V. The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry

In the event of a decisive victory of the revolution, power passes into the hands of the class that has played the leading role in the struggle; in other words, into the hands of the proletariat. This, let us say at once, by no means excludes the entry into the government of revolutionary representatives of non-proletarian social groups. They can and must be in it: a sound policy will compel the proletariat to admit to power the influential leaders of the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia or the peasantry. The whole question is: who will give the government’s policy its content, who will form a homogeneous majority in it? It is one thing when representatives of the democratic strata of the people take part in a government that is a workers’ government by the composition of its majority; it is quite another when representatives of the proletariat take part, as more or less honoured hostages, in a definitely bourgeois-democratic government.

The policy of the liberal capitalist bourgeoisie, in all its waverings, retreats and betrayals, is quite definite. The policy of the proletariat is still more definite and complete. But the policy of the intelligentsia, by reason of its intermediate social position and its political flexibility; the policy of the peasantry, by reason of its social heterogeneity, its intermediate position and its primitiveness; the policy of the petty bourgeoisie, again by reason of its lack of character, its intermediate position and its complete lack of political traditions: the policy of these three social groups is utterly indefinite, unformed, full of possibilities and therefore of surprises.

It is enough to try to imagine a revolutionary democratic government without representatives of the proletariat for the complete absurdity of such a notion to leap to the eye! A refusal by Social-Democrats to take part in a revolutionary government would mean the complete impossibility of a revolutionary government at all, and would thus be a betrayal of the cause of the revolution. But the participation of the proletariat in a government is both objectively most probable and admissible in principle only as a dominant and leading participation. One may, of course, call such a government the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, or, again, a coalition government of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. But the question will still remain: to whom does the hegemony belong in the government itself, and through it in the country? And when we speak of a workers’ government, we answer that the hegemony will belong to the working class.

The Convention, as the organ of the Jacobin dictatorship, by no means consisted of Jacobins alone; more than that, the Jacobins were even in a minority in it. But the influence of the sans-culottes outside the walls of the Convention, and the need for a resolute policy to save the country, put power into the hands of the Jacobins. Thus the Convention, while formally a national representation made up of Jacobins, Girondists and the vast Marsh, was in essence a dictatorship of the Jacobins.

When we speak of a workers’ government, we have in mind the dominant and leading position of the workers’ representatives in it.

The proletariat will not be able to consolidate its power without widening the base of the revolution.

Many sections of the working masses, especially in the countryside, will be drawn into the revolution and receive political organisation for the first time only after the vanguard of the revolution, the urban proletariat, has taken the helm of state. Revolutionary agitation and organisation will be carried on with the help of the resources of the state. Finally, legislative power itself will become a powerful instrument for revolutionising the masses of the people.

At the same time the character of our social and historical relations, which lays the whole burden of the bourgeois revolution on the shoulders of the proletariat, will not only create enormous difficulties for a workers’ government but will also, at least in the first period of its existence, give it invaluable advantages. This will show itself in the relations between the proletariat and the peasantry.

In the revolutions of 1789–93 and of 1848, power first passed from absolutism to the moderate elements of the bourgeoisie, and the latter emancipated the peasantry (how is another question) before revolutionary democracy received, or prepared to receive, power into its own hands. The emancipated peasantry lost all interest in the political ventures of the “townsmen”, that is, in the further course of the revolution, and, settling as an inert layer at the foundation of “order”, betrayed the revolution to the Caesarist or the old absolutist reaction.

The Russian revolution does not allow, and will not for a long time allow, any bourgeois-constitutional order to establish itself that could solve the most elementary tasks of democracy. As for the bureaucrat-reformers in the style of Witte or Stolypin, all their “enlightened” efforts are destroyed by their own struggle for existence. In consequence, the fate of the most elementary revolutionary interests of the peasantry, even of the whole peasantry as an estate, is bound up with the fate of the whole revolution, that is, with the fate of the proletariat.

The proletariat in power will stand before the peasantry as the class that has liberated it.

The rule of the proletariat will mean not only democratic equality, free self-government, the shifting of the whole burden of taxation on to the propertied classes, the dissolution of the standing army into the armed people and the abolition of compulsory church levies, but also the recognition of all the revolutionary reshufflings (seizures) of land relations carried out by the peasants. The proletariat will make these reshufflings the starting-point for further measures of state in the field of agriculture. Under such conditions the Russian peasantry will in any case be no less interested, during the first and most difficult period, in maintaining the proletarian regime (the “workers’ democracy”) than the French peasantry was interested in maintaining the military regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, which guaranteed to the new owners by the force of bayonets the inviolability of their plots of land. And this means that a representative assembly of the people, convened under the leadership of a proletariat that has secured the support of the peasantry, will be nothing other than a democratic dress for the rule of the proletariat.

But may not the peasantry itself push the proletariat aside and take its place?

That is impossible. All historical experience protests against this supposition. It shows that the peasantry is completely incapable of an independent political role.

The history of capitalism is the history of the subordination of the country to the town. The industrial development of the European towns in its time made the further existence of feudal relations in agricultural production impossible. But the countryside itself did not bring forward a class capable of coping with the revolutionary task of abolishing feudalism. The same town that subordinated agriculture to capital brought forward the revolutionary forces that took into their hands political hegemony over the countryside and extended to it the revolution in relations of state and property. In the course of further development the countryside falls finally into economic bondage to capital, and the peasantry into political bondage to the capitalist parties. These revive feudalism in parliamentary politics, turning the peasantry into their political domain, their electoral hunting ground. The modern bourgeois state, by means of the treasury and militarism, pushes the peasant into the jaws of usurer’s capital, and by means of state priests, state schools and the corruption of the barracks makes him a victim of usurers’ politics.

The Russian bourgeoisie is surrendering all the revolutionary positions to the proletariat. It will have to surrender the revolutionary hegemony over the peasantry as well. In the situation created by the passing of power to the proletariat, nothing will remain for the peasantry but to rally to the regime of workers’ democracy. Let it do so with no greater consciousness than it usually shows in rallying to a bourgeois regime! But whereas every bourgeois party, having won the votes of the peasantry, hastens to use its power to fleece the peasantry and to cheat it of all its expectations and promises, and then, at worst, to give way to another capitalist party, the proletariat, relying on the peasantry, will set all forces in motion to raise the cultural level of the countryside and to develop political consciousness in the peasantry.

From what has been said it is clear how we regard the idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. The point is not whether we consider it admissible in principle, whether we “want” or “do not want” such a form of political co-operation. We consider it unrealisable, at least in the direct and immediate sense.

Indeed: a coalition of this kind presupposes either that one of the existing bourgeois parties gains control of the peasantry, or that the peasantry creates a powerful independent party of its own. Neither the one nor the other, as we have tried to show, is possible.