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

256V. I. LENINments and to leave the commune to be granted to thosepeasants who may find it advantageous to do so, etc.”That is all. The error of that programme is not thatits principles or partial demands were wrong. No. Its principlesare correct, while the only partial demand it putsforward (the right to refuse allotments) is so incontestablethat it has now been carried out by Stolypin’s peculiarlegislation. The error of that programme is its abstractcharacter, the absence of any concrete view of thesubject. Properly speaking, it is not a programme, but aMarxist declaration in the most general terms. Of course,it would be absurd to put the blame for this mistake onthe authors of the programme, who for the first time laiddown certain principles long before the formation of aworkers’ party. On the contrary, it should be particularlyemphasised that in that programme the inevitability ofa “radical revision” of the Peasant Reform was recognisedtwenty years before the Russian revolution.Theoretically that programme should have been developedby clarifying the economic basis of our agrarian programme,the facts upon which the demand for a radical revision, asdistinct from a non-radical, reformist revision can andshould be based, and finally, by concretely defining thenature of this revision from the standpoint of the proletariat(which differs essentially from the general radicalstandpoint). Practically the programme should have beendeveloped by taking into account the experience of thepeasant movement. Without the experience of a mass—indeed, more than that—of a nation-wide peasant movement,the programme of the Social-Democratic LabourParty could not become concrete; for it would have beentoo difficult, if not impossible, on the basis of theoreticalreasoning alone, to define the degree to which capitalistdisintegration had taken place among our peasantry, andto what extent the latter was capable of bringing abouta revolutionary-democratic change.In 1903, when the Second Congress of our Party adoptedthe first agrarian programme of the R.S.D.L.P., we did notyet have such experience as would enable us to judge thecharacter, breadth, and depth of the peasant movement. Thepeasant risings in South Russia in the spring of 1902 remained