Peasant Societies.

[2] The political disagreements between Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) had split the RSDLP (the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party) in 1903.

Michael Neocosmos