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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY345I have quoted this argument in full because it clearlyindicates Plekhanov’s mistake. He has completely failedto understand the optimism which scares him. The “optimism”is not in assuming the election of officials by thepeople, etc., but in assuming the victory of the peasant agrarianrevolution. The real “difficulty” lies in securing thevictory of the peasant agrarian revolution in a countrywhich, at least since 1861, has been developing along Junker-bourgeoislines; and since you admit the possibilityof this fundamental economic difficulty, it is ridiculousto regard the difficulties of political democracy as all butanarchism. It is ridiculous to forget that the scope of theagrarian and of the political changes cannot fail to correspond,that the economic revolution presupposes a correspondingpolitical superstructure. Plekhanov’s cardinal mistakeon this question lies in this very failure to understandthe root of the “optimism” of our common, Menshevik andBolshevik, agrarian programme.Indeed, picture to yourselves concretely that a “peasantagrarian revolution”, involving confiscation of the landlords’estates, means in contemporary Russia. There canbe no doubt that during the past half-century capitalismhas paved the way for itself through landlord farming, whichnow, on the whole, is unquestionably superior to peasantfarming, not only as regards yields (which can be partlyascribed to the better quality of the land owned by thelandlords), but also as regards the wide use of improvedimplements and crop rotation (fodder grass cultivation).*There is no doubt that landlord farming is bound by a thousandties not only to the bureaucracy, but also to thebourgeoisie. Confiscation undermines a great many of theinterests of the big bourgeoisie, while the peasant revolution,as Kautsky has rightly pointed out, leads also to thebankruptcy of the state, i.e., it damages the interests notonly of the Russian, but of the whole international bourgeoisie.It stands to reason that under such conditions thevictory of the peasant revolution, the victory of the petty* See the new and comprehensive data on the superiority of landlordover peasant farming because of the new extensive cultivationof grass in Kaufman’s The Agrarian Question, Vol. II.