Introduction

The bourgeois and reactionary parties are greatly astonished that the peasant question has now suddenly, and everywhere, come onto the order of the day among the socialists. By rights they ought to be astonished that this did not happen long ago. From Ireland to Sicily, from Andalusia to Russia and Bulgaria, the peasant is a very essential factor of the population, of production and of political power. Only two regions of Western Europe form an exception. In Great Britain proper, large landed property and large-scale agriculture have totally displaced the peasant who farms on his own account; in Prussia east of the Elbe the same process has been going on for centuries, and here too the peasant is more and more either “cleared off” or at any rate pushed into the background economically and politically.

Up to now the peasant has mostly proved himself a factor of political power only through his apathy, which has its roots in the isolation of country life. This apathy of the great mass of the population is the strongest support not only of the parliamentary corruption in Paris and Rome but of Russian despotism as well. But it is by no means insurmountable. Since the rise of the labour movement it has not been especially hard for the bourgeois in Western Europe, particularly where small peasant ownership predominates, to make the socialist workers suspect and hateful to the peasant’s imagination as partageux, as “dividers”, as lazy, greedy townsfolk with an eye on the peasants’ property. The hazy socialist aspirations of the February Revolution of 1848 were swiftly brushed aside by the reactionary ballots of the French peasants; the peasant, who wanted to be left in peace, then dug out of the treasury of his memories the legend of Napoleon, the peasants’ emperor, and created the Second Empire. We all know what this one deed of the peasants cost the French people; it is still suffering from its consequences today.

Since that time, however, much has changed. The development of the capitalist form of production has cut the life-nerve of small-scale production in agriculture; small farming is declining and decaying beyond rescue. The competition of North and South America and of India has flooded the European market with cheap grain, so cheap that no home producer can compete with it. The big landowner and the small peasant alike see ruin staring them in the face. And since they are both landowners and countrymen, the big landowner sets himself up as the champion of the small peasant’s interests, and the small peasant—by and large—accepts him as his champion.

Meanwhile, however, a powerful socialist workers’ party has grown up in the West. The dim presentiments and feelings of the time of the February Revolution have been clarified, broadened and deepened into a programme that satisfies every scientific requirement and contains definite, tangible demands; and these demands are upheld in the German, French and Belgian parliaments by an ever-growing number of socialist deputies. The conquest of political power by the socialist party has come within measurable distance. But in order to conquer political power this party must first go from the town to the country, must become a power in the countryside. This party, which has the advantage over all the others of a clear insight into the connection between economic causes and political effects, and which has therefore long since caught sight of the wolf under the sheepskin of the big landlord who forces his friendship on the peasant—may this party calmly leave the peasant, doomed to ruin, in the hands of his false protectors until he is changed from a passive into an active opponent of the industrial workers? And with that we are in the middle of the peasant question.