In order to carry through this political revolution, as in 1848, the bourgeoisie, with its small numbers, is forced to rely on the much larger numbers of the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. To do so, it must also convince them that its interests are their interests, its revolution is their revolution. Is that true? No, its a fraud, as Marx sets out in The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire, and so on, and Trotsky sets out, here. The petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry, because of their overwhelming numbers, certainly have an interest in such formal democracy, on the face of it, but, as Marx sets out, the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry, because of its wide variation in conditions – rich peasants to starving subsistence peasants, and so on – and because of its innate individualism and atomisation, can never form the ruling class. It is led to always act as support for either the interests of the bourgeoisie or else the workers, i.e. society divides into these two large antagonistic class camps.
In order to overcome this deficiency, and where the other two classes are unable to impose their hegemony, the peasantry/petty bourgeoisie can be forcibly unified, under the leadership of some Bonapartist, strong leader. However, the state itself must pursue either the path of capitalist property, or of socialist property, or else fail. A Bonapartist regime, whilst resting on these intermediate social layers, must represent the interests of capital or labour, must be some form of capitalist state or workers' state, albeit with these bureaucratic deformities.
In Russia, the Marxists, in analysing this process of social evolution, therefore, identified these different social classes and their direction of travel. Given the huge size of the Russian peasantry, they saw a bourgeois-democratic state taking the form of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. That is, in order for the small bourgeoisie to establish a bourgeois-democracy, and overthrow Tsarism, it would have to rely on the much larger forces of the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat. Engels had described, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, that, first, the bourgeoisie, as a whole, had recruited the support of the workers and petty-bourgeoisie, in 1832, and, when the big industrial bourgeoisie became dominant, it enlisted the support of the workers to defeat the commercial and financial bourgeoisie that still existed in a symbiotic relation with the old landed aristocracy, in 1848.
What the Marxists, in Russia, did not know was how homogeneous the peasantry would turn out to be, and, so, what ability it would have to develop its own Peasant Party, that would represent its interests in any parliament. If it was relatively homogeneous, and established such a party, that would enhance the social position of the peasants, giving them greater social weight in this new social dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
The nature of the state, as a capitalist state, is signified by this term “Democratic”, i.e. one in which the political regime is that of bourgeois-democracy, or a parliamentary republic. That is because the development of the productive forces was still at a primitive level, making any rapid transition to socialist relations impossible, prior to socialist revolution, elsewhere, in Western Europe. It signified, basically, a period of transition, similar to that of the establishment of social-democracy, i.e. the increasing dominance of socialised capital as a transitional form of property.
The peasantry would seek to utilise this parliamentary democracy to carry through the agrarian revolution, supported by the proletariat. However, as Marx noted, and as Lenin and Trotsky describe, the peasants are a different class to the proletariat, with different class interests. As the agrarian revolution is completed, the differentiation of the peasantry throws more of them in the direction of the bourgeoisie, and that is all the more the case where these peasants are employers of wage labour, as the workers seek to raise wages etc.
As these different social weights, between peasants and workers, dependent not just on their overall numbers, but the degree of homogeneity, solidarity and so on, are unknown in advance, this formula of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, is considered algebraic, meaning, only in practice, will the balance be determined. In practice, however, it became clear that, despite its size, the Russian peasantry did not have the cohesive power to give it a determining role in the revolution, and it was carried along behind the proletariat.
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