1) In dealing with the genesis of capitalist production I stated 
that it is founded on “the complete separation of the producer 
from the means of production” (p. 315, column I, French edition 
of Capital) and that “the basis of this whole development 1s the 
expropriation of the agricultural producer. To date this has not been 
accomplished in a radical fashion anywhere except in England... 
But all the other countries of Western Europe are undergoing the same 
process” (l.c., column IT).? 

I thus expressly limited the “historical inevitability” of this 
process*” to the countries of Western Europe. And why? Be so 
kind as to compare Chapter XXXII, where it says: 

The “process of elimination transforming individualised and 
scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of 
production, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge 
property of the few, this painful and fearful expropriation of the 
working people, forms the origin, the genesis of capital... Private 
property, based on personal labour ... will be supplanted by capitalist 
private property, based on the exploitation of the labour of others, on 
wage labour” (p. 341, column II).° 

Thus, in the final analysis, it is a question of the transformation af 
one form of private property into another form of private property. Since 
the land in the hands of the Russian peasants has never been their 
private property, how could this development be applicable? 

2) From the historical point of view the only serious argument 
put forward in favour of the fatal dissolution of the Russian 
peasanis commune is this: By going back a long way communal 
property of a more or less archaic type*” may be found 
throughout Western Europe; everywhere it has disappeared with 
increasing social progress. Why should it be able to escape the 
same fate in Russia alone? I reply: because in Russia, thanks to a 
unique combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still 
established on a nationwide scale, may gradually detach itself from 
its primitive features and develop directly as an element of 
collective production on a nationwide scale. It is precisely thanks 
to its contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may 
appropriate the latter’s positive acquisitions without experiencing all 
its frightful misfortunes. Russia does not live in isolation from the 
modern world; neither is it the prey of a foreign invader like the 
East Indies. 

If the Russian admirers of the capitalist system denied the 
theoretical possibility of such a development, I would ask them this 
question: In order to utilise machines, steam engines, railways, 
etc., was Russia forced, like the West, to pass through a long 
incubation period in the engineering industry? Let them explain 
to me, too, how they managed to introduce in their own country, 
in the twinkling of an eye, the entire mechanism of exchange 
(banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to 
devise? 

If at the time of emancipation the rural communes had first 
been placed in conditions of normal prosperity; if the immense 
public debt, mostly paid for at the expense of the peasants, with 
the other enormous sums provided through the agency of the 
State (and still at the expense of the peasants) to the “new pillars 
of society”,*”' transformed into capitalists,—if all this expenditure 
had been applied to further developing the rural commune, no 
one would today be envisaging the “historical inevitability” of the 
destruction of the commune: everyone would recognise in it the 
element of regeneration of Russian society and an element of 
superiority over the countries still enslaved by the capitalist 
regime. 

Another circumstance favouring the preservation of the Russian 
commune (by the path of development) is the fact that it is not 
only contemporaneous with capitalist production but has outlasted 
the era when this social system still appeared to be intact; that it 
now finds it, on the contrary, in Western Europe as well as in the 
United States, engaged in battle both with science, with the 

popular masses, and with the very productive forces which it 
engenders.* In a word, it finds it in a crisis which will only end in 
its elimination, in the return of modern societies to the “archaic” 
type of communal property, a form in which, in the words of an 
American writer” quite free from any suspicion of revolutionary 
tendencies and subsidised in his work by the Washington 
government, “the new system” towards which modern society 
tends “will be a REVIVAL IN A SUPERIOR FORM Of an archaic social type”’. 
So we must not let ourselves to be alarmed at the word “archaic”. 

But then we would at least have to be familiar with these 
vicissitudes. We know nothing about them. In one way or another 
this commune perished in the midst of incessant wars, foreign and 
internal; it probably died a violent death. When the Germanic 
tribes came to conquer Italy, Spain, Gaul, etc.,*” the commune of 
the archaic type no longer existed. Yet its natural viability is 
demonstrated by two facts. There are sporadic examples which 
survived all the vicissitudes of the Middle Ages and have been 
preserved into our own day, for instance the district of Trier, in my 
native country. But more importantly, it imprinted its own 
characteristics so effectively on the commune which replaced it—a 
commune in which the arable land has become private property, 
whereas forests, pastures, common lands, etc., still remain communal 
property—that Maurer,° when analysing this commune of secon- 
dary formation, was able to reconstruct the archaic prototype. 
Thanks to the characteristic features borrowed from the latter, the 
new commune introduced by the Germanic peoples in all the 
countries they invaded was the sole centre of popular liberty and life 
throughout the Middle Ages. 

If we know nothing about the life of the commune or about the 
manner and time of its disappearance after the age of Tacitus, at 
least we know the starting point, thanks to Julius Caesar.“ In his 
day the land was already shared out annually, but between the 
gentes and the tribes of the Germanic confederations, and not yet 
between the individual members of the commune. The rural 
commune in Germany is therefore descended from a more archaic 

type; it was the product of a spontaneous development instead of 
being imported fully developed from Asia. There—in the East 
Indies—we also encounter it, and always as the final stage or final 
period of the archaic formation. 

To assess the possible outcomes from a purely theoretical point 
of view, that is to say, assuming normal conditions of life, I 
must now point out certain characteristic features which distin- 
guish the “agricultural commune” from the more archaic types. 

Firstly, previous primitive communities are all based on the 
natural kinship of their members; by breaking this strong but tight 
bond, the agricultural commune is better able to spread and to 
withstand contact with strangers. 

Next, in this form the house and its complement, the courtyard, 
are already the private property of the cultivator, whereas long 
before the introduction of agriculture the communal house was one 
of the material bases of previous communities. 

Finally, although arable land remains communal property, it is 
divided periodically between the members of the agricultural 
commune, so that each cultivator tills the fields assigned to him on 
his own account and appropriates as an individual the fruits 
thereof, whereas in more archaic communities production took 
place communally and only the yield was shared out. This 
primitive type of cooperative or collective production resulted, of 
course, from the weakness of the isolated individual, and not from 
the socialisation of the means of production. It is easy to see that 
the dualism inherent in the “agricultural commune” might endow 
it with a vigorous life, since on the one hand communal property 
and all the social relations springing from it make for its solid 
foundation, whereas the private house, the cultivation of arable 
land in parcels and the private appropriation of its fruits permit a 
development of individuality which is incompatible with conditions 
in more primitive communities. 

But it is no less evident that this very dualism might in time 
become a source of decay. Apart from all the influences of hostile 
surroundings, the mere gradual accumulation of chattels which 
begins with wealth in the form of cattle (even admitting wealth in 
the form of serfs), the increasingly pronounced role which the 
movable element plays in agriculture itself, and a host of other 
circumstances inseparable from this accumulation but which it 
would take me too long to go into here, will eat away at economic 
and social equality and give rise to a conflict of interests at the 
very heart of the commune, entailing first the conversion of arable 
land into private property and ending with the private appropria- 

tion of the forests, pastures, common lands, etc., which have 
already become communal appendages of private property. 

This is why the “agricultural commune” occurs everywhere as 
the most recent type of the archaic form of societies, and why in the 
historical development of Western Europe, ancient and modern, 
the period of the agricultural commune appears as a period of 
transition from communal property to private property, as a 
period of transition from the primary form to the secondary one. 
But does this mean that in all circumstances the development of 
the “agricultural commune” must follow this path? Not at all. Its 
constitutive form allows this alternative: either the element of 
private property which it implies will gain the upper hand over 
the collective element, or the latter will gain the upper hand over 
the former. Both these solutions are a priori possible, but for 
either one to prevail over the other it is obvious that quite 
different historical surroundings are needed.’ All this depends 
on the historical surroundings in which it finds itself (see 
p. 10°). 

Russia is the sole European country where the “agricultural 
commune” has kept going on a nationwide scale up to the present 
day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East Indies, 
and neither does it lead a life cut off from the modern world. On 
the one hand, the common ownership of land allows it to 
transform individualist farming in parcels directly and gradually 
into collective farming, and the Russian peasants are already 
practising it in the undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the 
land invites mechanical cultivation on a large scale; the peasant’s 
familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition 
from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, Russian 
society, which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the 
necessary advances for such a transition. On the other hand, the 

contemporaneitty of western production, which dominates the world 
market, allows Russia to incorporate in the commune all the 
positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without 
passing through its Caudine Forks.** 

If the spokesmen of the “new pillars of society” were to deny 
the theoretical possibility of the suggested evolution of the modern 
rural commune, one might ask them: Was Russia forced to pass 
through a long incubation period in the engineering industry, as 
was the West, in order to arrive at the machines, the steam 
engines, the railways, etc.? One would also ask them how they 
managed to introduce in their own country in the twinkling of an 
eye the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, joint-stock com- 
panies, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise? 

There is one characteristic of the “agricultural commune” in 
Russia which afflicts it with weakness, hostile in every sense. That 
is its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one 
commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is 
not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this 
type but which, wherever it is found, has caused a more or less 
centralised despotism to arise on top of the communes. The 
federation of Russian republics of the North proves that this 
isolation, which seems to have been originally imposed by the vast 
expanse of the territory, was largely consolidated by the political 
destinies which Russia had to suffer after the Mongol invasion.*” 
Today it is an obstacle which could easily be eliminated. It would 
simply be necessary to replace the volost,“°° the government body, 
with an assembly of peasants elected by the communes themselves, 
serving as the economic and administrative organ for their 
interests. 

One circumstance very favourable, from the historical point of 
view, to the preservation of the “agricultural commune” by the 
path of its further development is the fact that it is not only the 
contemporary of Western capitalist production and is thus able to 
appropriate its fruits without subjecting itself to its modus operandi, 
but has outlasted the era when the capitalist system still appeared 
to be intact; that it now finds it, on the contrary, in Western 
Europe as well as in the United States, engaged in battle both with 
the working-class masses, with science, and with the very 
productive forces which it engenders—in a word, in a crisis which 
will end in its elimination, in the return of modern societies to a 

superior form of an “archaic” type of collective property and 
production. 

It goes without saying that the evolution of the commune would 
be carried out gradually, and that the first step would be to place 
it in normal conditions on its present basis. 

Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian “rural commune” can 
preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of 
land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it 
also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the 
economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn 
over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide; it can 
gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has 
enriched mankind, without passing through the capitalist regime, 
a regime which, considered solely from the point of view of its 
possible duration hardly counts in the life of society. But we must 
descend from pure theory to the Russian reality.* 

3) To expropriate the agricultural producers it is not necessary 
to chase them off their land, as was done in England and 
elsewhere; nor is it necessary to abolish communal property by 
means of an ukase. Go and seize from the peasants the product of 
their agricultural labour beyond a certain measure, and despite 
your gendarmerie and your army you will not succeed in chaining 
them to their fields! In the last years of the Roman Empire, the 
provincial decurions*”’—not peasants but landowners—fled from 
their houses, abandoning their lands, even selling themselves into 
slavery, all in order to get rid of a property which was no longer 
anything more than an official pretext for extorting money from 
them, mercilessly and pitilessly. 

From the time of the so-called emancipation of the peasants the 
Russian commune has been placed by the State in abnormal 
economic conditions and ever since then it has never ceased to 
overwhelm it with the social forces concentrated in its hands. 
Exhausted by its fiscal exactions, the commune became an inert 
thing, easily exploited by trade, landed property and usury. This 
oppression from without unleashed in the heart of the commune 

itself the conflict of interests already present, and rapidly 
developed the seeds of decay. But that is not all. At the expense of 
the peasants the State has forced, as in a hothouse, some branches 
of the Western capitalist system which, without developing the 
productive forces of agriculture in any way, are most calculated to 
facilitate and precipitate the theft of its fruits by unproductive 
middlemen. It has thus cooperated in the enrichment of a new 
capitalist vermin, sucking the already impoverished blood of the 
“rural commune’’.’ 

..In a word, the State has given its assistance to the precocious 
development of the technical and economic means most calculated 
to facilitate and precipitate the exploitation of the agricultural 
producer, that is to say, of the largest productive force in Russia, 
and to enrich the “new pillars of society”. 

5) This combination of destructive influences, unless smashed 
by a powerful reaction, is bound to lead to the death of the rural 
commune. 

But one wonders why all these interests (including the large 
industries placed under government protection), seeing that they 
are doing so well out of the current state of the rural 
commune—why would they deliberately conspire to kill the goose 
that lays the golden eggs? Precisely because they sense that this 
“current state” is no longer tenable, and that consequently the 
current method of exploiting it is now outdated. Already the 
poverty of the agricultural producer has affected the land, which 
is becoming barren. Good harvests succeed famines by turns. The 
average of the last ten years showed agricultural production not 
simply standing still but actually declining. Finally, for the first 
time Russia now has to import cereals instead of exporting them. 
So there is no time to lose. There must be an end to it. It is 
necessary to make an intermediate rural class of the more or less 
prosperous minority of the peasants, and turn the majority into 
proletarians, without mincing matters. To this end the spokesmen 
of the “new pillars of society” denounce the very wounds which 
they have inflicted on the commune as being as many natural 
symptoms of its decrepitude. 

Disregarding all the miseries which are at present overwhelming 
the Russian “rural commune”, and considering only its constitu- 
tive form and its historical surroundings, it is first of all evident 

that one of its fundamental characteristics, communal ownership 
of the land, forms the natural basis of collective production and 
appropriation. What is more, the Russian peasant’s familiarity with 
the contract of artel would ease the transition from parcel labour 
to collective labour, which he already practises to a certain extent 
in the undivided grasslands, in land drainage and other undertak- 
ings of general interest. But for collective labour to supplant 
parcel labour—the source of private appropriation—in agricul- 
ture in the strict sense, two things are required: the economic 
need for such a change, and the material conditions to bring it 
about. 

As for the economic need, it will be felt by the “rural 
commune” itself from the moment it is placed in normal 
conditions, that is to say, as soon as the burdens weighing on it are 
removed and its cultivable Jand has assumed a normal extent. 
Gone are the days when Russian agriculture called for nothing but 
land and its parcel cultivator, armed with more or less primitive 
tools. These days have passed all the more swiftly as the oppression 
of the agricultural producer infects and lays waste his fields. What he 
needs now is cooperative labour, organised on a large scale. 
Moreover, will the peasant who lacks* the necessary things for 
cultivating two or three dessiatines” be better off with ten times the 
number of dessiatines? 

But where are the tools, the manure, the agronomic methods, 
etc., all the means that are indispensable to collective labour, to 
come from? It is precisely this point which demonstrates the great 
superiority of the Russian “rural commune” over archaic com- 
munes of the same type. Alone in Europe it has kept going on a 
vast, nationwide scale. It thus finds itself in historical surroundings 
in which its contemporaneity with capitalist production endows it 
with all the conditions necessary for collective labour. It is in a 
position to incorporate all the positive acquisitions devised by the 
capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks. The 
physical lie of the land in Russia invites agricultural exploitation 
with the aid of machines, organised on a vast scale and managed 
by cooperative labour. As for the costs of establishment—the 
intellectual and material costs— Russian society owes this much to 
the “rural commune”, at whose expense it has lived for so long 
and to which it must still look for its ‘element of regeneration”. 

The best proof that this development of the “rural commune” is 
in keeping with the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis 
which capitalist production has undergone in the European and 
American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis 
that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to 
a higher form of the most archaic type—collective production and 
appropriation. 

Since so many different interests, and especially those of the 
“new pillars of society” erected under the benign rule of 
Alexander II, have gained a good deal from the present state of the 
“rural commune’, why would they deliberately plot to bring about 
its death? Why do their spokesmen denounce the wounds inflicted 
on it as so much irrefutable proof of its natural decrepitude? Why 
do they wish to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? 

Simply because the economic facts, which it would take me too 
long to analyse here, have revealed the mystery that the current 
state of the commune is no longer tenable and that soon, by sheer force 
of circumstances, the current method of exploiting the mass of the 
people will no longer be in fashion. So new measures are 
needed—and the innovation stealthily introduced in widely 
differing forms always comes down to this: abolish communal 
property, make an intermediate rural class of the more or less 
prosperous minority of the peasants, and turn the majority into 
proletarians, without mincing matters. 

On the one hand, the “rural commune” has nearly been 
brought to the point of extinction; on the other, a powerful con- 
spiracy is keeping watch with a view to administering the final blow. 
To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed. 
For that matter, the holders of political and social power are do- 
ing their very best to prepare the masses for just such a disaster. 

And the historical situation of the Russian “rural commune”’ is 
unparalleled! Alone in Europe, it has kept going not merely as 
scattered debris such as the rare and curious miniatures in a state 
of the archaic type which one could still come across until quite 
recently in the West, but as the virtually predominant form of 
popular life covering an immense empire. If it possesses in the 
communal ownership of the soil the basis of collective appropria- 
tion, its historical surroundings, its contemporaneity with capitalist 
production, lend it all the material conditions of communal labour 
on a vast scale. It is thus in a position to incorporate all the 
positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without 
passing through its Caudine Forks. It can gradually replace parcel 
farming with large-scale agriculture assisted by machines, which 

the physical lie of the land in Russia invites. It can thus become the 
direct point of departure for the economic system towards which 
modern society tends, and turn over a new leaf without beginning 
by committing suicide. On the contrary, it would be necessary to 
begin by putting it on a normal footing. 

But opposing it is landed property controlling almost half the 
land—and the best land, at that—not to mention the domains of 
the State. That is where the preservation of the “rural commune” 
by way of its further development merges with the general trend 
of Russian society, of whose regeneration it is the price. 

Even from the economic point of view alone, Russia can emerge 
from its agrarian cul-de-sac by developing its rural commune; it 
would try in vain to get out of it by capitalised farming on the 
English model, to which all the social conditions of the country are 
inimical.* 

In order to be able to develop, it needs above all to live, and 
there is no escaping the fact that at the moment the life of the 
“rural commune” is in jeopardy. 

Apart from the reaction of any other destructive element from 
hostile surroundings, the gradual growth of chattels in the hands 
of private families, e.g. their wealth in the form of cattle, and 
sometimes even slaves or serfs—this sort of private accumulation 
is, in itself, enough to eat away at primitive economic and social 
equality in the long run, and give rise in the very heart of the 
commune to a conflict of interests which first undermines the 
communal ownership of arable land and ends by removing that of 
the forests, pastures, common lands, etc., after first converting 
them into a communal appendage of private property. 

4) The history of the decline of primitive communities (it would 
be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological 
formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of 
primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All 
we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any 
event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) 
the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater 

than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, 
that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline 
stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a 
certain stage of development, from historical surroundings not at 
all analogous with the historical surroundings of the Russian 
commune of today. 

When reading the histories of primitive communities written by 
bourgeois writers it is necessary to be on one’s guard. They do not 
even shrink from falsehoods. Sir Henry Maine, for example, who 
was a keen collaborator of the British Government in carrying out 
the violent destruction of the Indian communes, hypocritically 
assures us that all the government’s noble efforts to support the 
communes were thwarted by the spontaneous forces of economic 
laws! * 

5) You know perfectly well that today the very existence of the 
Russian commune has been jeopardised by a conspiracy of 
powerful interests; crushed by the direct extortions of the State, 
fraudulently exploited by the “capitalist” intruders, merchants, 
etc., and the land “owners”, it is undermined, into the bargain, by 
the village usurers, by conflicts of interests provoked in its very 
heart by the situation prepared for it. 

To expropriate the agricultural producers it is not necessary to 
chase them off their land, as was done in England and elsewhere; 
nor is it necessary to abolish communal property by an ukase. On 
the contrary: go and seize the product of their agricultural labour 
beyond a certain point and, despite all the gendarmes at your 
command, you will not succeed in keeping them on the land! In 
the last years of the Roman Empire the provincial decurions— 
large landowners—left their lands, becoming vagabonds, even 
selling themselves into slavery, simply in order to get rid of a 
“property” which was no more than an official pretext for 
extorting money from them. 

At the same time as the commune is bled dry and tortured, its 
land rendered barren and poor, the literary lackeys of the “new 
pillars of society” ironically depict the wounds inflicted on it as so 
many symptoms of its spontaneous decrepitude. They allege that it 
is dying a natural death and they would be doing a good job by 
shortening its agony. As far as this is concerned, it is no longer a 
matter of solving a problem; it is simply a matter of beating an 
enemy. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is 
needed. For that matter, the government and the “new pillars of 

society” are doing their best to prepare the masses for just such a 
disaster. If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it 
concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full 
scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in 
Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries 
enslaved by the capitalist system.