Lenin, Marx and America's Rural Poor

Conservative reactionaries or the driving force of leftist revolution?

The far-left in America is famous — some say infamous — for being partial to a bit of anti-Capitalism. It's one of those rare political facts these days that there is bipartisan awareness of. Of course, for those on the right, this is terrifying; there is a hysterical rebirth of the Red Scare among many of our right-wing commentators who are terrified by academics identifying as Marxists. The so-called Democratic Socialists have risen in popularity and mainstream recognition and their most famous faces Bernie Sanders and AOC are household names.

The consensus among these left-wing sceptics of Capitalism is that the inequalities which the capitalist economic system has generated are unjust and we need to take action to make a more just society. The Occupy Wall Street movement was a protest movement that spread across the world with its rallying slogan "We are the 99%". Such people point out that in 2021 the top 1% of Americans had 27% of America's national wealth which is more than the middle 60% of Americans.

These left-wingers are calling for a change in our economic system believing that this inequality between rich and poor is unjust.

To put it simply these left-wingers have built an entire movement that is against wealth inequality.

The Urban-Rural Divide

2016 election map by county (image via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0)

Given all these facts, if an alien arrived from another planet they would be baffled by the political divide in America.

In the 2016 US Presidential election, Hillary Clinton — the candidate for the left-wing Democrats — won in 472 counties while Trump — the candidate for the right-wing Republicans — won in 2,584. These 472 Democrat counties accounted for 64% of the country's GDP in comparison to Trump's 2,584 with their 36% of the country's economic output. By 2020 this gap had only widened: Biden's 509 counties made up 71% of America's economic activity.

America, it seems, is two nations stitched together by historical circumstance. What we are looking at is an urban/suburban economic powerhouse bursting into the future standing amid a rural ocean that has been left behind.

Given the left-wing distaste for wealth inequality, we might expect these election numbers to be reversed. You might expect that the ocean of lesser-off people would identify with the side of the aisle that is dedicated to flattening inequality. Or if not with the Democrat party as a whole — since the mainstream of the Democrat party is closer to Conservatism than they are to Socialism — we would at least expect this rural ocean of the left behind to be big fans of Democratic Socialists and vice versa but nothing could be further from the truth.

The Deeper Roots of the Problem

Image via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This peculiar fact is not unique to 21st-century America but has a long history in radical politics.

Since the days of Karl Marx there has been an ambivalence in Socialist circles towards the rural population. Marx described peasants as "rural idiots"; said that they represented "barbarism within civilisation" and compared the French peasants to potatoes in a sack. Even though the bourgeoisie were Marx's enemy number one he credited them with saving the poor from the life of peasantry:

“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

These rural poor thus played no part in Marx's view of revolution. After the revolution government would not be by the poor over the rich but by the specific class of the poor known as the Proletariat — i.e. the urban working class poor — over everyone else. The peasants were a historical curiosity headed for irrelevance thanks to advances in technology.

And of course Marx has a point here. At the start of the 19th century over 90% of the population worked in agriculture; today it's closer to 1%. But Marx was getting a bit ahead of himself.

In fact, insofar as Communist revolutions have been successful, this anti-rural bias of Marx had to be unlearned by generations of revolutionaries from Che Guevara in South America to Mao in China.

The first to unlearn this aspect of Marxism was the leader of the Russian Soviet Revolution Vladimir Lenin. After the collapse of the 1905 Communist rising in Russia, Lenin realised that there was no way revolution could succeed in Russia without the support of the peasant masses. And having learned from practical experience this limitation of Marxism, he worked endlessly from that moment to recruit the peasants to the cause. It was because of this peasant support that the Soviets came to power in Russia. This dovetails with Lenin's comment in 1899 that:

"We do not regard Marx's theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life." — Lenin, Our Program

Doing a post-mortem of Communism it is obvious that all its successes came not from Marx's dear urban proletarians but from the rural peasantry. It seems that in direct contradiction to Marx's claim — not the proletariat but the peasantry "alone is a truly revolutionary class". Far from being the conservative reactionaries that Marx imagined, the rural peasantry have been the backbone of every successful Communist revolution.

Revisiting the American Divide

Image via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Returning to the 21st century it is worth reminding ourselves of the situation.

The first important thing to note is that when we talk about a rural population in 21st-century America we are not talking about peasants doing subsistence farming. It's an entirely different ballgame. But the overarching socioeconomic similarities are compelling.

This second America is a radical rural population disenfranchised by Modern progress. Though they make up 84% of the country's districts and half the country's population they account for only 36% of the country's wealth. And in a historical parallel with Marx's take on the peasantry, this rural population have been dismissed as conservative reactionaries by the far-Left.

And so I find myself wondering whether the left has learned anything from history. If they thought a bit more like Lenin and a little less like Marx then they might be able to create a much more powerful alliance that would actually carry them into power.

Now admittedly this outcome is likely to be highly undesirable. The ethical heart of the left wing — much as it jars with the sensibilities of right-wing commentators — represents a far preferable mode of existence for society than the alternative. As David Mitrany put it in his article Communism and the Peasants:

"The curious side, and the significant lesson, of those events is that while the Socialists tried to remain good Marxists, the Communists only cared to remain good Leninists. To them the only goal that mattered was power, and to that end their tactics were as adaptable as their policy was un-Marxist."

Instead it seems that the Democratic Socialists will fit the other historical stereotype of the socialist — George Orwell's "intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation". In a profile of the Progressive demographic, the Pew Research Centre found that 48% of this cohort are university graduates — almost 50% more than the rest of the population.

These highly educated Progressives are creatures of the metropolis. I can't help wondering if universities were in rural towns rather than major cities whether we might see a conversion of America's radical ruralites from the right to the left. At the very least it seems that the radical American left has missed a major beat.