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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY313Indeed, in a capitalist country it is impossible to leavehalf the land (138,000,000 dessiatins out of 280,000,000)in private hands. There are two alternatives. Either privatelandownership is really needed at a given stage of economicdevelopment, really corresponds to the fundamental interestsof the capitalist farmer class—in which case it is inevitableeverywhere as the basis of bourgeois society whichhas taken shape according to a given type.Or private landownership is not essential for the givenstage of capitalist development, does not follow inevitablyfrom the interests of the farmer class, and even contradictsthose interests—in which case the preservation of thatobsolete form of ownership is impossible.The preservation of monopoly in one half of the land areaunder cultivation, the creation of privileges for one categoryof small farmers, the perpetuation in a free capitalistsociety of the “pale of settlement”, which divides landownersfrom tenants of public land, is an absurdity inseparablybound up with the absurdity of Maslov’s economictheory.Therefore, we must now proceed to examine the economicsignificance of nationalisation, which has been pushedinto the background by Maslov and his supporters.*5. CRITICISM OF PRIVATE LANDOWNERSHIPFROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE DEVELOPMENTOF CAPITALISMThe erroneous repudiation of absolute rent, of the formin which private landed property is realised in capitalistincomes, led to an important defect in Social-Democraticliterature and in the whole of the Social-Democratic positionon the agrarian question in the Russian revolution.Instead of taking the criticism of private landownershipinto their own hands, instead of basing this criticism onan economic analysis, an analysis of definite economic evolution,our Social-Democrats, following Maslov, surrenderedthis criticism to the Narodniks. The result was anextreme theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism and the dis-* At Stockholm one of these was Plekhanov. By the irony of history,this supposedly stern guardian of orthodoxy failed to notice,or did not want to notice, Maslov’s distortion of Marx’s economictheory.