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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY397about the right to work and the speeches about the rightto work delivered by the French petty-bourgeois democratsof 1848? Both are certainly declamations of a bourgeoisdemocrat vaguely expressing the real historical contentof the struggle. The declamations of the Trudovik, however,vaguely express the actual aims of the bourgeois revolutionwhich objective conditions make possible (i.e., make possiblea peasant agrarian revolution in twentieth-centuryRussia), whereas the declamations of the French Kleinbürger*in 1848 vaguely expressed the aims of the socialistrevolution, which was impossible in France in the middleof the last century. In other words: the right to work demandedby the French workers in the middle of the nineteenthcentury expressed a desire to remodel the whole of smallproduction on the lines of co-operation, socialism, and soforth, and that was economically impossible. The right towork demanded by the Russian peasants in the twentiethcentury expresses the desire to remodel small agriculturalproduction on nationalised land, and that is economicallyquite possible. The twentieth century Russian peasants’“right to work” has a real bourgeois content in addition toits unsound socialistic theory. The right to work demandedby the French petty bourgeois and worker in the middleof the nineteenth century contained nothing but an unsoundsocialistic theory. That is the difference that many of ourMarxists overlook.But the Trudovik himself reveals the real content of histheory: not everybody will go on the land, although everybody“has an equal right”. Clearly, only farmers will go onthe land, or establish themselves there. Doing away withprivate ownership of the land means doing away with allobstacles to the farmers establishing themselves on the land.It is not surprising that Kiselyov, imbued with deepfaith in the peasant revolution and with a desire to serveit, speaks scornfully about the Cadets, about their wish toalienate not all, but only a part of the land, to make thepeasants pay for the land, to transfer the matter to “unnamedland institutions”, in short, about “the plucked birdwhich the Party of People’s Freedom is offering the peas-* Kleinbürger—petty bourgeois.—Ed.