Contradictions in Policy towards the Peasantry

Lenin and Mao’s policy towards the peasantry sometimes seems contradictory and ambiguous, yet this can
be explained in relationship to their period of ideological development. From 1917 to 1919, the era of the May
Fourth Movement in China, young Mao Zedong gave great importance to the student movement. Despite his
limited knowledge of Marxist thought, Mao was captivated by the victory of the Russian Revolution, and following
the May Fourth movement, he supported Li Ta-chao’s idea of proletarian China. Therefore from 1921 to 1923, Mao
played an active role in the labor movement in Hunan, known as his ‘workers’ period,’ which explains why heechoes Lenin in referring to the revolution as “a joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes under the leadership
of the proletariat.”32 From 1923 to 1924, Mao was known as the ‘organization man’ who played a primarily
bureaucratic role in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. It was only from 1925 onwards, following his
rhetorical question, "At present we are hardly able to carry out our work among the workers in the cities; how could we
have time to work in the villages?"33 His realization that the Chinese revolution lay in the hands of the peasants is
announced in his address to the Second Congress of the Kuomintang in January 1926: “We have concentrated too much
on the cites and ignored the peasants.”34
Although Lenin is seemingly consistent in his evaluation of the peasantry, there are discrepancies in these
evaluations and how he put them into practice. Lenin is best known for his demands for the “the revolutionarydemocratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,”35 and yet there have been times when he has contradicted
this appeal. The Narodniks, early Russian socialists who advocated the support of the peasantry, were criticized in
the late 1800s to early 1900s by Lenin, who supported G.V. Plekhanov, the founder of the first Russian Marxist
group who argued the “development of the capitalist mode in industry and agriculture…as the achievement, not of
the peasantry, but of the industrial proletariat.”36 Despite his views on the dictatorship of the proletariat,37 Vera
Broido argues Lenin “had no understanding of the workers as human beings and…when they proved too backward,
too ignorant and too undisciplined to run the factories…he felt no compunction about sending them to concentration
camps.”38 In January 1919, Lenin used the workers as scapegoats to explain the standstill in industrial production,
saying that they had not ‘learned’ and formed the Tsektran (Central Committee of trade unions of transport
workers), which served as a symbol of oppression for the working class. The Tsektran overlooked the militarization
of labor with commissars acting as watchmen over workers and managers. In 1921, however, the New Economic
Policy induced an abatement of labor relations, suggesting Lenin had learned some lessons from the disaster caused
by War Communism.