The Peasant Question in France and Germany
Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland
Engels’s last major article, written in November 1894 against the agrarian programme the French Workers’ Party adopted at Nantes, which promised to protect the small peasant’s holding. The small peasant is a doomed survival of a past mode of production; socialists must neither hasten his ruin nor promise to save his plot, but win him for co-operative farming by example and public aid. Big estates are to be expropriated and worked by co-operatives of their labourers, and the East Elbian farm workers are the decisive battlefield against Prussian Junkerdom.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the German text published in Die Neue Zeit, XIII. Jahrgang, 1. Band, Nr. 10 (Stuttgart, November 1894), pp. 292–306, read from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung scan.
- Source
- Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Die Neue Zeit online edition
Start reading 55 min audiobook
Quiz
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Contents
- Introduction 4 min 11
Engels opens by explaining why the peasant question has suddenly become urgent for European socialists. Outside Britain and East Elbian Prussia, the peasantry is a major part of the population and of political power. Its apathy and fear of the “dividers” had been used against the socialists in 1848 and gave France the Second Empire. Now cheap overseas grain is ruining big and small landowners alike, and the big landlords pose as the peasants’ protectors. A socialist party that hopes to take power must go from the town to the country, or the doomed peasant will become its active enemy.
- I The Small Peasant and the French Programme 29 min 30
Engels surveys the rural classes of Germany: small peasants in the west, big and middle peasants in the north-west and Bavaria, the great estates east of the Elbe, and cottage industries. The small peasant, owner of his means of labour but losing the commons and his domestic crafts and sinking into debt, is “a future proletarian”. Engels then examines the French Workers’ Party’s agrarian programmes. He approves the modest Marseilles programme of 1892, but criticises the Nantes preamble of 1894 for promising to maintain doomed small holdings and to protect tenants who exploit labourers, and finds its practical demands ineffective or of benefit to big landowners.
- II What Socialists Can Offer the Peasants 22 min 25
Engels sets out his own policy. Socialists cannot promise to preserve the small holding; they foresee its ruin but will not hasten it, and in power will not expropriate small peasants by force. Instead they will encourage co-operative farming by example and state aid, on lines the Danish socialists had proposed. Big and middle peasants who want guarantees for their farms and their hired labour belong with the anti-Semites. The great estates are to be expropriated, perhaps with compensation, as Marx thought cheapest, and handed to co-operatives of their labourers. Winning the East Elbian farm workers would break the Junkers and Prussian supremacy.