Li Wei: A Historical Analysis of the Proposal and Creation of the Worker-Peasant Alliance
The worker-peasant alliance is a major issue related to the success or failure of the proletarian revolution. Within the history of the international communist movement, who exactly proposed and established the worker-peasant alliance?
In 2010, a discussion took place in the journal Marxism Studies (Makesizhuyi Yanjiu). One side argued that "Marx and Engels’ views on the role of the peasantry in the proletarian revolution were never positive," "they did not say that the peasantry would form an alliance with the working class," and "they did not say that the proletariat should view the peasantry as its own ally." The opposing side countered, "It is unacceptable to suggest that Marx and Engels did not have the idea that the peasantry could become an allied force of the proletarian revolution, or that they lacked the idea that the proletarian revolution requires a worker-peasant alliance." The issues discussed in these two articles concern whether Marx and Engels proposed the worker-peasant alliance, a debate that has been ongoing since the 20th century.
I. Two Interpretations of Who Proposed the Worker-Peasant Alliance
In 1947, following the 1943 Soviet publication of the two-volume Selected Works of Lenin, a Chinese edition of the two-volume Selected Works of Lenin was published. This was the standard text used by the Chinese ideological sphere and cadres for studying Leninist thought during the 1950s and 60s. In the "Preface to the 1946 Original Russian Edition" written by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), it was proposed for the first time in the history of the international communist movement and the history of Marxist development that Lenin’s 1894 work, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, "initially proposed the idea of a revolutionary worker-peasant alliance." In 1954, the Soviet Union compiled and published the first collection of essays in the history of Marxist development specifically discussing the worker-peasant alliance, Lenin on the Worker-Peasant Alliance, which was published in a Chinese edition in 1956. The editors—the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute of the Central Committee of the CPSU—noted once again: "The idea regarding the formation of a revolutionary alliance between workers and peasants as the primary means to overthrow Tsarism, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie, and to create a communist society, was initially proposed by Lenin in the book What the 'Friends of the People' Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, published in 1894."
Following the publication of the first Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Lenin in 1955, China independently compiled and published the second Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Lenin in 1984. For the first time, a "Foreword" was added to the beginning of each volume to interpret the contents and important theoretical viewpoints of the articles therein, a practice that has continued. The "Foreword" to Volume 1 of the second edition of the Collected Works of Lenin provided the first interpretation from the Chinese ideological sphere for the 1894 work What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats: "While criticizing the Narodniks [1], Lenin argued for the basic program and tactics of the Social-Democrats, elucidated the historical mission of the working class, and proposed the ideas of the worker-peasant alliance and the transformation of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution." It can be said that the Chinese ideological sphere identified with the views of the Soviet ideological sphere. The "Note" to Volume 1 of the third edition of the Selected Works of Lenin (1995) and the "Note to Volume One" of the 2012 revised third edition of the Selected Works of Lenin continued the aforementioned thought—that Lenin "proposed the ideas of the worker-peasant alliance and the transformation of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution." I believe the aforementioned interpretation contains the following subtext: since the worker-peasant alliance was first proposed by Lenin in 1894, then Marx and Engels prior to him had not proposed it.
Starting in 1956, based on the 1955 second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, China began successively translating and publishing the first Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. In the "Note to Volume Seven" translated in 1959, the Soviet ideological sphere provided an interpretation of Marx's work The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850: "A large portion of this work by Marx is devoted to analyzing the status and role of the peasantry, and analyzing its mutual relationship with the proletariat... based on the experience of the class struggle in France, he reached a very important theoretical and political conclusion: the proletariat must form an alliance with the peasantry." Subsequently, the "Note to Volume Eight" interpreted The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "With the bankruptcy of the small-peasant economy and its exploitation by usury capital, increasing masses of peasants will break free from the corruption of 'Napoleonic ideas.' The reason of the peasants, their correctly understood interests, and the development of the contradictions between them and the bourgeoisie—all this will inevitably lead the peasantry to take unified action with the working class... '...the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order.'" "This conclusion of Marx is a development of the idea of the worker-peasant alliance under the leadership of the working class, which he had already expressed in 'The Class Struggles in France.'" Did this argument by the Soviet ideological sphere mean they had changed their earlier thesis that it was Lenin who "initially proposed the idea of a revolutionary worker-peasant alliance"? China’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau [2] was not influenced by this change; the 1995 third edition of the Selected Works of Lenin and the 2012 revised third edition of the Selected Works of Lenin still adhered to the theoretical understanding held by the Soviet ideological sphere in the 1940s and 50s, producing two different interpretations compared to the Selected Works of Marx and Engels published in the same years.
The second edition of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels, published in the same year as the Selected Works of Lenin, included for the first time a "Note" in each volume to analyze and interpret the selected articles by Marx and Engels. The 1995 "Note" to Volume 1 of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels (2nd ed.) and the 2012 "Note to Volume One" of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels (3rd ed.) consistently held that it was Marx's 1850 publication The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 that "resolved the issue of the allied forces of the proletariat in the revolution" and "proposed the idea that the worker-peasant alliance is the most important prerequisite for the success of the proletarian revolution." It further argued that in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx "expounded the idea that the worker-peasant alliance is an important prerequisite for the success of the proletarian revolution," which was also an identification with the arguments in the "Notes" of the first Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels translated from the Russian edition.
I believe the "Forewords" written by the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau interpreting the thought of Marx, Engels, and Lenin carry high levels of representativeness and authority within the Chinese ideological and theoretical spheres, extensively influencing the field of Marxist studies in China. The "Note" to the 1995 second edition of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels written by the Bureau has profoundly influenced Chinese Marxist scholars for thirty years. The view that Marx first proposed the worker-peasant alliance has not only become a consensus in China’s theoretical circles but also the standard narrative in subsequent articles and books on the history of the international communist movement and the history of Marxist development. The Chinese Marxist community has yet to hold a discussion regarding these two contradictory interpretations of the worker-peasant alliance. I believe that to resolve these contradictions, one must clarify the actual situation of the relationship between workers and peasants and the associated ideas held by European socialists represented by Marx and Engels.
II. The Relationship between Workers and Peasants among 19th-Century European Socialists
The relationship between workers and peasants and the corresponding ideas of 19th-century European socialists were closely linked to the tortuous revolutionary path they experienced over half a century. To detach from this process and merely cite passages from Marx and Engels on the worker-peasant relationship to prove they proposed the worker-peasant alliance fails to reflect the true face of history.
Articles in the Chinese Marxist community researching Marx and Engels' thoughts on the worker-peasant relationship often cite the following types of statements:
—In January 1848, Engels noted in "The Movements of 1847": "There is no doubt that there will come a day when the impoverished and bankrupt peasants will unite with the proletariat; at that time, the proletariat will develop to a higher stage and declare war on the bourgeoisie."
—In March 1850, when Marx and Engels drafted the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League," they wrote: "Just as the democrats combine with the peasants, so the workers must combine with the rural proletariat."
—In 1852, Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that as the oppression and exploitation suffered by the peasants intensified, and as the disintegration of smallholding property accelerated, "the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order."
However, Chinese Marxist scholars generally fail to notice that the aforementioned understandings of the peasantry and worker-peasant relations published by Marx and Engels during the 1848 Revolutionary period were the thoughts they held during their youth, when they first participated in bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. These views subsequently underwent significant changes as their social experience and experience in revolutionary struggle accumulated and enriched.
The first to undergo a change in thought was Engels. At the end of 1848, in his work From Paris to Berne—half travelog and half social survey—Engels mentioned: "I have spoken with hundreds of peasants in different parts of France, and they all have a deadly hatred of Paris, and especially of the Paris workers." They opposed the Paris workers’ revolution and voted for "Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte." This experience completely changed Engels' view of the peasantry and worker-peasant relations; after this, he no longer held the idea that the peasantry could realize on its own the necessity of an alliance with the working class.
Marx's shift in understanding of the peasantry and worker-peasant relations occurred over a longer period.
After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Marx reflected on the history of that defeat. In May 1852, he published a standalone volume of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in New York; however, only a small number of copies were shipped back to Germany, where it was "never sold in the actual book market." Consequently, the book remained almost unknown to European intellectual circles. In 1869, when Marx published the second edition of the book in Germany, he deleted a passage from the first edition: "The French peasant, as soon as he is disappointed in the Napoleonic Restoration, will give up his belief in his smallholding; then the entire state edifice erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain that chorus without which its solo song in all peasant nations becomes a swan song [3]." It must be noted here that the first Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (1961) and the first Chinese edition of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels (1972), compiled and published domestically, both used the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Neither the main text nor the annotations contained the aforementioned passage deleted by Marx. In 1995, when the second edition of the Selected Works of Marx and Engels was published in China, Volume 1 again included the second edition of the work, but for the first time, it provided the deleted passage from the first edition as an "Editorial Note" for readers' reference. The "Preface" to that volume offered the following interpretation: "Marx elucidated the necessity of an alliance between the peasantry and the working class. He penetratingly analyzed the economic and political status of the peasantry under the capitalist system, pointing out that as bourgeois rule intensified, the peasantry became increasingly revolutionized and recognized the opposition between their own interests and those of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, they 'see the urban proletariat, whose mission is to overthrow the bourgeois order, as their natural ally and leader.' At the same time, with the support of the peasantry, 'the proletarian revolution will obtain that chorus without which its solo song in all peasant nations becomes a swan song.'" This marked the first time the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau [4] used a "Preface" to interpret Marx’s view that peasants would, based on their own circumstances, "see the urban proletariat... as their natural ally and leader." It was also the first interpretation of the "Editorial Note" regarding the passage Marx had deleted. This profoundly influenced the Marxist academic community in China, leading to thirty years of continuous articles arguing that Marx had proposed the worker-peasant alliance. In my view, we should respect Marx’s decision to delete this passage when he republished the work in 1869. Using modern ideological discourse to explain away Marx’s own revisions often merely adds ambiguity; thus, this deleted passage is unsuitable as a basis for modern arguments that Marx proposed the worker-peasant alliance.
Subsequently, it was the revolution of the Paris Commune that prompted a major shift in Marx’s understanding of the peasantry and the relationship between workers and peasants. It was through this failed revolutionary struggle that Marx realized "there exist profound contradictions between the urban producers and the rural producers, between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry." In 1875, four years after the defeat of the Paris Commune, Marx continued to reflect on the revolutionary struggles spanning over twenty years since 1848. He arrived at a conclusion regarding the peasantry that differed from his youth during the 1848 revolutions: "Where the peasant exists in the mass as a private proprietor, where he even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states of the West European continent, where he has not disappeared and been replaced by agricultural day laborers, as in England... the following will occur," namely, that "the peasant will hinder and wreck every workers’ revolution, as he has done in France up to now."
The aforementioned shifts in the thought of Marx and Engels simply provide a historical fact: during the era of the 1848 European bourgeois revolutions, the desire of European socialists for the working class and the peasantry to actively unite with one another was unrealizable for both parties. A truly profound theoretical understanding of the essence of this problem required half a century of proletarian revolutionary struggle. In 1901, while analyzing the draft of the new program of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Karl Kautsky wrote a passage that Lenin called "profoundly true and important": "Socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has, and, like the latter, it emerges from the struggle against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the masses. But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions... Socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously." He continued: "The task of Social Democracy is to imbue the proletariat with the consciousness of its position and the consciousness of its task." Lenin keenly perceived the profound scientific content in Kautsky’s view, distilled it, and successfully applied it to a crucial aspect of the proletarian revolutionary struggle—the building of the proletarian party. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin emphasized: "The workers could not have had Social-Democratic consciousness. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-unionist consciousness." Undoubtedly, neither the working class nor the peasantry could independently recognize the social essence of their own problems, nor could they generate a reciprocal revolutionary desire. Consequently, they would not spontaneously generate a socialist consciousness of a worker-peasant alliance. From this emerges a fundamental sociological principle: scientific socialism cannot arise spontaneously among the worker masses; it must be recognized by the worker masses through education under the leadership of a strong proletarian party.
In 1848, the Communist Manifesto—which marked the birth of Marxism—contained the following passage regarding the peasant question: "The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat." This classic discourse from the inaugural years of Marxism established the fundamental stance and viewpoint of Marx and Engels on worker-peasant relations throughout their lives, deeply influencing the various workers' parties of the First and Second Internationals. The Manifesto’s view of the peasantry as a social middle stratum remains theoretically correct. However, analyzing a problem in theory is not the same as solving it in practice. Transforming the scientific socialist theory found in books into policies and strategies that can guide actual revolutionary struggle is a highly variable and complex practical-intellectual project. A famous case occurred in 1875, twenty-seven years after the Manifesto and four years after the failure of the Paris Commune. While considering action strategies, the German Workers' Party formulated the Gotha Program, which included a clause concerning the peasantry: "Relative to [the working class], all other classes are only one reactionary mass." Confronted with such an understanding in the party program—one detrimental to uniting with the social middle strata—Marx and Engels immediately wrote the Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Workers' Party and sent a letter to the party to correct it. That the influential German Workers' Party held such a simplistic and one-sided view of the middle classes (including the peasantry) in the 19th-century international communist movement makes their subsequent volatile and lamentable revolutionary trajectory easier to understand.
From the February Revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, although the European proletariat endured two defeats, these twenty-plus years of armed struggle for state power were indeed the most heroic and brilliant chapters of the European proletarian revolutionary movement. During this period, European socialists, represented by Marx and Engels, reflected on the paths and methods of the revolutionary movement, tending to link the two major issues of armed struggle and the improvement of worker-peasant relations.
—In April 1856, Marx wrote to Engels: "How well we know our heroic brothers on the other side of the Rhine! The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasants' War [5]. Then the affair will be splendid." Here, in clear and emotive language, Marx for the first time proposed that fostering close worker-peasant relations for armed struggle was critically important for the German proletarian revolution. However, this idea—approximating a worker-peasant alliance—remained confined to their private correspondence for a long time. It was unknown to the workers' parties of the First and Second Internationals for thirty years and was not transformed into a methodology or strategy that could influence these parties to actively reach out to the peasantry.
—In February 1870, prior to the Paris Commune uprising, Engels incorporated the ideas from his April 1856 correspondence with Marx into his publicly published monograph, the Preface to the Second Edition of 'The Peasant War in Germany'. He publicly proposed to the German workers' movement of that time: "To awaken this class [Note: the agricultural proletariat and day laborers] and to win it over to the movement is the first and most urgent task of the German workers' movement. Once the mass of agricultural day laborers has learned to understand its own interests, no feudal, bureaucratic or bourgeois reactionary government will be possible in Germany." However, the German Workers' Party consistently ignored this idea—which Engels called "the first and most urgent task" and which could have practically led toward a worker-peasant alliance. They failed to transform this theoretical insight into methods and strategies to guide the proletariat in actively improving relations with the peasantry. A year later, it was not in Germany, but in France, that the Paris Commune broke out—the first armed uprising in which the European proletariat seized bourgeois state power. This was the pinnacle of the 19th-century international communist movement!
In 1875, four years after the failure of the Paris Commune, Marx reached a different understanding and judgment of the peasantry than he held during 1848. In 1894, forty-six years after the 1848 revolutions, the elderly Engels wrote The Peasant Question in France and Germany, offering a retrospective summary consistent with Marx’s 1875 views: "The dim socialist aspirations of the February Revolution were swiftly swept away by the reactionary votes of the French peasants," and "how much the French people have had to pay for this one deed of the peasants," noting that by the end of the 19th century, "the French people are still suffering from its consequences."
These historical reflections by Marx and Engels after 1848 surpassed their earlier understanding of the peasantry and represent the mainstream development of their thought on the peasant question. Some Chinese scholars argue that "Marx and Engels’ view of the role of the peasantry in the proletarian revolution was never positive," which accords with historical reality.
The Paris Commune uprising failed. A major historical task facing all European socialists and the First International was how to scientifically understand and summarize the Paris Commune—which, though defeated, was glorious. This task was intimately linked to the ideological and organizational development of the European working class and the entire trajectory of the proletarian revolution following the Commune’s defeat. However, by 1876, the First International had dissolved. Following the German Workers' Party’s adoption of the Gotha Program in 1875—which committed to "striving by all legal means for the free state—and—socialist society" and participating in National Assembly elections—the leaders of the newly formed French Workers' Party, Jules Guesde and Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, traveled to London in May 1880 to meet with Marx. Together, they drafted the French Workers' Party’s electoral program for the National Assembly, which contained no language regarding worker-peasant relations. From then on, European socialists and the workers' parties of various nations moved fully onto the parliamentary path.
European socialists and the First and Second Internationals were long situated in cities, far removed from the countryside and the peasantry. What impact did such an environment and experience have on their thinking regarding how to conduct the revolutionary struggle?
In March 1895, toward the end of his life, Engels published "Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850" (hereafter referred to as the Introduction). This work reflected the reflections, judgments, and summaries made by his generation—having lived through half a century of revolution—regarding the path of proletarian revolution and its modes of struggle. Two passages are particularly striking:
—"In France, too, the socialists are realizing more and more that no lasting victory is possible for them unless they first win over the great mass of the people, i.e., in this case, the peasants. Patient propaganda work and parliamentary activity are recognized here, too, as the immediate tasks of the party. Success was not long in coming. Not only have the socialists conquered a number of municipal councils, but fifty socialists now have seats in the Chambers, and they have already overthrown three ministries and a president of the republic."
—"The conditions of struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which had been decisive everywhere up to 1848, was to a considerable extent obsolete... Let us have no illusions about this."
In this publicly released Introduction, Engels emphasized that "patient propaganda work and parliamentary activity are recognized here, too, as the immediate tasks of the party." This constitutes one of the key themes of the Introduction, demonstrating full affirmation and a bright outlook for the parliamentary methods of struggle adopted by the workers' parties of France and Germany and the Second International. Intertwined with this is another key theme: that what "merits a somewhat more detailed examination here" are the "methods of struggle of 1848"—namely, the "old-style rebellion" of urban barricade warfare—which "is today obsolete in every respect." Although Engels continued to express the idea of not renouncing armed revolution in private letters to friends after the publication of the Introduction, these private exchanges of thought, which were not public at the time, had no influence on the action strategies of the French and German workers' parties or the Second International.
Differences exist within China’s intellectual circles regarding how to understand the two major themes expounded in the Introduction. Some scholars believe that "Engels, with great theoretical courage and the spirit of seeking truth from facts, made new theoretical judgments and conceptual breakthroughs regarding the process and struggle tactics of the proletarian socialist revolution," arguing that this represented the exploration of a new revolutionary path through the implementation of parliamentary struggle by the French and German workers' parties. I agree with this analysis; however, this only tells half the story. The other half is that history has proven this exploration did not succeed.
The failure of 19th-century European socialists to generate the theory and practice of a worker-peasant alliance was rooted in deeper historical factors. The 19th century was an era of European bourgeois revolutions. A major difference between these and the later bourgeois revolutions in Russia and China is that the European bourgeois-democratic revolutions, represented by Britain, France, and Germany, were completed entirely under the leadership of their own national bourgeoisies. They resolved the rural land question in ways favorable to the bourgeoisie. Through these revolutions, the entire peasantry came under the profound influence of their national bourgeoisie, becoming members of the rising bourgeois camp. Their significant political role was to serve as adherents and supporters of bourgeois political parties, manifesting as a major voting force in bourgeois electoral contests. Under the long-term malicious propaganda and influence of bourgeois parties, the European peasantry, as an electorate, had a very poor relationship with the urban working class. This gave rise to a problem: from any perspective, the European workers' parties in the proletarian revolution faced a formidable political task—they had to pull the peasants (referring here primarily to laboring peasants) out of the bourgeois camp and unite them under the banner of the proletarian revolution. Undoubtedly, for European socialists and workers' parties, improving worker-peasant relations was a difficult and heavy task, which ultimately became a historical regret!
Fifty-two years after the Paris Commune [6] revolution, in 1923, to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin authored the article "The October Revolution and the Middle Strata." Addressing the European revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, he penned these profound words: "One of the reasons for the defeat of the French Revolution of 1848 was that it did not meet with the sympathy and response of the French peasants. One of the reasons for the collapse of the Paris Commune was that it encountered the resistance of the middle strata, primarily the peasantry." Stalin’s explanation of the reasons for the failure of these two European revolutionary movements is concise and hits the mark. It not only objectively and truly reveals the actual state of worker-peasant relations in the 19th-century European communist movement but also profoundly points out why the 19th-century European proletarian revolution could not succeed. It is not difficult to see from Stalin’s words that although European socialists and workers' parties experienced two "iron and blood" struggles—the 1848 Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune uprising—they failed to complete the major historical task of scientifically understanding and summarizing the lessons of these two revolutionary defeats. Stalin’s "The October Revolution and the Middle Strata" serves as a key for Chinese Marxist circles to understand and analyze the reasons for the failure of the Paris Commune and the trajectory of the European proletarian revolutionary movement.
III. Historical Facts and Problems Reflected in "The Peasant Question in France and Germany"
The European proletarian revolutionary movement spanned nearly half a century. In November 1894, in his late years, Engels published The Peasant Question in France and Germany, putting forward the concept of the "peasant question" for the first time in the history of the international communist movement and the history of Marxist development. Accurately interpreting this work is an important method for discerning whether Marx and Engels possessed the idea of a worker-peasant alliance. This work reveals at least four major historical facts, from which a judgment based on seeking truth from facts can be made.
The opening lines of The Peasant Question in France and Germany read: "The bourgeois and reactionary parties are greatly amazed that everywhere among Socialists the peasant question has now suddenly been placed upon the order of the day. What they should rather be amazed at is that this has not happened much earlier." What was the historical situation Engels described as the peasant question "suddenly being placed upon the order of the day"? Why were the bourgeois parties "greatly amazed" by this?
At the tenth national congress of the Workers' Party of France (POF) in Marseille in September 1892, the first land program formulated by European socialists and workers' parties—44 years after the birth of the Communist Manifesto in 1848—was adopted. This program was further revised at the twelfth national congress in Nantes in September 1894. In October of the same year, Georg von Vollmar [7], a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), delivered a supplementary report on the land program at the Frankfurt Congress to discuss the peasant question, triggering internal party debate. These few opening lines in The Peasant Question in France and Germany expose a significant fact in the history of the international communist movement: it was not until the end of the 19th century, after half a century had passed, that European socialists and workers' parties finally "placed the peasant question on the order of the day," an act that even caused "bourgeois and reactionary parties" to feel "greatly amazed." This historical situation profoundly indicates that for decades, European socialists and workers' parties had little voice and almost no influence in the vast social sphere of the countryside and the peasantry. This is the first major historical fact revealed—that European socialists and workers' parties had not set foot in the peasant movement. Based on Engels’ lament that they had "not earlier" paid attention to the peasant question, one can judge that they had consistently remained absent from the peasant movement and had not proposed the idea of a worker-peasant alliance. This fact—that Engels himself was "amazed" by the lack of earlier attention to the peasant question—has long been overlooked by Chinese Marxist circles, yet it should indeed "amaze" us and warrants great attention and in-depth study. This historical fact and problem exposed at the beginning of the work is the threshold for understanding the entire text.
The second major historical fact reflected in The Peasant Question in France and Germany is that although the Workers' Party of France was founded in 1879, it only turned its attention to the peasant question more than a decade later, producing a land program that was "full of contradictions" and highly controversial. Engels stated bluntly: "Our French comrades are absolutely right in one thing: in France, no lasting revolution is possible against the will of the small peasant. Only it seems to me they have not hit upon the right way to approach the peasant." Engels’ revelation and conclusion are entirely correct! What requires further interpretation is that this conclusion—that the "French comrades" had "not hit upon the right way to approach the peasant"—was not an isolated case involving only the French party. Rather, it was a universal and unresolved problem for 19th-century European socialists and the various workers' parties of the First and Second Internationals. That they took half a century to even put the peasant question on the agenda, and still "had not found the right way to approach the peasant," clearly illustrates how much they neglected the peasantry. How could 19th-century European socialists and workers' parties, who had not "approached the peasant" for decades, possibly have "a series of basic principles regarding the theory of the peasant question" or a "complete and systematic" theory on the matter? This is clearly illogical. This practice of artificially inflating the thought of Marx and Engels in a way that does not conform to historical reality is undesirable; it resembles the occasion when Marx criticized the Russian Narodniks [8] for "insisting on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche générale [general path]," noting that such a move "would do me too much honor and yet too much insult."
Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in March 1871, Marx wrote The Civil War in France in April, pointing out that "deep contradictions existed between the urban and rural producers, between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry." Twenty-three years later, had this situation changed? It had not. The third major historical fact revealed by The Peasant Question in France and Germany is: "Since the rise of the working-class movement, the bourgeois in Western Europe, particularly in regions where small-peasant proprietorship predominates, has been able to make the peasants suspicious and hateful of the socialist workers by representing them as partageux, as 'propounders of a division of property,' as a crowd of lazy, greedy city people who want to seize the peasant's property." From the words of Marx and Engels, one can clearly see the truth of why the 19th-century European urban working class failed for decades to "approach the peasant," and the reality of the relationship between European socialists, workers' parties, and the peasantry. From this, one can infer that the relationship was cold and distant—how then could there be a worker-peasant alliance?
The fourth major historical fact disclosed in The Peasant Question in France and Germany is that the main subject of the article concerns the participation of the French and German workers' parties in National Assembly elections. This situation thoroughly and profoundly reveals how the peasantry was positioned in the thinking of European socialists and the workers' parties of the Second International. As China’s Marxist academic circles interpret The Peasant Question in France and Germany...
...There is a widely cited sentence in the text: "In order to conquer political power, this party must first go from the town to the country, must become a power in the countryside." Many commentators look only at the literal meaning of this sentence and rigidly link or compare it to the efforts of our Chinese Communists to move deep from the cities into the countryside to launch the Land Revolution in 1927, viewing "this thought of Engels as a herald of the New-Democratic Revolution led by the Communist Party of China." Most scholars have not deeply reflected on the circumstances under which Engels made this suggestion to the workers' parties of France and Germany "to conquer political power," what problems facing those parties he was addressing, what he was calling on them to go "from the town to the country" to do, and how they were to conquer political power. Briefly stated, the suggestion in The Peasant Question in France and Germany that the workers' parties "go from the town to the country" has nothing in common with the CPC's move deep into the countryside after the failure of the Great Revolution in 1927 [9]. In the vision of European socialists, the French and German workers' parties, and the entire Second International, the socio-political positioning of the peasantry was completely different from that of the CPC. What then was their positioning of the peasant? What was the essence of their relationship with the peasant? Two words: the voter! As early as 1848, Engels emphasized: "The French peasant possesses over six million votes, accounting for more than two-thirds of all votes in France." The reality in 1894 was that the French Workers' Party "wanted to win over the small peasant from one day to the next, as much as possible even in the most recent general election." The suggestion and urging in The Peasant Question in France and Germany for the workers' parties to "go from the town to the country" and connect with the peasants was for the purpose of "winning over the small peasants in the general election," competing with bourgeois parties for these peasant votes, and using those votes to "conquer political power"! Voters and votes were the essence of the relationship between 19th-century European socialists/workers' parties and the peasantry. Reading the Chronology of the Life and Work of Marx and Engels, one finds no traces of them going deep into the countryside to participate in peasant movements; they always analyzed and discussed the peasantry as a part of the intermediate social strata. It can be said that the "Peasant Question" as a specialized theoretical concept and as a relatively independent major practical and theoretical issue in the proletarian revolution had not yet systematically emerged in Marx’s thought. The concept of the "Peasant Question" put forward by Engels in his later years, with participation in bourgeois parliamentary elections and the voter-relationship with peasants as its primary content, is not of the same type as the later "Peasant Question" concept of Lenin and Mao Zedong, which focused on the struggle against the landlords and the bourgeoisie. The alliance of workers and peasants proposed by the former Soviet Russia and our country was the result and expression of the struggle against the landlords and the bourgeoisie; it developed during the struggle to seize state power from the bourgeoisie by armed force, and it possessed clear targets, means, and goals of revolutionary struggle.
When Engels wrote The Peasant Question in France and Germany, he sincerely cautioned the workers' parties of France and Germany to "go from the town to the country." However, this advice did not take effect; they did not follow this proposal of Engels—which possessed significant political orientation and policy functions—and did not "go from the town to the country," thereby losing this opportunity to "approach the peasantry" which might have influenced and changed their own trajectory! Instead, what influenced them was a different set of remarks. The text optimistically looked forward to the "ever-increasing number of socialist deputies" in "the parliaments of Germany, France, and Belgium," which made "the socialist conquest of power a matter of the foreseeable future." It was precisely based on this optimistic prediction of the electoral situation that the article proposed and explained policy suggestions regarding small, middle, and large peasants for "once our party is in possession of state power."
The actual historical situation and deep-seated historical problems of European socialists and the First and Second Internationals reflected in The Peasant Question in France and Germany have opened a historical door for the Chinese Marxist academic community to comprehensively review their historical activities and seek truth from facts in studying the original face of their worker-peasant relations and thought. The history of the 19th-century international communist movement shows that starting from the Second International, European socialists and workers' parties drifted further and further from the revolutionary path of the alliance of workers and peasants, leaving a major historical task that urgently needed to be resolved by the proletarian revolutionary movement of the 20th century.
IV. Lenin Proposed and Created the Alliance of Workers and Peasants
Who proposed and created the alliance of workers and peasants, thereby opening the door to victory for the proletarian revolutionary movement? The first person to truly attempt and preliminarily resolve the problem of the alliance of workers and peasants in practice and theory was Lenin. Russian socialists, represented by Lenin, often had the harrowing experience of being exiled to the countryside for long periods by the Tsarist government; they understood the Russian countryside and peasants, and possessed the life experience and ideological sentiments necessary to generate the idea of an alliance of workers and peasants.
The Soviet intellectual community believed that it was Lenin who proposed and created the alliance of workers and peasants, and that the alliance of workers and peasants was a product of Leninism. As mentioned previously, in the late 1940s, the Soviet intellectual community first proposed that Lenin "initially put forward the idea of the revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants" in What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894). In 1954, the Soviet Union published On the Alliance of Workers and Peasants, which was the first theoretical collection in the history of Marxist development specifically discussing this topic. The editors at the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute of the CPSU Central Committee believed: "The idea that the revolutionary alliance formed by workers and peasants is the primary means of overthrowing the Tsarist system, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie, as well as creating a communist society, was first proposed by Lenin in What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats published in 1894. In this work, Lenin demonstrated: The alliance of the Russian working class and the peasantry would overthrow the Tsarist autocracy, and then, by forming an alliance with the laboring people and the exploited masses, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the proletarians of other countries, would follow the high road of open political struggle straight toward the victorious communist revolution. Lenin demonstrated in his subsequent works that: the alliance of workers and peasants is the supreme principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat." "Lenin’s thought on the alliance of workers and peasants became the guiding principle for all activities of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union founded by Lenin. The alliance of workers and peasants was the most important condition for the Soviet people to achieve a victory of world-historical significance and for the Soviet socialist state to be consolidated and strengthened." This argument by the Soviet intellectual community is grounded in solid historical facts and is tenable.
In actual revolutionary struggle, proposing the idea of an alliance of workers and peasants and establishing such an alliance are not independent processes that can be separated. When Lenin used the verbal expression "alliance of workers and peasants," he was already planning ideologically and deploying and implementing actions for the joint struggle of workers and peasants against the landlord class and the big bourgeoisie; the close fusion of his practice and thought was like a river formed by streams that grows increasingly torrential. This is why it is said that "theory is the ideological expression of practice."
The history of the proletarian revolutionary struggle over the past century shows that only by fighting on the front lines of the struggle against the enemy and personally experiencing and commanding all aspects of the revolutionary struggle can one obtain true revolutionary practice and experiential knowledge, and thus sublimate these into theoretical ideas that truly reflect and guide the actual revolutionary movement. During the brutal warfare of establishing the Jiangxi Revolutionary Base Area in 1930, Mao Zedong wrote in Oppose Book Worship: "The correct and firm struggle tactics of the Communist Party can never be produced by a few people sitting in a room; they can only be produced in the process of mass struggle—that is to say, they can only be produced in actual experience." This is an absolute truth, a revolutionary experience and ideological understanding watered with blood. The alliance of workers and peasants is just such an issue. It is not a scholastic concept that can be discussed in pure thought or in books detached from the actual revolutionary movement; rather, it is a concrete practical problem of revolution, saturated with and connected to every aspect of the proletarian revolutionary struggle. Like blood flowing through the human body, it permeates the "three magic weapons" of the proletarian revolutionary body: Party building, armed struggle, and the united front. It deeply influences and determines the distinction and transition between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletarian-socialist revolution, and concerns the revolutionary path and mode of struggle of the proletarian movement. Consequently, the proposal and creation of the alliance of workers and peasants requires the proletarian party to have extensive historical preparation and a series of basic elements. One of the most fundamental tasks is that the proletarian party must contend for leadership over the revolution within the bourgeois revolution—never acting as "politically weak assistants to the bourgeoisie," but rather "becoming the leader of the people's revolution." This was precisely the product and innovation of Lenin leading the Bolshevik Party in deep participation in the Russian bourgeois revolution!
Whom does proletarian leadership in a bourgeois revolution lead? Primarily, it leads the peasantry. What is the core of the peasant question? It is the land question. The land question and the peasant question are like the palm and the back of a hand; they are the central issues of the bourgeois revolution. History and reality tell us that there is no peasant in the world who does not love the land! Seizing the land of the landlords is the only source for the revolutionary transformation of the peasants' actions and thoughts, thereby allowing them to grow into a revolutionary force. Only by leading the peasants to complete this historical task can the proletariat generate and form a firm alliance of workers and peasants with them; only with a firm alliance of workers and peasants can the proletariat-led bourgeois revolution be carried out and completed—there is no shortcut. If the proletariat fails to unite with and rely on the broad masses of peasants and relies only on its own strength, it will surely suffer a crushing defeat and have no hope of revolutionary success under the combined assault of the feudal forces and the bourgeoisie. These revolutionary experiences and theoretical thoughts regarding the peasant question and the alliance of workers and peasants are not an issue for Soviet and Chinese intellectual circles, but they had not yet emerged in the 19th-century European communist movement.
In parliamentary elections, as Engels said, "The Social-Democratic Party now thrives by shunning the illegal" [10] in conducting the workers' movement—meaning the various parties abide by the constitutions and laws of the bourgeois states, treating all as equals and viewing the peasants as voters. In the alliance of workers and peasants, the proletarian party unites, relies on, and leads the peasants, viewing them as close comrades-in-arms in the joint opposition to the landlord class and the big bourgeoisie, and thus as the allied army of the proletarian revolution. Peasants as voters in a bourgeois state parliament and peasants as members of an alliance of workers and peasants generated in a bourgeois revolution are not the same thing; the tactical strategies and theoretical ideas regarding the peasant question in these two cases are as different as clouds and mud. These are two completely different positions and attitudes toward the peasantry with clearly defined lines between friends and enemies, belonging to two completely different modes of struggle and revolutionary paths. The democratic historical task of opposing the landlord class is the primary and fundamental task for the proletariat in leading the peasantry and forming the alliance of workers and peasants. The alliance of workers and peasants and its theoretical ideas could only be generated in the struggle against the landlord class and the big bourgeoisie; this historical task fell upon the Bolsheviks led by Lenin.
Lenin’s What is to be Done? proposed fundamental ideas regarding the building of a proletarian party guided by Marxism, which thereafter set proletarian Party building on the right track; this is a prerequisite and essential element for the generation and formation of the alliance of workers and peasants. The "Marxist" guidance spoken of here was distilled, summarized, and categorized by Lenin leading the Bolsheviks in the practice of the Russian revolution, in the struggle against the opportunism and revisionism of the Second International, from the publicly published works and articles of Marx and Engels, and from the complex socialist trends in Europe. Resultantly, the term "Marxism" began to be used in a positive sense and took root; Marxism became a banner rallying the proletarian revolutionaries and truly became the theoretical foundation for the guiding ideology of the proletarian revolutionary movement. Prior to this, Marxism was still in formation and had not yet gained wide recognition and application; it had not been clearly defined as the guiding ideology of the proletarian revolutionary movement—the First and Second Internationals. Undoubtedly, neither the working class nor the peasantry could spontaneously generate the socialist consciousness of an alliance of workers and peasants; only a proletarian revolutionary party that consciously takes Marxism as its theoretical foundation for reflection and guidance can propose an alliance of workers and peasants in the struggle against the landlord-bourgeoisie.
The failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 signaled the basic completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Western Europe. In contrast, the primary task of the Russian revolution remained a bourgeois-democratic one—to oppose Tsarist autocracy and resolve the peasant land issue. This led to contradictions and debates between Russian Marxists and European socialists regarding the nature of the Russian revolution. Because Marxism was still in its formative stages in the 19th century, the Second International remained deeply mired in the theoretical ideas and struggle methods of social democracy for a long period. It never produced or possessed the clear and profound insight later achieved by Lenin: namely, that "the era of Russian social development in which democratism and socialism merged into one inseparable whole (as was the case, for example, in the era of Chernyshevsky) has passed away forever"; and that "a gulf now lies between these two ideas, and Russian socialists should have understood this long ago; they should have understood the inevitability and absolute necessity of a complete and final rupture with the ideas of the democrats." The struggle methods and theoretical tenets of Second International social democracy were not only unable to answer or resolve the problems of the Russian revolution but actually obstructed Russian Marxists from thinking deeply about the Russian revolutionary path.
It is an unavoidable historical fact that, faced with revolutionary defeat, European socialists and workers' parties turned away from armed struggle following the 1871 Paris Commune uprising and moved entirely toward active participation in electoral campaigns for bourgeois national parliaments. Conversely, in 1905, Lenin led the Bolsheviks to the front lines of the Moscow struggle during the Russian Revolution. Despite the failure of the uprising, he was not discouraged. He profoundly summarized the lessons of the defeat, writing works of great practical significance such as Lessons of the Moscow Uprising and Lessons of the Guerilla Warfare. Quoting Kautsky, then an influential theorist of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International, Lenin pointed out: "Kautsky is right when he says that after the Moscow uprising, Engels's conclusions should be re-examined, because the Moscow uprising brought forth 'new barricade tactics.' These tactics are the tactics of guerrilla warfare." Rather than abandoning the goal of "building a revolutionary army," Lenin sought to rehabilitate the reputation of failed urban street fighting, elevating it to the strategic status of comprehensive guerrilla warfare. In speaking and acting this way, Lenin effectively distanced himself from the idea in Engels’s 1895 Introduction [11] that urban street fighting had become obsolete. He thus liberated thought/intellect, leading the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to actively cooperate with the Socialist Revolutionary Party—which already held broad influence among the Russian peasantry—and resolutely implementing the previously proposed strategic slogan of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." Stalin considered this slogan and strategy to be "Lenin’s great service to the Russian revolution."
Lenin led the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to propose, support, and successively organize Peasant Soviets, Worker-Peasant Soviets, and Worker-Peasant-Soldier Soviets. Abandoning parliamentary struggle, he instead organized the October Revolution to seize power through armed force. The worker-peasant alliance thus emerged and developed as a concrete entity of revolutionary struggle, becoming the most basic, solid, and powerful class foundation and revolutionary force for the victory of the Russian October Revolution. Undoubtedly, Lenin found the "correct method of approaching the peasantry" suited to Russia. Stalin pointed out that "the October Revolution was the first revolution in the world to bring the question of the middle strata, and above all the peasant question, to the forefront," and that "the October Revolution was a perfect combination of a 'peasant war' and a 'proletarian revolution'!" Clearly, the proposal and creation of the worker-peasant alliance depend on how the proletarian party views the peasantry and what priority it accords the peasant question in establishing a specific type of worker-peasant relationship.
Subsequently, Lenin proposed the great revolutionary slogan: "Proletarians of all countries and oppressed nations, unite!" This slogan manifested Lenin’s major theoretical development of proletarian revolutionary practice and the peasant question, driving the magnificent global national liberation movements. Lenin clearly saw that "the main mass of inhabitants in backward countries consists of peasants," and that the essence and main body of national liberation movements were peasant movements. By attaching high importance to the exploited and oppressed side of the laboring peasantry, he unearthed and elevated the long-ignored and suppressed revolutionary potential and infinite power of the peasants. It can be said that Lenin transcended Marx and Engels’s simple exposure and critique of the peasantry as small-landowners and small-producers. For the first time, he viewed the laboring peasantry as a great revolutionary force that could stand alongside the working class. He thus solved the problem of the proletariat leading bourgeois-national-democratic revolutionary movements where the peasantry was the main body. This demonstrated an expansion in the scope and power of the revolution, as well as a deepening of its content and themes. From then on, the bourgeois-democratic movements entering the 20th century "no longer belonged to the category of the old world bourgeois-democratic revolution... but became part of the new world revolution, namely, the proletarian-socialist world revolution." This practical and theoretical clarification of the distinctions and links between bourgeois democratism and proletarian socialism was one of the essential elements that gave birth to the worker-peasant alliance.
While 19th-century European socialists and the workers' parties of the Second International never escaped the ideological shackles of social democracy—the belief that "political power comes from the ballot"—the worker-peasant alliance led by Lenin through armed struggle moved from the bourgeois-democratic revolution toward the proletarian-socialist revolution. This formed the divergence and differing historical trajectories between the two. The proposal and creation of the worker-peasant alliance carry epoch-making significance in the history of the international communist movement, profoundly signaling that the development of Marxism had entered a brand-new historical stage—the era of Leninism.
The definitive resolution of the worker-peasant alliance problem, from practice to theory, was achieved by the Chinese Communists, represented by Mao Zedong, standing on the shoulders of Marxism-Leninism! Believing firmly in Leninism and adhering to the path of the October Revolution, the Chinese Communists, from the very beginning of the Chinese revolution, directly studied and applied the policies, strategies, and theoretical ideas of the Leninist worker-peasant alliance. Moving from the cities deep into the countryside, they lived and worked alongside the peasants day and night, sharing their joys and sorrows and their common destiny. They found the "correct method of approaching the peasantry" suited to China—establishing rural Party branches, running Peasant Movement Training Institutes, forming peasant associations, "striking the local tyrants and distributing the land" [12], building the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, establishing rural base areas, implementing rent and interest reductions, and carrying out land reform and the socialist transformation of agriculture. In this process, workers and peasants merged into one family. The New China—the People's Republic of China—is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. In the contemporary era, Xi Jinping’s thoughts on the worker-peasant alliance serve as the guiding ideology for consolidating and developing that alliance in our country, leading the Chinese Communists deep into the countryside, and guiding the entire peasantry to shake off poverty and build a "green and beautiful" [13] new countryside. From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, several generations of Chinese Communists, as political representatives of the Chinese working class, have held deep feelings for the peasantry. This is the spiritual source of the CPC’s long-term, unremitting persistence in the worker-peasant alliance. The CPC insists on uniting, relying on, and educating the Chinese peasantry. The Chinese peasants have become the fresh blood and primary force for the CPC’s growth, and the great main force of Chinese revolution, construction, and reform. The path of the Chinese worker-peasant alliance is the path of Chinese revolution, construction, and reform, writing a vivid and glorious chapter in the history of the international communist movement. The successful path of the Chinese worker-peasant alliance is one of the greatest achievements and most valuable experiences in the century-long history of the CPC’s growth.
In the second half of the 19th century, the European proletarian revolutionary movement occurred alongside the European bourgeois revolutionary movements. The Marxism that arose then was in its founding period. The revolutionary experience of the young European proletariat and workers' parties struggling against the bourgeoisie was insufficient to discover, answer, or resolve the series of practical and theoretical problems within the proletarian revolutionary movement. Because they did not experience peasant movements, they did not form the idea of a worker-peasant alliance. This fact and historical phenomenon are not to be regretted in the history of the international communist movement or the history of Marxist development; nor do they diminish the series of great historical contributions made by European socialists, represented by Marx and Engels, to the global proletarian revolutionary movement. Every era has the historical tasks it is capable of proposing and solving. As Mao Zedong humorously told the Romanian Ambassador to China, Nicolae Cioroiu, in 1956: "We won't do everything well; otherwise, our descendants would have no work to do." In the history of the international communist movement and the history of Marxist development, the proposal and creation of the worker-peasant alliance underwent a long and tortuous history. It was the product of the proletarian revolutionary movement reaching a higher stage, reflecting the different historical stages of growth for both the international communist movement and Marxism.
(About the Author: Li Wei is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Marxism Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) Source: Marxist Theoretical Research in Higher Education, Issue 4, 2025 Editor: Huihui