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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY339area of 57,000,000 dessiatins in 44 gubernias (accordingto Kaufman). Who is to determine what the lands availablefor “colonisation” are? Only the bourgeois central authority,of course. It alone will determine, for instance, whetherthe 1,500,000 dessiatins of “army lands” of the OrenburgCossacks, or the 2,000,000 dessiatins of the Don Cossacklands can or cannot serve as “colonisation lands” for thewhole country (because the Cossacks have 52.7 dessiatinsper household). Clearly, the question is not as it is put byMaslov, Plekhanov, and Co. It is not a question of protectingthe local regional self-governing bodies from the encroachmentsof the central government by means of paperresolutions; that cannot be done either with paper, or evenwith guns; for the trend of capitalist development is towardscentralisation, towards the concentration of such aforce in the hands of the central bourgeois government asthe “regions” will never be able to stand up against. Thepoint is that one and the same class should have politicalpower both centrally and locally, that democracy shouldbe quite consistently applied in both cases to an absolutelyequal degree, a degree sufficient to ensure the completesupremacy of, let us say, the majority of the population,i.e., the peasantry. That alone can serve as a real guaranteeagainst “excessive” encroachments of the centre, againstinfringements of the “lawful” rights of the regions. Allother guarantees invented by the Mensheviks are downrightfoolishness; they are foolscaps donned by provincial philistinesto protect themselves from the power of the centralauthority which has been concentrated by capitalism.That is exactly the kind of philistine foolishness that Novosedskyis guilty of, as also the whole of the present programme,which conceives the possibility of complete democracyin local self-government and a “lower” degree of democracyat the centre. Incomplete democracy means thatpower at the centre is not in the hands of the majority ofthe population, not in the hands of those elements whichpredominate in the local self-governing bodies; and thatmeans not only the possibility but the inevitability of conflicts,out of which, by virtue of the laws of economic development,the non-democratic central authority mustemerge victorious!