Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Vol. II by Hal Draper

Author:Hal Draper [Draper, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, History, Revolutionary, Politics
ISBN: 9780853455660
Google: 4i0UCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 644916
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1977-01-15T10:30:09+00:00

7. LAND TO THE PEASANTS: EASTERN EUROPE

When we come to Eastern Europe, Marx’s advocacy of the programmatic demand summarized by the later slogan “Land to the peasants” becomes heavily stressed. We find this true most often with reference to Poland, because of his frequent involvement with support of Polish national-revolutionary movements. But the position applied far more widely to the peasant countries of the Slavic east.

Marx and Engels first gave public utterance to this programmatic view on Poland at a London meeting commemorating the Cracow uprising of 1846, held (as it happened) on the same day that the February revolution of 1848 was exploding on the other side of the Channel. The Communist Manifesto was coming off the press that same week, with its statement of support to the Polish revolutionary tendency “that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation.”73 What would an agrarian revolution mean in Poland?

At the commemoration meeting, Marx’s speech stressed that it was a question of a social revolution in Poland, not merely a political one. But was the Cracow revolution “communist,” as has been claimed, asked Marx, just “because it tried to break the chains of feudalism, to liberate tributary property and transform it into free property, into modern property?” No, it was not communist, but nevertheless it aimed at a great social overturn.

The men who were at the head of the Cracow revolutionary movement had the deep conviction that only a democratic Poland could be independent, and a Polish democracy was impossible without the abolition of feudal rights, without the agrarian movement which would transform the tribute-paying peasants into free property-owners, into modern property-owners. Put Polish aristocrats in the place of the Russian autocrat and you will have conferred naturalization papers on despotism.74

This transformation of the peasants into owners of the land they tilled was the economic content of the social overturn to come, and it was intertwined with the democratic and liberatory character of the Cracow movement: “The Cracow revolution has given a glorious example to all of Europe by identifying the cause of the nation with the cause of democracy and the liberation of the oppressed class.” Marx pointed to the close analogy with Ireland. This revolution, he said, “finds the confirmation of its principles in Ireland, where the narrowly national [i.e., nationalist] party has been buried with O’Connell and the new national party is above all reformatory and democratic.”75

Reformatory and democratic: for land reform (land to the peasants) and the overthrow of the autocracy—this was the social-revolutionary side of the national revolution.

Engels’ speech at the meeting stressed that the 1846 Cracow uprising was fundamentally different from the Warsaw revolt of 1830. In 1830 the Polish aristocracy had excluded three-quarters of the nation from the revolution: “They left intact the brutalizing servitude of the peasants and the infamous condition of the Jews.” They rejected Lelewel’s effort to unite the national cause with the cause of liberty “by emancipating the Jews and peasants, by having the peasants participate in the ownership of the soil, by reconstructing Poland on the basis of democracy and equality.

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