The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today

In Lenin’s Two Tactics, written in the Russian context, there is no discussion about any country that is hegemonized by imperialism. Even when being hegemonized by imperialism is accounted for, as in later Marxist analysis relating to colonial and semicolonial societies like India and China, the general position has been that the democratic revolution against both imperialism and feudalism (the latter itself sustained by imperialism) requires an alliance between several classes, including the workers and the mass of the peasantry. The revolutionary transition to socialism that can occur when the workers lead this original class alliance, however, requires their shedding some segments of the peasantry from among their allies of the first stage (when the workers do not lead the alliance, this transition has to wait until they acquire a leading role). Even in the context of the reassertion of the hegemony of imperialism, in other words, the broad perspective of Lenin’s analysis has continued to hold sway, with the discussion being focused on which precise class elements have to be shed in the second, transitionary stage and how to identify them.

This trajectory of Marxist analysis relating to third-world societies does not take adequate cognizance of the fact that the democratic revolution against imperialism is not a finished act, a successful once-and-for-all uprising. It may have appeared for a while after decolonization that it was a finished act, that while imperialism continued to remain a powerful element in the background, it could be countered by the existence of the Soviet Union, so that within the countries of the third world, a slightly modified version of Lenin’s perspective could still be used. This envisioned a carrying forward of the democratic revolution against the feudal remnants within the decolonized societies under the leadership of the proletariat with the support of the bulk of the peasantry, and a subsequent transition to socialism with the backing of only certain segments within the peasantry.

Put differently, it may have appeared that where the anti-imperialist class alliance was led by the proletariat, the subsequent path of development could more or less follow in broad terms what Lenin had visualized—but where it was not led by the proletariat, but by the national bourgeoisie, the task was to replace the bourgeois-led dirigiste regimes that came up after decolonization by proletariat-led regimes that carried forward the democratic revolution to completion. This could be accomplished by overturning the bourgeoisie’s inevitable compromise with feudalism in postcolonial societies and ridding the peasants of the feudal yoke, then proceeding to socialism while shedding some segments of the peasantry that had been allies of the proletariat earlier. ²

If, however, the stage of being liberated from imperialism does not end once and for all with decolonization (that is, if imperialism does not just remain a mere background presence after decolonization), then this question of shedding segments of the peasantry from the class alliance has to be rethought. Indeed, since imperialism is an essential component of metropolitan capitalism, as long as metropolitan capitalism remained intact, imperialism was bound to attempt to reassert its hegemony, albeit in a changed setting. This, it turns out, is exactly what happened. A refashioned imperialism arose that subverted the postcolonial dirigiste regimes everywhere and replaced them with neoliberal regimes. This refashioned imperialism broke the class alliance that had underlain the third world’s struggle against colonialism by integrating the domestic big bourgeoisie into the corpus of international finance capital, even acquiring the support of a significant segment of the urban middle class with the promise of employment in activities relocated from the metropolis. It substantially re-acquired control over third-world natural resources by effecting their “denationalization” and attacked the working class everywhere—in the advanced countries through the threatened and actual relocation of activities to the third world, and in the third world through an increase in the relative size of the labor reserves in the labor force both by quickening the pace of technological change through the imposition of trade liberalization and by removing the protection that peasant agriculture and petty production had obtained from the postcolonial dirigiste regime. This led to the impoverishment of those engaged in these sectors and forced them to seek work elsewhere. This entire process of reassertion of hegemony by a refashioned imperialism was, of course, facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which removed a major bulwark against such hegemony.

The neoliberal regime that came into being under the aegis of this refashioned imperialism greatly increased income and wealth inequalities in society. As a consequence, it reduced the ratio of total consumption to total income, since, unlike the poor, who consume a large share of their incomes, the rich do not; and this reduction of consumption demand in turn gave rise to a crisis of overproduction. In the face of such a crisis, neoliberal regimes have tended to make an alliance with neofascist elements to create a diversionary discourse, as is evident in many countries in recent years (including countries of the third world) in order to divide the people and to blunt and repress the resistance that might otherwise emerge in a period of crisis, against the hegemony of big capital that is now integrated with globalized finance capital.

The question of the worker-peasant alliance today therefore has to be seen in this new context of a refashioned imperialism under the aegis of international finance capital. The struggle today has to be against the hegemony of domestic big capital within the third world, which enjoys a rapport with the feudal elements and is integrated with international finance capital. Given the relative smallness of the working class in third-world societies, the peasantry constitutes the most sizable force against the hegemony of this phalanx of forces. This phalanx enjoys the support not only of the metropolitan states but also of the third-world states that in many instances are neofascist. Since the peasantry has been a pronounced victim of this new post-dirigiste regime because of the withdrawal of state support and protection that it had enjoyed under dirigisme, just as it had been a victim in the colonial era by having to pay for the “drain of surplus,” it has an unambiguously oppositional role vis-à-vis this regime.³

The peasantry’s suffering under the neoliberal order emerges clearly from Indian data. In rural India, the percentage of population not having access to 2,200 calories per person per day (which was the benchmark for rural poverty originally adopted by the country’s erstwhile Planning Commission) was 58 in 1993–1994, that is, roughly around the time when the neoliberal regime was introduced (in 1991). This percentage increased to 68 in 2011–2012. By 2017–2018, the situation had become so bad that the government withdrew the survey data collected in that year from the public sphere, and even changed the method of data collection (which makes subsequent years non-comparable with the earlier ones). From whatever information was available briefly in the public domain before the data were withdrawn, the percentage below this calorie norm was 80.5 percent in 2017–2018.⁴

This finding is in conformity with another finding: between 1991 and 2011, both being years when population censuses were carried out (there has been no census after 2011), the number of “cultivators” had gone down by fifteen million; they had either become agricultural laborers or migrated to cities in search of jobs. Since new job creation has been paltry, these migrants would have simply swollen the numbers sharing a given number of jobs and hence lowered the average income of the entire working population.

The Peasantry’s Strength in the Fight Against Imperialism

The peasants, who are victims of neoliberalism, possess a unique strength that is particularly helpful in the fight against it. Karl Marx had seen in Britain the classical pattern of the emergence of capitalism, where the peasantry had been separated from its access to land through the enclosure movement that constituted an integral part of the process of primitive accumulation of capital. With the virtual disappearance of the peasantry and the replacement of peasant agriculture by capitalist agriculture, the old community that had been the backbone of rural life was also destroyed. Rootless, atomized individuals who did not know one another flocked to towns in search of jobs, where those who did obtain employment in the newly emerging capitalist factories were to form a new community only over time through “combinations” or trade unions. Marx’s vision was that this new community, to which revolutionary theory had to be brought from outside, would overthrow the system that had destroyed the old community.

In the “new world,” comprising the temperate regions to which Europeans migrated, the immigrants who displaced the local inhabitants and took over their lands to carry out agriculture did not constitute a “peasant community” in any meaningful sense. But in “colonies of conquest,” mainly in the densely populated tropical and semitropical regions of the world—as distinct from the “colonies of settlement” in the temperate regions—the old “peasantry” continued as before, with the imperial rulers registering their presence through the imposition of a drastic income compression upon it. There was a direct compression of the peasantry’s incomes through the colonial taxation system leading to a “drain of surplus,” that is, a tax-financed and hence gratis appropriation of a range of primary commodities required in the metropolis but not producible there (or not producible all the year around, or in sufficient quantities). There was also an indirect income compression imposed on the agricultural population via the destruction of local crafts by mandatory imports of manufactures from the metropolis, with the displaced craftsmen crowding into agriculture. The land area could not expand commensurately in the absence of adequate public investment; thereby the process raised rents and lowered wages. While there was immense suffering in the countryside, the periodic famines that racked colonial India being the obvious instance, the peasantry, and hence the old community, remained more or less intact.

Hence, in the colonies of conquest, that is, the colonial and semicolonial countries, especially of Asia, the peasantry as a community remained intact not only through the colonial period but also after that, during the dirigiste era and even into the neoliberal era. The landlords, to be sure, were often outside this community; since the colonial rulers had made titles to land a saleable commodity, money-making “outsiders” often bought these land titles. But these landlords, while they were superimposed upon the rural society where they did not even reside most of the time, did not negate the continuation of the old community constituted by the peasantry. Of course, in a country like India, where the caste system divided the rural population, there was not one but several communities, each consisting of a caste group (or groups), but within each such community, a sense of solidarity lingered on, despite the development of capitalism in the economy. This pre-existing sense of community becomes an asset for the peasantry in any struggle against the neoliberal and neofascist order.

This was evident recently in India when the farmers sustained a year-long struggle against three farm laws passed as ordinances by the government. These laws would have removed the residual protection for them that remained, for instance in the form of a guarantee of “minimum support prices” that are still offered by the state for foodgrain production. Such support has been removed in the case of cash crop production, giving rise to a large number of debt-induced peasant suicides owing to their getting trapped into selling at falling prices. The farm laws were also aimed at facilitating contract farming with foreign and domestic food business corporations being permitted to contract directly with farmers, a move to which the latter were opposed. The farmers eventually won, and the government had to withdraw the farm laws, though it has not given up its project; but their victory became possible only because of the powerful solidarity they received within their community.

It follows therefore that the peasantry constitutes a major oppositional force not just against feudalism but against imperialism as well, a force that has the added advantage of still retaining within itself community bonds that add to its strength. The proletariat in third-world societies therefore must have an enduring alliance with the mass of the peasantry if it is to fight against imperialist hegemony. This has many important implications to which we now turn.

The Possibility of Capitalist Restoration

If the resistance of the mass of the peasantry has a crucial role in the fight against imperialism, and if this fight is not one climactic act but a long, drawn-out process that will last as long as capitalism lasts in the metropolis, then a number of conclusions follow. First, the argument for rejecting the concept of a “primitive socialist accumulation” that had been advanced by Yevgeny Preobrazhensky in the context of the Soviet industrialization debate of the 1920s becomes overwhelming.⁵ Preobrazhensky, it may be recalled, had argued for imposing a compression of incomes on the rich peasantry to raise resources for socialist industrialization. This concept was theoretically unacceptable anyway, no matter what the conjunctural compulsions might have been on the young Soviet state after the revolution: socialist construction cannot be seen in any case as being imitative of the development of capitalism, so the fact that capitalism had a process of primitive accumulation cannot be used to argue that socialism too must have such a process of primitive accumulation (the reductio ad absurdum of such an argument would be to justify “socialist imperialism” just because capitalist development requires imperialism). Socialist construction must instead take the route of developing agriculture and foodgrain production, so that workers and peasants exchange what they produce, instead of any section of the peasantry having to be targeted for socialist construction.⁶ But the fact that the alliance between the workers and the mass of the peasantry has to be maintained during the entire course of the prolonged struggle against imperialism makes the abandonment of any process of primitive socialist accumulation absolutely necessary on practical grounds.

Second, the question of shedding segments of the peasantry from the worker-peasant alliance in the transition to socialism simply cannot arise. This is so, first, because if any segment within the peasantry, say the rich peasants, knows that, having participated in carrying forward the democratic revolution, it is going to be turned against once the democratic phase is over, then it would never join the democratic revolution led by the proletariat to start with. Any revolution itself would become an impossibility under these circumstances. Second, when the democratic revolution entails a struggle against not just feudal remnants but a refashioned imperialism itself, the need to reassure every section of the peasantry that the revolution will never turn against it, so that it remains steadfast in its support for the revolution, becomes absolutely paramount. The class alliance forged against imperialism, for overturning the neoliberal regime, and carrying forward the democratic revolution by doing so, must therefore remain intact during the entire process of transition to socialism; and, for this, whatever changes in the system of property become necessary for the transition to socialism (for instance, the shift from individual property to cooperative or collective forms of property) must be voluntarily brought about, through a demonstration that the changes are beneficial for all concerned, and that they would accelerate the development of the productive forces to everyone’s benefit.

It may be argued here that since the rich peasants constitute a proto-capitalist class, having them in the worker-peasant alliance during the transition to socialism will subvert this transition by giving rise to a tendency toward the development of capitalism from within, even while fighting the residual power of big capital and imperialism. Moreover, since commodity production would be taking place in the transition—characterized by an inherent tendency toward differentiation among peasant producers and the emergence of capitalism—the incorporation of rich peasants within the worker-peasant alliance, instead of shedding them from it, would create an unchecked tendency toward capitalism, subverting the transition to socialism.

The fallacy in this argument arises from its erroneous concept of commodity production. Every type of production for the market does not constitute commodity production and hence does not become a progenitor of capitalism. Production for the market has characterized the world of petty and small-scale producers in countries like India and China for millennia, often even with the use of hired labor, without ushering in capitalism; that is because it was not commodity production in the sense that Marx had talked about, namely, a system of production that has the inherent tendency to create differentiation among producers and usher in capitalism in the true sense.⁷

Commodity production entails that while the product is both a use value and an exchange value for the buyer, it is only an exchange value, only representing a sum of money, for the seller. Alfred Marshall’s fisher, who sells fish in the market and consumes whatever cannot be sold, is not a commodity producer. Likewise, producers of different goods and services exchanging their wares among themselves, as in the Indian jajmani system, do not constitute commodity producers, even when their transactions are mediated through the use of money. Commodity production, in short, requires as a necessary condition an impersonality in the relation between the buyer and the seller, such as occurs in long distance trade, for instance. Even such trade involving production for an unknown market, however, constitutes only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for differentiation among producers and the ushering in of capitalism.

What we are pointing to, then, is that anxieties about a return to an emergent capitalism from within the transition to socialism, if the rich peasantry is not squeezed out, are anxieties based on a misunderstanding of how capitalism emerges and develops. Capitalism is a product of complex circumstances that generate not just a Darwinian struggle among producers, but a Darwinian struggle where there is no state of rest, upon reaching which a producer can feel assured of survival. It is an incessant Darwinian struggle that continues on the basis of ever higher scales of production. The commodity production that leads up to such a system, that is, capitalism, does not arise simply by producing for the market, even when such production uses hired labor. It follows therefore that the fears of a restoration of capitalism that may arise when the mass of the peasantry—and not just the semiproletarian elements within it—are part of the worker-peasant alliance are greatly exaggerated.

Contradictions in the Transition to Socialism

But even if a capitalist tendency does not emerge in the transition to socialism just because the mass of the peasantry, as distinct from only the semiproletarian elements within it, is a part of the worker-peasant alliance, there would certainly be serious contradictions within the alliance. These would result from the divergent interests of the different segments within it. The rich peasants, for instance, would like to keep the wages of the agricultural laborers low, which would be unacceptable to the latter and antithetical to the project of building socialism. The state presiding over the transition will have to negotiate these contradictions.

The negotiations will be straightforward on many issues but not others. They will be straightforward on wages by stipulating the wage rates and the agricultural product prices that will be received by the producers, and likewise on conditions of work. On mechanization of agricultural activities, the state may, for instance, make agricultural workers’ cooperatives the sole owners of all the machines that replace human labor, so that what the workers lose by way of wage incomes can be made up through profit incomes earned through the deployment of machines.

For such negotiations to be actually effective, however, certain other conditions must be fulfilled. For instance, stipulating wages will be ineffective if the scourge of unemployment is not removed. If not openly then surreptitiously, the employers will pay less than the stipulated wages to the agricultural laborers. The state regulations that govern the employer-laborer and other such contradictory relationships must therefore be ensconced within a universe where they can be effective. The best way of creating such a universe is by having a set of constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental, universal, and justiciable economic rights, in addition, of course, to the usual social and political rights.

This may appear odd at first sight, for rights concern individuals while the objective of socialism is to create a new community in the place of the one that capitalism had destroyed. Conferring rights on individuals still amounts to treating them as “monads” (to use Marx’s term from On the Jewish Question); and apotheosizing the individual may appear to defeat the objective of socialism.

The question of rights of an individual, however, arises precisely when an individual or a group of individuals is excluded from the community and is in a position to be victimized by the community. Rights, in other words, are a mode of protection against being excluded from the community, and since such exclusion is necessarily directed against an individual or a group of individuals, individual rights are precisely the bulwark needed against victimization through exclusion. A regime of fundamental economic rights of every individual, in short, provides the requisite cushion on the basis of which a community can be created. Not just the transition to socialism but the institution of socialism itself must be built on a set of fundamental economic rights for individuals (apart from social and political rights that we need not discuss here).

In fact, the institution of such individual rights is essential in order to prevent the re-emergence of capitalism and the historical subversion of the process of transition to socialism. One such fundamental economic right must be the right to employment, failing which the person not provided with work must be paid a full wage, as distinct from an unemployment allowance. Full employment is incompatible with capitalism, which cannot function without a reserve army of labor, while the erstwhile socialist countries like the Soviet Union or those of Eastern Europe were characterized not just by full employment but by a labor shortage, prompting economists such as Janos Kornai to talk of them as “resource-constrained” systems, as distinct from the “demand-constrained system” of capitalism.⁸ A symptom of capitalist deviation during the transition to socialism would be the creation of unemployment, and guarding against unemployment by institutionalizing a universal right to employment ipso facto guards against a slide to capitalism (though, of course, no constitutional guarantee can entirely prevent a counterrevolution).

Toward Voluntary Cooperativization

We have so far argued that the bedrock of the fight against imperialism embodied in the neoliberal regimes at present will be provided by an alliance between the working class and the mass of the peasantry and that this alliance will have to continue intact, without the working class shedding any allies among the peasantry, throughout the transition to socialism. In other words, the entire peasantry, including the rich peasantry, is an ally in the struggle against neoliberal capitalism that is marked by the domination of domestic monopoly capital integrated with globalized finance capital. Moreover, it remains an ally in the transition to socialism.

As for fears of capitalist restoration that may be ushered in by not shedding segments of the original alliance, such as the rich peasantry, our argument has been that such fears are greatly exaggerated; and also that a barrier can be erected against such capitalist restoration by instituting a set of fundamental economic rights.

But while the mass of the peasantry will be a part of the worker-peasant alliance in the transition to socialism, peasant proprietorship will have to be replaced voluntarily by cooperative forms of property, including over land. In determining any individual peasant’s stake in the cooperative, the value of his land may be counted in the beginning as part of the contribution, but the relative importance of this contribution will decline over time as the size of the total stake in the cooperative increases and subsequent contributions are made on the basis of labor incomes.

The need for cooperatives, including for cooperative farming through pooling of land, arises for a number of reasons, which also constitute incentives for peasants to join such cooperatives voluntarily. In Asian conditions, where land scarcity is acute, the key to accelerating agricultural growth—which in turn constitutes the key to overall growth—lies in “land augmentation” in the sense of increasing land area to whatever extent possible and land productivity, not just via rise in crop yield but also via multiple cropping. Individual peasant production is inferior to cooperative production in the matter of land augmentation. Several considerations underlie this point.

First, the land that is wasted at present by having boundaries between individual plots gets eliminated when there is cultivation of pooled land so that the total land area increases, no matter how marginally. Second, a whole range of capital projects that can raise land productivity can be undertaken when land and labor are pooled, but not when cultivation occurs on individual, family owned plots. The obvious instances are bunding and land reclamation, irrigation projects, tackling erosion in general and landslides in hilly areas, afforestation, building protection against wild animals in forested areas, and so on. This in fact was a major benefit of the Chinese communes: in addition to the investment on these communes that came from central plan funds, there was extra investment undertaken by the commune populations themselves on the basis of their own resources, including labor.⁹ Third, the use of different segments of pooled land for different purposes, depending on the suitability of each segment for a particular purpose, can be practiced; this is not possible in the case of individual farming. Fourth, some crops may require a minimum scale of cultivation, which can be attained in the case of pooled cultivation but may not be attainable when there is individual farming. Fifth, we mentioned earlier that machines that replace human labor will have to be owned by laborers’ cooperatives. However, once cooperative farming comes up where both the landless workers as well as the landed peasantry are members, the ownership of these machines can be shifted to the cooperative farm as the single repository of all means of production. Sixth, since socialism will entail a decentralized economy and decentralized decision-making in society, the cooperative can be the means of organizing not just economic but also social, political, and cultural life. It can, in short, become synonymous with a commune, and it will over time come to own industries and promote other non-agricultural activities.

It is these attractions that will persuade all peasants, including even the rich peasants, to become part of the cooperative and hence of the refashioned local community that will grow up around it. Of course, socialism does not mean building a society with a multiplicity of local communities. Socialism does not eliminate communities but it provides the framework by which one may seek to transcend their potential for generating parochial tensions. The relationship between the local community and the overarching large community that comprises the socialist country as a whole will have to be negotiated and managed so that there is no exclusive emphasis on either the local community consciousness or any overarching dominating national consciousness. In particular, there has to be a conscious effort to keep the economic difference between the various local communities within bounds, both through differential taxation and also through differential central investment allocation.

These remarks have been made in the spirit of suggesting general directions that a transition to socialism must take but, of course, any more detailed specification will depend on contingencies that develop when such general directions are pursued. Our purpose here is not to provide every detail of how the transition to socialism would be effected, nor what a socialist society would exactly look like. Marx himself wisely desisted from providing explicit details on this score. The basic point—despite this paper’s suggested analytical modifications of Marx, Lenin, and the doctrines we owe to them—remains within the general vision they articulated. Namely, a vision of a society where individuals are not atomized and alienated entities; where the distinction between town and country gets substantially eliminated; where the scourge of unemployment does not cast its shadow on the lives of people; where income inequality between individuals and localities is kept in check; where a sense of community differing from the one that capitalism had destroyed which had been marked by inequality, oppression, and stagnation develops among the people; and where lives can be devoted to the pursuit of creativity. Such a vision is now coming on to the practical agenda.

Notes

1. ↩ V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 494.
2. ↩ This, for instance, was the basic programmatic position of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the largest Communist party in India. The democratic revolution that had to be resumed and carried forward under the leadership of the working class was called the “people’s democratic revolution.”
3. ↩ The term “drain of surplus” refers to the continuous outflow of surplus from the colonies of conquest to the metropolis that was enforced without any quid pro quo by the ruling metropolitan powers throughout the colonial era. For a discussion of the “drain of surplus” from India to Britain during the colonial period, see Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).
4. ↩ These figures are taken from Utsa Patnaik’s forthcoming book, Exploring the Poverty Question (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2025).
5. ↩ The concept was introduced in Y. Preobrazhensky’s 1926 book The New Economics. An English edition, translated by Brian Pearce with an introduction by Alec Nove, was brought out by Oxford University Press in 1965.
6. ↩ Michał Kalecki’s perspective on the problem of resource mobilization in a mixed underdeveloped economy, according to which the financial problem of resource mobilization is nothing else but the real problem of raising the rate of agricultural growth, should also be valid for a third-world economy attempting a transition to socialism. See Michał Kalecki, “The Problem of Resource Mobilization in a Mixed Underdeveloped Economy,” in Selected Essays on the Economic Growth of the Socialist and the Mixed Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
7. ↩ For an elaboration of this argument, see P. Patnaik, “Defining The Concept of Commodity Production,” Studies in People’s History 2, no. 1 (May 2015): 117–25. The argument of this paper is based on Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1903), Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.
8. ↩ Janos Kornai, “Resource-Constrained versus Demand-Constrained Systems,” Econometrica 47, no. 4 (July 1979): 801–19. The basic dichotomy between the two systems, with capitalism being typically demand-constrained and the actually existing Eastern European socialism being resource-constrained, had been noted originally by Kalecki, who had also argued that neoclassical growth theory such as the one by Robert Solow was more apposite for socialism than for capitalism.
9. ↩ Utsa Patnaik, “Three Communes and a Production Brigade: The Contract Responsibility System in China,” in China: Issues in Development, ed. Ashok Mitra (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 1988).