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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY281making the sign of the cross), and expresses the need forthe utmost development of the land’s productive forcesunder commodity production.One may judge from this how clever Pyotr Maslov is inthinking that the only difference between his agrarian programmeand the peasant programme of the Trudoviks is theperpetuation of the old, medieval, allotment ownership!The peasant allotment land is a ghetto in which the peasantryis suffocating and from which it is straining to escapeto free* land. Yet in spite of the peasants’ demandsfor free, i.e., nationalised, land, Pyotr Maslov seeks toperpetuate this ghetto, to perpetuate the old system; hewould subject the best lands, confiscated from the landlordsand converted to public use, to the conditions of theold system of landownership and the old methods of farming.In deeds, the Trudovik peasant is a most determinedbourgeois revolutionary, but in words he is a petty-bourgeoisutopian who imagines that a “General Redistribution”is the starting-point of harmony and fraternity,** andnot of capitalist farming. Pyotr Maslov is, in deeds, a reactionarywho, fearing the Vendée of a future counter-revolution,seeks to consolidate the present anti-revolutionaryelements of the old forms of landownership and to perpetuatethe peasant ghetto, while in words he thoughtlessly repeatsmechanically learnt phrases about bourgeois progress. Whatthe real conditions are for real free-bourgeois progress andnot for the Stolypin-bourgeois progress of Russian agriculture,Maslov and Co. absolutely fail to understand.The difference between the vulgar Marxism of PyotrMaslov and the methods of research that Marx really used* The “Socialist-Revolutionary” Mr. Mushenko, the most consistentexponent of the view of his party in the Second Duma bluntlydeclared: “We raise the banner of the liberation of the land” (47th sitting,May 26, 1907, p. 1174). One must be blind to fail to perceivenot only the essential capitalist nature of this supposedly “socialist”banner (Pyotr Maslov sees this too), but also the progressive economicnature of such an agrarian revolution compared with the Stolypin-Cadetrevolution (this Pyotr Maslov does not see).** Cf. the naïve expression of this bourgeois-revolutionary pointof view in the speech of the “Popular Socialist” Volk-Karachevskyabout “equality, fraternity, and liberty”. (Second Duma, 16th sitting,March 26, 1907, pp. 1077-80.)