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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY283of a goodly share of landlord ownership! But the Social-Democrat, led astray by the “municipalisers”, does notunderstand that the sound of words vanishes but the deedremains. The sound of the words about equality, socialisation,etc., will vanish, because there cannot be equalisationunder commodity production. But the deed will remain,i.e., the greatest break with the feudal past that can possiblybe achieved under capitalism, the break with medievalallotment ownership and with all routine and tradition.When people say “nothing will come of equalised redistribution”,the Marxist ought to understand that this “nothing”relates exclusively to the socialist aims, exclusivelyto the fact that this is not going to abolish capitalism. Butfrom attempts to bring about such a redistribution, evenfrom the very idea of such a redistribution, very muchwill come that will be of advantage to the bourgeois-democraticrevolution.For that revolution may take place either with the predominanceof the landlords over the peasants—and thatrequires the preservation of the old form of ownership andthe Stolypin reform of it exclusively by the power of theruble; or it will take place as a result of the victory ofthe peasantry over the landlords—and that, in view of theobjective conditions of capitalist economy, is impossiblewithout the abolition of all forms of medieval landownership,both landlord and peasant. The choice is betweenthe Stolypin agrarian reform and peasant revolutionarynationalisation. Only these solutions are economically real.Anything intermediate, from Menshevik municipalisationto Cadet redemption payments, is petty-bourgeoisnarrow-mindedness, a stupid distortion of theory, a poorinvention.in the Second Duma in favour of ownership (as distinct from the CadetBill on state land reserve introduced in the First Duma) but at thesame time he added: “The Party proposes only [!] to limit their [thepeasants’] right to alienate, and right to mortgage, i.e., to preventthe selling and buying of land on a large scale in future” (12th sitting,March 19, 1907, p. 740 of Stenographic Record). That is the archreactionaryprogramme of a bureaucrat disguised as a liberal.