The Peasant War in Germany, by Engels

[p035] The Peasant War in Germany by Frederick Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 4s. 6d.) ; THIS modestly-priced and well-bound volume is of more general interest than the title suggests. The Peasant War, originally written in 1850, is accompanied by a preface, writ- ten in 1874, which seeks to explain its contemporary political point. In an appendix there are two useful essays on German agrarian history, The Mark (1882) and History of the Prussian Peasantry (1886) and notes and Marx-Engels letters which together show the scope of Engels’ later thought and work on German history and the Peasant War of 1525, ‘the critical episode’, as he says, in the Reformation (‘bourgeois revolu- tion no. 1’). Around this central thesis Engels planned to write an outline of German history, but he never had time for it; hence the interest of the rough notes. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow) provide the preface to this collection of material. The Peasant War is described as a ‘classical model of research on anti-feudal peasant movements, applicable not only in Germany’s case, but in that of other countries as well.’ This is misleading. Of course this little work has reminded Marxists of the revolutionary history of the feudal peasantry; it has mapped out fields for later Marxist research; it has provided a model for Marxist historical writing. But, as we normally under- stand the words, not a classical model, and not of research. Engels, as he tells us himself, wrote the work hastily; in the summer of 1850, as two political articles, ‘under the immedi- ate impression of the counter-revolution just then completed.’ He was quick to see that this abortive revolution of 1848-50 had a striking parallel in 1525: for example, a ‘ludicrous. similarity in the behaviour of the city burghers’ in both; in both, the failure of the local revolts through lack of central -. direction. So he plundered the factual content of a large: ’ work by Zimmermann 6n the Peasant War, published in™ 1841-3. Engels’ method was to summarize the political nar- rative and to seek to explain and illuminate it by an analysis of the class structure of German society in relation to its economic stage of development, including some suggestions about why class struggles then ‘were clothed in religious shibboleths’, why there was a contrast between the thought of the burgher reformist Martin Luther and the plebeian revolutionary Thomas Munzer. The latter’s ‘anticipation’ of communism ‘in fantasy’ interested him more than the sober demands for redress of economic grievances by peasant lead- ers. Such then is the model. Engels’ hasty formulations on his highly complex subject- matter are sometimes penetrating; more often they seem in- correct or crude, whether on religion, politics or the peasantry. This is partly because a century of historical work has been done since Engels wrote, partly because Engels’ purpose in writing was purely political. He wrote to point a moral, which he elaborates in the 1874 preface. The oppressed would not always be beaten down by their oppressors. Step by step the proletariat was advancing behind the big bourgeois, who were inevitably creating conditions for its victory. But this vic- tory could be hastened if the workers, being in a minority, could draw to their side other groups who stood to gain by the destruction of feudal, bureaucratic or bourgeois oppres- sion: in particular the poor peasants and the agricultural labourers who were the biggest group in the countryside wherever large and medium sized estates persisted. It was this conclusion which was impelling Engels for-

[p036] ward to researeh into German agrarian history and to the threshold of a Marxian theory of the development of landed property and peasant society under feudalism and capitalism. He was still dependent for material on the work of profes- sional historians, but took immense critical pains, for example in the study of G. L. Maurer for the essay called The Mark. This formed an appendix to the 1882 pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. As he wrote to Marx in sending him the manuscript, ‘the first draft was all of one piece but un- fortunately wrong. I mastered the material only by degrees and that is why there is so much patching.’ (p. 204) M.G. Automation & Society