One of the principal, if not the principal, accusations hurled against the Opposition, was its “underestimation” of the peasantry. On this point, too, life has made its tests and rendered its verdict along national and international lines. In every case the official leaders proved guilty of underestimating the role and significance of the proletariat in relation to the peasantry. In this the greatest shifts and errors took place, in the economic and political fields and internationally. At the root of the internal errors since 1923 lies an underestimation of the significance, for the whole of national economy and for the alliance with the peasantry, of state industry under the management of the proletariat. In China, the revolution was doomed by the inability to understand the leading and decisive role of the proletariat in the agrarian revolution.

From the same standpoint, it is necessary to examine and evaluate the entire work of the Krestintern, which from the beginning was merely an experiment—an experiment, moreover, which called for the utmost care and rigid adherence to principles. It is not difficult to understand the reason for this.

The peasantry, by virtue of its entire history and the conditions of its existence, is the least international of all classes. What are commonly called national traits have their chief source precisely in the peasantry. From among the peasantry, it is only the semi-proletarian masses of the peasant poor who can be guided along the road of internationalism, and only the proletariat can guide them. Any attempt at a short-cut is merely playing with the classes, which always means playing to the detriment of the proletariat. The peasantry can be attracted to internationalist politics only if it is torn away from the influence of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and if it recognizes in the proletariat not only its ally, but its leader. Conversely, attempts to organize the peasants of the various countries into an independent international organization, over the head of the proletariat and without regard to the national communist parties, are doomed in advance to failure. In the final analysis such attempts can only harm the struggle of the proletariat in each country for hegemony over the agricultural laborers and poor peasants.

In all bourgeois revolutions as well as counter-revolutions, beginning with the peasant wars of the sixteenth century and even before that time, the various strata of the peasantry played an enormous and at times even decisive role. But it never played an independent role. Directly or indirectly, the peasantry always supported one political force against another. By itself it never constituted an independent force capable of solving national political tasks. In the epoch of finance capital the process of the polarization of capitalist society has enormously accelerated in comparison to earlier phases of capitalist development. This means that the specific gravity of the peasantry has diminished and not increased. In any case, the peasant is less capable in the imperialist epoch of independent political action on a national, let alone international scale, than he was in the epoch of industrial capitalism. The farmers of the United States today are incomparably less able to play an independent political role than they were forty or fifty years ago when, as the experience of the Populist movement shows, they could not and did not organize an independent national political party.

The temporary but sharp flip to agriculture in Europe resulting from the economic decline caused by the war gave rise to illusions concerning the possible role of the “peasant,” i.e., of bourgeois pseudo-peasant parties demagogically counterposing themselves to the bourgeois parties. If in the period of stormy peasant unrest during the post-war years one could still risk the experiment of organizing a Peasants’ International, in order to test the new relations between the proletariat and the peasantry and between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, then it is high time now to draw the theoretical and political balance of the five years’ experience with the Peasants’ International, to lay bare its vicious shortcomings and make an effort to indicate its positive aspects.

One conclusion, at any rate, is indisputable. The experience of the “peasant” parties of Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia (i.e., of all the backward countries); the old experience of our Social Revolutionists, and the fresh experience (the blood is still warm) of the Kuomintang; the episodic experiments in advanced capitalist countries, particularly the La Follette–Pepper experiment in the United States—have all shown beyond question that in the epoch of capitalist decline there is even less reason than in the epoch of rising capitalism to look for independent, revolutionary, anti-bourgeois peasant parties.

“The city cannot be equated to the village, the village cannot be equated to the city in the historical conditions of the present epoch. The city inevitably leads the village, the village inevitably follows the city. The only question is which of the urban classes will lead the village.”
(Lenin, Works, Vol. XVI, “The Year 1919,” p. 442.)

In the revolutions of the East the peasantry will still play a decisive role, but once again, this role will be neither leading nor independent. The poor peasants of Hupeh, Kwangtung, or Bengal can play a role not only on a national but on an international scale, but only if they support the workers of Shanghai, Canton, Hankow, and Calcutta. This is the only way out for the revolutionary peasant on an international road. It is hopeless to attempt to forge a direct link between the peasant of Hupeh and the peasant of Galicia or Dobrudja, the Egyptian fellah and the American farmer.

It is in the nature of politics that anything which does not serve a direct aim inevitably becomes the instrument of other aims, frequently the opposite of the one sought. Have we not had examples of a bourgeois party, relying on the peasantry or seeking to rely upon it, deeming it necessary to seek insurance for itself in the Peasants’ International, for a longer or shorter period, if it could not do so in the Comintern, in order to secure protection from the blows of the communist party in its own country? Like Purcell, in the trade union field, protected himself through the Anglo-Russian Committee? If La Follette did not try to register in the Peasants’ International, that was only because the American Communist Party was so extremely weak. He did not have to. Pepper, uninvited and unsolicited, embraced La Follette without that. But Radič, the banker-leader of the Croatian rich peasants, found it necessary to leave his visiting card with the Peasants’ International on his way to the cabinet. The Kuomintang went infinitely further and secured a place for itself not only in the Peasants’ International and the League Against Imperialism, but even knocked at the doors of the Comintern and was welcomed there with the blessing of the Politbureau of the C.P.S.U., marred by only one dissenting vote.

It is highly characteristic of the leading political currents of recent years that at a time when tendencies in favor of liquidating the Profintern [Red International of Labor Unions] were very strong (its very name was deleted from the statutes of the Soviet trade unions), nowhere, so far as we recall, has the question ever been raised in the official press as to the precise conquests of the Krestintern, the Peasants’ International.

The Sixth Congress must seriously review the work of the Peasants’ “International” from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism. It is high time to draw a Marxian balance to this long-drawn-out experiment. In one form or another the balance must be included in the program of the Comintern. The present draft does not breathe a single syllable either about the “millions” in the Peasants’ International, or for that matter, about its very existence.