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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY3373. THE CENTRAL AUTHORITYAND THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE BOURGEOIS STATEIt is the central state authority that the municipalisersdislike above all else. Before we proceed to examine theirarguments, we must first ascertain what nationalisationmeans from the political and legal standpoint (its economiccontent we have ascertained above).Nationalisation is the transfer of all the land to theownership of the state. State ownership means that thestate is entitled to draw the rent from the land and to laydown general rules governing the possession and use of theland for the whole country. Under nationalisation suchgeneral rules certainly include prohibition of any sort ofintermediary, i.e., the prohibition of sub-letting, or thetransfer of land to anyone except the direct tiller, and soon. Furthermore, if the state in question is really democratic(not in the Menshevik sense à la Novosedsky), itsownership of the land does not at all preclude, but, on thecontrary, requires that the land be placed at the disposalof the local and regional self-governing bodies within thelimits of the laws of the country. As I have already pointedout in my pamphlet Revision, etc.,* our minimum programmedirectly demands this when it calls for the self-determinationof nationalities, for wide regional self-government,and so on. Hence the detailed regulations, correspondingto local differences, the practical allotment, or distributionof land among individuals, associations, etc.—all thisinevitably passes into the hands of the local organs of thestate, i.e., to the local self-governing bodies.Any misunderstandings on this score, if they could arise,would be due either to a failure to understand the differencebetween the concepts of ownership, possession, disposaland use, or to demagogical flirting with provincialismand federalism.** The basis of the difference between* See present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 181-83.—Ed.** We see that kind of flirting on the part of Maslov. ...“Perhaps,”he writes in an article in Obrazovaniye, 1907, No. 3, p. 104, “in someplaces, the peasants would agree to share their lands, but the refusalof the peasants in a single large area (e.g., Poland) to share their landswould be enough to make the proposal to nationalise all the land anabsurdity.” That is a sample of vulgar argumentation in which thereis no trace of thought, but a mere jumble of words. The “refusal” of