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

312V. I. LENINThat is why, proceeding from his “theory”, Maslov inevitablyarrived at the conclusion that “it makes no differencewhether it [ground rent] is called absolute or differentialrent” (Obrazovaniye, No. 3, p. 103); that the onlyquestion is whether that rent is to be made over to the localor to the central authorities. But such a view is the resultof theoretical ignorance. Quite apart from the questionof whom the rent is paid to, and the political purposes forwhich it will be used, there is the far more fundamentalquestion of the changes in the general conditionsof capitalist farming and of capitalist development thatare brought about by the abolition of private ownershipof land.Maslov has not even raised this purely economic question;it has not entered his mind, and it could not do so sincehe repudiates absolute rent. Hence the distorted one-sided,“politician’s” approach, as I might call it, which reducesthe question of confiscating the landlords’ estates exclusivelyto that of who will receive the rent. Hence the distorteddualism in the programme based on the anticipationof “the victorious development of the revolution” (the expressionused in the resolution on tactics which was addedto Maslov’s programme at the Stockholm Congress). Thevictorious development of the bourgeois revolution presupposes,first of all, fundamental economic changes that willreally sweep away all the survivals of feudalism and medievalmonopolies. In municipalisation, however, we see areal agrarian bimetallism: a combination of the oldest,most antiquated and obsolete, medieval allotment ownershipwith the absence of private landownership, i.e., withthe most advanced, theoretically ideal system of agrarianrelations in capitalist society. This agrarian bimetallismis a theoretical absurdity, an impossibility from thepurely economic point of view. Here, the combination ofprivate with public ownership of land is a purely mechanicalcombination “invented” by a man who sees no differencebetween the very system of capitalist farming underprivate landownership and without private landownership.The only question such a “theoretician” is concerned with is:how is the rent, “no matter what you call it, absolute ordifferential”, to be shuffled around?