To do real, substantive work on the peasant question post-1917 would took a good chunk of a lifetime I think. Lenin wrote and re-wrote his stuff on the agrarian question in Russia half a dozen times before 1917 only to discard a lot of it as practical policy in 1917 and thereafter without really looking back or re-assessing basic assumptions. Lars Lih discusses how Bolshevik preconceptions clashed sharply with reality in 1918 onward in his book, Bread and Authority, which I highly recommend. What comes through in Lih’s work is that the class divide within the peasantry was vastly overblown or misunderstood, that the peasants in struggle tended to form a unitary bloc rather than differentiate into kulaks at one and end semi-proletarian at the other, that the main divide in the villages, especially in the early years of the Soviet government, was not between rich ‘haves’ and poor ‘have-nots’ but between entire regions that had grain and those that did not. What those that did have was not much beyond subsistence levels and so Lenin’s claim in 1918 that: “Having completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in alliance with the peasants as a whole [in October 1917], the Russian proletariat finally passed on to the socialist revolution when it succeeded in splitting the rural population, in winning over the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, and in uniting them against the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, including the peasant bourgeoisie” needs to be re-evaluated given that the committees of poor peasants that supposedly embodied this class war in the village strategy were unceremoniously disbanded in fall of 1918.

I would want to go back and look at Kautsky’s work on this question, as well as Lenin’s, before proceeding to evaluate that material as well as contemporary stuff.

Prianikoff points out something important, namely, that Nasser’s regime pursued a reformist rather than revolutionary land reform policy. The land ownership was reshuffled rather than revolutionized and the landlord class was not ended (as in Viet Nam or China after communist parties took over) but modified, so the Mubarak had an easier time reversing decades of progressive measures in the countryside by undoing those reforms. I’m not sure where else in the world a 20th-century task like land reform remains unfinished or what precisely precise implications that means for the worker-peasant alliance in the democratic revolution that is being undone by Sisi’s coup.

Nasser’s land reform law limited the size of big farms. It redistributed the surplus land to tenants, estate workers, and the poor. It also fixed rents and gave tenants greater security of tenure.
A minimum wage was also established for rural workers.

There was also a push to establish Agricultural Cooperatives in the 60’s. These pooled farming equipment and provided cheap seeds and fertilizer to small farmers.

By the end of Nasser’s period in office, about 17 percent of Egypt’s agricultural land had been redistributed to small farmers.

This process was halted under Sadat and reversed under Mubarak.
Small farmers were increasingly driven off the land, while capitalist agriculture advanced.
Poorly understood loans from the Agricultural bank trapped numerous farmers in a web of debt.
The Cooperatives were corrupted and a black market in seeds and fertilizer pushed up prices beyond the reach of the poorer farmer.

In 1992, under Mubarak, Law 96 was passed. This removed the prohibition on the eviction of tenants and relaxed rent controls. Forced eviction often involved the intervention of the state security apparatus. In 1997 alone, around 100 farmers were killed and 1,000 injured. Arbitrary arrests, beatings and the repression of independent farming unions took place.

Just before Mubarak’s overthrow 40 percent of Egyptians lived below the poverty line of US$2 a day, the majority being small farmers and rural families. Egypt, with a rapidly growing population and a limited arable land area, had become a net importer of wheat.

Not surprisingly many Egyptian small farmers were hostile to Mubarak and welcomed his overthrow.
Morsi and the F&JP tried to win over these farmers by promising them debt forgiveness and giving them seeds and medicine.

What happened subsequently is a good illustration of the real powerlessness of the Morsi government. Officials of the Agricultural Bank told small farmers they’d “heard of the decree”, but did nothing about it. Effectively, they sabotaged the government’s decree.

Morsi was too wedded to the free market to challenge them effectively and when he tried to take stronger measures, was portrayed as being dictatorial.

The old regime sabotaged the MB Presidency, turned the impoverished small farmers and petty traders against it, then crushed it by military action.

Which is a good illustration of why the working class needs to provide leadership to these impoverished, but easily manipulated layers of the population.

When I wrote on the decline of the U.S. SWP on this website, I emphasized that it was responding to pressures that bear down on every small socialist group whose sense of purpose is self-referential (build and recruit to the organization). The SWP, historically, paid a lot of attention to farmers — but that ended as, over time, the SWP’s vision narrowed.

I am glad to hear you will be doing some work on the peasant question. To my mind, it’s a subset of a broader topic: the role in the class struggle of exploited independent producers, a category that includes many workers who have to set themselves up in business in order to find work, or who are forced into this status by the boss. Not to mention all the young workers who have to accept employment with no pay, etc..

I’m going to be mostly out of touch for the next month, but I certainly look forward to reading your future contributions and articles.

Thank you John. I have to say I was positively shocked when I discovered that Egypt is a majority rural country in the course of researching and writing my article on the democratic and socialist revolutions. I, like many other Western radicals, derived my understanding of Egypt’s revolution first and foremost from reprinted statements of RS (and other groups). Based on those, one would never know that most of the country’s laboring classes are rural much less what their special or specific problems and issues were.

I was really hoping that responses to my piece would touch on the peasant/farmer question, but outside of John hardly anyone has really grappled with the content of that piece which covers a whole lot of issues.

I both agree and disagree with John when he writes, “Our views on the peasantry come mainly from discussions 100 years ago. There is much here that is useful and valid (particularly the Comintern documents). But this heritage includes notions that peasants cannot sustain an independent political movement, will not support a transition to socialism, and can be rescued from the grip of reaction only by working-class leadership.” The notion that the peasantry cannot be a class for itself is one that comes from Trotsky, not Lenin, who spent many years analyzing the details and nuances of peasant-based parties in Russia in works like Two Tactics of Social Democracy and many others.

There’s no doubt that the Bolivian experience should encourage all of us to go back to the drawing board and it’s something I hope to do over the next couple years (in addition to studying Venezuela a lot more closely).

Our views on the peasantry come mainly from discussions 100 years ago. There is much here that is useful and valid (particularly the Comintern documents). But this heritage includes notions that peasants cannot sustain an independent political movement, will not support a transition to socialism, and can be rescued from the grip of reaction only by working-class leadership.

To take only one current example, in Bolivia over the past decade a peasant-based movement built a political party that has taken and held governmental power, winning significant gains for working people, with very little help and a good deal of opposition from organized labor. That should be enough to convince us that old blueprints have to be revisited.

Of course, peasants are class-divided, and property ownership can push them in a radical or conservative direction, depending on circumstances. But peasants internationally have succeeded in building a global movement, La Via Campesina, which has held to an anti-capitalist course under the intense pressures of neo-liberalism. No wing of the workers’ movement has been able to do this.

Farmers in countries like Canada, where I live, no longer have the numerical weight to strongly influence class struggles on their own. But they have a great deal of moral authority and a capacity to form alliances. In ecosocialist struggle they exert influence.

A colleague of mine is trying to build an anti-corporate ecological committee in an area of small cities and farmland. A generation ago, he would have started by contacting unionists. Now, most of the industries are gone. He is starting with the farmers.

This summer I went to farmers’ markets in Toronto to talk to people about tar sands pipelines. I took along a leaflet reprinting farmers’ opinions on the tar sands issue. I found that their views carry authority.

In my opinion, we socialists in the “western” countries should pull our weight in analyzing trends and pressures affecting farmers here and globally and solidarizing with their struggles.

John

“Binh, how do you know what the RS write in Arabic?”

It’s not hard to run their stuff through Google translate. If they had produced something weighty, it’s hard to imagine that the Cliffites in the West wouldn’t have translated it. Feel free to find an Arabic speaker to prove me wrong on this.

“Ppl on the Western left should stop judging the RS on the basis of how they feel about their local Cliffite group in their own country. As I said before I don’t know if they (and the other neither-Morsi-nor-military groups, which includes anarchists, left liberals, even some Islamists) could be doing things better and I suspect you don’t know either.”

My judgment of RS has nothing to do with my opinion of the ISO. If you had bothered to read the lengthy piece I wrote (or my stuff on the ISO and “Leninism,” you would know that the political content of one has very little to do with the other.

The “neither Morsi no military” groups are hopelessly irrelevant. They are essentially adopting a position of neutrality in the face of SCAF’s murderous crackdown on the Brotherhood and the destruction of Egypt’s only mass-based party.

“But Binh, as you were one of the main proponants of the theory that mass movements such as Occupy Wall Street would throw up the new forms of organisation that will replace the failed 20th century vanguard models, instead of gloating over the RS’s failure (so far, at least) to win the Egyptian masses away from support of military repression, maybe you would like to share your thoughts on how it came to this. How did the movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak — so much more mass, more militant, and more organised than Occupy Wall Street — end up becoming a cheer squad for military repression?”

How many strawmen can you pack into a single paragraph? 1) I never “theorized” that OWS would replace political parties. 2) I never gloated over RS’s mistakes.

How the left-liberals ended up as liberal-fascists is an interesting but sad story and I’ve written about it. Essentially they got frustrated when they could not beat the Muslim Brotherhood fair and square at the ballot box and turned against the democratic process, using the same nasty obstructionist tactics as the American Tea Party in an effort to rob Morsi’s administration of legitimacy by doing things like withdrawing en masse from the committee writing the constitution and then bleating that they had no influence over its content. They would also do stuff like bring homemade weapons to demonstrations to attack Brotherhood supporters and when violence broke out, they would demand the army step in and declare martial law over Morsi’s. They worked very hard to create an atmosphere of chaos and instability to compel the military to intervene in politics once more, and they have succeeded fantastically.

The deeper underlying problem is that the left-liberal bourgeois and petty-bourgeois milieu (and RS is very much a part of this) in Egypt is Western-educated and Western-centric and can’t compete in any meaningful sense with a “native” force like the Brotherhood. They don’t speak the same language or have the same concerns; they insisted Egypt immediately adopt modern American/French-style secularism, not realizing that these are products of 200+ years of struggle. They view the masses (the majority of whom support the Brotherhood) as hopelessly backward, uneducated, unenlightened, just as Western liberals view working-class gun owners in the red states as “trailer trash” and rednecks.

“Or maybe not. Maybe you’d rather pretend it isn’t happening and pretend that Muslim Brotherhood have the support of the masses and call for Western leftists to support Morsi’s reinstatement.”

The Brotherhood is the country’s only mass-based party with something like 800,000 members and an even larger number of voters (~5 million or so). Unlike you, I know better than to pretend that groups like the April 6 movement or Sabahi’s Popular Current have the support of the masses; Sisi will probably win more votes than either of them in any future (unfree) election.

I certainly don’t agree with the argument that “Western Left can’t give any advice” to the left in Egypt.

The very fact that the Western Left has had the luxury of democratic freedoms; like free speech and assembly, has allowed it to preserve a Marxist historical and political culture with universal relevance. (Illegality hasn’t been an issue in Western Europe since the Second War and state repression eased up after McCarthyism)

For similar reasons, the politics that derive from this are subject to opportunistic distortions. This makes international debate even more important.

Events like the Kapp putsch are certainly relevant to Egypt.
They show that when the working class is united, it has the power to crush military coups d’etat and incipient fascist movements.

The MB is however, not equivalent to the KPD, the SPD, or the Nazis. It’s a movement that originally developed in an oppressed Third World Nation, combining elements of an anti-imperialism with an appeal to tradition.

Originally, this tended to reject all Western influence, both the colonial and the progressive. But the MB of al-Banna and Qutb had to reinvent itself during the years it withstood state repression. It managed to carve out a niche in Egyptian society and created a politcal party which gained a measure of popular legitimacy.

So MB isn’t directly equivalent to the unreconstructed Jihadist groups operating in Syria or Iraq. Nor, given its history, is it likely to be destroyed by the current repression against it.

Whatever illusions its leaders had in electoralism and the Army leadership, they have been severely tested since the coup.
The MB’s rank and file could go either way; it could follow the path of Jihad Islamiya, which killed Anwar Sadat -the dead-end of terror attacks and assasinations. Or it can develop a broad anti-coup coalition, relying on mass action to topple the Military government.

But this means relying on the masses – petty traders, the small farmers and working class. In the main, it appears to be following the latter path.

This means that the question of how the working class should respond to this movement is posed.To put it bluntly, those workers leaders who rallied behind el-Sisi were hoodwinked.
Presumably the Mubarakists were trying to sow discord and profit from it. The coup leaders may have tried to bring trade union leaders, Coptic and Muslim religious figures and Liberal politicians into their tent. But they’ve also sent in the tanks when rank and file strikes occurred, as at Mahalla.

It’s hard to believe the suggestions made in certain Western Marxist periodicals, that the coup provided a “space” for the working class to organise. What’s blindingly obvious is that street protests are being driven off the streets by gunfire!

Reports and photos of the demonstrations of the “anti-Coup alliance” indicate that they are being supported by a mixture of people. The MB doesn’t appear to be enforcing strict Islamic dress codes on women, or excluding secular people from their protests.

So what’s to stop the participation of Socialists and workers in these protests? This requires both sensitivity to popular traditions, as well as firm principles. Understanding and utilising the MB’s specific contradictions requires not only the armoury of Western Marxism, but the Left wingers who operated in Muslim societies, like Tan Malaka.

It’s certainly not simply a question of aggressively denouncing religion from a secularist point of view.

Binh, how do you know what the RS write in Arabic? Ppl on the Western left should stop judging the RS on the basis of how they feel about their local Cliffite group in their own country. As I said before I don’t know if they (and the other neither-Morsi-nor-military groups, which includes anarchists, left liberals, even some Islamists) could be doing things better and I suspect you don’t know either.

But Binh, as you were one of the main proponants of the theory that mass movements such as Occupy Wall Street would throw up the new forms of organisation that will replace the failed 20th century vanguard models, instead of gloating over the RS’s failure (so far, at least) to win the Egyptian masses away from support of military repression, maybe you would like to share your thoughts on how it came to this. How did the movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak — so much more mass, more militant, and more organised than Occupy Wall Street — end up becoming a cheer squad for military repression?

Or maybe not. Maybe you’d rather pretend it isn’t happening and pretend that Muslim Brotherhood have the support of the masses and call for Western leftists to support Morsi’s reinstatement.

“Then there’s the Revolutionary Socialists. Their consistent neither-Morsi-nor-military line seems to be programmatically correct. They appear to be able to respond to events, and to rapid and extreme changes in the political situation. Their main problem seems to be that no-one in Egypt cares what they think. Or at least not very many people — certainly not enough. They are definitely not a vanguard. I actually have no idea whether the inability of the RS and other Third Square types to gain much of an audience so far is due to objective conditions or whether there’s something important they’re doing wrong or failing to do.”

No one cares what RS thinks in Egypt because they are very much part of the Western-educated, Westernized elite whose ideas and methods are very remote, even alien, to the homegrown “native” radical trends and urges among the country’s toiling classes. One important example (I can provide others) of this remoteness is their failure to even address or deal with the class struggle in the countryside where the majority of the population lives!

Now, I’m not saying they need to adopt a detailed, 50-point transitional program aimed at the peasants, but reading all of their English statements, they never once even touch on a single problem related to land, landlords, or agriculture. I wonder if they even have journal-length articles in Arabic interrogating social relations in the countryside that would even be remotely comparable in depth to the stuff Russian social democrats were working on in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. If you want to make a revolution in your country you have to do some homework first.

If nobody’s listening to RS, it has a lot to do with the fact that RS doesn’t seem to speak to the concerns and problems facing the laboring classes. Formulaic denunciations of Mubarak, Morsi, Sisi, ElBaradei just won’t cut it I’m afraid.