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

276V. I. LENINtransformed into small bourgeois farms.* As regards themass of “unappropriated” American lands, this role ofcreating the new agrarian relationships to suit the newmode of production (i.e., capitalism) was played by the“American General Redistribution”, by the Anti-Rentmovement (Anti-Rent-Bewegung) of the forties, the HomesteadAct, 110 etc. When, in 1846, Hermann Kriege, aGerman Communist, advocated the equal redistributionof the land in America, Marx ridiculed the Socialist-Revolutionaryprejudices and the petty-bourgeois theory ofthis quasi-socialism, but he appreciated the historicalimportance of the American movement against landed property,**as a movement which in a progressive way expressedthe interests of the development of the productive forcesand the interests of capitalism in America.6. WHY HAD THE SMALL PROPRIETORS IN RUSSIATO DECLARE IN FAVOUR OF NATIONALISATION?Look from this angle at the agrarian evolution of Russiasince the second half of the nineteenth century.What was our “great” Peasant Reform, the “cutting off”of the peasants lands, the removal of the peasants to the“poor lands”, the enforcement of the new land regulations* See Kautsky’s Agrarian Question (p. 132 et seq. of the Germantext) concerning the growth of the small farms in the AmericanSouth as a result of the abolition of slavery.** Vperyod, 1905, No. 15 (Geneva, April 7/20), article “Marx onthe American ‘General Redistribution’”. (See present edition, Vol. 8,pp. 323-29.—Ed.) (Second volume of Mehring’s Collected Works ofMarx and Engels.) “We fully recognise,” wrote Marx in 1846, “thehistorical justification of the movement of the American NationalReformers. We know that this movement strives for a result which,true, would give a temporary impetus to the industrialism of modernbourgeois society, but which, as a product of the proletarian movement,and as an attack on landed property in general, especially underthe prevailing American conditions, must inevitably lead, by its ownconsequences, to communism. Kriege, who with the German Communistsin New York joined the Anti-Rent-Bewegung (movement),clothes this simple fact in bombastic phrases, without entering intothe content of the movement.” 111