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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY291lem, not of consolidating the new agriculture, which hasalready taken shape, by means of dividing the land as privateproperty, but of clearing the ground for the creationof a new agriculture (out of the existing elements) upon“free”, i.e., nationalised, land. The fanaticism of the privateproperty owner can and should assert itself, in duetime, as a demand of the newly-hatched free farmer for theassured possession of his farm. Nationalisation of the landhad to become the demand of the peasant masses in the Russianrevolution as the slogan of farmers who want to breakthe shell of medievalism. Therefore, for Social-Democratsto preach division of the land to the mass of the peasants,who are inclined towards nationalisation, and who are onlyjust beginning to enter the conditions for the final “sortingout” that should produce free farmers capable of creatingcapitalist agriculture, is glaring historical tactlessness,and reveals inability to take stock of the concrete historicalsituation.Our Social-Democratic “divisionists”—Comrades Finn,Borisov, and Shanin—are free from the theoretical dualismof the “municipalisers”, including the latters’ vulgar criticismof Marx’s theory of rent (with this we shall deal lateron), but they make a mistake of a different kind, a mistakeof historical perspective. While taking a generallycorrect stand in theory (and in this they differ from the“municipalisers”), they repeat the mistake of our cut-offlandsprogramme of 1903. That mistake was due to the factthat while we correctly defined the trend of development,we did not correctly define the moment of that development.We assumed that the elements of capitalist agriculturehad already taken full shape in Russia, both in landlordfarming (minus the cut-off lands and their conditions ofbondage—hence the demand that the cut-off lands be returnedto the peasants) and in peasant farming, which seemedto have given rise to a strong peasant bourgeoisie andtherefore to be incapable of bringing about a “peasant agrarianrevolution”. The erroneous programme was not theresult of “fear” of the peasant agrarian revolution, but ofan over-estimation of the degree of capitalist developmentin Russian agriculture. The survivals of serfdom appearedto us then to be a minor detail, whereas capitalist agricul-