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

362V. I. LENINetc. The petty-bourgeois method is the method of buildingup relations making for the greatest possible degree of socialpeace. The proletarian method is exclusively that ofclearing the path of all that is medieval, clearing it for theclass struggle. Therefore, the proletarian can leave it to thesmall proprietors to discuss “norms” of landownership;the proletarian is interested only in the abolition of thelandlord latifundia, the abolition of private ownershipof land, that last barrier to the class struggle in agriculture.In the bourgeois revolution we are interested not inpetty-bourgeois reformism, not in a future “nest” of tranquillisedsmall farmers, but in the conditions for the proletarianstruggle against all petty-bourgeois tranquillity on abourgeois basis.It is this anti-proletarian spirit that municipalisationintroduces into the programme of the bourgeois agrarianrevolution; for, despite the deeply fallacious opinion ofthe Mensheviks, municipalisation does not extend andsharpen the class struggle, but, on the contrary, bluntsit. It blunts it, too, by assuming that local democracy ispossible without the complete democratisation of the centre.It also blunts it with the idea of “municipal socialism”,because the latter is conceivable in bourgeois society onlyaway from the high road of the struggle, only in minor,local, unimportant questions on which even the bourgeoisiemay yield, may reconcile itself to without losing the possibilityof preserving its class rule.The working class must give bourgeois society the purest,most consistent and most thorough-going programmeof bourgeois revolution, including the bourgeois nationalisationof the land. The proletariat scornfully rejects pettybourgeoisreformism in the bourgeois revolution; we areinterested in freedom for the struggle, not in freedom forphilistine bliss.Naturally, the opportunism of the intelligentsia in theworkers’ party takes a different line. Instead of the broadrevolutionary programme of bourgeois revolution, attentionis focused on a petty-bourgeois utopia: to secure localdemocracy with incomplete democratisation at the centre,to secure for petty reformism a little corner of municipalactivity away from great “turmoil”, and to evade the extra-