MIA > Archive > Nicolai Bukharin
From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 67 [43], 18 October 1923, p. 758.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The slogan of slogans: alliance (smütschka) between the working class and the peasantry, is resounding all over Soviet Russia, throughout the whole Soviet Union. In Bulgaria the workers’ and peasants’ bloc is carrying on a heroic struggle against the Zankoff Government. In Germany, peasants’ unions are forming, and marching hand in hand with the workers, with the Communist Party. In every section of the Comintern the slogan of the workers’ and peasants’ government has taken a foremost place. In the United States of America the workers’ and farmers’ bloc is a real fact of political life. In Japan the workers have the leadership of the movement among the small tenant farmers, etc. And finally, the whole working class of the industrial West is forming an alliance with the agricultural East.
It is worth while thinking over these facts. Their significance is so great that it is imperatively necessary for us to follow the question to its logical conclusion.
There is no doubt whatever that the working class and the peasantry form two different classes. There have been certain historical periods in which the peasantry has frequently taken sides with the bourgeoisie, and the village pariahs have often ground the city proletariat beneath their heel. Despite this, today the peasantry (here we leave aside the practically important question of the various strata within the peasantry itself), or at least a section of the peasantry, is with the proletariat.
Let us first consider an historical analogy. The industrial bourgeoisie and the landowning nobility are also two different classes. The landlord is a category of the feudal world, he is its representative, he is the social head of its civilization. The industrial bourgeois is the bearer of quite another, the capitalist social order, a society which he represents, rules, and leads. There was a time when the industrial bourgeoisie raised the flag of insurrection against the landowners, and when the peasants’ unions set fire to the farm houses of the landowners (France). The struggle between the Whigs and Tories in England is an object lesson of class warfare between landlords and bourgeoisie But today another historical connection exists, and the bloc between the capitalists and landowners, even the semi-feudal landowners, has become an actual fact. The leading rôle is played by the capitalists. They have the stale organization in their hands. They “lead” the whole of capitalist society with its semi-feudal following. And the junkers support their allies, stand up for them, aid them in every way. The further capitalist evolution advances, the more the feudal landowner adapts himself to the capitalist; and the more the landowner becomes “capitalised”, the more rapid is the transformation of landowning economics into capitalist economics, in the natural course of evolution.
It has now become impossible for capitalism to lead society. This truth is making its way through wars, through symptoms of economic decay, through revolutions. And in prop.ort on as the leadership of society passes into the hands of the proletariat, the more firmly is the bloc created and established between the two working classes, the proletariat and the peasantry.
The rôle of leader falls to the proletariat before and after the revolution, when the organization of the state is in its hands. The peasantry aids this ally, and forms a broad basis of support for it. The more rapidly economic life falls into normal lines, the more rapidly will the peasantry adapt itself to the proletariat. The natural process of evolution (by means of the process of circulation, of state credit, cooperatives, etc.) will enable the peasantry gradually to “grow into” the collective socialist organization of society. So long as the individualist character of the peasantry has not completely disappeared, socialized industry tugs the mighty mass of small peasants in its wake. In other words: If we regard the transition period (the period of conquest of state power by the proletariat, and the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat) from the standpoint of class regroupings, we may say that the landowning and bourgeois bloc is being substituted by the workers’ and peasants’ bloc.
A very long historical period of human development has thus to be passed through beneath the sign of the hammer and sickle. In the near future the workers’ and peasants’ bloc will become the decisive factor in the world’s history.
Last updated on 28 April 2023