At the same time as reading Bax's book I was also reading Peter Blickle's much more recent account The Revolution of 1525, which I will review shortly. Bax, like Blickle, identifies the origins of the Peasant War in the great crises of the early 16th century, and the ongoing oppression of the peasantry. Bax reproduces the famous Twelve Articles produced by the peasantry, an extraordinary series of demands which were in several cases accepted either in whole or in part by the lords and town councils whom the revolutionary masses presented them too.
The Articles essentially turned the world of 16th century Germany upside-down, abolishing serfdom, demanding the ending of various oppressive acts by lords and calling for a much more communal social and economic life. Bax however sees them as "moderate" and "exclusively agrarian in character" dealing with the "grievances of the peasant against his lord, lay or ecclesiastic, but had nothing to say on the social problems and the ideas of political reconstruction agitating the mind of the landless proletarian or the impoverished handicraftsman within the walls of the towns."
In contrast we might look at Blicke's argument. Blicke is no socialist, but he understands the revolutionary nature of the Twelve Articles in contrast to Bax's crude dismissal. Blick writes:
the Twelve Articles collected and focused the grievances of individual Upper Swabian villages, and multiple reprintings made the crisis of the agrarian order clear top peasants of the whole empire. To understand the articles in terms of the local economic, social and political background is actually to lay bare the basic causes of the revolution of the common man.... By basing their demands on the Bible, the Twelve Articles constructed an alternate framework and thus pointed a way out of the late medieval crisis, which had become a social and political crisis as well as an agrarian one.
For Blicke, the "common man's revolution" was against the old order and for a "godly order" based on mutual solidarity and common ownership. By contrast Bax sees the movement as being (following Lasalle) "in the main reactionary, harking back as it did to the old village community with its primitive communistic basis, an institution which was destined to pass away in the natural course of economic development... necessarily doomed to be gradually superseded by those individualistic rights of property that form the essential condition of the modern capitalist world."
Bax's position seems to me to be a crude application of the Marxist understanding of history. Bax believes that the feudal society would inevitably be replaced by a capitalist society, a process which would see the "old village community" disappear. Anyone appearing to defend this, was inevitably reactionary. But this is to misunderstand what was happening in 1525 and the Marxist method itself. Engels himself, writing on the Peasant War emphasised how for the Peasants to win "the movement could have been brought to a successful conclusion only by an alliance of all the opposition parties, mainly the nobility and the peasants."
In this context we cannot simply see the peasant's movement in terms of the peasants alone, but Bax judges the peasants' demands in isolation. This said, Bax also makes the mistake in assuming that the peasant demands are reactionary, and look backward. Blicke, in contrast, emphasises the transformative society that they encapsulated, but it is a society that cannot be realised because it is in direct contradiction to the interests of the existing ruling class.
In this context we cannot simply see the peasant's movement in terms of the peasants alone, but Bax judges the peasants' demands in isolation. This said, Bax also makes the mistake in assuming that the peasant demands are reactionary, and look backward. Blicke, in contrast, emphasises the transformative society that they encapsulated, but it is a society that cannot be realised because it is in direct contradiction to the interests of the existing ruling class.
Some Marxist writers have noted how Marx and Engels speculated that communal Russian peasant society in the 19th century might form the basis for a transition to socialism. No doubt had the German peasantry been able to win, such ideas might have been discussed by Marxists about them. Instead Bax views the peasants' radical demands in a wholly negative light, dismissing their utopia as reactionary.
Bax is on much stronger ground when he describes the battles of the peasantry, looking in turn at how these played out during the Peasant War in different parts of Germany. His sympathies are with the struggles of the peasantry and is horrified by the counter-revolutionary slaughter, writing that the violence of the peasantry should not "blind us in any way to the intrinsic righteousness of the popular demands".
Blicke has noted that the struggles did lead in a number of cases, to some radical success, with German serfdom nopt surviving the uprising. Bax however argues that the war "with some exceptions" saw a "riveting of the peasant's chains and an increase of his burdens". He returns at the end to his earlier them to argue that "the peasant programme was out of the line of natural social progress and that the war itself was carried on from the beginning in a manner that rendered success well-nigh impossible". As such Bax misses the wider social and economic implications of the revolutionary movement.
While Bax's book has its interesting points and, in particular, his account of the peasant struggles remains valid, his analysis is too crude and undialectical to offer a real understanding of the social and economic process of the Peasant War. Future readers should take this in account and combine a reading of Bax's book with other engagements with the subject.
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