Frederick Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany in London in the summer of 1850, with the wounds of the just-defeated revolution of 1848–49 still open. It was, he says in the preface, "written in London in the summer of 1850, while still under the immediate impression of the counter-revolution just then completed," and it appeared that year in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung review that Marx edited from Hamburg. It is a short, fierce book about a distant event: the great rising of German peasants and plebeians in 1525, which Marx had called "the most radical fact of German history." Engels leaned heavily on the liberal historian Wilhelm Zimmermann for his facts and his chronology, and said as much; his originality lay not in the archive but in the reading of it. Twenty years later he added a preface for the book edition of 1870, and in 1874 a long supplement on the German workers' movement of his own day. The edition in your hands — Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956, the house that would shortly become Progress Publishers — reprints that text with an introduction by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and gathers round it four appendices: Engels on "The Mark," his sketch of the history of the Prussian peasantry, a selection of his and Marx's letters, and drafts from his unfinished manuscripts.
What the book does supremely well is to read a war fought under religious banners as a war between classes. To the "home-bred historians" Engels mocks, the Reformation was so much "violent theological bickering"; he shows that behind Luther, behind Thomas Münzer and his millenarian — thousand-year-kingdom — communism, behind the princes and the timid town burghers, stood the hard material interests of a society straining out of feudalism. He sorts the confusion of the age into three great camps: the Catholic reaction, the moderate Lutheran burghers who wanted reform without revolution, and the revolutionary party of peasants and plebeians. Around "the magnificent figure of Thomas Münzer" he builds a tragedy — the revolutionary who saw further than his class or his century and was broken for it — and from Münzer's ruin he draws a political lesson of permanent, and dangerous, clarity: "The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents." It is one of the great sentences of the socialist tradition, and it was written out of the defeat Engels had just lived through, not from the safety of hindsight.
It has, too, the marks of a young revolutionary's polemic. Its facts are Zimmermann's, corrected here and there by the edition's own notes; its parallels between 1525 and 1848 are drawn with a broad brush, so that the sixteenth-century burgher becomes an almost too-tidy ancestor of the cowardly liberal of 1849, who "betrayed the insurgent peasantry and went over to the side of the feudal gentry." And the supplement of 1874 carries the seed of a later trouble: Engels's growing — and, in its own terms, well-earned — confidence in the lawful, organised advance of German Social-Democracy. That confidence the Second International would harden, after his death, into a fatalism of automatic progress, a faith that the future would arrive of itself, which the catastrophe of 1914 blew apart. None of this is concealed by the book. The honest reader watches Engels both make the argument and, in the prefaces, temper it — which is the finest thing about him.
Then comes the passage the canonising state could not read in front of a mirror. A leader thrust into power before his class is ready, Engels goes on, "is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are their own interests." And the verdict: "Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost."
Written of Münzer in 1525, it reads like a warning addressed across four centuries to October 1917 — to a workers' party that took power in a peasant country, encircled, blockaded and starving, in exactly the epoch when, in Engels's words, "the movement is not yet ripe." The revolutionary current that Trotsky founded took the warning to heart, and located the Soviet degeneration where Engels's own logic points: first in objective conditions — the isolation of the revolution once Germany failed to follow it, the destruction of the working class in the civil war, the backwardness of the country — and then in the bureaucracy's usurpation of the state the workers had made. What that current did not do was pretend the danger away. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism did. Its introduction files the book safely as a study of "the early bourgeois revolution," a closed episode of the German past, and enlists Münzer as a heroic forerunner of Bolshevism — while the sentences about the leader who must feed his own people with the asseveration that an alien interest is theirs are left lying on the page, uninterpreted, unturned. They could not be turned, because to apply them was to describe the regime that was printing the book. The state that published Engels so carefully on the German peasants' war of 1525 had, within living memory of 1956, waged its own war on its peasants — the forced collectivisation and the famine of 1932–33 — and no note in this volume lets the one throw any light on the other. The reflex runs deeper than a single silence: an edition that could print Engels on "The Mark" and the fate of the peasant commune had, close at hand, Marx's own late writings on the Russian commune and the drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich, which asked whether Russia might reach socialism through the village commune rather than over its corpse — and those the canon quietly kept out of circulation. The peasant question that Engels studied with such care was, in the USSR, not studied but settled by force.
Read against that silence, the living Engels is easy to find. He is the materialist who refuses to mistake a banner — a cross, a red star — for the class content beneath it, and who insists that even the boldest will is bounded by "the level of development of the material means of existence." He is, above all, the sober analyst of revolutionary timing, who understood that the tragedy of the premature revolutionary is not cowardice or treachery but a trap sprung by history — and who therefore armed his heirs to recognise the trap, rather than to canonise the men caught in it. Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, and Ernest Mandel after him, read the fate of the October revolution in exactly these terms: a revolution betrayed by its isolation and its bureaucracy, not an original sin of Bolshevism, and they kept this book's warning alive as living analysis instead of embalming it as scripture. That is how to read The Peasant War in Germany now — not as a monument to a heroic defeat safely locked in the sixteenth century, but as Engels meant every line of it: a manual for finding the class struggle beneath its disguises, and an unsparing meditation on what it costs to move too soon.