Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY239The pivot of the struggle is the feudal latifundia whichare the most conspicuous embodiment and the strongestmainstay of the survivals of serfdom in Russia. The developmentof commodity production and capitalism willcertainly and inevitably put an end to those survivals.In that respect Russia has only one path before her, thatof bourgeois development.But there may be two forms of that development. Thesurvivals of serfdom may fall away either as a result ofthe transformation of landlord economy or as a result ofthe abolition of the landlord latifundia, i.e., either by reformor by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceedby having big landlord economies at the head, which willgradually become more and more bourgeois and graduallysubstitute bourgeois for feudal methods of exploitation.It may also proceed by having small peasant economies atthe head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the“excrescence” of the feudal latifundia from the social organismand then freely develop without them along the pathof capitalist economy.Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois developmentwe would call the Prussian path and the Americanpath, respectively. In the first case feudal landlordeconomy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlordeconomy, which condemns the peasants to decades of mostharrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the sametime a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”)arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, orelse it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates andsplits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates,becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolvesinto a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main contentof the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage intoservitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of thefeudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the mainbackground is transformation of the patriarchal peasantinto a bourgeois farmer.In the economic history of Russia both these types ofevolution are clearly in evidence. Take the epoch of the fallof serfdom. A struggle went on between the landlords andthe peasants over the method of carrying out the reform.