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

278V. I. LENINmine the very foundations of the life of entire villages,and, at any price, in spite of everything, setting at naughtthe life and husbandry of any number of “old established”allotment peasants, to set up new otrub 111a holdings, as thebasis for new capitalist agriculture. There is unquestionableeconomic sense in that line; it faithfully expresses the realcourse of development as it should be under the rule oflandlords who are being transformed into Junkers.What is the other line, the peasant line? Either it iseconomically impossible—in which case all talk aboutthe peasants confiscating the landlords’ estates, about thepeasant agrarian revolution, etc., is either humbug or anempty dream. Or it is economically possible—provided oneelement of bourgeois society is victorious over the otherelement of bourgeois society—in which case we must form aclear idea of, and clearly show to the people, the concreteconditions for that development, the conditions under whichthe peasants can reshape the old agrarian relations on anew, capitalist basis.Here there naturally arises the thought that this peasantline is precisely the division of the landlords’ estates amongthe peasants for their private property. Very well. But ifthis division is to correspond to the really new, capitalistconditions of agriculture, it must be carried out in a newway and not in the old way. The division must be based noton the old allotment land distributed among the peasantsa hundred years ago at the will of the landlords’ bailiffsor of the officials of Asiatic despotism, but on the needsof free, commercial agriculture. To meet the requirementsof capitalism, the division must be a division among freefarmers, not among “indolent” peasants, the great majorityof whom run their economies by routine and traditionin conformity with patriarchal, not with capitalist conditions.A division according to the old standards, i.e., inconformity with the old forms of landownership based onpeasant allotments, will not be the clearing of the old landownership,but its perpetuation; not clearing the wayfor capitalism, but rather encumbering it with a mass ofunadapted and unadaptable “indolents” who cannot becomefree farmers. To be progressive, the division must be basedon a new sorting process among the peasant cultivators,