V. I.

Lenin

From a Publicist’s Diary ( Peasants and Workers )

PEASANTS AND WORKERS

Izvestia of the All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies [1]
No. 88, of August 19, carries an exceedingly interesting article
which should be regarded as basic material for every Party
propaganda and agitation worker who has anything to do with the
peasants and for every class-conscious worker who is going to the
countryside or comes in contact with peasants.

The article is entitled “Model Mandate Compiled on the
Basis of 242 Mandates Submitted by Local Deputies to the
First All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies Held in
Petrograd, 1917”

The best thing would be for the Congress of Peasants’ Deputies
to publish as much detailed information as possible about all
those mandates. (if it is absolutely impossible to print them all
in full, which, of course, would be preferable). It is particularly necessary, for instance, to have a full list of the
gubernias, uyezds and volosts, showing how many mandates have been
received from each locality, when they were compiled or delivered,
and to analyse at least the basic demands, so that we can tell
whether the various points differ according to areas, whether such
questions as abolition of private property rights to all
peasant lands, periodic redistribution of land, prohibition of
wage-labour, confiscation of the landowners’ implements and
livestock, etc., etc., are put differently in, say, areas with
homestead and communal land ownership, areas with Russian and
non-Russian populations, central and outlying areas, areas that
never had serfdom, and so on. No thorough-going study of the
extraordinarily valuable material contained in the peasant
mandates is possible without such details. And we Marxists must
exert every effort to make a thorough-going study of the facts
underlying our policy.

In the absence of better material, and as long as it has not
been proved factually incorrect in one respect or another, the
summary of the mandates (as we shall call the “Model
Mandate”) remains the only material of its kind which, we
repeat, is an absolute must for every Party member.

The first part of the summary is devoted to general political
principles, to demands of political democracy; the second, to the
land question. (It is to be hoped that the All-Russia Congress of
Peasants’ Deputies or some other body will summarise the peasants’
mandates and resolutions concerning the war.) Without going into
detail in the first part, we shall note only two points from it,
§ 6, demanding the election of all office-holders, and
§ 11, calling for the abolition of the standing army once the war is over. These
points bring the peasants’ political programme closest of all to
the Bolshevik Party programme. Basing ourselves on these points,
we must stress and prove through all our propaganda and agitation
that the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders are
traitors not only to socialism, but also to democracy. In
Kronstadt, for instance, contrary to the will of the population
and to democratic principles, and to please the capitalists, they
upheld the office of a commissar subject to approval by the
government, that is, an office not purely elective. In the
Petrograd district councils and in other local self-government
bodies, the Socialist-B evolutionary and Menshevik leaders,
contrary to democratic principles, are fighting the Bolshevik
demand for the immediate institution of a workers’ militia, to be
succeeded by a popular militia.

According to the summary, the peasant land demands are primarily
abolition of private ownership of all types of land, including the
peasants’ lands, without compensation; transfer of lands on which
high-standard scientific farming is practised to the state or the
communes; confiscation of all livestock and implements on the
confiscated lands (peasants with little land are excluded) and
their transfer to the state or the communes; a ban on wage-labour;
equalised distribution of land among the working people, with periodical
redistributions, and so on. In the transition period, pending the
convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the peasants demand the
immediate enactment of laws prohibiting the purchase and sale of
land, abolition of laws concerning separation from the commune,
farmsteads, etc., laws protecting forests, fisheries, etc.,
abolishing long-term and revising short-term leases, and so on.

You do not have to give these demands a lot of thought to see
that it is absolutely impossible to realise them in alliance with
the capitalists, without breaking completely with them, without
waging the most determined and ruthless struggle against the
capitalist class, without overthrowing its rule.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries are deceiving themselves and the
peasants precisely by assuming and spreading the idea that these
reforms, or similar reforms, are possible without overthrowing
capitalist rule, without all state power being transferred to the
proletariat, without the peasant poor supporting the most
resolute, revolutionary measures of a proletarian state power
against the capitalists. The significance of the appearance of a
Left wing among the “Socialist-Revolutionaries” is that it
proves there is a growing awareness of this deception within their
party.

Indeed, confiscation of all private land means the confiscation
of hundreds of millions in capital belonging to the banks to which
the greater part of this land is mortgaged. How can any measure
like this be taken without the revolutionary class overcoming the
capitalists’ resistance by revolutionary methods? Moreover, it is
here a question of the most highly centralised capital of all,
bank capital, which is connected through billions of threads with
all the nerve centres of the capitalist economy of a huge country
and which can be defeated only by the no less centralised might of
the urban proletariat.

Further, take the transfer of highly efficient farms to the
state. Obviously, the “state” capable of taking them over
and running them really and truly in the interests of the working
people, and not in the interests of the officials and the
capitalists themselves, must be a proletarian revolutionary
state.

The confiscation of stud farms, etc., and then of all livestock
and implements, is something more than striking one staggering
blow after another at private ownership of the means of
production. It means taking steps towards socialism, for the
transfer of livestock and implements “to the exclusive use of
the state or a commune’ implies large-scale, socialist agriculture
or at least socialist control over integrated small farms,
socialist regulation of their economy.

And what about a “ban” on wage-labour? This is a meaningless phrase, helpless, unwittingly naive wishful thinking
on the part of downtrodden petty proprietors, who do not see that
capitalist industry as a whole would come to a standstill if there
were no reserve army of wage-labour in the countryside, that it is
impossible to “ban” wage-labour in the villages while permitting it in the towns, and lastly, that to “ban”
wage-labour means nothing but a step towards socialism.

Here we come to the fundamental question of the workers’
attitude to the peasants.

A mass Social-Democratic workers’ movement has existed in
Russia for more than twenty years (if we begin with the great
strikes of 1896). Throughout this long span of time, through two
great revolutions, through the entire political history of Russia,
runs the issue of whether the working class is to lead the
peasants forward, to socialism, or whether the liberal bourgeoisie
are to drag them back, to conciliation with capitalism.

The opportunist wing of the Social-Democrats has always
reasoned by the worldly-wise formula:
since the
Socialist-Revolutionaries are petty bourgeois, “we” reject
their philistine utopian views on socialism in the name of
bourgeois rejection of socialism. Struvism neatly replaces
Marxism, and Menshevism slithers down to the role of a Cadet
flunkey seeking to “reconcile” the peasants to bourgeois
rule. The latest and most striking evidence of that role is that
Tsereteli and Skobelev, hand in hand with Chernov and Avksentyev,
were busy signing the Cadets’ reactionary landowner decrees in the
name of “revolutionary democrats”.

The revolutionary Social-Democrats, who have never renounced
criticism of the petty-bourgeois illusions of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, and never entered into any bloc with them except against the Cadets, work unremittingly
to wrest the peasants away from Cadet influence, and in opposition to the
philistine’s utopian view of socialism, put forward the
revolutionary proletarian road to socialism instead of liberal
conciliation with capitalism.

Now that the war has speeded up developments fantastically,
aggravated the crisis of capitalism to the utmost, and confronted
the peoples with making an immediate choice between destruction
and immediate determined strides towards socialism, the full depth
of the gulf between semi-liberal Menshevism and revolutionary
proletarian Bolshevism is clearly revealed over the practical
issue of what action the tens of millions of peasants should
take.

Accept the rule of capital because “we” are not yet ripe
for socialism, the Mensheviks tell the peasants, substituting,
incidentally, the abstract question of “socialism” in general for the concrete question of whether it is possible to
heal the wounds inflicted by the war without decisive strides
towards socialism.

Accept capitalism because the Socialist-Revolutionaries are
petty-bourgeois utopians, the Mensheviks tell the peasants and
rally together with the Socialist-Revolutionaries to support the
Cadet government.

And the Socialist-Revolutionaries, beating their breast, assure
the peasants that they are against any peace with the capitalists,
that they have never regarded the Russian revolution as a
bourgeois revolution—and therefore enter into a bloc with the
opportunist Social-Democrats and rally to support a bourgeois
government. The Socialist-Revolutionaries sign all peasant
programmes. however revolutionary, except that they do so not to
carry them out, but to pigeon-hole them and deceive the peasants
with the most noncommittal promises, while actually pursuing for
months a policy of compromise with the Cadets in the coalition
government.

This crying, practical, direct, palpable betrayal of the
peasants’ interests by the Socialist-Revolutionaries radically
alters the situation. We must take this change into account. It is
not enough to conduct agitation against the
Socialist-Revolutionaries in the old way, the way we did between
1902 and 1903, and 1905 and 1907. It is not enough to expose
theoretically the petty-bourgeois illusions of “socialisation
of land”, “equalised land tenure”, “a ban on wage-labour”, etc.

That was on the eve of the bourgeois revolution, or before the
bourgeois revolution’s completion, and the task was primarily to
carry it through to overthrow the monarchy.

Now the monarchy has been overthrown. The bourgeois revolution
has been completed in so far as Russia has become a democratic
republic with a government of Cadets, Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries. And the war in the past three years has
pushed us a good thirty years ahead. It has forced on Europe
universal labour service and the compulsory syndication of
undertakings, caused hunger and unprecedented ravages in the
leading countries, and imposed steps towards socialism.

The fundamental premise of our class policy at that time was
that only the workers and peasants can overthrow the monarchy. And
this premise was correct. February and March 1917 reaffirmed
this.

The premise of our class policy today is that only the proletariat, leading the poorest peasants (the semi-proletarians,
as our programme puts it), can end the war with a democratic
peace, heal the war wounds, and initiate steps towards socialism
which have become absolutely necessary and urgent .

It follows that the emphasis in our propaganda and agitation
against the Socialist-Revolutionaries must be shifted to the fact
that they have betrayed the peasants. They represent a minority of
well-to-do farmers rather than the mass of the peasant poor. They
are leading the peasants to an alliance with the capitalists,
i.e., to subordination to them, rather than to an alliance with
the workers. They have bartered the interests of the working and
exploited people for ministerial posts and a bloc with the
Mensheviks and Cadets.

History, accelerated by the war, has forged so far ahead that the
old formulas have acquired a new meaning. “A ban on wage-labour” was formerly only an empty phrase bandied
about by the petty-bourgeois intellectual. In the light of today,
it means something different: the millions of peasant poor say in
their 242 mandates that they want hired labour abolished but do
not know how to do it. We know how. We know that this can be done only in alliance with the workers,
under their leadership, against the capitalists, not through a
compromise with them.

These are the changes that the basic line of our propaganda and
agitation against the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the basic line we
pursue in addressing the peasants, must now undergo.

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party has betrayed you, comrade
peasants. It has betrayed the hovels and deserted to the palaces,
if not the royal palaces, then those where the Cadets, those
bitter enemies of the revolution, and particularly the peasant
revolution, sit in the same government as the Chernovs,
Peshekhonovs, and Avksentyevs.

Only the revolutionary proletariat, only the vanguard that
unites it, the Bolshevik Party, can actually carry out the
programme of the peasant poor which is put forward in the 242
mandates. For the revolutionary proletariat is really advancing to
the abolition of wage-labour along the only correct path, through
the overthrow of capital and not by prohibiting the hiring of
labourers, not through a “ban” on wage-labour. The revolutionary proletariat is really advancing to confiscation of
land, implements, and agricultural technical establishments, to
what the peasants want and what the Socialist-Revolutionaries
cannot give them.

This is how the basic line pursued by the worker in addressing
the peasant must now change. We workers can and will give you what
the peasant poor want and are searching for without always knowing
where and how to find it. We workers are upholding our own
interests and at the same time the interests of the vast majority
of the peasants against the capitalists , while the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, allying themselves with the capitalists, are betraying these interests.

*     * *
Let us recall what Engels said on the peasant question shortly
before his death. He stressed that socialists have no intention
whatever of expropriating the small peasants, and that the
advantages of mechanised socialist agriculture [2] will be made
clear to them only by force of example .

The war has now confronted Russia in practice with a problem of
exactly this order. There is a shortage of implements. They must
be confiscated, and the highly efficient farms must not be
“divided up”.

The peasants have begun to realise this. Need has compelled
them to do so. The war has compelled them, for there are 110
implements to be had anywhere. What there is must be thriftily
husbanded. And large-scale farming means saving labour through the
use of implements as well as many other things.

The peasants want to keep their small farms, to set equal
standards for all, and to make readjustments on an equalitarian
basis from time to time. Fine. No sensible socialist will differ
with the peasant poor over this. If the land is confiscated, that
means the domination of the banks has been undermined, if the
implements are confiscated, that means the domination of capital
has been undermined—and in that case, provided the proletariat rules centrally , provided political
power is taken over by the proletariat, the rest will come
by itself , as a result of “force of example”, prompted by experience.

The crux of the matter lies in political power passing into the
hands of the proletariat. When this has taken place, everything
that is essential, basic, fundamental in the programme set out in
the 242 mandates will become feasible . Life will show what
modifications it will undergo as it is carried out. This is an
issue of secondary importance. We are not doctrinaires. Our theory
is a guide to action, not a dogma.

We do not claim that Marx knew or Marxists know the road to
socialism down to the last detail. It would be nonsense to claim
anything of the kind. What we know is the direction of this road,
and the class forces that follow it; the specific, practical
details will come to light only through the experience of the millions when they take things into their own
hands.

Trust the workers, comrade peasants, and break with the
capitalists! Only in close alliance with the workers can you begin
to carry out the programme set out in the 2/i2 man dates. Allied
with the capitalists and led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, you
will never live to see a single determined, radical step in the spirit of this programme.

But when in alliance with the urban workers, waging a ruthless
struggle against capital, you begin to realise the programme of
the 242 mandates, the whole world will come to our and your
assistance, and then the success of that programme—not as it
stands now, but in its essence—will be assured. When that
happens, the domination of capital and wage slavery xviii come to
an end. That will be the beginning of the reign of socialism, the
reign of peace, the reign of the working people.

---
Notes:
[1]
Izvestia of the All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies (Izvestia
Vserossiiskogo Soveta Krestyanskikh Deputatov)—the official daily
newspaper of that Soviet published in Petrograd from May 9 (22)
to December 1917. It expressed the views of the Right wing of the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Its attitude to the October
Revolution was hostile. It was closed down for its counter-revolutionary
propaganda.

[2]
Lenin is referring to Frederick Engels, The Peasant Question in France and Germany (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works , Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, pp. 469–72).