Capital cities led the major revolutions in European history, in England (1642–1649 and 1688), France (1789 and 1848), and Russia (1905 and the February and October Revolutions of 1917). In Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq, modernization was led by rural people or residents of small towns (Gamal Abdel Nasser, Abdel Hakim Amer, Zakaria Mohieddin, Anwar Sadat, Mohamed Omran, Salah Jadid, Hafez al-Assad, Houari Boumediene, Chadli Bendjedid, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein) through military organizations that seized power by force, or political parties whose military or clandestine organizations staged coups to attain power.
In European revolutions, the agrarian question was addressed through agrarian reform, with the bourgeoisie leading a revolution against absolutism rooted in the agrarian aristocracy. This was also what Leon Trotsky called the key to the Russian Revolution: “If the agrarian question, inherited from barbarism and Russia’s ancient history, had been resolved by the bourgeoisie and arrived at a suitable solution, the Russian proletariat would not have been able to seize power in 1917” (“History of the Russian Revolution,” Part One, Arab Institution for Studies and Publishing, Beirut 1971, p. 93). This also explains the Chinese Revolution led by the Communist Party in 1949. However, in the cases of England, France, Russia, and China, the agrarian question was resolved without peasant leadership, but rather by bourgeois leadership (England and France) or workers’ leadership (Russia and China).
In Egypt, officers from the Free Officers Organization came to power, as did the Ba’ath Party in Syria. Both relied on rural or small-town bases. In both cases, this was due to the inability of parties such as the Wafd in Egypt or the People’s and National Parties in Syria to resolve the agricultural question through agrarian reform—meaning the unleashing of capitalist relations in the countryside, the urbanization and modernization of rural areas, and the elimination of pre-capitalist socio-economic relations. The leadership of these parties consisted of new capitalists or large landowners. Many of the new Egyptian and Syrian capitalists invested in industry and banking following initial capital accumulation from their agricultural holdings—such as the Egyptian cotton fields after British control began in 1882, or in Syria during 1941–1945 when Syrian agriculture and livestock became the food supply for the Allied armies stretching from Iraq to Libya.
In Algeria, the military organization of the National Liberation Front (FLN) after independence in 1962 was primarily based on a rural social base. When it ousted the civilian leadership of the FLN, represented by President Ahmed Ben Bella, through the 1965 coup, it reflected a socio-economic balance in post-independence Algeria tilted in favor of the countryside—a shift that required a military coup to implement.
In Iraq, the rise of the Ba’ath Party, representing the Tikrit-Ramadi-Samarra alliance, marked the decline of the influence of Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, which had begun to weaken with the collapse of the monarchy (1921–1958). The rule of Abdel Karim Qasim, the Ba’ath coup on February 8, 1963, and the Arif brothers’ leadership (November 18, 1963 – July 17, 1968) signaled the impending decline of Iraqi capitalism emerging in London. This decline led to the emergence of the Tikrit-Anbari-Samarrai Ba’ath regime, which combined a less developed rural base with Bedouin nomadic elements.
While the revolutions in England, France, Russia, and China managed to modernize their countries, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq experienced setbacks after leaders like Nasser, the Ba’ath Parties, and military rulers such as Boumediene and Benjedid.
What Karl Marx explains in his book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is likely the key to understanding the rise of peasant power: he attributes the phenomenon of Bonapartism to the fact that, at moments of social class stalemate, anyone can emerge as “the individual savior of the nation,” whether they possess talent—like Napoleon Bonaparte (1799–1815)—or are talentless with a criminal past—like Louis Bonaparte. Yet, this did not prevent him from being elected by a broad social bloc, mostly peasants, in the presidential elections ten months after the February 1848 Revolution. This was followed by the suppression of the working-class forces that had been the backbone of the revolution, through a bourgeois alliance with the financial aristocracy.
Three years later, the peasants became the backbone of Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire when he seized power and established a personal dictatorship, which culminated in the 1870 humiliating defeat at the Battle of Sedan against the Prussians, leading to the collapse of the French state.
Anyone reading Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire and his second work, The Civil War in France (on the Paris Commune of 1871), will notice how peasants shifted from supporting Louis Bonaparte in 1848 to opposing the Paris workers during the Commune. Marx states: “Just as the Bourbons (the family of kings before the Revolution of 1789) were the family of the large estates, and the Orleans (Louis Philippe, King of France from 1830 to 1848) the family of money, so the Bonapartists are the family of the peasantry—that is, the mass of the French people” (“The Eighteenth Brumaire,” in Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Part One, Progress Publishing House, Moscow, no date, p. 283).
Bonapartism, with its peasant base, led France to two defeats: at Waterloo in 1815 and at Sedan. France’s attempt to heal its wounds from Waterloo—stemming from Napoleon Bonaparte’s failure to impose control over the continent against Britain and Russia—likely contributed to global instability. One manifestation of this was Paris’s support for Muhammad Ali Pasha in his attempts to undermine the Ottoman Empire, which was protected by Russia and Britain, during the 1830s and 1840s. Moreover, France’s defeat by the Germans at Sedan eventually contributed to both World Wars.
Bonapartist scars were not suffered by England, under Oliver Cromwell (1642–1658), with the Parliament’s revolt against absolute monarchy and the “king reigns but does not rule” revolution of 1688; nor by Lenin and Stalin’s Russia; nor by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s China. In practice, France only managed to recover from these wounds with the internal reconciliation of 1905 between the forces of the old regime and the modern forces established by the 1789 revolution—most notably through the adoption of secularism. However, its external crises following defeats in 1870 and 1940 against Germany were only resolved in the 1960s under de Gaulle, when he reconciled with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Its longstanding complex of British superiority, dating back to the 1756–1763 war, remains unresolved to this day.
To summarize: The peasants, in Marxism, are often viewed by many thinkers not as a class but as social strata. History has not provided a progressive example of them independently leading the historical process. Rather, they became a progressive historical force only when led by the bourgeoisie or the working class.
In both Marxism and liberalism—the core of modern Western thought—there is a negative view of the independent historical role of the peasantry. The events in Egypt after 1952, Syria after 1963, Iraq after 1968, and Algeria after 1965 tend to support this perspective.
In Syria, after December 8, 2024, there are signs of a new rural or small-town-based government, indicating that its primary social support is rooted in the countryside or small municipalities rather than in the two major cities, as was the case between 1946 and 1958.
