The ideology of anti‐bolshevism

Continuity existed between Marx and Lenin on the peasant problem. Marx recognized that the capitalist peasant, the tenant‐farmer, would not support a proletarian revolution, but the capitalist peasant could be a revolutionary force in a liberal revolution. Marx felt that if a liberal revolution was found to be progressive for the proletariat, an alliance could be formed between proletariat and tenant‐farmers in the bourgeois revolution. Moreover, in Vol. III of Das Kapital Marx discerned the evolution of an agricultural proletariat. These agricultural wage‐labourers would support a proletarian revolution, and thus were allies of the urban proletariat in a socialist revolution. Lenin was familiar with the arguments of Vol. III of Das Kapital and incorporated them in his Development of Capitalism in Russia (composed in 1898). And certainly by 1901, and not in the revolution of 1905 as most commentators maintain, Lenin's ideas on the peasantry had fully matured and were entirely consonant with the views of Marx. By 1901, by extending the insights of Marx to Russia, Lenin had formulated the policy later enunciated in 1905 in Two Tactics of Social‐Democracy in the Democratic Revolution: two revolutions were brewing in the countryside, between capitalist farmers and aristocracy and between agricultural wage‐labourers and capitalist farmers, and the urban proletariat could find an ally for either a liberal or socialist revolution by allying with the capitalist farmer in the bourgeois revolution or the agricultural wage‐labourer in the socialist revolution.