3 - Agrarian Structures and Peasant Insurrections

Summary

When non-peasant social forces clash, when rulers are divided or foreign powers attack, the peasantry's attitude and action may well prove decisive. Whether this potential is realized is mainly dependent upon the peasants' ability to act in unison, with or without formal organization.

Teodor Shanin

Massive As They Were, societal political crises alone were not enough to create social-revolutionary situations in France, Russia, and China. Administrative and military breakdowns of the autocracies inaugurated social-revolutionary transformations—rather than, say, interregnums of intraelite squabbling leading to the break-up of the existing polity or the reconstitution of a similar regime on a more or less liberal basis. This result was due to the fact that widespread peasant revolts coincided with, indeed took advantage of, the hiatus of governmental supervision and sanctions. In Barrington Moore's vivid phrase, “the peasants … provided the dynamite to bring down the old building.” Their revolts destroyed the old agrarian class relations and undermined the political and military supports for liberalism or counterrevolution. They opened the way for marginal political elites, perhaps supported by urban popular movements, to consolidate the Revolutions on the basis of centralized and mass-incorporating state organizations.

Peasant revolts have in truth attracted less attention from historians and social theorists than have urban lower-class actions in revolutions-even for the predominantly agrarian societies with which we are concerned here. This is understandable. Urban workers, whether preindustrial or industrial, have often played highly visible parts in (failed as well as successful) revolutions. And their aims and achievements have been linked to those of self-consciously revolutionary leaderships. Hence insurrectionary urban workers seem like true revolutionaries compared to peasants who merely “rebel” in the countryside, far from the centers of national-political consciousness and decision.

Nevertheless, peasant revolts have been the crucial insurrectionary ingredient in virtually all actual (i.e., successful) social revolutions to date, and certainly in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. This is not really surprising, given that social revolutions have occurred in agrarian countries where peasants are the major producing class. Without peasant revolts, urban radicalism in predominantly agrarian countries has not in the end been able to accomplish social-revolutionary transformations. The cases of the English and German (1848) Revolutions (to be discussed below) help to demonstrate this assertion. Both of these contrast cases had vigorous urban-popular revolutionary movements.