ABSTRACT
Marx’s notion was that history would make of the farmer simply an industrial worker of one sort or another; and he could embrace the farmer ultimately in the same formula he mechanically applied to the industrial working class. As a theorist of history, Marx found the farmer out of place; and there is a note of human irritation and annoyance in Marx’s treatment of him. Marxist theory had no sympathy or interest in the desires of the farmer. Nevertheless, Communist tacticians in both Russia and China achieved power in large part by harnessing to their purposes the peasant’s aspiration for his own land. Brushing the peasant aside as a kind of miscast rural industrial worker, Marxism abandoned him to other leaders. Thus the Russian and Eastern European peasant has demonstrated that he cannot be quickly converted into a rural industrial worker according to Marx’s formula, even by the full power of a modern totalitarian state.
