Engels and the Worker–Peasant Alliance

Abstract

Friedrich Engels’ bicentenary was celebrated in 2020. As a contribution to this celebration, this article argues that Engels, among his various other substantive contributions, must be credited with his conceptualization of the worker–peasant alliance. Given that this alliance was fundamental to democratic and socialist revolutions in the Third World in the twentieth century, and continues to be so in the twenty-first, it remains important to clarify its trajectory within classical Marxism. Engels turned his attention to the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany so as to illuminate the challenges faced in the course of the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe. He argued that, for large sections of the peasantry, the throwing off of their feudal yoke required an alliance with the proletariat. This, however, did not mean land redistribution via private landholdings but nationalization of the land. It also did not mean an alliance with the whole of the peasantry. These two questions and the antagonisms that they entailed were central to the development of Marxist theory and practice in the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, as well as others in the Third World. Today, neoliberal globalization has shifted the terrain of struggle further by the fact of corporate dominance over the whole of the peasantry. The massive agitation of the Indian agriculturists since the end of 2020 and the alliances that have emerged should be an eye-opener.