The Peasant Question in France and Germany

An important work by Engels on the peasant question and the land question. Written between 15 to 22 November 1894. Published in Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 1, No. 10, 1894–1895. In 1928, the Shanghai Far East Book Company published the Chinese translation book The Peasant Question translated by Lu Yiyuan into Chinese; in August 1951, Renmin Publishing House published the single edition Peasant Question in France and Germany co-translated by Cao Baohua and Mao Linying.

On October 25, 1894, the leader of reformist faction of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Georg Heinrich von Vollmar, made a report on the drafting of the agrarian programme at the Frankfurt Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and advocated that such programme should reflect the interests of the rural workers as well as those of the wealthy rural classes and the rural bourgeoisie. In explaining the proposal, he quoted the agrarian programme of the French Workers’ Party and claimed that Engels also endorsed it. Engels wrote this article to clarify the peasant programme of the proletarian party and criticize the erroneous views of the opportunists on the peasant question that were becoming increasingly prevalent within the working-class parties in various countries, including France and Germany. In the work, Engels comprehensively elaborated the Marxist doctrine of the peasantry. Engels pointed out that “the peasant is a very essential factor of the population, production and political power”, and that the proletarian party, in order to conquer the political power, “must first go from the towns to the country, must become a power in the countryside.” Next, it proposed to conduct a scientific analysis of the situation of different classes and strata in the countryside, and put forth the principle of a differentiated treatment. Engels pointed out that the economic status of small farmers determines their political indifference, and they even suffered from bourgeois deception and propaganda. For this reason, the political parties of workers should focus their work on the small peasants and form a reliable alliance with them. It is just as evident that when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. “Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose.” Big and middle peasants who engage in exploitation through wage-labor should not be deprived by using violence, instead, all peasant households should be united into co-operatives to gradually eliminate the exploitation of wage-labor more and more in such co-operatives and make a gradual transition to a new mode of production. Big landowners should be severely dispossessed and their large estates to be handed over to agricultural workers who are already cultivating it and we should also organize them in rural co-operatives. Whether this dispossession is to be carried out by compensation or not will depend on the situation when the proletariat acquires power, particularly depends on the attitude of the landowners. “We by no means consider compensation as impermissible in any event; Marx told me (and how many times!) that, in his opinion, we would get off cheapest if we could buy out the whole lot of them.” Next, it criticized the increasingly growing opportunistic views within the working-class parties of France and Germany. First, the fallacy “to bring together all the elements of rural production”. Engels pointed out that socialism is especially opposed to the exploitation of wage-labor, therefore, we should “flatly deny that the socialist workers’ party of any country is charged with the task of taking into its fold, in addition to the rural proletarians and the small peasants, also the idle and big peasants and perhaps even the tenants of the big estates, the capitalist cattle breeders and other capitalist exploiters of the national soil.” Second, the claim “to maintain the small-holding ownership of the peasants.” In Engels’ view, neither now, nor at any time in the future, could the working-class party promise the small-holding peasants to protect their private property in any event, in order to temporarily meet the peasants’ demands and to accommodate their sense of property. It must be seen that the destruction of small-peasant property is inevitable. Finally, it elaborated on the fundamental principles of scientific socialism. It pointed out that the task of socialism is to transfer the means of production to the producers as their common possession, and that therefore the communists must fight for taking collective possession of the means of production by all means at the disposal of the proletariat.

The Peasant Question of France and Germany is an important document in the development of the history of Marxism. It clarified the importance of peasants as an ally of the working class in the cause of the proletarian revolution, pointed out the policies, guidelines, etc. for the proletarian party to win the support of the peasants in its struggle to conquer the political power and to guide the peasants to the socialist road after the victory of the revolution, and further enriched Marxism and put forth the correct way to solve the peasant question for the proletariat in power.