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

364V. I. LENINagrarian reform [?] precisely of that character. It will be achievedwhen, at the highest point of development of the revolution, the consciouselements of social development are strong” (p. 103. Our italics).If Y. Larin or other Mensheviks believe this to be anexposition of the municipalisation programme, they arelabouring under a tragicomical illusion. The transfer ofall the land to state ownership is nationalisation of the land,and we cannot conceive of the land being disposed of otherwisethan through local self-governing bodies acting withinthe limits of a general state law. To such a programme—notof “reform”, of course, but of revolution—I wholeheartedlysubscribe, except for the point about distributing the land“gratis” even to those farmers who employ hired labour. Topromise such a thing on behalf of bourgeois society is morefitting for an anti-Semite than for a Social-Democrat. NoMarxist can assume the possibility of such an outcome withinthe framework of capitalist development; nor is thereany reason for considering it desirable to transfer rent tocapitalist farmers. Nevertheless, except for this point, whichwas probably a slip of the pen, it remains an indubitablefact that in a popular Menshevik pamphlet the nationalisationof the land is advocated as the best outcome at thehighest point of development of the revolution.On the question of what is to be done with the privatelyowned lands, Larin has this to say:“As regards the privately owned lands occupied by big, efficientcapitalist farms, Social-Democrats do not propose the confiscationof such lands for the purpose of dividing them among the small farmers.While the average yield of small peasant farming, either onprivately owned or rented land, does not reach 30 poods per dessiatinthe average yield of capitalist agriculture in Russia is over 50 poods”(p. 64).In saying this, Larin in effect throws overboard the ideaof a peasant agrarian revolution, for his average figuresof crop yields appertain to all the landlord lands. If wedo not believe in the possibility of achieving a wider andmore rapid increase in the productivity of labour on smallfarms after they have been freed from the yoke of serfdom,then all talk about “supporting the revolutionary actionsof the peasantry, including the confiscation of the landfrom the landlords”, is meaningless. Besides, Larin forgets