Illusions about the peasantry: Karl Kautsky and the agrarian question

Abstract

The Agrarian Question, by Karl Kautsky. Two volumes. Translated by Pete Burgess, with an Introduction by Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin. London: Zwan Publications, 1988. Pp.xxxix + 459. £25 per volume (hardback). The first English translation of the complete 1899 edition of Karl Kautsky's The Agrarian Question prompts a critical assessment of that work: as a political intervention, and as a work of theory; in its own time, and with respect to today's Third World. Kautsky, the political optimist, embraced an ineffectual political compromise: a stance no less likely today. His analysis has certain crucial limitations: including a conception of agrarian capitalism excessively moulded by the Prussian example, and an absence of any notion that wage‐labour can come in different forms. The strength of The Agrarian Question, however, is its refusal to compromise with illusions about the peasantry and its opposition to ‘agrarianism and policies of general ‘peasant protection’. Its continuing relevance is illustrated in the context of contemporary rural India, where the brutal offensive of landowners/peasants against the emerging self‐assertion of rural labour is discussed.