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    The two years of revolution, from the autumn of 1905 to the autumn of 1907, have furnished a vast amount of experience of historical value concerning the peasant movement in Russia and the character and significance of the peasants' struggle for land. Decades of so-called "peaceful" evolution (i.e., when millions of people peacefully allow themselves to be fleeced by the upper ten thousand) can never furnish such a wealth of material for explaining the inner workings of our social system as has been furnished in these two years both by the direct struggle of the peasant masses against the landlords and by the demands of the peasants, expressed with at least some degree of freedom, at assemblies of representatives of the people. Therefore, the revision of the agrarian programme of the Russian Social-Democrats in the light of the experience of these two years is absolutely necessary, particularly in view of the fact that the present agrarian programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was adopted at the Stockholm Congress in April 1906, i.e., on the eve of the first public appearance of representatives of the peasantry from all over Russia with a peasant agrarian programme, in opposition to the programme of the government and to that of the liberal bourgeoisie.

    The revision of the Social-Democratic agrarian programme must be based on the latest data on landed property in Russia in order to ascertain with the utmost precision what actually is the economic background of all the agrarian programmes of our epoch, and what precisely are the issues in the great historic struggle. This economic basis of the real struggle must be compared with the ideological-political reflection of this basis that is found in the programmes, declarations, demands, and theories of the

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spokesmen of the different classes. This is the course, and the only course, that a Marxist should take, unlike the petty-bourgeois socialist who proceeds from "abstract" justice, from the theory of the "labour principle", etc., and unlike the liberal bureaucrat who, in connection with every reform, covers up his defence of the interests of the exploiters by arguments about whether the reform is practicable and about the "state" point of view.

ern region" (in the Arkhangelsk, Olonets and Vologda gubernias). Of course, by deducting all these lands we considerab!y overestimate the area of land unsuitable for agriculture. It suffices to point out that such a cautious statistician as Mr. A. A. Kaufman calculates that in the Vologda and Olonets gubernias 25,700,000 dessiatins of forest land (with over 25 per cent of forest) could be utilised for additional allotment to the peasants.[*] However, since we are dealing with general data about the land area, without giving separate figures for forest land, it will be more correct to take a more cautious estimate of the land area suitable for agriculture. After deducting 107,900,000 dessiatins, there will be left 287,300,000 dessiatins, or in round figures, 280,000;000 dessiatins, leaving out a portion of urban land (the totaI of which is 2,000,000 dessiatins) and a portion of the state lands in the Vyatka and Perm gubernias (the total area of state land in these two gubernias is 16,300,000 dessiatins).

    Thus, the aggregate amount of land suitable for agriculture in European Russia is distributed as follows:

    Now we must give separate figures for small and large (particularly very large) holdings in order to obtain a concrete idea of the conditions of the peasant struggle for land in the Russian revolution. Such figures, however, are incomplete. Of the 138,800,000 dessiatins of peasant allotment land 136,900,000 dessiatins are classified according to size of holdings. Of the 101,700,000 dessiatins of privately owned land, 85,900,000 dessiatins are so classified; the remaining 15,800,000 dessiatins are recorded as belonging to "societies and associations". Examining the latter we find that 11,300,000 dessiatins are owned by peasant

    Out of the 39,500,000 dessiatins of state and other lands, only the crown lands[98] (5,100,000 dessiatins) lend themselves to classification according to size. These, too, are very large semi-medieval landed estates. We thus get a total area of land, both classified and not classified according to size of holdings, as follows:

    Let us now classify the allotment land according to size of holdings. By rearranging the data obtained from our source of information into somewhat larger groups, we get:

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    From these data it is evident that more than half of the households (6,200,000 out of 12,300,000) have up to 8 dessiatins each, i.e., in general and on the average, an area of land that is absolutely insufficient to support a family. Ten million one hundred thousand households possess up to 15 dessiatins each (making a total of 72,900,000 dessiatins), i.e., over four-fifths of the total number of households are, at the present level of peasant agricultural technique, on the brink of semi-starvation. Middle and well-to-do households -- according to amount of land owned -- number only 2,200,000 out of 12,300,000, owning altogether 63,900,000 dessiatins out of 136,900,000 dessiatins. Only households having more than 30 dessiatins each can be regarded as rich; of these there are only 600,000, i.e., one-twentieth of the total nurnber of households. They possess nearly one-fourth of the total land area: 32,700,000 out of 136,900,000 dessiatins. To give an idea as to which categories of peasants constitute this group of rich households, we shall point out that first place among them is held by the Cossacks. In the over-30-dessiatins-per-household group, the Cossack households number 266,929 having a total of 14,426,403 dessiatins, i.e., the overwhelming majority of the Cossacks (in European Russia: 278,650 households having a total of 14,689,498 dessiatins of land, i.e., an average of 52.7 dessiatins per household).

    The only data available for the whole of Russia enabling us to judge how all the peasant households are approximate-

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    The two years of revolution, from the autumn of 1905 to the autumn of 1907, have furnished a vast amount of experience of historical value concerning the peasant movement in Russia and the character and significance of the peasants' struggle for land. Decades of so-called "peaceful" evolution (i.e., when millions of people peacefully allow themselves to be fleeced by the upper ten thousand) can never furnish such a wealth of material for explaining the inner workings of our social system as has been furnished in these two years both by the direct struggle of the peasant masses against the landlords and by the demands of the peasants, expressed with at least some degree of freedom, at assemblies of representatives of the people. Therefore, the revision of the agrarian programme of the Russian Social-Democrats in the light of the experience of these two years is absolutely necessary, particularly in view of the fact that the present agrarian programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was adopted at the Stockholm Congress in April 1906, i.e., on the eve of the first public appearance of representatives of the peasantry from all over Russia with a peasant agrarian programme, in opposition to the programme of the government and to that of the liberal bourgeoisie.

    The revision of the Social-Democratic agrarian programme must be based on the latest data on landed property in Russia in order to ascertain with the utmost precision what actually is the economic background of all the agrarian programmes of our epoch, and what precisely are the issues in the great historic struggle. This economic basis of the real struggle must be compared with the ideological-political reflection of this basis that is found in the programmes, declarations, demands, and theories of the

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spokesmen of the different classes. This is the course, and the only course, that a Marxist should take, unlike the petty-bourgeois socialist who proceeds from "abstract" justice, from the theory of the "labour principle", etc., and unlike the liberal bureaucrat who, in connection with every reform, covers up his defence of the interests of the exploiters by arguments about whether the reform is practicable and about the "state" point of view.

ern region" (in the Arkhangelsk, Olonets and Vologda gubernias). Of course, by deducting all these lands we considerab!y overestimate the area of land unsuitable for agriculture. It suffices to point out that such a cautious statistician as Mr. A. A. Kaufman calculates that in the Vologda and Olonets gubernias 25,700,000 dessiatins of forest land (with over 25 per cent of forest) could be utilised for additional allotment to the peasants.[*] However, since we are dealing with general data about the land area, without giving separate figures for forest land, it will be more correct to take a more cautious estimate of the land area suitable for agriculture. After deducting 107,900,000 dessiatins, there will be left 287,300,000 dessiatins, or in round figures, 280,000;000 dessiatins, leaving out a portion of urban land (the totaI of which is 2,000,000 dessiatins) and a portion of the state lands in the Vyatka and Perm gubernias (the total area of state land in these two gubernias is 16,300,000 dessiatins).

    Thus, the aggregate amount of land suitable for agriculture in European Russia is distributed as follows:

    Now we must give separate figures for small and large (particularly very large) holdings in order to obtain a concrete idea of the conditions of the peasant struggle for land in the Russian revolution. Such figures, however, are incomplete. Of the 138,800,000 dessiatins of peasant allotment land 136,900,000 dessiatins are classified according to size of holdings. Of the 101,700,000 dessiatins of privately owned land, 85,900,000 dessiatins are so classified; the remaining 15,800,000 dessiatins are recorded as belonging to "societies and associations". Examining the latter we find that 11,300,000 dessiatins are owned by peasant

    Out of the 39,500,000 dessiatins of state and other lands, only the crown lands[98] (5,100,000 dessiatins) lend themselves to classification according to size. These, too, are very large semi-medieval landed estates. We thus get a total area of land, both classified and not classified according to size of holdings, as follows:

    Let us now classify the allotment land according to size of holdings. By rearranging the data obtained from our source of information into somewhat larger groups, we get:

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    From these data it is evident that more than half of the households (6,200,000 out of 12,300,000) have up to 8 dessiatins each, i.e., in general and on the average, an area of land that is absolutely insufficient to support a family. Ten million one hundred thousand households possess up to 15 dessiatins each (making a total of 72,900,000 dessiatins), i.e., over four-fifths of the total number of households are, at the present level of peasant agricultural technique, on the brink of semi-starvation. Middle and well-to-do households -- according to amount of land owned -- number only 2,200,000 out of 12,300,000, owning altogether 63,900,000 dessiatins out of 136,900,000 dessiatins. Only households having more than 30 dessiatins each can be regarded as rich; of these there are only 600,000, i.e., one-twentieth of the total nurnber of households. They possess nearly one-fourth of the total land area: 32,700,000 out of 136,900,000 dessiatins. To give an idea as to which categories of peasants constitute this group of rich households, we shall point out that first place among them is held by the Cossacks. In the over-30-dessiatins-per-household group, the Cossack households number 266,929 having a total of 14,426,403 dessiatins, i.e., the overwhelming majority of the Cossacks (in European Russia: 278,650 households having a total of 14,689,498 dessiatins of land, i.e., an average of 52.7 dessiatins per household).

    The only data available for the whole of Russia enabling us to judge how all the peasant households are approximate-

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ly classified according to scale of farming and not according to area of allotments, are those about the number of horses owned. According to the last army horse censuses of 1888-91, the peasant households in 48 gubernias of European Russia are classifled as follows:

    Broadly speaking, this means that over one-half are poor (5,600,000 out of 10,100,000), about one-third are middle households (3,300,000 with 2 or 3 horses), and slightly over one-tenth are well-to-do (1,100,000 out of 10,100,000).

    Let us now examine the distribution of individual private landed property. The statistics do not give a clear enough idea of the smallest holdings, but they give extremely detailed data on the biggest latifundia.

    We see here, first, the enormous preponderance of large landownership: 619,000 small holders (up to 50 dessiatins) own only 6,500,000 dessiatins. Secondly, we see vast latifundia: 699 owners have almost 30,000 dessiatins each!

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28,000 owners have a total of 62,000,000 dessiatins, i.e., 2,227 dessiatins each. The overwhelming majority of these latifundia are owned by the nobility, namely, 18,102 estates (out of 27,833) and 44,471,994 dessiatins of land, i.e., over 70 per cent of the entire latifundia area. The medieval character of landlordism is very strikingly revealed by these data.

    Ten million peasant households own 73,000,000 dessiatins of land, whereas 28,000 noble and upstart landlords own 62,000,000 dessiatins. Such is the main background of the arena on which the peasants' struggle for the land is developing. On such a main background amazing technical backwardness, the neglected state of agriculture, an oppressed and downtrodden state of the mass of peasantry and an endless variety of forms of feudal, corvée exploitation are inevitable. Not to wander too far afield we must confine ourselves to mentioning briefly these commonly known facts, which have been described at great length in the extensive literature on peasant agriculture. The size of the landholdings outlined by us in no way corresponds to the scale of farming. In the purely Russian gubernias large-scale capitalist farming definitely drops into the background. Small-scale farming preponderates on large latifundia, comprising various forms of tenant farming based on servitude and bondage, labour service (corvée) farming, "winter hiring",[99] bondage for cattle trespassing the landlords' pastures, bondage for the cut-off lands, and so on without end. The mass of the peasants, crushed by feudal exploitation, are being ruined and some of them let their allotments to "thrifty" farmers. The small minority of well-to-do peasants develops into a peasant bourgeoisie, rents land for capitalist farming and exploits hundreds of thousands of farm-hands and day-labourers.

    Bearing in mind all these facts, which have been fully established by Russian economic science, we must distinguish, in regard to the present struggle of the peasants for the land, four basic groups of landholdings: (1) a mass of peasant farms crushed by the feudal latifundia and directly

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interested in the expropriation of these latifundia, an expropriation from which they stand to gain directly more than anyone else; (2) a small minority of middle peasants already possessing an approximately average amount of land, sufficient to conduct farming in a tolerable way; (3) a small minority of well-to-do peasants who are becoming transformed into a peasant bourgeoisie and who are connected by a number of intermediate stages with farming conducted on capitalist lines, and (4) feudal latifundia far exceeding in dimensions the capitalist farms of the present period in Russia and deriving their revenues chiefly from the exploitation of the peasants by means of bondage and the labour-rent system.

    Of course, the available data on landed property enable us to distinguish these basic groups only very approximately and sketchily. Nevertheless, we are obliged to distinguish them if we are to present a complete picture of the struggle for land in the Russian revolution. And we can safely say in advance that partial corrections of the figures, partial shifting of the boundary line between one group and another, cannot substantially alter the general picture. It is not partial corrections that are important; what is important is that a clear contrast be made between small landownership, which is striving for more land, and the feudal latifundia, which monopolise an enormous amount of land. The chief falsity of both the government's (Stolypin's) and the liberals' (the Cadets') economics lies in the fact that they conceal, or obscure, this clear contrast.

    Let us assume the following sizes of landholdings for the four groups mentioned: (1) up to 15 dessiatins; (2) 15 to 20 dessiatins; (3) 20 to 500 dessiatins, and (4) over 500 dessiatins per holding. Of course, in order to present a complete picture of the struggle for land, we must, in each of these groups, combine the peasants' allotments with the private holdings. In our source of information the latter category is divided into groups: up to 10 dessiatins, and from 10 to 20 dessiatins, so that a group up to 15 dessiatins can be singled out only approximately. Any inaccuracy that may arise from this approximate calculation and from the round figures that we give, will be quite negligible (as

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the reader will soon see) and will not affect the conclusions to be drawn.

    Here is a table showing the present distribution of land among these groups in European Russia:

    Such are the relations which give rise to the peasants' struggle for land. Such is the starting-point of the peasants' struggle (7-15 dessiatins per household plus renting on terms of bondage, etc.) against the very big landlords (2,333 dessiatins per estate). What is the objective tendency, the ultimate point of this struggle? Obviously, it is the abolition of large feudalist estates and the transfer of the land

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according to certain principles) to the peasants. This objective tendency inevitably arises from the predominance of small-scale cultivation, which is held in bondage by the feudal latifundia. To depict this tendency in the same graphic way in which we depicted the starting-point of the struggle, i.e., the present state of affairs, we must take the best conceivable eventuality, i.e., we must assume that all the feudalist latifundia, as well as all land not classified according to holdings, have passed into the hands of the ruined peasantry. It is this best eventuality which all the participants in the present agrarian struggle envisage more or less distinctly: the government talks about "allotting" land to the "needy", the liberal official (or Cadet) talks about supplementary allotments to those who have little land, the peasant Trudovik talks about increasing holdings to the "subsistence" or "labour" "norm", and the Social-Democrat, differing on the question of the form of land tenure, generally accepts the proposal of the Narodniks about allotting land to the poorest peasants. (In the Second Duma, 47th sitting, May 26, 1907, Tsereteli accepted the figure of the value of the 57,000,000 dessiatins of land to be alienated as given by the Narodnik Karavayev, namely, 6,500,000,000 rubles, of which the poorest peasants having up to 5 dessiatins account for 2,500,000,000 rubles. See Stenographic Record, p. 1221.) In short, however much the landlords, the officials, the bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the proletariat may differ in their view of the aims and terms of the reform, they all outline the same tendency, namely, the transfer of the large landed estates to the most needy peasants. With the fundamental differences of opinion among the classes concerning the extent and terms of such a transfer we shall deal separately elsewhere. At present we shall supplement our outline of the starting-point of the struggle with a similar outline of its possible ultimate point. We have already shown what the situation is now. We shall show what it may be then. Let us assume that 30,000 landlords will retain 100 dessiatins each, i.e., a total of 3,000,000 dessiatins, while the remaining 67,000,000 dessiatins and 50,000,000 dessiatins of unclassified land will be transferred to 10,500,000 poor households. We shall then get the following:

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    Such is the economic basis of the struggle for land in the Russian revolution. Such is the starting-point of this struggle and its tendency, i.e., its ultimate point, its result in the best eventuality (from the standpoint of those engaged in the struggle).

    Before proceeding to examine this economic basis and its ideological (and ideological-political) cloak, let us dwell on possible misunderstandings and objections as welI.

    First, it may. be said that my picture presupposes the division of the land, whereas I have not yet examined the question of municipalisation, division, nationalisation, or socialisation.

    That would be a misunderstanding. My picture leaves out altogether the terms of landownership; it does not deal at all with the terms of the transfer of the land to the peasants (whether in ownership or in one or another form of tenure). I have taken only the transfer of the land in general to the small peasants and there can be no doubt whatever that this is the trend of our agrarian struggle. The small peasants are fighting, fighting to have the land transferred to themselves. Small (bourgeois) cultivation is fighting large-scale (feudal) landownership.* At best, the revolution can have no other result than the one I have drawn.

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    Secondly, it may be said that l had no right to assume that all the confiscated lands (or expropriated lands, for I have not yet said anything about the terms of expropriation) will be transferred to the peasants with little land. It may be said that owing to economic necessity the lands must be transferred to the wealthier peasants. But such an objection would be a misunderstanding. To demonstrate the bourgeois character of the revolution, I must take the best eventuality from the standpoint of the Narodniks, I must assume the achievement of the aim set themselves by those who are fighting. I must take an aspect that most closely approaches the so-called General Redistribution[100] and not the further consequences of the agrarian revolution. If the masses win the struggle, they will take the fruits of the victory for themselves. To whom these fruits will ultimately go is another matter.

    Thirdly, it may be said that I have assumed an unusually favourable result for the poor peasantry (that the whole of the poor peasantry will be transformed into middle peasants with holdings up to 18 dessiatins per household) by overestimating the extent of the unoccupied land area. It may be said that I should have discounted forests, which, it is said, cannot be allotted to the peasants. Such objections may, and even inevitably will, be raised by the economists in the government and Cadet camp, but they will be wrong. First, one must be a bureaucrat who all his life grovels to the semi-feudal landlord to imagine that the peasants will not be able to manage forest land properly and derive an income from it for themselves and not for the landlords. The standpoint of the police official and of the Russian liberal is: how to provide the muzhik with an allotment? The standpoint of the class-conscious worker is: how to free the muzhik from feudal landlordism? How to break up the feudal latifundia? Secondly I have left out the whole of the northern region (the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonets gubernias), as well as parts of the Vyatka and Perm gubernias, i.e., areas in which it is difficult to imagine that the agricultural exploitation of land covered by forests is likely in the near future. Thirdly, a special calculation of the forest areas would greatly complicate the matter without much altering the results. For instance,

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Mr. Kaufman, who is a Cadet, and, consequently, is very cautious when dealing with landlord estates, calculates that land with over 25 per cent of forest might go to cover the shortage of land, and he thus obtains an area of 101,700,000 dessiatins for 44 gubernias. For 47 gubernias I have estimated a land area of approximately 101,000,000 dessiatins, i.e., 67,000,000 out of the 70,000,000 dessiatins of the feudal latifundia, and 34,000,000 dessiatins owned by the state and by various institutions. Assuming that all landed estates of over 100 dessiatins are to be expropriated, these lands will be increased by another nine or ten million dessiatins.[*]

    The data given here on the role of the large landlord estates in the struggle for land in Russia must be amplified in one respect: A characteristic feature of the agrarian programmes of our bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in them the question as to which class is the most powerful opponent of the peasantry, and which holdings form the bulk of the expropriable lands are obscured by arguments about "norms". They (both the Cadets and the Trudoviks) talk mainly about how much land the peasants need according to this or that "norm", instead of dealing with the more concrete and vital question: how much land is available for expropriation? The first day of presenting the question obscures the class struggle, conceals the essence

    The mistake some Marxists make is that, while criticising the Narodnik theory, they overlook its historically real and historically legitimate content in the struggle against serfdom. They criticise, and rightly criticise, the "labour principle" and "equalisation" as backward, reactionary petty-bourgeois socialism ; but they forget that these theories express progressive, revolutionary petty-bourgeois democracy, that they serve as the banner of the most determined struggle against the old, feudal Russia. The idea of equality is the most revolutionary idea in the struggle against the old system of absolutism in general, and against the old system of feudal landlordism in particular. The idea of equality is legitimate and progressive for the petty-bourgeois peasant insofar as it expresses the struggle against feudal, serf inequality. The idea of "equalised" landownership is legitimate and progressive insofar as it expresses the aspirations of ten million peasants, with allotmellts of seven dessiatins and ruined by the landlords, for a division * of the 2,300-dessiatin feudal latifundia. And in the present historical situation that idea really expresses such strivings, it gives an impetus towards consistent bourgeois revolution, while mistakenly clothing this in vague, quasi-socialist phraseology. He would be a poor Marxist indeed who, while criticising the falsity of a socialist disguise for bourgeois slogans, failed to appreciate their liistorically progressive significance as the most decisive bourgeois slogans in the struggle against serfdom. The real content of the revolution which the Narodnik regards as "socialisation" will be that it will most consist-

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geoisie (as our Narodniks have imagined it to be) -- it was a struggle for the American type of bourgeois development as against the Prussian type of bourgeois development.

    And in those localities of Russia where no serfdom had existed, where agriculture was undertaken entirely, or chiefly, by free peasants (for example, in the steppes of the Trans-Volga area, Novorossia, and the Northern Caucasus, which were colonised after the Reform), the growth of the productive forces and the development of capitalism proceeded far more rapidly than in the central provinces which were burdened by survivals of serfdom.[*]

    While Russia's agricultural centre and agricultural borderlands show us, as it were, the spatial or geographical distribution of the localities in which one or the other type of agrarian evolution prevails, the fundamental features of both types of evolution are also clearly evident in all those localities where landlord and peasant farming exist side by side. A cardinal mistake of the Narodnik economists was that they believed that landlord farming was the only source of agrarian capitalism, while they regarded peasant farming from the point of view of "people's production" and the "labour principle" (that is the view taken even now by the Trudoviks, the "Popular Socialists", and the Socialist-Revolutionaries). We know that this is wrong. Landlord economy evolves in a capitalist way and gradually replaces the labour rent system by "free wage-labour", the three-field system by intensive cultivation, and the obsolete peasant implements by the improved machinery employed on the big private farms. Peasant farming also evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The better the condition of the "village commune" and the greater the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process of differentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic

lot. We cannot here go into details[*] which concern another part of our argument. All we need do here is to define the line of the Cadet agrarian programme. And in this connection we must say that the question of the composition of the local land committees is of cardinal importance. Only political infants could be taken in by the sound of the Cadet slogan of "compulsory alienation". The question is, who will compel whom? Will the landlords compel the peasants (to pay an exorbitant price for inferior land), or will the peasants compel the landlords? The Cadet talk "about equal representation of the conflicting interests" and about the undesirability of "one-sided violence" reveals as clear as clear can be the essence of the matter, namely, that the Cadet idea of compulsory alienation means that the landlords will compel the peasants!

    The Cadet agrarian programme follows the line of Stolypin progress, i.e., landlord bourgeois progress. That is a fact. Failure to appreciate this fact is the fundamental mistake made by those Social-Democrats who, like some of

    As for the spokesmen of the peasantry, i.e., the Trudoviks, the Social-Narodniks, and partly the Socialist-Revolutionaries, we find that, in spite of considerable vacillation and wavering, they, in both Dumas, adopted a very clear line of defeading the interests of the peasantry against the landlords. For instance, vacillation is observed in the programme of the Trudoviks on the question of redemption payments, but, in the first place, they frequently interpret that as something in the nature of public relief for disabled landlords[*]; secondly, in the records of the Second Duma one can find a number of exceedingly characteristic speeches by peasants repudiating redemption payments and proclaiming the slogan: all the land to all the people.[**] On the question of the local land committees -- this all-important question as to who will compel whom -- the peasant deputies are the originators and supporters of the idea of having them elected by universal suffrage.

    We are not, for the time being, dealing with the content of the agrarian programmes of the Trudoviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, on the one hand, and the Social-Democrats, on the other. We must first of all note the incontrovertible fact that the agrarian programmes of all the parties and classes which came out openly in the Russian revolution can be clearly divided into two basic types, corresponding to the two types of bourgeois agrarian evolution. The dividing line between the "Right" and "Left" agrarian programmes does not run between the Octobrists

to presume that the land hunger of the Russian peasantry can be satisfied by migration.[*]

    These correct arguments of Mr. Kaufman, the liberal, contain, nevertheless, a very serious mistake. Mr. Kaufman argues in this way: "Considering the type of people who now migrate, their present degree of prosperity, and their present cultural level" (p. 129 of the book mentioned), the amount of land available for satisfying the needs of the Russian peasants by means of migration is absolutely insufficient. Consequently, he concludes in defence of the Cadet agrarian programme, compulsory alienation of private land in European Russia is essential.

    That is the usual argument of our liberal and liberal-Narodnik economists. It is so constructed as to lead to the conclusion that if there were sufficient land suitable for migration, the feudal latifundia could be left intact! The Cadets and other politicians of the same kind are thoroughly permeated with the ideas of the well-meaning official; they claim to stand above classes and above the class struggle. The feudal latifundia must be done away with not because they imply the feudal exploitation and bondage of millions of the population and retard the development of the productive forces, but because millions of families cannot be immediately packed off to, say, Siberia or Turkestan! The stress is laid not upon the feudal class character of the latifundia in Russia, but upon the possibility of reconciling the classes, of satisfying the peasant without injuring the landlord; in short, upon the possibility of bringing about the notorious "social peace".

    The arguments of Mr. Kaufman and his innumerable followers among the Russian intelligentsia have to be turned upside down to be put right. Since the Russian peasant is crushed by the feudal latifundia, for that reason both the free settlement of the population over the territory of Russia and the rational economic use of the bulk of her borderlands are incredibly retarded. Since the feudal lati-

fundia are keeping the Russian peasantry in a downtrodden state, and perpetuate, through the labour-service system and bondage, the most backward forms and methods of land cultivation, for that reason both the technical progress and the mental development of the mass of the peasants are hindered, as also their activity, initiative, and education, which are essential for the economic utilisation of a far larger area of the Russian land reserves than is utilised today. For the feudal latifiindia and the predominance of bondage in agriculture imply also a corresponding political superstructure -- the predominance of the Black-Hundred landlord in the state, the disfranchisement of the population, the prevalence of Gurko-Lidval methods of administration,[101] and so on and so forth.

    That the feudal latifundia in central agricultural Russia are having a disastrous effect upon the whole social system, upon social development as a whole, upon the entire condition of agriculture, and upon the whole standard of living of the masses of the peasantry, is a matter of common knowledge. I only have to refer here to the vast Russian economic literature which has proved the prevalence in Central Russia of labour-service, bondage, rack rent, "winter hiring", and other charming aspects of medievalism.[*]

    The fall of serfdom created conditions which (as I pointed out in detail in The Development of Capitalism ) caused the population to flee from those haunts of the last descendants of the serf-owners. The population fled from the central agricultural area to the industrial gubernias, to the capitals, and to the southern and eastern borderlands of European Russia, and settled in hitherto uninhabited lands. In the pamphlet I have mentioned, Mr. Mertvago quite truly remarks, by the way, that the conception of what sort of land is unsuitable for agriculture is liable to undergo rapid change.

    "'The Taurida steppes,'" he writes, "'owing to the climate and the scarcity of water, will always be one of the poorest and least suitable regions for cultivation.' That

    That is true not only of Taurida Gubernia, but of a number of other gubernias in the southern and eastern border lands of European Russia. The southern steppes, and also the gubernias on the left bank of the Volga, which in the sixties and seventies lagged behind the ceutral black-earth gubernias in the output of grain, outstripped those provinces in the eighties (The Development of Capitalism, p. 186).[*] Between 1863 and 1897 the population of the whole of European Russia increased by 53 per cent -- 48 per cent in the case of the rural and 97 per cent in the case of the urban population -- whereas in Novorossia, the Lower Volga, and eastern gubernias, the population increased during the same period by 92 per cent -- 87 per cent increase in the rural population and 134 per cent increase in the urban population (ibid., p. 446).[**]

    "We have no doubt," Mr. Mertvago continues, "that the present bureaucratic estimate of the economic importance of our land reserves is not less mistaken than that of Beer and Helmersen concerning Taurida Gubernia in 1845" (ibid.).

    That is correct. But Mr. Mertvago fails to see the source of Beer's mistakes, and of the mistakes of all bureaucratic estimates. The source of those mistakes is that while taking into consideration the given level of technique and culture, no allowance is made for the advance of this level. Beer and Helmersen did not foresee the technical changes that became possible after the fall of serfdom. And there cannot be the least doubt now that a tremendous increase in the productive forces, a tremendous rise in the technical and cultural level will inevitably follow the break-up of the feudal latifundia in European Russia.

    Let us pass to an examination of the Social-Democratic agrarian programme. I outlined the chief historical stages in the evolution of the views of Russian Social-Democrats on the agrarian question in the first section of the pamphlet Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers' Party.* We must explain more fully the nature of the mistake contained in the previous agrarian programmes of Russian Social-Democracy, i.e., in the programmes of 1885 and 1903.

    In the draft issued by the Emancipation of Labour group in 1885, the agrarian programme was outlined as follows: "A radical revision of our agrarian relations, i.e., of the terms on which the land is to be redeemed and allotted to the peasant communities. The right to refuse their allot-

    The present agrarian programme of the Social-Democratic Party, which was adopted at the Stockholm Congress, marks a great step forward in comparison with the preceding one in one important respect, viz., by recognising confiscation of the landlords'[*] estates, the Social-Democratic Party resolutely took the path of recognising the peasant agrarian revolution. The words in the programme: ". . . supporting the revolutionary actions of the peasantry, including the confiscation of the landlords' estates", quite definitely express that idea. In the course of the discussion at the Stockholm Congress, one of the reporters, Plekhanov, who together with John[102] sponsored that programme, spoke frankly about the necessity of ceasing to be afraid of a "peasant agrarian revolution ". (See Plekhanov's report. Minutes of the Stockholm Congress, Moscow, 1907, p. 42.)

    One would have thought that this admission -- that our bourgeois revolution in the sphere of agrarian relations must be regarded as a "peasant agrarian revolution" -- would have put an end to the major differences of opinion among Social-Democrats on the question of the agrarian programme. Actually, however, differences arose over the question whether Social-Democrats should support division of the landlords' estates among the peasants as private property, or municipalisation of the landlords' estates, or nationalisation of all the land. First of all, therefore, we must definitely establish the fact, all too often forgotten by Social-Democrats, that these questions can be correctly answered

    That argument was directly and categorically advanced by Comrade John in his report. "If the revolution," he said, "were to lead to an attempt to nationalise the peasants' allotments, or to nationalise the lands confiscated from the landlords, as Comrade Lenin suggests, such a measure would lead to a counter-revolutionary movement, not only in the borderlands, but also in the central part of the country. We would have not one Vendée,[103] but a general revolt of the peasantry against attempts by the state to interfere with the peasants' own [John's italics] allotments, against attempts to nationalise the latter." (Minutes of the Stockholm Congress, p. 40.)

    That seems clear, does it not? The nationalisation of the peasants' own lands would lead to a general revolt of the peasantry! That is the reason why Comrade X's original municipalisation scheme, which had proposed to transfer to the Zemstvos not only the private lands, but "if possible" all the lands (quoted by me in the pamphlet Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers' Party *), was replaced by Maslov's municipalisation scheme, which proposed to exempt the peasants' lands. Indeed, how could they ignore the fact, discovered after 1903, about the in evitable peasant revolt against attempts at complete nationalisation? How could they refrain from adopting the standpoint of another noted Menshevik, Kostrov,[104] who exclaimed in Stockholm:

    "To go to the peasants with it [nationalisation] means antagonising them. The peasant movement will go on apart from or against us, and we shall find ourselves thrown overboard in the revolution. Nationalisation deprives Social-Democracy of its strength, isolates it from the peasantry and thus also deprives the revolution of its strength" (p. 88).

    One cannot deny the force of that argument. To try to nationalise the peasants' own land against their wishes in a peasant agrarian revolution! Since the Stockholm Congress believed John and Kostrov, it is not surprising that it rejected that idea.

    The above-quoted categorical assertions of John and Kostrov were made in April 1906, i.e., on the eve of the First Duma. I argued (see my pamphlet Revision, etc.*) that the peasantry was in favour of nationalisation, but I was told that the decisions of the congresses of the Peasant Union[105] did not prove anything, that they were inspired by the ideologists of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, that the masses of the peasants would never support such demands.

    Since then this question has been documentarily answered by the First and Second Dumas. The representatives of the peasantry from all parts of Russia spoke in the First and particularly in the Second Duma. No one, with the possible exception of the publicists of Rossiya [106] and Novoye Vremya, could deny that the political and economic demands of the peasant masses found expression in both those Dumas. One would have thought that the idea of nationalising the peasants' lands should be finally buried now, after the independent declarations made by the peasant deputies in the presence of the other parties. One would have thought that the supporters of John and Kostrov could easily have got the peasant deputies to raise an outcry in the Duma against nationalisation. One would have thought that Social-Democracy, led by the Mensheviks, should really have "isolated" from the revolution the advocates of nationalisation who are rousing an all-Russian counter-revolutionary Vendée.

    As a matter of fact, something different happened. In the First Duma it was Stishinsky and Gurko who showed concern for the peasants' own (John's italics) lands. In both Dumas it was the extreme Right-wingers who, jointly

    The words "placed at the disposal " introduce the utmost confusion. Nobody knows who are to be the owners[*] of the lands confiscated from the landlords! That being the case, the owner can only be the state. What does "disposal" consist of? What are to be its limits, forms, and conditions? That, too, will have to be determined by the central parliament. That is self-evident, and, moreover, in our Party's programme special mention is made of "forests of national importance" and of "lands available for colonisation". Obviously, only the central state authority is in a position to single out the "forests of national importance" from the general mass of forest land, and, the "lands available far colonisation" from the total land area.

    In short, the Maslov programme, which, in a particularly distorted form, has now become the programme of our Party, is quite absurd in comparison with the Trudovik pro-

group, 2 non-party deputies, 1 deputy more to the left than the Cadets (Peterson), and 1 Cadet (Odnokozov, a peasant). There was a preponderance of peasants among the signatories (no fewer than 54 out of 91 in the Second Duma, and no fewer than 52 out of 104 in the First). It is interesting that P. Maslov's special expectations regarding the homestead peasants (referred to above[*]) who, he said, could not agree to nationalisation, were also completely defeated by the attitude of the peasant deputies in both Dumas. For instance, in Podolsk Gubernia nearly all the peasants are homestead peasants (in 1905 there were 457,134 homestead peasants and only 1,630 members of village communes); nevertheless, 13 Podolsk deputies (mainly peasant farmers) signed the Land Bill of the "104" in the First Duma, and 10 in the Second Duma! Among other gubernias with homestead landownership we will mention Vilna, Kovno, Kiev, Poltava, Bessarabia, and Volhynia, deputies from which signed the Land Bill of the "104". The distinction between village commune members and homestead peasants as regards land nationalisation may appear important and material only to those who share Narodnik prejudices and those prejudices, by the way, were dealt a hard blow when the peasant deputies of the whole of Russia first came forward with a land programme. As a matter of fact, the demand for the nationalisation of the land is called forth not by any specific form of landownership, not by the "communal habits and instincts" of the peasants, but by the general conditions of the whole system of small peasant landownership (both communal and homestead) which is crushed by the feudal latifundia.

    Among the deputies in the First and Second Dumas who sponsored the nationalisation Bill of the 104 we see representatives from all parts of Russia, not only from the central agricultural and the industrial non-black-earth gubernias, not only from the northern (Arkhangelsk and Vologda -- in the Second Duma), eastern and sonthern borderlands (Astrakhan, Bessarabia, Don, Ekaterinoslav, Kuban, Taurida, and Stavropol gubernias and regions), but also from the gubernias of Little Russia, the South-west, North-west,

    All this is true. But the Socialist-ReYolutionaries are wrong in believing that "strong" words can obscure the fact that the crux of the matter is not the opportunism of Peshekhonov and Co., but the individualism of the small farmer. The point is not that the Peshekhonovs are polluting the ideological stream of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, but that the majority of the progressive peasant deputies have revealed the real economic content of Narodism, the real aspirations of the small farmers. What the Land Bills of the 104 in the First and Second Dumas[*] revealed was the bankruptcy of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in face of the representatives of the broad, really all-Russian, peasant masses.

    While declaring in favour of nationalisation of the land, the Trudoviks very clearly reveal in their Bill the "selfish and individualistic" aspirations of the small farmers. They propose to leave the allotments and the small private holdings in the possession of their present owners (Clause 3 of the Land Bill of the 104), provided legislative measures are taken to ensure that they "gradually become the property of the whole nation". Translated into the language of real economic relations, it means just this: we take as our starting-point the interests of the real owners, of the real, not the nominal, tillers of the soil, but we want their economic activity to develop quite freely on nationalised**

    After examining the views of Rodbertus, exposing the great limitations of the theory of this Pomeranian landlord, and enumerating in detail every single manifestation of his stupidity (II, 1. Teil, S. 256-58, erster Blödsinn -- sechster Blödsinn des Herrn Rodbertus [*]), Marx turns to Ricardo's theory of rent (II, 2. Teil, § 3b, "The Historical Conditions of Ricardo's Theory").[107]

    Speaking of Ricardo and Anderson, Marx says: "Both start out from the view, regarded as very strange on the Continent: (1) that no landed property exists as an obstacle to any investment of capital in the land; (2) that there the tillers pass from better to worse soils. For Ricardo this premise is absolute -- leaving out of account interruptions in development through the reaction of science and industry; for Anderson it is relative, since the worse soil is again transformed into better; (3) that capital, the mass of capital requisite for application to agriculture, is always available.

    "Now, as far as points 1 and 2 are concerned, it must appear very peculiar to those on the Continent that in the country where, according to their notions, feudal landed .property has been most strongly preserved, economists start out from the idea that landed property does not exist. Anderson does so as well as Ricardo. The explanation is as follows:

    "first, the peculiarity of the English law of enclosures' [i.e., the law relating to the enclosure of the common lands] which has absolutely no analogy with the continental division of common land.

    In Volume III of Capital (2. Teil, S. 156) Marx had already pointed out that the form of landed property with which the incipient capitalist mode of production is confronted does not suit capitalism. Capitalism creates for itself the required forms of agrarian relationships out of the old forms, out of feudal landed property, peasants' commune property, clan property, etc.[108] In that chapter, Marx compares the different methods by which capital creates the required forms of landed property. In Germany the reshaping of the medieval forms of landed property proceeded in a reformative way, so to speak. It adapted itself to routine, to tradition, to the feudal estates that were slowly converted into Junker estates, to the routine of indolent peasants* who were undergoing the difficult transition from corvée to the condition of the Knecht and Grossbauer. In England this reshaping proceeded in a revolutionary, violent way; but the violence was practised for the benefit of the landlords, it was practised on the masses of the peasants, who were taxed to exhaustion, driven from the villages, evicted, and who died out, or emigrated. In America this reshaping went on in a violent way as regards the slave farms in the Southern States. There violence was applied against the slaveowning landlords. Their estates were broken up, and the large feudal estates were

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transformed into small bourgeois farms.[*] As regards the mass of "unappropriated" American lands, this role of creating the new agrarian relationships to suit the new mode of production (i.e., capitalism) was played by the "American General Redistribution", by the Anti-Rent movement (Anti-Rent-Bewegung ) of the forties, the Homestead Act,[110] etc. When, in 1846, Hermann Kriege, a German Communist, advocated the equal redistribution of the land in America, Marx ridiculed the Socialist-Revolutionary prejudices and the petty-bourgeois theory of this quasi-socialism, but he appreciated the historical importance of the American movement against landed property,[**] as a movement which in a progressive way expressed the interests of the development of the productive forces and the interests of capitalism in America.

    What was our "great" Peasant Reform, the "cutting off" of the peasants lands, the removal of the peasants to the "poor lands", the enforcement of the new land regulations

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by military force, shootings, and floggings? It was the first act of mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in agriculture. It was the "clearing of estates" for capitalism by the landlords.

    What is Stolypin's agrarian legislation under Article 87, that encouragement of the kulaks to pluuder the village communes, that breaking-up of the old agrarian relationships for the benefit of a handful of well-to-do proprietors at the price of the rapid ruin of the masses? It was the second big step in mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of capitalism. It was the second "clearing of estates" for capitalism by the landlords.

    And what does the Trudovik nationalisalion of the land stand for in the Russian revolution?

    It stands for "clearing of estates " for capilalism by the peasantry.

    The main source of all the well-meant foolishness of our municipalisers is precisely their failure to understand the economic basis of the bourgeois agrarian revolution in Russia in its two possible types, i.e., the landlord-bourgeois revolution, and the peasant-bourgeois revolution. Without a "clearing" of the medieval agrarian relationships and regulations, partly feudal and partly Asiatic, there can be no bourgeois revolution in agriculture, because capital must -- through economic necessity -- create for itself new agrarian relationships, adapted to the new conditions of free commercial agriculture. That "clearing" of the medieval lumber in the sphere of agrarian relations in general, and of the old system of landownership first and foremost, must chiefly affect the landlords' estates and peasant allotments, since both kinds of landed property are now, in their present form, adapted to the labour-service system, to the corvée heritage, to bondage, and not to a free capitalistically developing economy. Stolypin's "clearing" undoubtedly follows the line of the progressive capitalist development of Russia; but it is adapted solely to the interests of the landlords: let the rich peasants pay the "Peasant" (read: Landlord) Bank an exorbitant price for the land; in return we shall give them freedom to plunder the village communes, to forcibly expropriate the masses, to round off their plots, to evict the poor peasants, to under-

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mine the very foundations of the life of entire villages, and, at any price, in spite of everything, setting at naught the life and husbandry of any number of "old established" allotment peasants, to set up new otrub [111a] holdings, as the basis for new capitalist agriculture. There is unquestionable economic sense in that line; it faithfully expresses the real course of development as it should be under the rule of landlords who are being transformed into Junkers.

    What is the other line, the peasant line? Either it is economically impossible -- in which case all talk about the peasants confiscating the landlords' estates, about the peasant agrarian revolution, etc., is either humbug or an empty dream. Or it is economically possible -- provided one element of bourgeois society is victorious over the other element of bourgeois society -- in which case we must form a clear idea of, and clearly show to the people, the concrete conditions for that development, the conditions under which the peasants can reshape the old agrarian relations on a new, capitalist basis.

    Here there naturally arises the thought that this peasant line is precisely the division of the landlords' estates among the peasants for their private property. Very well. But if this division is to correspond to the really new, capitalist conditions of agriculture, it must be carried out in a new way and not in the old way. The division must be based not on the old allotment land distributed among the peasants a hundred years ago at the will of the landlords' bailiffs or of the officials of Asiatic despotism, but on the needs of free, commercial agriculture. To meet the requirements of capitalism, the division must be a division among free farmers, not among "indolent" peasants, the great majority of whom run their economies by routine and tradition in conformity with patriarchal, not with capitalist conditions. A division according to the old standards, i.e., in conformity with the old forms of landownership based on peasant allotments, will not be the clearing of the old landownership, but its perpetuation ; not clearing the way for capitalism, but rather encumbering it with a mass of unadapted and unadaptable "indolents" who cannot become free farmers. To be progressive, the division must be based on a new sorting process among the peasant cultivators,

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which will sift the farmers from the useless lumber. And this new sorting out is nationalisation of the land, i.e., the total abolition of private landownership, complete freedom to till the land, the unhampered transformation of the old peasantry into free farmers.

    Picture to yourselves the present system of peasant farming and the character of the old peasant landownership based on allotments. "Although united by the village commune into tiny administrative, fiscal, and land-holding associations, the peasants are split up by a mass of diverse divisions into grades, into categories according to size of allotment, amount of payments, etc. Let us take, for example, the Zemstvo statistical returns for Saratov Gubernia; there the peasants are divided into the following grades: gift-land peasants, owners, full owners, state peasants, state peasants with communal holdings, state peasants with quarter holdings, state peasants that formerly belonged to landlords, crown-land peasants, state-land tenants and landless peasants, owners who were formerly landlords' peasants, peasants whose farmsteads have been redeemed, owners who are former crown-land peasants, colonist freeholders, settlers, gift-land peasants who formerly belonged to landlords, owners who are former state peasants, manumitted, those who do not pay quit-rent, free tillers, temporarily-bound, former factory-bound peasants, etc.; further there are registered peasants, migrant, etc.[112] All these grades differ in the history of their agrarian relations, in size of allotments, amount of payments, etc., etc. And within the grades there are innumerable differences of a similar kind: sometimes even the peasants of one and the same village are divided into two quite distinct categories: 'Mr. X's former peasants' and 'Mrs. Y's former peasants'. All this diversity was natural and necessary in the Middle Ages."* If the new division of the landlords' estates were carried out in conformity with this feudal system of landownership -- whether by levelling to a uniform rate, i.e., equal division, or by fixing some kind of ratio between

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the new and the old, or in some other way -- not only would it not guarantee that the new plots would meet the requirements of capitalist agriculture, but, on the contrary, it would perpetuate the obvious lack of conformity. Such a division would impede social evolution, would tie the new to the old instead of liberating the new from the old. Real liberation call only be achieved by nationalising the land, thus creating the conditions for the rise of free farmers, for the development of free farming without connection with the old, without any relation to medieval landownership in the form of peasant allotments.

    Capitalist evolution on the medieval peasant allotments proceeded in post-Reform Russia in such a way that the progressive economic elements freed themselves from the determining influence of the allotments. On the one hand, proletarians emerged, who rented out their allotments, abandoned them, or let the land go to waste. On the other hand, peasant owners emerged, who purchased or rented land, built up a new economy out of various fragments of the old, medieval system of landownership. The land that is now cultivated by a more or less well-to-do Russian peasant, i.e., by one who, given a favourable outcome of the revolution, is really capable of becoming a free farmer, consists partly of his own alIotment, partly of an allotment he has rented from a neighbour who is a village-commune member, partly, perhaps, of land rented on long-term lease from the state, land leased annually from the landlord, land purchased from the bank, and so forth. Capitalism requires the abolition of all these distinctions of category; it requires that all economy on the land be organised exclusively in accordance with the new conditions and demands of the market, the demands of agriculture. Nationalisation of the land fulfils this requirement by the revolutionary peasant method; at one stroke it completely divests the people of all the rotten rags of all forms of medieval landownership. There must be neither landlord nor allotment ownership, there must be only the new, free landowner ship -- such is the slogan of the radical peasant. And that slogan expresses in the most faithful, in the most consistent and categorical manner the interests of capitalism (which the radical peasant in his simplicity tries to ward off by

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making the sign of the cross), and expresses the need for the utmost development of the land's productive forces under commodity production.

    One may judge from this how clever Pyotr Maslov is in thinking that the only difference between his agrarian programme and the peasant programme of the Trudoviks is the perpetuation of the old, medieval, allotment ownership. The peasant allotment land is a ghetto in which the peasantry is suffocating and from which it is straining to escape to free[*] land. Yet in spite of the peasants' demands for free, i.e., nationalised, land, Pyotr Maslov seeks to perpetuate this ghetto, to perpetuate the old system; he would subject the best lands, confiscated from the landlords and converted to public use, to the conditions of the old system of landownership and the old methods of farming. In deeds, the Trudovik peasant is a most determined bourgeois revolutionary, but in words he is a petty-bourgeois utopian who imagines that a "General Redistribution" is the starting-point of harmony and fraternity,[**] and not of capitalist farming. Pyotr Maslov is, in deeds, a reactionary who, fearing the Vendée of a future counter-revolution, seeks to consolidate the present anti-revolutionary elements of the old forms of landownership and to perpetuate the peasant ghetto, while in words he thoughtlessly repeats mechanically learnt phrases about bourgeois progress. What the real conditions are for real free-bourgeois progress and not for the Stolypin-bourgeois progress of Russian agriculture, Maslov and Co. absolutely fail to understand.

    The difference between the vulgar Marxism of Pyotr Maslov and the methods of research that Marx really used

    That the abolition of allotment ownership is a condition for the creation of free peasant farming in conformity with the new capitalist conditions is quite clearly realised by the peasants themselves. Mr. Groman, in his detailed and accurate description of the discussion at the peasant congresses,[*] cites the following remarkahle opinion expressed by a peasant:

    "During the discussion on redemption payment, one delegate, without meeting with any real opposition, said: 'It has been said that alienation without compensation would hit many peasants who had purchased land with their hard-earned money. There are few such peasants, and they have little land, and they will get land in any case when it is distributed'. That explains the readiness to relinquish property rights both in allotment and purchased land."

    A little further on (p. 20) Mr. Groman repeats this as the general opinion of the peasants.

    "They will get land in any case when it is distributed"! Is it not perfectly clear what economic necessity dictated this argument? The new distribution of all the land, both landlord and allotment land, cannot reduce the holdings of nine-tenths (or rather, ninety-nine hundredths) of the peasantry; there is nothing to fear from it. But the redistribution is necessary because it will enable the real, genuine farmers to arrange their land tenure in accordance with the new conditions, in accordance with the requirements of capitalism (the "dictates of the market" to individual producers), without submitting to the medieval relations which determined the size, location, and distribution of allotment land.

    Mr: Peshekhonov, a practical and sober-minded "Popular Socialist" (read: Social-Cadet) who, as we have seen, has managed to adapt himself to the demands of the masses of small proprietors all over Russia, expresses this point of view even more definitely.

But we are dealing with a more concrete[*] question, viz., the landlord versus the peasant way of "removing the fences" (Mr. Peshekhonov's expression), of "clearing" the land for capitalism.

    In winding up the debate on the agrarian question in the Second Duma, Mr. Mushenko, the official spokesman of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, revealed just as definitely as Mr. Peshekhonov the capitalist nature of the land nationalisation that the petty-bourgeois socialists choose to call "socialisation", the establishment of "equal right to the land", and so on.

    "The population will be properly distributed," Mr. Mushenko said, "only when the land is unfenced, only when the fences imposed by the principle of private ownership of land are removed" (47th sitting, May 26, 1907, p. 1172 of Stenographic Record). Exactly! The "proper" distribution of the population is the very thing the market, capitalism, requires. But the "proper" distribution of "proper" farmers is hindered by both landlord and allotment ownership.

    One more observation on the statements made by delegates of the Peasant Union merits our attention. Mr. Groman writes in the above-mentioned pamphlet:

    "The notorious question of the 'village commune' -- that cornerstone of the tenets of the old and new Narodism -- was not raised at all and was tacitly rejected: the land must be placed at the disposal of individuals and associations state the resolutions passed at both the First and Second Congresses" (p. 12).

    M. Shanin, approaching the question in his pamphlet[*] from a somewhat different angle, involuntarily provided another argument for the nationalisation which he detests so much. By citing the example of Ireland, by his analysis of the conditions of bourgeois reform in the domain of agriculture, M. Shanin has proved only one thing, viz., that the principles of private ownership of the land are incompatible with public or state ownership of the land (but that incompatibility has to be proved also by a general theoretical analysis, of which Shanin did not even think). If he has proved anything else it is that private ownership must be recognised wherever the state carries out any reforms in the sphere of agriculture developing on capitalist lines. But all these arguments of Shanin's are wide of the mark: of course, under the conditions of bourgeois reform only private ownership of land is conceivable; of course, the preservation of private ownership of the bulk of the land in the United Kingdom left no other way open for part

of it than private ownership. But what has that to do with the "peasant agrarian revolution" in Russia? M. Shanin has pointed out the correct path, if you like, but it is the correct path of a Stolypin agrarian reform, and not of a peasant agrarian revolution.[*] The difference between the two ways is entirely lost upon M. Shanin, and yet unless this difference is clearly realised, it is ridiculous to talk about a Social-Democratic agrarian programme in the Russian revolution. And when M. Shanin, prompted, of course, by the very best motives, defends confiscation against redemption payments, he loses all sense of historical perspective. He forgets that in bourgeois society confiscation, i.e., expropriation without compensation, is as utterly incompatible with reform as land nationalisation. To speak of confiscation while admitting the possibility of a reformist and not a revolutionary solution of the agrarian question is like petitioning Stolypin to abolish landlordism.

    Another aspect of Shanin's pamphlet is its heavy emphasis on the agricultural character of our agrarian crisis, on the absolute necessity of adopting higher forms of economy, of improving agricultural technique, which is so incredibly backward in Russia, and so forth. Shanin elaborates these correct theses in such an incredibly one-sided fashion, and he so completely ignores the abolition of the feudal latifundia and the changing of agrarian relationships as a condition for that technical revolution, that an utterly

    Look at the question which Shanin raises from the standpoint of such a revolution. Modern agricultural technique demands that all the conditions of the ancient, conservative, barbarous, ignorant, and pauper methods of economy on peasant allotments be transformed. The three-field system, the primitive implements, the patriarchal impecuniosity of the tiller, the routine methods of stock-breeding and crass naïve ignorance of the conditions and requirements of the market must all be thrown overboard. Well, then, is such a revolutionising of agriculture possible if the old system of landownership is preserved? The division of the land among the present allotment owners could mean preserving half* of the medieval system of landownership. Division of the land might be progressive if it consolidated modern farming, modern agricutural methods, and scrapped the old. But division cannot give an impetus to modern agricultural methods if it is based on the old system of allotment ownership. Comrade Borisov,[113] an advocate of division, said in Stockholm: "Our agrarian programme is a programme for the period of developing revolution, the period of the break-up of the old order and the organisation of a new social-political

    The question arises by what criterion are we to determine whether the new system of agriculture has already developed sufficiently to have the division of the land adapted to it, and not to have a division that will perpetuate the old obstacles to the new farming? There can be but one criterion, that of practice. No statistics in the world can assess whether the elements of a peasant bourgeoisie in a given country have "hardened" sufficiently to enable the system of landownership to be adapted to the system of farming. This can be assessed only by the mass of the farmers themselves. The impossibility of assessing this at the present moment has been proved by the fact that the mass of the peasants have come forward in our revolution with a programme of land nationalisation. The small farmer, at all times and throughout the world, becomes so attached to his farm (if it really is his farm and not a piece of the landlord's estate let out on labour-service, as is frequently the case in Russia) that his "fanatical" defence of private ownership of the land is inevitable at a certain historical period and for a certain space of time. If in the present epoch the mass of the Russian peasants are not displaying the fanaticism of private property owners (a fanaticism which is fostered by all the ruling classes, by all the liberal-bourgeois politicians), but are putting forward a widespread and firmly held demand for the nationalisation of the land, it would be childishness or stupid pedantry to attribute it to the influence of the publicists of Russkoye Bogatstvo [114] or Mr. Chernov's pamphlets. It is due to the fact that the real condiitions of life of the small cultivator, of the small farmer in the village, confront him with the economic prob-

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lem, not of consolidating the new agriculture, which has already taken shape, by means of dividing the land as private property, but of clearing the ground for the creation of a new agriculture (out of the existing elements) upon "free", i.e., nationalised, land. The fanaticism of the private property owner can and should assert itself, in due time, as a demand of the newly-hatched free farmer for the assured possession of his farm. Nationalisation of the land had to become the demand of the peasant masses in the Russian revolution as the slogan of farmers who want to break the shell of medievalism. Therefore, for Social-Democrats to preach division of the land to the mass of the peasants, who are inclined towards nationalisation, and who are only just beginning to enter the conditions for the final "sorting out" that should produce free farmers capable of creating capitalist agriculture, is glaring historical tactlessness, and reveals inability to take stock of the concrete historical situation.

    Our Social-Democratic "divisionists" -- Comrades Finn, Borisov, and Shanin -- are free from the theoretical dualism of the "municipalisers", including the latters' vulgar criticism of Marx's theory of rent (with this we shall deal later on), but they make a mistake of a different kind, a mistake of historical perspective. While taking a generally correct stand in theory (and in this they differ from the "municipalisers"), they repeat the mistake of our cut-off lands programme of 1903. That mistake was due to the fact that while we correctly defined the trend of development, we did not correctly define the moment of that development. We assumed that the elements of capitalist agriculture had already taken full shape in Russia, both in landlord farming (minus the cut-off lands and their conditions of bondage -- hence the demand that the cut-off lands be returned to the peasants) and in peasant farming, which seemed to have given rise to a strong peasant bourgeoisie and therefore to be incapable of bringing about a "peasant agrarian revolution". The erroneous programme was not the result of "fear" of the peasant agrarian revolution, but of an over-estimation of the degree of capitalist development in Russian agriculture. The survivals of serfdom appeared to us then to be a minor detail, whereas capitalist agricul-

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ture on the peasant allotments and on the landlords' estates seemed to be quite mature and well-established.

    The revolution has exposed that mistake; it has confirmed the trend of development as we had defined it. The Marxist analysis of the classes in Russian society has been so brilliantly confirmed by the whole course of events in general, and by the first two Dumas in particular, that non-Marxist socialism has been shattered completely. But the survivals of serfdom in the countryside have proved to be much stronger than we thought: they have given rise to a nation-wide peasant movement and they have made that movement the touchstone of the bourgeois revolution as a whole. Hegemony in the bourgeois liberation movement, which revolutionary Social-Democracy always assigned to the proletariat, had to be defined more precisely as leadership which rallied the peasantry behind it. But leading to what? To the bourgeois revolution in its most consistent and decisive form. We rectified the mistake by substituting for the partial aim of combating the survivals of the old agrarian system, the aim of combating the old agrarian system as a whole. Instead of purging landlord economy, we set the aim of abolishing it.

    But this correction, made under the impact of the imposing course of events, did not make many of us think out to its logical conclusion our new evaluation of the degree of capitalist development in Russian agriculture. If the demand for the confiscation of all the landlord estates proved to be historically correct -- and that undoubtedly was the case -- it meant that the wide development of capitalism calls for new agrarian relationships, that the beginnings of capitalism in landlord economy can and must be sacrificed to the wide and free development of capitalism on the basis of renovated small farming. To accept the demand for the confiscation of the landlord estates means admitting the possibility and the necessity of the renovation of small farming under capitalism.

    Is that admissible? Is it not a gamble to support small farming under capitalism? Is not the renovation of small farming a vain dream? Is it not a demagogic "trap for the peasants", a Bauernfang ? That, undoubtedly, was what many comrades thought. But they uere wrong. The re-

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novation of small farming is possible even under capitalism if the historical aim is to fight the pre-capitalist order. That is the way small farming was renovated in America, where the slave plantations were broken up in a revolutionary manner and the conditions were created for the most rapid and free development of capitalism. In the Russian revolution the struggle for the land is nothing else than a struggle for the renovated path of capitalist development. The consistent slogan of such a renovation is -- nationalisation of the land. To exclude allotment land from nationalisation is economically reactionary (we shall deal separately with the politically reactionary aspect of that exclusion). The "divisionists" are skipping the historical task of the present revolution; they assume that the objectives of the peasants' mass struggIe have already been achieved, whereas that struggle has only just begun. Instead of stimulating the process of renovation, instead of explaining to the peasantry the conditions for consistent renovation, they are already designing a dressing-gown for the appeased, renovated farmer.*

    "Everything in good season." Social-Democracy cannot undertake never to support division of the land. In a different historical situation, at a different stage of agrarian evolution, this division may prove unavoidable. But division of the land is an entirely wrong expression of the aims of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in 1907.

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    A grave fault of almost the whole Social Democratic press on the question of the agrarian programme in general, and a shortcoming of the debate at the Stockholm Congress in particular, is that practical considerations prevail over theoretical, and political considerations over economic.* Most of us, of course, have an excuse, namely, the conditions of intensive Party work under which we discussed the agrarian problem in the revolution: first, after January 9, 1905, a few months before the outbreak (the spring "Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P." of Bolsheviks in London in 1905 and the Conference of the Minority held at the same time in Geneva), and then on the day after the December uprising,[116] and in Stockholm on the eve of the First Duma. But at all events this shortcoming must be corrected now, and an examination of the theoretical aspect of the question of nationalisation and municipalisation is particularly necessary.

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    Absolute rent arises from the private ownership of land. That rent contains an element of monopoly, an element of monopoly price.[*] Private ownership of land hinders free competition, hinders the levelling of proit, the formation of average profit in agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises. And as agriculture is on a lower technical level than industry, as the composition of capital is marked by a larger proportion of variable capital than of constant capital, the individual value of the agricultural product is above the average. Hence, by hindering the free levelling of profits in agricultural enterprises on a par with non-agricultural enterprises, the private ownership of land makes it possible to sell the agricultural product not at the highest price of production, but at the still higher individual value of the product (for the price of production is determined by the average profit on capital, while absolute rent prevents the formation of this "average" by monopolistically fixing the individual value at a level higher than the average).

    Thus, differential rent is inevitably an inherent feature of every form of capitalist agriculture. Absolute rent is not; it arises only under the private ownership of land, only under the historically** created backwardness of agriculture, a backwardness that becomes fixed by monopoly.

    Kautsky compares these two forms of rent, particularly in their bearing on the nationalisation of the land, in the following propositions:

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    "As differential rent, ground rent arises from competition. As absolute rent, it arises from monopoly. . . . In practice, ground rent does not present itself to us divided in parts; it is impossible to say which part is differential rent and which part is absolute rent. Moreover, it is usually mixed with the interest on capital expended by the landowner: Where the landowner is also the farmer, ground rent appears as a part of agricultural profit.
    "Nevertheless, the distinction between the two forms of rent is extremely important.
    "Differential rent arises from the capitalist character of production and not from the private ownership of land.
    "That rent would continue to exist even under nationalisation of the land, as demanded [in Germany] by the advocates of land reform, who would nevertheless preserve the capitalist mode of agriculture. In that case, however, rent would no longer accrue to private persons, but to the state.
    "Absolute rent arises out of the private ownership of land, out of the antagonism of interests between the landowner and the rest of society. The nationalisation of the land would make possible the abolition of that rent and the reduction of the price of agricultural produce by an amount equal to that rent. [Our italics.]
    "To proceed: the second distinction between differential rent and absolute rent is that the former is not a constituent part affecting the price of agricultural produce, whereas the latter is. The former arises from the price of production; the latter arises from the excess of market price over price of production. The former arises from the surplus, from the super-profit, that is created by the more productive labour on better soil, or on a better located plot. The latter does not arise from the additional income of certain forms of agricultural labour; it is possible only as a deduction from the available quantity of values for the benefit of the landowner, a deduction from the mass of surplus value -- therefore, it implies either a reduction of profits or a deduction from wages. If the price of foodstuffs rises, and wages rise also, the proflt on capital diminishes. If the price of foodstuffs rises without an increase in wages, then the workers suffer the loss. Finally, the following may happen -- and this may be regarded as the general rule -- the loss caused by absolute rent is borne jointly by the workers and the capitalists."*

    Thus, the question of the nationalisation of the land in capitalist society falls into two essentially distinct parts: the question of differential rent, and that of absolute rent. Nationalisation changes the owner of the former, and undermines the very existence of the latter. Hence, on the

    I already had occasion in 1901, in Zarya (published abroad), to refer to Maslov's wrong conception of the theory of rent in dealing with his articles in the magazine Zhizn [*][120]

    The debates prior to and in Stockholm, as I have already said, were concentrated to an exaessive degree on the political aspect of the question. But after Stockholm, M. Olenov, in an article entitled "The Theoretical Principles of the Municipalisation of the Land" (Obrazovaniye, 1907, No. 1), examined Maslov's book on the agrarian question in Russia and particularly emphasised the incorrectness of Maslov's economic theory, which repudiates absolute rent altogether.

    Maslov replied to Olenov in an article in Obrazovaniye, Nos. 2 and 3. He reproached his opponent for being "impudent", "bumptious", "flippant", etc. As a matter of fact, in the sphere of Marxist theory, it is Pyotr Maslov who is impudent and stupidly bumptious, for it is difficult to imagine a greater display of ignorance than the smug "criticism" of Marx by Maslov, who persists in his old mistakes.

    "The contradiction between the theory of absolute rent and the whole theory of distribution e~pounded in Volume 111," writes Mr. Maslov, "i9 90 glaring that one can ollly account for it by the fact that Volume 111 i9.a po9thumou9 publicatlon containing also the rough notes of the author." (rhc Agrarlan QueJtion, 3rd ed., p. 108, footnote.)

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    Only a person who understands nothing about Marx's theory of rent could write a thing like that. But the patronising condescension with which the incomparable Pyotr Maslov treats the author of those rough notes is truly superb! This "Marxist" is too superior to think it necessary to familiarise himself with Marx before trying to teach other people, to study at least the Theories of Surplus Value, published in 1905, in which the theory of rent is made so plain that even the Maslovs should be able to grasp it! Here is Maslov's argument against Marx:

    "Absolute rent is said to arise from the low composition of agricultural capital. . . . As the composition of capital affects neither the price of the product, nor the rate of profit, nor the distribution of surplus value among the entrepreneurs in general it cannot create any rent. If the composition of agricultural capital is lower than that of industrial capital, differential rent results from the surplus value obained in agricuiture, but that makes no difference as far as the formation of rent is concerned. Consequently, if the 'composition' of capital changed, it would not affect rent in the least. The amount of rent is not in the least determined by the character of its origin, but solely by the above-mentioned difference in the productivity of labour under different conditions" (op. cit., pp. 108-09. Maslov's italics).

    It would be interesting to know whether the bourgeois "critics of Marx" ever went to such lengths of frivolity in their refutations. Our incomparable Maslov is completely muddled; and he is muddled even when he expounds Marx (incidentally, that is also a habit of Mr. Bulgakov and all other bourgeois assailants of Marxism, who, however, differ from Maslov in that they are more honest, since they do not call themselves Marxists). It is not true to say that according to Marx absolute rent results from the low composition of agricultural capital. Absolute rent arises from the private ownership of land. This private ownership creates a special monopoly having nothing to do with the capitalist mode of production, which can exist on communal as well as on nationalised land.* The non-capitalist monopoly created by the private ownership of land prevents the levelling of profits in those branches of production

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which are sheltered by this monopoly. In order that "the composition of capital shall not affect the rate of profit" (there should be added: the composition of an individual capital, or of the capital of an individual branch of industry; here too Maslov expounds Marx in a muddled way), in order that the average rate of profit may be formed, the profits of all the separate enterprises and of all the separate spheres of industry must be levelled. The levelling takes place through free competition, through the free investment of capital in all branches of production without distinction. Can that freedom exist where there is non-capitalist monopoly? No, it cannot. The monopoly created by the private ownership of land hinders the free investment of capital, hinders free competition, hinders the levelling of the disproportionately high agricultural profit (arising from the low composition of agricultural capital). Maslov's objection reveals an utter lack of understanding, which is particularly obvious when, two pages further on, we come across a reference to . . . brickmaking (p. 111); here, too, the technical level is low, the organic composition of capital is below the average, as in the case of agriculture, and yet there is no rent!

    There cannot be any rent in brickmaking, esteemed "theoretician", because absolute rent arises not from the low composition of agricultural capital, but from the monopoly created by the private ownership of land, which prevents competition from levelling the profits of "low composition" capital. To repudiate absolute rent means repudiating the economic significance of the private ownership of land.

    Maslov's second argument against Marx is this:

    "Rent from the 'last' investment of capital, Rodbertus's rent and Marx's absolute rent, will disappear because the tenant can always make the 'last' investment the 'last but one' if it produces anything besides the ordinary profit" (p. 112).

    Pyotr Maslov muddles things, "impudently" muddles them.

    In the first place, to put Rodbertus on a par with Marx on the question of rent is to display crass ignorance. Rodbertus's theory is based on the assumption that the erroneous calculations of the Pomeranian landlord ("not to

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count" the raw product in agriculture!) are obligatory also for the capitalist farmer. There is not a grain of historism in Rodbertus' s theory, not a grain of historical reality, for he takes agriculture in general, regardless of time and place, agriculture in any country and in any epoch. Marx takes a special historical period in which capitalism has promoted technical development in industry more quickly than in agriculture; Marx takes capitalist agriculture restricted by non-capitalist private ownership of land.

    Secondly, the reference to the tenant who "can always" make the last investment of capital the last but one shows that our incomparable Pyotr Maslov has failed to understand, not only Marx's absolute rent, but his differential rent as well ! That is incredible, but it is a fact. During the term of his lease the tenant "can always" appropriate, and always does appropriate, all rent if he "makes the last investment the last but one", if -- to put it more simply and (as we shall see in a moment) more correctly he invests fresh capital in the land. During the term of the lease, private ownership of land ceases to exist for the tenant; by paying rent, he has "ransomed himself" from that monopoly and it can no longer hinder him.[*] That is why, when a fresh investment of capital in his land yields the tenant additional profit and additional rent, it is the tenant, not the landowner, who appropriates that rent. The landowner will begin to appropriate that additional rent only after the tenant's lease has expired, when a new lease is drawn up. What mechanism will then transfer the additional rent from the pocket of the tenant farmer to that of the landowner? The mechanism of free competition, since the fact that the tenant receives not only average profit but also super-profit (= rent) will attract capital to this unusually profitable enterprise. Hence it is clear, on the one hand, why, all other things being equal, a long lease is to the advantage of the tenant and a short lease to the advantage of the landlord. Hence it is clear, on the other hand, why, for example, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, the English

    The question now arises: what form of additional rent does the tenant appropriate during the term of his lease? Is it only absolute rent, or is it also differential rent? It is both. For had Pyotr Maslov taken the trouble to understand Marx before "criticising the rough notes" so amusingly, he would have known that differential rent is obtained not only from different plots of land, but also from different outlays of capital on the same plot.[*]

    Thirdly (we apologise to the reader for wearying him with this long list of blunders which Maslov commits in every sentence; but what else can we do if we have to deal with such a "prolific" Konfusionsrat -- a "muddled counsellor", as the Germans say?) -- thirdly, Maslov's argument about the last and last but one investment is based on the notorious "law of diminishing returns". Like the bourgeois economists, Maslov recognises that law (and, to make it look important, even calls this stupid invention a fact). Like the bourgeois economists, Maslov connects that law with the theory of rent, declaring with the audacity of one who is utterly ignorant of theory, that "if it were not for the fact that the productivity of the last outlays of capital diminishes, there would be no such thing as ground rent" (p. 114).

    For a criticism of this vulgar bourgeois "law of diminishing returns" we refer the reader to what I said in 1901 in opposition to Mr. Bulgakov.** On that question there is no essential difference between Bulgakov and Maslov.

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    To supplement what I said in opposition to Bulgakov I will quote just one more passage from the "rough notes" in Volume III, which reveals the Maslov-Bulgakov criticism in all its splendour.

    "Rather than tracing to their origin the real natural causes leading to an exhaustion of the soil, which, incidentally, were unknown to all economists writing on differential rent, owing to the level of agricultural chemistry in their day, the shallow conception was seized upon that any amount of capital cannot be invested in a limited area of land; as the Westminster Review, for instance, argued against Richard Jones that all of England cannot be fed through the cultivation of Soho Square". . . .[123]

    This objection is the only argument that Maslov and all other advocates of the "law of diminishing returns" use. If that law did not operate, if succeeding outlays of capital could be as productive as preceding ones, there would then be no need, they argue, to extend the area of cultivation; it would be possible to obtain any quantity of agricultural produce from the smallest of plots by the investment of fresh capital in the land, i.e., it would then be possible for "all of England to be fed through the cultivation of Soho Square", or to "put the agriculture of the whole globe on one dessiatin",* etc. Consequently, Marx analyses the main argument in favour of the "law" of diminishing returns. He goes on to say:

    . . . "If this be considered a special disadvantage of agriculture, precisely the opposite is true. It is possible to invest capital here successively with fruitful results, because the soil itself serves as an instrument of production, which is not the case with a factory, or holds only to a limited extent, since it serves only as a foundation, as a place and a space providing a basis of operations. It is true that, compared with scattered handicrafts, large-scale industry may concentrate much production in a small area. Nevertheless, a definite amount of space is always required at any given

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level of productivity, and the construction of tall buildings also has its practical limitations. Beyond this any expansion of production also demands an extension of land area. The fixed capital invested in machinery, etc., does not improve through use, but on the contrary, wears out. New inventions may indeed permit some improvement in this respect, but with any given development in productive power, machines will always deteriorate. If productivity is rapidly developed all of the old machinery must be replaced by the more advantageous; in other words, it is lost. The soil, however, if properly treated, improves all the time. The advantage of the soil, permitting successive investments of capital to bring gains without loss of previous investments, implies the possibility of differences in yield from these successive investments of capital." (Das Kapital, III. Band, 2. Teil, S. 314.)[124]

    Maslov preferred to repeat the threadbare fable of bourgeois economics about the law of diminishing returns rather than ponder over Marx's criticism. And yet Maslov has the audacity, while distorting Marx, to claim here, on these very questions, that he is expounding Marxism!

    The degree to which Maslov mutilates the theory of rent from his purely bourgeois point of view of the "natural law" of diminishing returns can be seen from the following tirade, which he gives in italics: "If successive outlays of capital on the same plot of land, leading to intensive farming, were equally productive, the competition of new lands would immediately disappear; for the cost of transport affects the price of grain in addition to the cost of production" (page 107).

    Thus, overseas competition can be explained only by means of the law of diminishillg returns! Exactly what the bourgeois economists say! But if Maslov was unable to read or incapable of understanding Volume III, then at least he should have familiarised himself with Kautsky's The Agrarian Question, or with Parvus's pamphlet on the agricultural crisis. Perhaps the popular explanations given by those Marxists would have enabled Maslov to understand that capitalism raises rent and increases the industrial population. And the price of land (= capitalised rent) keeps that rent at its inflated level. This applies also to differ-

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ential rent, so that we see a second time that Maslov failed to understand anything Marx wrote even about the simplest form of rent.

    Bourgeois economics accounts for the "competition of new lands" by the "law of diminishing returns"; for the bourgeois, consciously or unconsciously, ignores the social-historical aspect of the matter. Socialist economics (i.e., Marxism) accounts for overseas competition by the fact that land for which no rent is paid undercuts the excessively high grain prices established by capitalism in the old European countries, which raised ground rent to an incredible degree. The bourgeois economist fails to understand (or conceals from himself and others) that the level of rent fixed by the private ownersllip of land is an obstacle to progress in agriculture, and he therefore throws the blame upon the "natural" obstacle, the "fact" of diminishing returns.

    What is intensification? It is the further expenditure of labour and capital. A reaping-machine, according to the discovery of our great Maslov, is not expenditure of capital. A seed-drill is not expenditure of capital! "The substitution of multiple-crop rotation for the three-field system" is equally applicable in large-scale and in small farming. That is not true. The introduction of multiple-crop rotation also calls for additionaI outlays of capital and it is much more applicable in large-scale farming. Incidentally, in this connection see the data on German agriculture quoted above ("The Agrarian Question and the 'Critics of Marx'"[*]). Russian statistics, too, testify to the same thing. The slightest reflection would reveal to you that it could not be otherwise; that multiple-crop rotation cannot be applied equally in small and large-scale farming. Nor can increased quantities of fertilisers be "equally applicable", because big farms (1) have more cattle, which is of the greatest importance in this respect; (2) feed their cattle better and are not so "sparing" of straw, etc.; (3) have better facilities for storing fertilisers; (4) use larger quantities of artificial fertilisers. Maslov, in a really "impudent" way, distorts well-known data on modern agriculture. Finally, deep ploughing cannot be equally applicable in small and large-scale farming either. It is sufficient to point to two facts: first, the use of steam ploughs is increasing on the large farms (see above-quoted data on Germany; now, probably, electric ploughs too).** Perhaps even Maslov will realise that these cannot be "equally" applicable in large-scale and small farming. In the latter

    Therefore, we must now proceed to examine the economic significance of nationalisation, which has been pushed into the background by Maslov and his supporters.[*]

    The erroneous repudiation of absolute rent, of the form in which private landed property is realised in capitalist incomes, led to an important defect in Social-Democratic literature and in the whole of the Social-Democratic position on the agrarian question in the Russian revolution. Instead of taking the criticism of private landownership into their own hands, instead of basing this criticism on an economic analysis, an analysis of definite economic evolution, our Social-Democrats, following Maslov, surrendered this criticism to the Narodniks. The result was an extreme theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism and the dis-

    Marx directed such criticism not only against big landownership, but also against small landownership. The free ownership of land by the small peasant is a necessary concomitant of small production in agriculture under certain historical conditions. A. Finn was quite right in emphasising this in opposition to Maslov. But the recognition of this historical necessity, which has been proved by experience, does not relieve the Marxist of the duty of making an all-round appraisal of small landownership. Real freedom of such landownership is inconceivable without the free purchase and sale of land. Private ownership of land implies the necessity of spending capital on purchasing land. On this point Marx, in Volume III of Capital, wrote: "One of the specific evils of small-scale agriculture, where it is combined with free landownership, arises from the cultivator's investing capital in the purchase of land" (III, 2, 342). "The expenditure of capital in the price of the land withdraws this capital from cultivation" (ibid., 341).[125]

    "The expenditure of money-capital for the purchase of land, then, is not an investment of agricultural capital. It is a decrease pro tanto in the capital which small peasants can employ in their own sphere of production It

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reduces pro tanto the size of their means of production and thereby narrows the economic basis of reproduction. It subjects the small peasant to the money-lender, since credit proper occurs but rarely in this sphere in general. It is a hindrance to agriculture, even where such purchase takes place in the case of large landed estates. It contradicts in fact the capitalist mode of production, which is on the whole indifferent to whether the landowner is in debt, no matter whether he has inherited or purchased his estate" (344-45).[126]

    Thus, both mortgage and usury are, so to speak, forms of capital's evasion of the difficulties which private landownership creates for the free penetration of capital into agriculture. In commodity production society it is impossible to conduct economy without capital. The peasant, and his ideologist the Narodnik, cannot help realising this. Hence, the question boils down to whether capital can be freely invested in agriculture directly, or through the medium of the usurer and the credit institutions. The peasant and the Narodnik, who, partly, are not aware of the complete domination of capital in modern society, and, partly, pull the cap of illusions and dreams over their eyes in order to shut out the unpleasant reality, turn their thoughts towards outside financial aid. Clause 15 of the Land Bill of the 104 reads as follows: "Persons receiving land from the national fund and lacking sufficient means to acquire the necessary agricultural equipment must be given state assistance in the form of loans and grants." Without a doubt, such financial assistance would be necessary if Russian agriculture were reorganised by a victorious peasant revolution. Kautsky, in his book The Agrarian Question in Russia, quite rightly emphasises this. But what we are discussing now is the social-economic significance of all these "loans and grants", which the Narodnik overlooks. The state can only be an intermediary in transferring the money from the capitalists; but the state itself can obtain this money only from the capitalists. Consequently, even under the best possible organisation of state assistance, the domination of capital is not removed in the least, and the old question remains: what are the possible forms of investment of capital in agriculture?

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    And that question inevitably leads to the Marxist criticism of the private ownership of land. That form of ownership is a hindrance to the free investment of capital in the land. Either complete freedom for this investment -- in which case: abolition of private landownership, i.e., the nationalisation of the land; or the preservation of private landownership -- in which case: penetration of capital by roundabout ways, namely, the mortgaging of land by landlords and peasants, the enslavement of the peasant by the usurer, the renting of land to tenants who own capital.

    Marx says: "Here, in small-scale agriculture, the price of land, a form and result of private landownership, appears as a barrier to production itself. In large-scale agriculture, and large estates operating on a capitalist basis, ownership likewise acts as a barrier, because it limits the tenant farmer in his productive investment of capital, which in the final analysis benefits not him, but the landlord." (Das Kapital, III. Band, 2. Teil, S. 346-47.)[127]

    Consequently, the abolition of private landownership is the maximum that can be done in bourgeois society for the removal of all obstacles to the free investment of capital in agriculture and to the free flow of capital from one branch of production to another. The free, wide, and rapid development of capitalism, complete freedom for the class struggle, the disappearance of all superfluous intermediaries who make agriculture something like the "sweated" industries -- that is what nationalisation of the land implies under the capitalist system of production.

    Of course, the existence of small landed property, or, more correctly, of small farming, introduces certain changes in the general propositions of the theory of capitalist rent, but it does not destroy that theory. For example, Marx points out that absolute rent as such does not usually exist under small farming, which is carried on mainly to meet the needs of the farmer himself (Vol. III, 2. Teil, S. 339, 344).[128] But the more commodity production develops, the more all the propositions of economic theory become applicable to peasant farming also, since it has come under the conditions of the capitalist world. It must not be for

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gotten that no land nationalisation, no equalised land tenure, will abolish the now fully established fact that the well-to-do peasants in Russia are already farming on capitalist lines. In my Development of Capitalism I showed that, according to the statistics of the eighties and nineties of the last century, about one-fifth of the peasant households account for up to half of peasant agricultural production and a much larger share of rented land ; that the farms of these peasants are now commodity-producing farms rather than natural-economy farms, and that, finally, these peasants cannot exist without a vast army of farm-hands and day-labourers.[*] Among these peasants the elements of capitalist rent are taken for granted. These peasants express their interests through the mouths of the Peshekhonovs, who "soberly" reject the prohibition of hired labour as well as "socialisation of the land", who soberly champion the point of view of the peasant economic individualism which is asserting itself. If, in the utopias of the Narodniks, we carefully separate the real economic factor from the false ideology, we shall see at once that it is precisely the bourgeois peasantry which stands to gain most from the break-up of the feudal latifundia, irrespective of whether that is carried out by division, nationalisation, or municipalisation. "Loans and grants" from the state, too, are bound to benefit the bourgeois peasantry in the first place. The "peasant agrarian revolution" is nothing but the subordination of the whole system of landownership to the conditions of progress and prosperity of precisely these capitalist farms.

    Money rent is the moribund yesterday, which cannot but die out. Capitalist rent is the nascent tomorrow, which cannot but develop under the Stolypin expropriation of the poor peasants ("under Article 87"), as well as under the peasant expropriation of the richest landlords.

    The view is often met with among Marxists that nationalisation is feasible only at a high stage of development of capitalism, when it will have fully prepared the con-

ditions for "divorcing the landowners from agriculture" (by means of renting and mortgages). It is assumed that large-scale capitalist farming must have already established itself before nationalisation of the land, which cuts out rent without affecting the economic organism, can be brought about.[*]

    Is this view correct? Theoretically it cannot be substantiated; it cannot be supported by direct references to Marx; the facts of experience speak against it rather than for it.

    Theoretically, nationalisation is the "ideally" pure development of capitalism in agriculture. The question whether such a combination of conditions and such a relation of forces as would permit of nationalisation in capitalist society often occur in history is another matter. But nationalisation is not only an effect of, but also a condition for, the rapid development of capitalism. To think that nationalisation is possible only at a very high stage of development of capitalism in agriculture means, if anything, the repudiation of nationalisation as a measure of bourgeois progress; for everywhere the high development of agricultural capitalism has already placed on the order of the day (and will in time inevitably place on the order of the day in other countries) the "socialisation of agricultural production", i.e., the socialist revolution. No measure of bourgeois progress, as a bourgeois measure, is conceivable when the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is very acute. Such a measure is more likely in a "young" bourgeois society, which has not yet developed its strength, has not yet developed its contradictions to the full, and has not yet created a proletariat strong enough to strive directly towards the socialist revolution. And Marx allowed the possibility of, and sometimes directly advocated, the nationalisation of the land, not only in the epoch of the bourgeois revolution in Ger-

    "That is why in theory the radical bourgeois arrives at the repudiation of private landed property. . . . In practice, however, he lacks courage, since the attack on one form of property, private property in relation to the conditions of labour, would be very dangerous for the other form. Moreover, the bourgeois has territorialised himself." (Theorien über den Mehrwert, II. Band, 1. Teil, S. 208.)[129]

    Marx does not mention here, as an obstacle to the achievement of nationalisation, the undeveloped state of capitalism in agriculture. He mentions two other obstacles, which speak much more strongly in favour of the idea of achieving nationalisation in the epoch of bourgeois revolution.

    First obstacle: the radical bourgeois lacks the courage to attack private landed property owing to the danger of a socialist attack on all private property, i.e., the danger of a socialist revolution.

    Second obstacle: "The bourgeois has territorialised himself". Evidently, what Marx has in mind is that the bour-

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geois mode of production has already entrenched itself in private landed property, i.e., that this private property has become far more bourgeois than feudal. When the bourgeoisie, as a class, has already become bound up with landed property on a broad, predominating scale, has already "territorialised itself", "settled on the land", fully subordinated landed property to itself, then a genuine social movement of the bourgeoisie in favour of nationalisation is impossible. It is impossible for the simple reason that no class ever goes against itself.

    Broadly speaking, these two obstacles are removable only in the epoch of rising and not of declining capitalism, in the epoch of the bourgeois revolution, and not on the eve of the socialist revolution. The view that nationalisation is feasible only at a high stage of development of capitalism cannot be called Marxist. It contradicts both the general premises of Marx's theory and his words as quoted above. It oversimplifies the question of the historically concrete conditions under which nationalisation is brought about by such-and-such forces and classes, and reduces it to a schematic and bare abstraction.

    The 'radical bourgeois" cannot be courageous in the epoch of strongly developed capitalism. In such an epoch this bourgeoisie, in the mass, is inevitably counter-revolutionary. In such an epoch the almost complete "territorialisation" of the bourgeoisie is already inevitable. In the epoch of bourgeois revolution, however, the objective conditions compel the "radical bourgeois" to be courageous; for, in solving the historical problem of the given period, the bourgeoisie, as a class, cannot yet fear the proletarian revolution. In the epoch of bourgeois revolution the bourgeoisie has not yet territorialised itself : landownership is still too much steeped in feudalism in such an epoch. The phenomenon of the mass of the bourgeois farmers fighting against the principal forms of landownership and therefore arriving at the practical achievement of the complete bourgeois "liberation of the land", i.e., nationalisation, becomes possible.

    In all these respects the Russian bourgeois revolution finds itself in particularly favourable conditiolls. Arguing from the purely economic point of view, we must certainly

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admit the existence of a maximum of survivals of feudalism in the Russian system of landownership, in both landlord estates and peasant allotments. Under such circumstances, the contradiction between relatively developed capitalism in industry and the appalling backwardness of the countryside becomes glaring and, owing to objective causes, makes the bourgeois revolution extremely far-reaching and creates conditions for the most rapid agricultural progress. The nationalisation of the land is precisely a condition for the most rapid capitalist progress in our agriculture. We have a "radical bourgeois" in Russia who has not yet "territorialised" himself, who cannot, at present, fear a proletarian "attack". That radical bourgeois is the Russian peasant.

    From this point of view the difference between the attitude of the mass of the Russian liberal bourgeoisie and that of the mass of Russian peasants towards the nationalisation of the land becomes quite intelligible. The liberal landlord, lawyer, big manufacturer and merchant have all sufficiently "territorialised" themselves. They cannot but fear a proletarian attack. They cannot but prefer the Stolypin-Cadet road. Think what a golden river is now flowing towards the landlords, government officials, lawyers, and merchants in the form of the millions which the "Peasant" Bank is handing out to the terrified landlords! Under the Cadet system of "redemption payments" this golden river would have a slightly different direction, would, perhaps, be slightly less abundant, but it would still consist of hundreds of millions, and would flow into the same hands.

    Out of the revolutionary overthrow of all the old forms of landownership neither the government official nor the lawyer can derive a single kopek. And the merchants, in the mass, are not far-sighted enough to prefer the future expansion of the home, peasant, market to the immediate possibility of snatching something from the gentry. Only the peasant, who is being driven into his grave by the old Russia, is capable of striving for the complete renovation of the system of landownership.

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  [96] Lenin's book The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907 was written in November-December 1907. It was included in Part 2, Volume II of the collection of Lenin's works entitled Twelve Years, which was to have been published in 1908, but the book was seized at the printers by the police and destroyed. Only one copy was saved with several pages

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at the end of it missing. The book was first published in 1917 under the title, Vl. Ilyin (N. Lenin), The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1906-1907 (Petrograd. Zhizn i Znaniye Publishers).
    The 1917 edition of this book was printed from the mutilated copy, which broke off at the following unfinished sentence: "The reformative path of creating a Junker-bourgeois Russia presupposes the preservation of the foundations of the old system of landownership and their slow" . . . (See present volume, p. 425.) To this Lenin added the words: "systematic, and most painful coercion of the mass of the peasantry. The revolutionary path of creating a peasant bourgeois Russia necessarily presupposes the break-up of the,old system of landownership, the abolition of the private ownership of the land."
    The present edition is reproduced from the manuscript corrected by Lenin several years after the 1908 edition.    [p.217]

  ^[97] Allotment land -- the plots of land allotted to the peasants after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861; they belonged to the village commune and were periodically reallotted among the peasants for their use.    [p.220]

  ^[98] Crown lands -- land made over in 1797 out of the total of state lands to the members of the tsarist household as their private property together with the peasants who worked it; by a ukase of Paul I. The revenue from the exploitation of the crown-land peasants was used for the upkeep of the imperial family (including the Grand dukes, their wives, daughters, etc.). These sums were not included in the state budget and were not subject to control by the state.    [p.222]

  ^[99] Winter hiring -- the system practised by the landlords and kulaks of hiring peasants for summer work in the winter, when the peasants were badly in need of money and compelled to accept enslaving terms.    [p.225]

  ^[100] General Redistribution -- a slogan expressing the peasants' urge towards a general redistribution of the land and the abolition of landlordism.    [p.230]

  ^[101] Gurko-Lidlval methods of administration -- this refers to the embezzlement, profiteering, and extortion that reigned among the higher tsarist officials and government contractors. Gurko was Deputy Minister of the Interior; in 1906, he was involved in embezzlement and profiteering in connection with grain consignments for the famine-stricken areas. The contractor for this grain was the swindler and profiteer Lidval.    [p.251]

  ^[102] John -- the Menshevik P. P. Maslov.    [p.258]

  ^[103] Vendée -- a department in Western France where, during the French bourgeois revolution in the late eighteenth century, a counter-

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revolutionary insurrection of the ignorant and reactionary peasantry took place, directed against the Republic. The insurrection was staged by the Catholic clergy, the nobles, and royalist émigrés, and supported by England. Vendée became a synonym for reactionary revolts and hot-beds of counter-revolution.    [p.260]

  ^[104] Kostrov -- Noah Jordania, leader of the Caucasian Mensheviks.    [p.260]

  ^[105] The All-Russian Peasant Union -- a revolutionary-democratic organisation founded in 1905. The programme and tactics of the Union were adopted at its first and second congresses held in Moscow in August and November 1905. The Peasant Union demanded political freedom and the immediate convocation of a constituent assembly, and adhered to the tactics of boycotting the First Duma. The Union's agrarian programme called for the abolition of private ownership of the land, and the transfer of monastery, crown, and state lands to the peasants without compensation. The Union, however, pursued a half-hearted vacillating policy. While demanding the abolition of landlordism, it agreed to partial compensation for the landlords. From the very beginning of its activities the Union was persecuted by the police. It ceased to exist early in 1907.    [p.261]

  ^[106] Rossiya (Russia ) -- a police-sponsored, Black-Hundred newspaper, published in St. Petersburg from 1905 to 1914. From 1906 it was the official organ of the Ministry of the Interior.    [p.261]

  ^[107] Rodbertus's views are analysed by Karl Marx in Theorien über den Mehrwert, 2. Teil, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, SS. 82-85; Ricardo's theory is analysed in the same book, SS. 229-33.    [p.273]

  ^[108] See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 603.    [p.275]

  ^[109] Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, 2. Teil, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, S. 100.    [p.275]

  ^[110] The Homestead Act -- a law passed in the United States in 1862 granting settlers a plot of land up to 160 acres free of charge or at a nominal price. This land became the private property of its holder after five years.    [p.276]

  ^[111] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Bd. 4, S. 8, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959.    [p.276]

  ^[111a] Otrub (farmstead ) -- land allotted to peasants, who, under a law issued by the tsarist Minister Stolypin in 1906, were allowed to withdraw from the village communes. The purpose of this law was to create a mainstay for the autocracy in the countryside in the shape of a kulak class.    [p.278]

  ^[112] The peasants in Russia, as a class of feudal society, were divided into three major categories 1) privately owned (landlords') peasants.

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2) state peasants, and 3) crown-land peasants (belonging to the tsar's family). Each of these categories in turn, was divided into grades and special groups, which differed from one another in origin, forms of land ownership and land tenure, legal and agrarian status, etc. The Peasant Reform of 1861, carried out from abbve by the tsarist government in the interests of the feudal landlords, kept this diversity of grades intact right up to 1917.

    Gift-land peasants -- former serfs, chiefly of the southern and south-eastern black-earth gubernias, who at the time of the abolition of serfdom, received from their landiords gift allotments without having to pay compensation. Under the "Regulations" of the Peasant Reform of 1861, the landlord had the right, "by voluntary agreement" with the peasant, to make him a "gift" of a quarter of the "top" or "statutory" allotment due to the peasant (including the cottage plot) on the understanding that all the rest of peasant's land became the property of the landlord. Gift allotment, which strikingly illustrated the predatory nature of the 1861 Reform, was known among the people as "quarter", "orphan", "cat's", or "Gagarin" allotment (the latter from the name of Prince P. P. Gagarin who put forward a draft of the corresponding clauses to the local regulations governing land endowment of the peasants in the Great Russian and Ukrainian gubernias).
    There were numerous gift-land peasants in such land-poor black-earth gubernias as Voronezh, Kharkov, Poltava, and Tambov, where the market price of land seized by the landlords was very high. Many peasants received gift allotments in the south-eastern and southern black-earth gubernias of Orenburg, Ufa, Saratov Ekaterinoslav, and Samara, where rentals were much lower than the quit-rents due to the landlord under the "Regulations of February 19". By the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of the growth of the population and the reallotments which this involved, the gift-landers lost practically all their allotments and formed the bulk of the land-poor peasants,

    Temporarly-bound peasants -- former landlords' peasants who, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, were obliged to perform various services for the landlords (corvée service or quit-rent payment) in return for the use of allotments. This "temporarily-bound status" continued until the peasants, by agreement with the landlords had purchased their allotments by redemption payments. The landlords were obliged to accept redemption payments which became obligatory only after the Ukase of 1881, by which the "obligatory relation" between the peasant and the landlords had to cease as from January 1, 1883.

    Owners -- former landlords' peasants who had redeemed their allotments under the "Reguations of February 19, 1861" and thus ceased to be temporarily bound.

    Full owner -- former landlords' peasant who had redeemed their allotments before the specified date and had the right to own

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the land as private property. The full owners were comparatively few and constituted the most well-to-do element in the countryside.

    State peasants -- a category of peasant who tilled state lands and who, in addition to the poll-tax, paid feudal quit-rent to the state or the leaseholder of state property. They also performed numerow services (road repairs, billeting of soldiers, stage-horse posting, etc.): Under Peter I this category included odnodvortsi, chernososhniye peasants, half-croppers, Siberian ploughmen of the Northern maritime country, and peoples of the Volga and Ural regions (Tatars, Chuvashes, Mordovians, Udmurs, and Komi). Later other categories were added -- "economy" peasants (serfs who passed to the state from the secularised church estates), state peasants of the western territories and Transcaucasia, Ukrainian Cossacks, and others. The forms of land tenure and land ownership among the state peasants were extremely varied, and this condition continued even after the Peasant Reform.

    State peasants with communal holdings had no right to own land as private property; they used arable and other lands belonging to the village commune.

    State peasants with quarter holdings -- descendants of former servicemen in the lower ranks (children of boyars, Cossacks, the streltsi, dragoons, soldiers, etc.) who guarded the southern and south-eastern borderlands of the State of Muscovy. The Tsar of Muscovy rewarded their services with an endowment of a quarter lot (half a dessiatin) and they settled in single households (hence their name odnodvortsi ). Communal landownership arose among them in addition to their quarter holdings.
    These odnodvortsi, being freemen, for a long time held an intermediate position between the nobies and peasants, and had the right to acquire serfs. Under Peter I they were turned into state peasants, and their land became the property of the state. Actually, however, the state peasant's with quarter holdings disposed of their lands as their own private property; in this they differed from the state peasants with communal holdings, who had no right to buy, sell, or bequeath their land.

    State peasants who formerly belonged to landlords -- a category of state peasants, acquired by the state from private owners or donated to the state, etc. Although regarded as state peagants they enjoyed fewer rights; they were given equal rights in 1859 on the eve of the 1861 Reform, but certain distinctions remained.

    Crown-land peasants -- a category of peasants who tilled the crown lands. Besides the poll-tax, they paid feudal quit-rent, performed various services, and were subjected to exactions in kind, all of which went for the maintenance of members of the tsarist household. When the crown lands took shape in 1797 the status of the peasants living on these estates was defined as something between state and landlords' peasants. The abolition of serfdom was first applied to the crown-land peasants in 1858, but did not take full effect until 1863.

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These peasants received allotments as their private property subject to redemption payments over a period of 49 years. They were provided with land slightly better than the landlords' peasants, but worse than the state peasants.

    Free tillers -- the category of peasants freed from serfdom under the law of February 20,1803. This law permitted the landlords to decide the terms on which they gave their peasants freedom with land.

    Registered peasants -- a category of state peasants attached to state-owned and private manufactories for performing auxiliary jobs (wood-chopping, coal handling, ore breaking, haulage, etc). This practice of attachment assumed wide dimensions in the Urals, Olonets gubernia, and other places in the early eighteenth century. Beginning with the early nineteenth century the registered peasants were gradually freed from factory jobs. They won complete freedom as a result of the Peasant Reform of 1861.    [p.279]

  ^[113] Borisov -- S. A. Suvorov.    [p.289]

  ^[114] Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth ) -- a monthly magazine, published in St. Petersburg from 1876 to the middle of 1918. In the early nineties it became the organ of the liberal Narodniks. From 1906 it was virtually the organ of the semi-Cadet Popular Socialist Party.    [p.290]

  ^[115] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 787.    [p.293]

  ^[116] Lenin is referring to the discussion of the agrarian question at the First Conference of the R. S. D. L. P. held in Tammerfors December 12-17 (25-30), 1905. The report on this question was made by Lenin. In furtherance of the decision of the Third Congress of the Party, the Conference found it necessary to include in the programme an item calling for support of the peasants' revolutionary measures, including confiscation of all state, church, monastery, crown, and privately owned lands. The Conference drew special attention to the need for an independent organisation of the rural proletariat and for showing the latter that its interests could not be reconciled with those of the rural bourgeoisie.    [p.294]

  ^[117] Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, 2. Teil, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, S. 336.    [p.298]

  ^[118] Ibid., SS. 84, 96, 236.    [p.298]

  ^[119] This section was published in the newspaper Proletary, No. 33, July 23 (August 5), 1908.    [p.300]

  ^[120] Zhizn (Life ) -- a monthly magazine, published in St. Petersburg from 1897 to 1901; in 1902, it was published abroad. From 1899 onwards the magazine was the organ of the "legal Marxists".    [p.300]

  ^[121] Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, 2. Teil, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, S. 36.    [p.301]

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  ^[122] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 634-720.    [p.304]

  ^[123] Ibid., p. 761.    [p.305]

  ^[124] Ibid., p. 761-62.    [p.306]

  ^[125] Ibid., p. 787.    [p.314]

  ^[126] Ibid., p. 790.    [p.315]

  ^[127] Ibid., p. 792.    [p.316]

  ^[128] Ibid., p. 785, 789-90.    [p.317]

  ^[129] Karl Marx, Theorien ïber den Mehrwert, 2. Teil, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, S. 36.    [p.320]