CLASSES AND CLASS STRUGGLE: POLITICS

(vi) The peasants WE HAVE . already taken Marx's well-known definition of the small peasantry *as class and not a class' to illustrate his views on the: relation between the economic and political processes in a class's formation.

Equally instructive is his explanation of how this very amorphous character of the peasantry, given their history since the decrees following the Revolution of 1789, laid the basis for the power of Louis Napoleon.

Marx's classic text 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', besides constituting a model of the method of historical materialism, throws much light on the subsequently vexed and momentous problem of the relationship of the peasantry to the socialist revolution.

For example, Lenin's strategy in Russia did not include the 'peasant alliance' simply as an organizational device, but was the extension into the conditions of backward Russia of the theoretical conclusions of Marx and Engels from 1848 and in the subsequent years.

"The Bonaparte dynasty,' writes Marx, 'represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it; not the country folk who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies linked up with the towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied bondage to this old order, want to see themselves with their small-holding saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant;

not his judgement, but his prejudice; not his future, but his past; not his modern Cévennes [where a famous peasant uprising took place in the early 18th century] but his modern Vendée [where the peasants supported the Royalists after 1789].'21 Contended In the years of the parliamentary republic of 1848 up to the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon in December 1851, 'the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery'.

Marx's method here should be noted. He does not deduce the political character of the peasant 'once and for all' from the economic-social definition of the class, but sees upon this basis a struggle between 'the past and the future' of the peasants as a class, a struggle joined only through the drawing of the peasants into the maelstrom of political history from 1848 to 1851, which has already been explained by Marx as the outcome of economic and class developments at the national and international levels (above).

This development from the outside' sets the terms under which the struggle of past against future in the peasantry takes place, and on this basis 21(*18th Brumaire, 'Selected Works' Vọl II, p. 416.)

Name Addre Marx discusses the disputes over local government, education, religion, morality, and so on, which raged among the peasants.

This method should be contrasted with any pseudo-Marxist 'analyses' which build up some 'model' of the class psychology of the peasant (or of the bourgeois, etc.) from the material conditions of his existence and then proceed to test it, confirm it, refine it, etc., through a consideration of various facts about peasant life and peasant history.

Analysis

Attempts to present *working-class culture' by a similar method, instead of through the historical analysis of the central experiences of the proletariat's struggle to become a 'class for itself' in conflict with the bourgeoisie, prove still more ludicrous.

This struggle between . the past and •the future of the peasantry is not to be understood just as a matter of consciousness, or as some tragic fate. Its material basis is made clear in the brilliant closing passages of "The 18th Brumaire', particularly in the following paragraphs:

'After the first revolution (1789) had transformed the peasants from semi-villeins into freeholders, Napoleon firmed and regulated the conditions on which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which had just come into their possession and slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now causing the ruin of the French peasant is his dwarf holding itself, the division of the land, the form of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is precisely the material conditions which made the feudal peasant into a small peasant and Napoleon into an emperor.

"Two generations have sufficed to produce the inevitable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture, progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist.

'The "Napoleonic" form of property, which at the beginning of the 19th century was the condition for the liberation and enrichment of the French countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century as the law of their enslavement and pauperisation.

And it is just this law which is the first of the "idees napoléoniennes" which the second Bonaparte has to uphold.

If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in this smallholding property itself but outside it in the influence of secondary causes, then his experiments will burst like soap bubbles when they come into contact with the of production.'"

Marx goes on to show how the small-holding, the extension of private property of the bourgeois type into the countryside, which had been the main guarantee of the bourgeois order against feudal restoration, had within two generations turned into the new enslavement of the small peasant:

"The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly-arisen smallholding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and marrow and throws them into the alchemistic cauldrons of capital. The Code Napoleon is now nothing but a codex of distraints, forced sales and compulsory auctions. "23 The future interests of the peasantry are therefore only to be found in the overthrow of the bourgeois order, and in alliance with that social force which can overthrow it, the proletariat.

In so far as the peasantry remains the slave of its past, of its illusions of the permanent and prosperous smallholding, protected by the Emperor, its class nature will 22(Ibid, pp.

23 (Ibid.) serve to strengthen the bourgeois state in its most repressIve forms against the proletariat and the revolutionary sections of the peasantry itself. Thus:

'Besides the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the smallholding is burdened by taxes.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army, the priests and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

'By its very nature, smallholding property forms a suitable basis for all-powerful and innumerable bureaucracy.

It creates a uniform level of relationships and persons over the whole surface of the land.

Hence it also permits of uniform action from a supreme centre on all points of this uniform mass. It annihilates the aristocratic intermediate grades between the mass of the people and the state power.

'On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct interference of this state power and the intervention of its immediate organs."24 • Whereas the first Napoleon, in the 1790s, could take his revolutionary armies beyond France's borders and 'repay with interest' the taxes of the peasants through the opening up of vast new markets and the plunder of other nations, the second 'ghost' of the Empire needed to equip and pay his bureaucratic caste directly out of the state revenue from taxes; raising parasitism to new heights, if the expression is suitable.

Not only the state, but the Church also, is now placed in a position where it appears openly as the ideological protector of the ruin and oppression of the small peasant, rather than the religious accompaniment of his new-found independence, as in the 1790s. Finally the army, the last 'idée napoléonienne', which was after 1789 'the flower of the peasant youth', becomes under Louis Napoleon 'the swamp-flower of peasant lumpenproletariat'.

The development of capitalism between 1789 and 1848, the unfolding of its internal class conflicts just at the point where the bourgeoisie was forced to face up to its own last republican' struggle (1848), the maturing of new "(Ibid, PP. relations of production in society as a whole which imperiously demand the demise of the peasant small-holdingall this has built up 'behind the back' of the peasant a situation in which his traditional ideology is brought into complete contradiction with his material conditions of life, where every action into which he is forced will either confirm his oppression in still more bestial forms or, by a leap in consciousness through alliance with the proletariat, set going the process that will abolish his own and all private Estimate Marx was wrong in his estimate of the stage of maturity for socialist revolution reached by French society in 1848 And yet, from his historicalmaterialist analysis of these events he cast a searchlight to the developing class relations of the capitalist system as a whole, and not only in France. It was 20 years before the ghost of Bonaparte was laid; but then, in 1871, in the action of thousands o: workers in the Paris Commune who had certainly never read Marx, the final words of his '18th Brumaire' were dramatically and literally fulfilled:

'But if the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the iron statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendôme column.' It remains to explain the political consciousness and role of the peasantry in terms of our earlier presentation of the role of ideology.

When Marx talks about 'false consciousness' he is not dismissing the ideological aspects of history as ephemeral. This false consciousness' must be understood as a necessary link in the causal chain, but the very conditions which make possible the recognition of its falseness as well as its necessity demand at the same time a struggle against its persistence.

Marx concludes, on the illusions of the peasants:

'One sees; all idées napoléoniennes are the ideas of the undeveloped small-holding in the freshness of its youth; for the small-holding that has outlived its day they are an absurdity.

They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words that are reduced to phrases, spirits reduced to ghosts.

'But the parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between the state power and society.'2 And it was in the Paris Commune of 1871, 20 years later, that the proletariat made first revolutionary bid against this 'pure form' of the bourgeois state. Paris was then isolated, particularly from the peasants in the countryside, but this time, in contrast with 1848, the proletariat discovered in practice that the old state machine must be 'smashed", and new independent organs of a new type of state be set up by the working class.

The question of revolutionary leadership based on Marxist theory and its need to project a strategy towards the peasantry among all its other tasks, was also posed by the Paris Commune, but because the 'parody' of 1851 had been lived through and exhausted, by 1871 qualitatively new experiences could be made. Marx wrote to Kugelmann:

'Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.

(April 17, 1871.)

(vii) A note on 'the mid- A note on 'the Idle classes' UNDER THE general heading of 'the middle classes', many very different questions are often thrown together, : with the purpose of suggesting that Marx's-division 'proletariatbourgeoisie and his insistence on the polarization between these two classes, with the revolutionary consequences flowing from it, is misguided because it fails to account for the effect of intermediate and transitional layers or classes.

We have already seen that Marx's major work, 'Capital', is in any case concerned with a level of analysis where these intermediate layers are explicitly excluded from consideration.

At the political and ideological levels, however, the role of these middle strata is of great importance. In this chapter, for example, we have summarized the verdict of Marx on the role of the peasantry in the course of the last stages of the bourgeois revolution and its juncture with the first appearance of the revolutionary proletariat in 1848.

25 (Ibid, Obviously this has been a matter of political importance to the working-class movement ever since.

We confine ourselves here simply to indicating, with selected quotations from a great many which could be used, that Marx, Engels and their followers were keenly aware of the 'middle classes' problem, and that Marx's reference to it as 'irrelevant to present purposes' in 'Capital' was not an isolated afterthought.

Marx always discusses the problem, however, strictly in relation to the framework of the principal class conflict in the given society, that derived from the relations of production the key sectors of the mode of production. Referring to Ricardo, for example, he 'What Ricardo forgets to mention is the continual increase in numbers of the middle classes . . • situated midway between the workers on one side and the capitalists and landowners on the other.

These middle classes rest with But if the imperia • mantle finally falls oi the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the iron slat of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendome column.

all their weight upon the working class and at the same time increase the social security and power of the upper class, 6 Marxists would make Although this situation continually brings an unwelcome number of new soldiers into the field, and into competition with the existing individual capitalists, it also consolidates the rule of capital itself, enlarges its basis, and enables it to recruit ever new forces for itself out of the lower layers of society....

"The more a ruling class is able to assimilaté the most prominent men of the dominated classes the more stable and dangerous is its rule.' It is clear that the use of phrases like 'insurmountable class barriers' as indications of Marx's view of class by bourgeois sociologists like Lipset and Schumpeter amounts to gross misrepresentation, The question is not one of the fate of individuals or of the numbers of such individuals but of the changes in class relations.

Later Marxists have account of the rise of the 'new' middle classes in exactly this way.

These social groups were the subject of much discussion in the Marxist movement before the turn of the century. Lenin's review (1899) revisionism' reply the of Bernstein" indicates the terms of the discussion. Lenin wrote:

"The chapter on the "new middle estate" is likewise extremely interesting and, for us Russians, particularly instructive. If Bernstein had merely wanted to say that in place of the declining petty producers a new middle estate, the intelligentsia, is appearing, he would be perfectly correct, says Kautsky, pointing out that he himself noted the importance of this phenomenon several years before.

'In all spheres of people's labour, capitalism increases the number of office and professional workers with particular rapidity, and makes a growing démand for intellectuals.

"The latter occupy a special position among the other classes, attaching themselves partly to the bourgeoisie by their connections, their outlooks, etc., and partly to the wage-workers as increasingly deprives the intellectual of his independent position, converts him into a hired worker and threatens to lower his living standard. The transitory, unstable, contradictory position of that stratum of society now under discussion is reflected in the particularly widespread diffusion in its midst of hybrid, eclectic views, a farrago of contrasting principles and ideas, an urge to rise verbally to the higher spheres and to conceal the conflicts between the historical groups of the population with phrases—all of which Marx lashed with his sarcasm half a century ago. 2