----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 8:27:35 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] it's over - now the destruction really begins
I think this is half-right. The Bolsheviks found their support not from peasants but from first-generation workers (ex-peasants).
--- On Tue, 3/10/09, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
The
> latter was the domain of left wing intellectuals and
> radicalized peasantry - for the most part.
>
[WS:] True, but the key word in my argument was "radicalized." Radicalization typically occurred when the old system of landowner hegemony interacted with wage-labor system of the growing industry, but was not really replaced by it. Landowners in labor intensive agriculture had to rely on labor repressive measures, because they could not increase their profits by capital investment (technology.) It was a zero-sum game that radicalized both sides - on the one hand, radically reactionary landowners, on the other - radically anarchist or communist peasantry.
However, peasantry as such was often pacified by paternalistism of landowners and had low organizational potential. If dissatisfied, they would engage in short lived rebellions against the landowners or their proxies (cf. pogroms in Eastrn Europe or Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya, albeit the latter has some substantial differences), but after such rebellions were put down by force, things would go back to the usual idiocy of the rural life. It was radical intellectuals who changed the rule of the game by organizing dissatisfied peasatry into radical (typically Communist) parties. This was particularly evident in countries like Spain, Italy, and later China. Peasantry was quite crucial for Bolshevik mobilization as well, especially that a lot of that was mobilized to support the war effort. The collapse of command structures of the Russian army as a result of war defeat left a lot of peasants with guns - a very fertile ground for radical organizing.
Wojtek