V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v6; en:CW/CW41;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

“4. Establishment of peasant committees:

(a) for the return to the rural societies (by means of expropriation or—in cases where the lands have changed hands—by redemption, etc.) of those lands which were cut off from the peasants when serfdom was abolished and which serve in the hands of the landlords as an instrument for their enslavement…”[178]

“We are obliged to fight against all survivals of serf-owning relations—on that score there can be no doubt whatever for a Social-Democrat; and since these relations are interwoven in the most intricate manner with bourgeois relations, we have to penetrate, so to speak, into the very core of this tangle, without being daunted by the complexity of the task.”[179]

“…the workers’ section contains demands directed against the bourgeoisie, while the peasants’ section contains demands directed against the serf-owning landlords (against the feudal lords, I would say, if the question of the applicability of this term to our landed nobility were not so controversial1)).

___

1) I personally am inclined to answer this question in the affirmative, but in the present case, of course, it is neither the place nor the time to substantiate, or even to advance, this decision, for the point at issue now is the defence of the collective, joint-editorial draft of the agrarian programme.”[180]

“But to try beforehand, before the final outcome of the struggle, in the very course of the struggle, to determine that we shall perhaps not achieve the maximum—that would be sheer philistinism.”[181]

* Plekhanov proposed to alter this phrase as follows: “To restrain oneself, before the final outcome of the struggle, in the very course of the struggle, by the consideration…”. Ed.

“‘Our movement’ is the Social-Democratic working-class movement. The peasant masses cannot possibly ‘join’ it: that is not problematical, but impossible, and there has never been any talk of it. But the peasant masses cannot but join the ‘movement’ against all survivals of serfdom (and against the autocracy, too).”[182]

*** See the previous reply to Plekhanov’s remark. Ed.

“We must spread more widely the idea that only in a republic can a decisive battle take place between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; we must create and strengthen republican traditions among all Russian revolutionaries and among the broadest possible masses of Russian workers; we must express by this slogan—‘republic’—that in the struggle for the democratisation of the state system we will go all the way, without looking back…”[183]

158 V. I. Lenin has in mind the works of Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in two volumes, Vol. II, 1955, pp. 23–24) and Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891” (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, Vol. XVI, Part II, 1936, p. 109).

“Thus, the entire content of Point 4 can, for the sake of simplicity, be expressed in two words: ‘return the cut-off lands.’ The question arises, how did the idea of such a demand arise? As a direct deduction from that general and fundamental proposition that we must help the peasants and urge them to achieve the fullest possible abolition of all survivals of serfdom. Everyone agrees with that, does he not? Well, if you agree to take this road, then kindly proceed along it independently, do not force us to drag you, do not be faint-hearted about the ‘unusual’ appearance of this road, do not be disconcerted by the fact that in many places you will find no beaten track at all, but will have to crawl along the edge of a precipice, force your way through thickets, and leap over pits. Do not complain about the lack of a road: such complaints will be useless whining, for you should have known beforehand that you were not taking a highway, straightened and levelled by all the forces of social progress, but the paths of backwoods and byways, from which there is a way out, but a direct, simple, and easy way out neither you, nor we, nor anyone else will ever find—‘never,’ i.e., generally until such time as these dying, and painfully slowly dying, backwoods and byways still exist.

And if you do not want to poke into these byways, then say straight out that you do not want to, and do not fob us off with phrases.”[184]

“The direct survivals of corvée economy, which have been recorded countless times by all economic studies of Russia, are maintained not by any special law protecting them, but by the force of actually existing land relations. This is so true that witnesses before the well-known Valuev Commission said outright: serfdom would undoubtedly revive again if it were not prohibited by direct law. That means one of two things: either do not touch the land relations between peasants and landlords at all—then all other questions are solved very ‘simply,’ but then you will not touch the main source of all survivals of serf economy in the countryside, then you will ‘simply’ stand aside from a very burning question affecting the deepest interests of the serf-owners and the enslaved peasantry, a question which may easily become tomorrow or the day after one of the most burning socio-political questions in Russia. Or you want to touch that source of ‘backward forms of economic bondage’ which land relations represent—and then you must reckon with such complexity and intricacy of these relations as simply does not admit of an easy and simple solution. Then, being dissatisfied with the concrete solution of the intricate question we have proposed, you are no longer entitled to fob us off with a general ‘complaint’ about its intricacy, but must make an attempt to analyse it independently and propose another concrete solution.

What significance the cut-off lands have in the contemporary peasant economy is a question of fact.”[185]

“Labour-service causes stagnation of technique and stagnation of all social-economic relations in the countryside, for it hinders the development of money economy and the disintegration of the peasantry, relieves (comparatively) the landlord from the stimulating influence of competition (instead of improving technique he reduces the share of the sharecropper; incidentally, this reduction has been recorded in a number of localities over many years of the post-Reform period), ties the peasant to the land, thereby retarding the development of migration and seasonal labour, etc.”[186]

“And in general: since it is generally recognised that the cut-off lands are one of the main sources of the labour-service system, and that this system is a direct survival of serfdom, retarding the development of capitalism, how can one doubt that the return of the cut-off lands will undermine labour-service and accelerate social-economic development?”[187]

*** V. I. Lenin has in mind the beginning of Chapter VII of his article (see present volume, pp. 329–330). Ed.

“As far as I can judge, all objections ‘against the cut-off lands’ fall under one or another of these four points, the majority of those who objected (Martynov among them) answering all four questions in the negative, regarding the demand for the return of the cut-off lands as both wrong in principle, politically inexpedient, practically unrealisable, and logically inconsistent.”[188]

** Yes, there is more than enough of that stuff, i.e., Martynov. Ed.

*** Refers to V. I. Lenin’s reply to G. V. Plekhanov’s remark on p. 434 of the present volume. Ed.

“And we shall not be contradicting ourselves in the least if, in the next historical period, when the peculiarities of a given socio-political ‘conjuncture’ have passed, when the peasantry, let us say, is satisfied with paltry sops from a paltry section of the owners and ‘growls’ decisively against the proletariat, if we then delete from our programme the struggle against the survivals of serfdom. Then, probably, we shall have to delete from the programme the struggle against the autocracy as well, for it is impossible to suppose that the peasantry will be freed from the most odious and oppressive serf-owner yoke before political freedom is achieved.”[189]

“We shall be told: ‘However stubbornly the labour-service economy resists the onslaught of capitalism, it nevertheless yields to it—more than that: it is doomed to complete disappearance; the large-scale labour-service economy is giving way and will give way directly to large-scale capitalist economy. You, however, want to accelerate the process of liquidating serfdom by a measure which is, in essence, a breaking up (partial, it is true, but still a breaking up) of large-scale economy. Are you not thereby sacrificing the interests of the future to the interests of the present? For the sake of the problematical possibility of a peasant uprising in the near future against serfdom, you are making more difficult, in the more or less distant future, an uprising of the rural proletariat against capitalism!’

Such reasoning, however convincing it may seem at first sight, suffers from great one-sidedness…”[190]

Axelrod. In my opinion, delete the compliment to opponents à la Martynov. P. A.

“…this could not fail to have the most profound influence on the spirit of protest and independent struggle among the entire working rural population.”[191]

159 In April 1902 a general strike was declared in Belgium in support of the demand for universal suffrage advanced in parliament by representatives of the workers’, liberal, and democratic parties. Over 300,000 workers took part in the strike; workers’ demonstrations took place throughout the country. However, after parliament rejected the bill on electoral reform and troops fired on the demonstrators, the opportunist leadership of the Workers’ Party (Vandervelde and others) capitulated and, under pressure from its ‘allies’ in the camp of the liberal bourgeoisie, called off the general strike. The defeat of the working class of Belgium in April 1902 served as a lesson for the working-class movement throughout the world. “The socialist proletariat will see,” wrote Iskra, No. 21, June 1, 1902, “to what practical results the opportunist tactics lead, which sacrifice revolutionary principles in the hope of quick success. The proletariat will be convinced once again that none of the means of political pressure it applies against the enemy can achieve its aim if it is not prepared to carry that means to its logical conclusion.”

“And in order to facilitate later the transition to socialism for our farm labourers and semi-labourers, it is extremely important that the socialist party should now begin to ‘intercede’ for the small peasantry, doing ‘all it can’ for them, not refusing to take part in solving the painful and intricate ‘alien’ (non-proletarian) questions, accustoming the entire working and exploited mass to see in it their leader and representative.”[192]

“The Russian bourgeoisie has been ‘tardy’ in fulfilling its own task of sweeping away all survivals of the old regime—and we must and shall correct this deficiency until it is corrected, until we have political freedom, until the condition of the peasantry feeds discontent in almost the entire mass of the educated bourgeois society (as we see in Russia), and not feed in that mass a feeling of conservative self-complacency over the ‘indestructibility’ of what is supposedly the most powerful bulwark against socialism (as we see in the West, where the said self-complacency is to be observed in all parties of order, from the Agrarians and Conservatives pur sang[193], through the liberal and free-thinking bourgeois, down to even… saving the presence of the Chernovs and the Vestnik Russkoi Revolyutsii!… down to even the fashionable ‘critics of Marxism’ on the agrarian question).”[194]

“The nationalisation of the land is another matter. This demand (if understood in the bourgeois, and not in the socialist sense) really ‘goes further’ than the demand for the return of the cut-off lands, and in principle we fully share this demand. At a certain revolutionary moment we shall not, of course, refuse to advance it.”[195]

160 G. V. Plekhanov has in mind the following remark by Yu. O. Martov, made at the Zurich meeting of the Iskra editorial board on April 2 (15), 1902: “The reactionary character of the demand for the nationalisation of the land at the present moment in Russia must be emphasised more strongly and more prominently.”

After the Zurich meeting V. I. Lenin made some changes in Chapter VII, where the demand for the nationalisation of the land is discussed (see present volume, pp. 338–339).

“But we are drawing up our present programme not only, and not even so much, for the epoch of a revolutionary uprising, as for the epoch of political slavery, for the epoch preceding political freedom. And in such an epoch the demand for the nationalisation of the land expresses much more weakly the immediate tasks of the democratic movement in the sense of the struggle against serfdom.”[196]

“That is why we think that the maximum of our agrarian programme on the basis of the present social system should not go beyond a democratic revision of the Peasant Reform. The demand for the nationalisation of the land, while being quite correct from the standpoint of principle and quite suitable for certain moments, is politically inexpedient at the present moment.”[197]

161 G. V. Plekhanov has in mind the following remark by Yu. O. Martov: “Instead of this it must be said that we accept the nationalisation of the land only as an immediate prologue to the socialisation of all means of production.”

** Refers to V. I. Lenin’s reply to G. V. Plekhanov’s remark on p. 442 of the present volume. Ed.

“Such a composition of the court would ensure both its democratic character and the free expression of the different class interests of the various sections of the rural population.”[198]

“…it is known that in our countryside rent is more often of a serf-owning than of a bourgeois character, and rent is much more ‘money rent’ (i.e., transformed feudal rent) than capitalist rent (i.e., surplus over the entrepreneur’s profit). A reduction of rent, therefore, would directly facilitate the replacement of serf forms of economy by capitalist forms.”[199]

“Even the autocracy is therefore compelled more and more frequently to create a special (of course, utterly miserable, and more plundered by embezzlers of public funds and bureaucrats than used for the benefit of the starving) ‘fund for the cultural and charitable needs of rural societies.’ We, too, cannot but demand, among other democratic reforms, the creation of such a fund. It is hardly possible to argue against this.”[200]

162 This refers to the compensation paid by the government of King Charles X of France to the former émigrés whose lands had been confiscated and sold as national property during the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the eighteenth century; the so-called “Law of Indemnity,” adopted on March 27, 1825, provided for a money grant totalling 1,091,360,000 francs (“the milliard of the émigrés”). The largest sums went to the king’s favourites. To raise this enormous sum, the government increased taxes and converted the 5% government stock, reducing it to 3%.

163 P. B. Axelrod has in mind G. V. Plekhanov’s remark on the following passage in the article: “But why confine ourselves to this source? Why not try, besides this, to return to the people at least part of the tribute which the slave-owners of yesterday have exacted and continue to exact from the peasants with the aid of the police state?” (present volume, pp. 342–343). Plekhanov wrote: “That is just what should be proposed, and not charity. And the sums can be returned only by those who received them: the nobles.”

“But this tribute cannot be returned in full, we are told. That is true (just as the cut-off lands cannot be returned in full).”[201]

“In practice, of course, the abolition of collective responsibility (this reform Mr. Witte may perhaps succeed in carrying out even before the revolution), the abolition of estate divisions, freedom of movement, and freedom to dispose of the land for each individual peasant will inevitably and rapidly lead to the destruction of that fiscal-serf burden which the present-day land commune is, to the extent of three-quarters. But such a result will only prove the correctness of our views on the commune, will prove its incompatibility with the entire social-economic development of capitalism.”[202]

“We shall reply to this: the right of every peasant to demand the allotment of land to him as a separate holding does not yet follow from our formulation. From it follows only the freedom to sell land, and even this freedom is not contradicted by the right of the members of the commune to the preferential purchase of land that is being sold.”[203]

164 G. V. Plekhanov has in mind the following remark by Yu. O. Martov: “This proposition is incorrect. The freedom to demand the allotment of a separate holding does follow from the freedom to dispose of the land. Instead of this it is sufficient to point out that the transformation of the power of the commune over the individual into the power of a comradely union over a member who has freely joined it is not excluded by our demands.”

After the Zurich meeting V. I. Lenin deleted both phrases in the manuscript, replacing them with the words: “Such an objection would be unfounded…” and further, ending with the words: “sold by their colleague” (see below, pp. 446–447).

“Such an objection would be unfounded. Our demands do not destroy the comradely union, but, on the contrary, create in place of the archaic (de facto semi-serf) power of the commune over the peasant the power of a modern comradely union over members who freely join it. In particular, for example, our formulation does not contradict the recognition, under certain conditions, of the right of the members of the commune to the preferential purchase of land sold by their colleague.”

“To clear the road for the free development of the class struggle in the countryside, it is necessary to remove all survivals of the serf order, which now conceal the beginnings of capitalist antagonisms within the rural population and prevent them from developing.”[204]

The remarks of the “author of the remarks” show with complete clarity only the following. If he has set himself the aim of making joint work with him in the editorial board impossible for comrades who disagree with him, even on unimportant questions, then he is very quickly and surely moving towards this noble goal. But let him also bear the consequences if he achieves it.

(1) The remarks are written so carelessly that what was before the correction has not been collated with what came after it.

(2) The list of corrections has even been simply thrown out! “Don’t hinder my temper.”

(3) Almost none of the alterations proposed by the author of the remarks have been formulated by him himself—contrary to the precise condition adopted out of necessity to avoid impossible delays.

(4) The tone of the remarks is deliberately insulting. If I were to “analyse” in the same tone Plekhanov’s article on the programme (i.e., precisely his personal “article,” and not the draft of a general declaration, a general programme, etc.), that would immediately be the end of our collaboration. And I “put to the vote”: whether members of the editorial board are to be allowed to provoke other members to this?

(5) The striving, by means of votes, to interfere even in the manner of expression of members of the editorial board is the height of tactlessness.

The author of the remarks reminds me of that coachman who thinks that to drive well one must pull the horses often and hard. I am, of course, no more than a “horse,” one of the horses, with Plekhanov as the coachman, but it does happen that even the most harassed horse throws an over-zealous coachman.