The peasantry, land reform, and the worker-peasant alliance in the struggle for socialism
The agrarian question is one of the central problems of revolutionary strategy. It concerns the role of the peasantry in the revolution, the nature of landlordism and rural exploitation, the relationship between agriculture and industry, and the path from small-scale peasant farming to large-scale socialist agriculture. Every successful socialist revolution has had to confront and resolve the agrarian question.
For Marx, the separation of the producer from the land was the foundation upon which capitalism was built. Primitive accumulation — the enclosure of common lands, the eviction of peasants, the destruction of communal agriculture — created the landless proletariat that capitalism required. Understanding the agrarian question means understanding the historical origins of capitalist exploitation and the conditions for its overthrow.
Lenin developed the Marxist analysis of the agrarian question into a comprehensive revolutionary strategy. He demonstrated that the peasantry, while not the leading revolutionary class, is an indispensable ally of the proletariat. The worker-peasant alliance — the smychka — is the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in any country where the peasantry constitutes a significant portion of the population.
"The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion, allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the autocracy's resistance by force and paralyse the bourgeoisie's instability."
— V. I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)The countryside under capitalism is not a homogeneous mass of "farmers." It is riven by class divisions just as sharp as those in the city. Lenin identified the principal rural classes as follows:
The large landowners — feudal lords, latifundistas, plantation owners — who own vast tracts of land and extract rent from those who work it. In many countries, the landlord class is intertwined with finance capital and the imperialist bourgeoisie. Their land holdings represent concentrated wealth accumulated through centuries of dispossession. The liquidation of landlordism through land reform is a fundamental democratic task of the revolution.
Peasants who own enough land to employ hired labour and accumulate surplus. They exploit the labour of poor peasants and agricultural workers. Under capitalism, the rich peasantry tends to develop into a rural bourgeoisie, concentrating land ownership while the majority of peasants are impoverished. Lenin recognised the kulaks as enemies of the revolution who would resist collectivisation and defend private property in land.
Peasants who own or rent enough land to subsist without regularly hiring labour or selling their own. The middle peasant is a vacillating element — they can be won to the revolution through patient political work, but they can also be pulled toward the kulaks if the revolution fails to address their immediate concerns. Lenin insisted that the middle peasantry must be neutralised or won over, never antagonised.
The majority of the rural population in most countries: peasants with little or no land, forced to sell their labour to survive. They are the natural allies of the urban proletariat. Together with the agricultural workers — the rural proletariat — they form the revolutionary base in the countryside. Land reform, debt cancellation, and the provision of tools and credit are the immediate demands that mobilise this class.
The worker-peasant alliance (smychka) is not charity from the proletariat to the peasantry. It is a strategic necessity. The proletariat cannot hold power without the support of the peasant majority, and the peasantry cannot liberate itself without the leadership of the organised working class.
Confiscation of landlord estates and redistribution to the landless and land-poor peasantry. Cancellation of peasant debts. Abolition of feudal obligations and rent. This is the democratic stage.
Voluntary formation of agricultural cooperatives for purchasing, marketing, and shared equipment. State support through credit, machinery, and technical assistance. Building the material basis for collective farming.
Transition from individual to collective farming on the basis of mechanisation and socialist consciousness. Large-scale agriculture achieves higher productivity, eliminates rural poverty, and bridges the gap between town and country.
The highest form of socialist agriculture — state-owned farms operated as industrial enterprises. Workers receive wages, modern technology is fully deployed, and production is planned according to social need.
The Russian peasantry lived under conditions of semi-feudal oppression well into the twentieth century. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was a fraud — peasants were "freed" but burdened with redemption payments for land they had worked for generations. The landlord class retained the best land while peasants were crowded onto inadequate plots.
The Bolsheviks won the peasantry in 1917 with one word: land. The Decree on Land, issued on the second day of Soviet power, abolished landlordism without compensation and gave the land to those who worked it. This was not yet socialism — it was the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that the Russian bourgeoisie had been too cowardly to carry out.
The transition to collectivisation in the late 1920s and early 1930s was driven by the contradiction between small-scale peasant agriculture and the needs of socialist industrialisation. Individual peasant plots could not feed a rapidly urbanising nation or generate the surplus needed for industrial investment. Collectivisation, despite its difficulties and errors, transformed Soviet agriculture from a backward, subsistence-level system into a modern, mechanised sector that fed 200 million people and exported grain.
Mao Zedong's great contribution to Marxism-Leninism on the agrarian question was his analysis of the peasantry as the principal revolutionary force in semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries. In China, where the proletariat was small and concentrated in a few coastal cities, the revolution was waged from the countryside.
The Chinese Communist Party carried out land reform in the liberated areas during the civil war, mobilising poor peasants to overthrow landlords through mass meetings (speak bitterness campaigns) where peasants publicly confronted their class enemies. After liberation in 1949, nationwide land reform was completed by 1953, distributing 47 million hectares to 300 million peasants.
The subsequent transition to cooperatives and then communes reflected Mao's understanding that land reform alone was insufficient — without collective organisation, class differentiation would re-emerge and a new rural bourgeoisie would develop. The People's Communes, at their best, combined agriculture with local industry, education, and healthcare, beginning to bridge the gap between town and country.
Before the revolution, Cuba's agriculture was dominated by US-owned sugar plantations and cattle ranches. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 limited private land holdings, nationalised the latifundias, and distributed land to 100,000 peasant families. A second, more radical reform in 1963 further limited holdings and expanded the state farm sector.
Cuba's agrarian transformation demonstrated that land reform in the neo-colonial world inevitably confronts imperialism. The nationalisation of US-owned plantations triggered the economic blockade that persists to this day. But Cuban agriculture, despite the blockade, has achieved food sovereignty, developed advanced biotechnology, and pioneered organic farming methods that are studied worldwide.
"The peasant question is basically a national question... The peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement."
— J. V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism (1924)Today the agrarian question takes on new dimensions. Transnational agribusiness corporations — Cargill, Monsanto (Bayer), ADM, Syngenta — control the global food system from seed to supermarket. They dictate what is grown, how it is grown, what price the farmer receives, and what price the consumer pays. The farmer, whether in Iowa or India, is squeezed between the monopoly power of input suppliers and the monopoly power of grain traders.
The concept of food sovereignty, developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, demands the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture policies, to protect domestic production from dumped imports, and to prioritise local food systems over export-oriented monoculture. While food sovereignty is not in itself a socialist programme, it reflects the objective interests of the peasantry against imperialist agribusiness and provides a basis for revolutionary mobilisation.
The twenty-first century has seen a new wave of primitive accumulation. Tens of millions of hectares of land across Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been seized by foreign investors — sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, agribusiness corporations — for industrial agriculture, biofuel production, and speculative investment. Peasant communities are evicted, forests cleared, and subsistence agriculture destroyed to make way for export plantations.
This is not development — it is the reproduction of colonial relations under new legal forms. The same pattern that Marx described in his analysis of the English enclosures is being repeated on a global scale: the separation of the producer from the means of production, the creation of a landless proletariat, and the concentration of land in the hands of capital.
Capitalist agriculture is both a major contributor to climate change and one of its principal victims. Industrial farming produces approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions through deforestation, chemical fertilisers, livestock methane, and transportation. At the same time, climate change threatens crop yields through droughts, floods, heat waves, and the spread of pests.
The contradiction is clear: the capitalist food system is destroying the ecological basis of food production. Only socialist planning — the rational organisation of agriculture according to scientific principles and social need — can resolve this contradiction. Agroecology, crop diversification, soil restoration, and localised food systems are not merely technical fixes; they require the overthrow of agribusiness monopoly power, which is to say, they require socialism.
The history of the agrarian question yields several indispensable lessons for communists:
The agrarian question remains unresolved everywhere capitalism exists. In the imperialist countries, family farms are destroyed by agribusiness monopolies. In the neo-colonial world, peasants are dispossessed by land grabs and crushed by debt. Only the socialist reorganisation of agriculture — large-scale, planned, mechanised, and ecologically sustainable — can feed humanity and end rural exploitation.
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