Table of Contents:
A China
B Europe C Mexico D The peasantry in the Bolshevik revolution
D1 The first workers’ government
D2 The Makhno army
D3 The Kronstadt rebellion
E As a conclusion
On the formula of a workers and peasant government
Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 04.05.2026
In the West Bank, 80,000 to 100,000 families rely on olive farming, while in Gaza, before October 2023, around 560,000 people relied on agriculture, including fishing and livestock, for their livelihoods. These people are going to be very important in the next intifada. This raises the question of the relationship of the working class and the peasantry. We call for a workers government supported by the Peasants, or for a worker and peasants’ government in red democratic state from the river to the sea.
The question of this formula is what do we mean by it. If we mean the dictatorship of the working class and a workers’ state it is very correct formula, but if it raised like the Stalinist did, of a revolutionary democratic government, this formula is very wrong as it implies a bourgeois historical separate stage like the program of the Mensheviks and the right SR in the context of the Russian revolution.
While the agrarian workers are part of the working class, the peasantry is a different class and it includes petit bourgeois and even bourgeois layer and the task of the working class is to separate the lower layers from the exploiting layer and form the alliance with the lower stratum.
The peasantry can not establish a peasant state nor it can by itself establish a workers’ state. It either supports the working- class revolution or a bourgeois counter revolution. The transitional program explains the above.
In this article I want to deal with the history of peasant revolutionary struggles which confirms the above. It is not account of all peasants’ rebellions but only some important ones.
A China: China was foe long time an Asiatic mode of production, it began to change with the imperialist control of China that brought the railways, telegraphs, and other advanced technologies for the exploitation of China as a colony.
Two of the longest dynasties in China, the Han and Ming, were established by peasants’ rebellions.
Following the death of Qin Shi Huang in 210 BCE, the empire became unstable, leading to a massive peasants’ revolt. The leader of the revolutionary struggle was Liu Bang.
The Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) came to power after the brutal, short-lived Qin Dynasty collapsed into civil war, with Liu Bang—a peasant who rose to become Emperor Gaozu—defeating rival warlords to establish the new regime. By tempering Qin’s harsh legalism with Confucian principles, the Han secured widespread legitimacy and created a lasting, prosperous centralized state for 400 years.
After hundreds of years of Mongol’s rule, a peasant revolt known as the Red Turban, led by Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and monk captured Nanjing in 1356, consolidated power in southern China, and marched on Beijing in 1368, overthrew the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty and established the Ming Dynasty with Zhu Yuanzhangas the emperor and they dynasty that last between 1364-1644 a period of strong, centralized rule and a return to Confucian traditions.
B Europe: After the black death that killed millions and the long war, known as the Hundred Years ‘ War (1337-1453) between England and France the serfs rebelled.
The 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt and the 1524–1525 German Peasants’ War, were violent uprisings against oppressive feudal obligations, high taxation, and the impacts of economic disruption. Driven by constraints on freedom, such as serfdom and wage controls after the Black Death, peasants sought economic equality and social reforms.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England: ignited by a third poll tax (1380–81) to fund the Hundred Years’ War, this revolt saw tens of thousands rise in the southeastern counties. Led by figures like Wat Tyler and John Ball, rebels marched on London, targeting government figures like John of Gaunt and destroying tax records. However, the rebellion without a program for a different society was brutally suppressed and its leaders executed.
The Jacquerie (1358 – France): A revolutionary uprising in northern France amid the Hundred Years’ War. Serfs, heavily burdened by taxation and the destruction caused by the conflict, rose against the nobility, resulting in rapid and savage suppression of the rebellion, for the same reason-the lack of a program for a different society.
The German Peasants’ War (1524–1525): The largest uprising before the French Revolution, involving hundreds of thousands in central Europe. Inspired by the Protestant Reformation and the “Twelve Articles,” peasants sought to eliminate serfdom, reduce tithes, and restore communal land. Despite early successes, the revolt was crushed by princes, resulting in mass casualties.
The French revolution of 1789 was a bourgeois revolution even though the rebel masses were the peasants.
C Mexico
The Heroic peasant’s revolutionary struggle in Mexico during the revolution that began in 1910 failed to achieve an equal society and brought the bourgeois to power. The peasant army led by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa won many battles. Zapata helped to form the Liberation Army of the South, of which he soon became the undisputed leader. Zapata’s forces contributed to the fall of the dictator Díaz, defeating the Federal Army in the Battle of Cuautla in May 1911. However, he was not a national leader as the peasants’ army could not unite. Zapata’s limited political vision outside of Morelos led to his failure. Zapata aligned with Francisco I. Madero to depose Porfirio Díaz, but Madero failed to honor promises regarding land redistribution, forcing Zapata into a new rebellion. Later, Madero was betrayed and assassinated by forces under Venustiano Carranza.
Despite capturing Mexico City multiple times with Pancho Villa, Zapata did not have a national plan, his plan focused on the southern agrarian demands (Plan de Ayala).
His inability to anticipate the deception of Jesús Guajardo, a pro-Carranza officer, led to his murder in an ambush in 1919.
Pancho Villa frequently entered into alliances with the bourgeoisie, indicating that the peasantry could not wage an independent struggle for power alone. The United States played a critical role in the failure of the peasant revolutionary struggle by occasionally embargoing weapons to certain factions (like Villa) and supporting more moderate, business-friendly leaders.
Thus, the heroic Peasants revolutionary struggle brought to power a new class. While the 1910 revolution broke the power of the old landed aristocracy (hacendados), a new urban-based, business-oriented elite-the capitalists inherited that power and, in continued the oppression of the rural population.
The Mexican government, particularly the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after 1929, used a combination of rhetoric and repression to control peasants. They established the National Peasant Confederation to align peasants with the government, bribed or killed independent leaders, and co-opted revolutionary rhetoric to make peasants believe they had already won.
The 1992 repeal of Article 27 of the Mexica constitution—which had promised land redistribution—marked the definitive end of the revolutionary commitment to the peasantry, a move made in preparation for NAFTA.
D The peasantry in the Bolshevik revolution
D1 The first workers’ government—a coalition between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs)—failed primarily due to irreconcilable differences over foreign policy, especially over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918).
Lenin position was that peace with Germany was essential at any cost to save the revolution, even if it meant ceding vast territories like Ukraine.
The Left S.R viewed the treaty as a “betrayal of the international revolution” and a surrender to German imperialism.
In protest, the Left SR commissars resigned from the government in March 1918,
The Bolsheviks facing a catastrophic food crisis in the cities, introduced “War Communism,” which included forced grain requisitioning and the creation of Committees of Poor Peasants (kombedy) to seize food from better-off farmers.
The Left SRs: As a peasant-based party, were horrified by these “anti-peasant” decrees and the use of force in rural areas, which they saw as a violation of the peasants’ revolutionary rights.
The Left SRs felt that the Bolsheviks were excluding all other socialist-reformists voices and were moving toward a one-party dictatorship.
On July 6, 1918, Left SR members assassinated the German Ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach, in a deliberate attempt to provoke a new war with Germany and force the Bolsheviks to abandon the peace treaty.
D2 The Makhno army, formally known as the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU) or simply the Makhnovtsi (“Black Army”), was a powerful anarchist peasant army active in southeastern Ukraine and southern Russia between 1918 and 1921 during the Russian Civil War. Led by Nestor Makhno, the army fought to create a stateless, self-governing society based on libertarian communism—the “Makhnovshchina”—fought some time against the White Army, and ultimately against the Bolshevik Red Army.
D3 The Kronstadt rebellion was a 1921 insurrection of peasants against the Bolshevik government in the Russian port city of Kronstad. On March 1, 1921, sailors approved the “Petropavlovsk Resolution,” rejecting Bolshevik authority and forming a Provisional Revolutionary Committee. This was the reaction of the peasants to the policy of war communism. A policy designed to rebuild the destruction during the civil war. The government, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, refused to negotiate, accusing the rebels of being tools of “White Guard” conspirators and foreign forces The Red Army forces (about 60,000 soldiers) crossed the frozen Gulf of Finland to take the fortress, resulting in significant casualties. The uprising was officially crushed by March 18, 1921, with many sailors executed or sent to prison camps, and others fleeing to Finland. This event forced Lenin to replace the War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP) to allow some market activity.
The rebellion and the NEP were the result of a revolution in one country under the attack of the counter revolution and 14 imperialist states.
E: As a conclusion
In 1932 Trotsky wrote to the Chinese left opposition on the question of the alliance of the working class and the peasants. It is clear that Trotsky was for an alliance of the working class and the peasants but under the leadership of the working class.
“At the present time it is evident that there are substantial grounds for expressing the hope that, through a correct policy, it will be possible to unite the workers’ movement, and the urban movement in general, with the peasant war; and this would constitute the beginning of the third Chinese revolution. But in the meantime, this still remains only a hope, not a certainty. The most important work lies ahead.
In this letter I want to pose only one question which seems to me, at least from afar, to be the most important and acute…
The peasant movement has created its own armies, has seized great territories, and has installed its own institutions. In the event of further successes—and all of us, of course, passionately desire such successes—the movement will become linked up with the urban and industrial centers and, through that very fact it will come face to face with the working class. What will be the nature of this encounter? Is it certain that its character will be peaceful and friendly?
At first glance the question might appear to be superfluous. The peasant movement is headed by Communists or sympathizers. Isn’t it self-evident that in the event of their coming together the workers and the peasants must unanimously unite under the Communist banner?
Unfortunately, the question is not at all so simple. Let me refer to the experience of Russia. During the years of the civil war the peasantry in various parts of the country created its own guerrilla detachments, which sometimes grew into full-fledged armies. Some of these detachments considered themselves Bolshevik, and were often led by workers. Others remained non-party and most often were led by former non-commissioned officers from among the peasantry. There was also an “anarchist” army under the command of Makhno.
So long as the guerrilla armies operated in the rear of the White Guards, they served the cause of the revolution. Some of them were distinguished by exceptional heroism and fortitude. But within the cities these armies often came into conflict with the workers and with the local party organizations. Conflicts also arose during encounters of the partisans with the regular Red Army, and in some instances, they took an extremely painful and sharp character” [i]
Endnotes:
[I] L. Trotsky Peasant War in China and the Proletariat
(September 22, 1932)