p Lenin carried out his scientific research in the field of agrarian relations because he wanted to determine, on the basis of precise economic analysis, what path of social development was in the best interests of the developing productive forces and also in those of the proletariat in the class struggle. Capitalism was clearly a necessary precondition for the advancement of the 293 interests of both, and he indicated which of the two possible roads to the victory of capitalism in Russian agriculture was the more preferable from the point of view of the proletariat, and why.

p In his letter to I. Skvortsov-Stepanov dated December 16, 1909, Lenin wrote that he was trying, to prove and did prove that "the development of agrarian relations in Russia is proceeding on capitalist lines both in landlord and in peasant economy, both outside and within the ’village commune’. In the second place, that this development has already irrevocably determined that there will be no other path than the capitalist path, no other grouping of classes than the capitalist grouping."  [293•1  And further: "We cannot halt at a general solution of the problem of capitalism when new events (and events that are of world-historic importance such as those of 1905-07) have raised a more concrete problem, of a more detailed nature, the problem of the struggle between the two paths or methods of capitalist agrarian development."  [293•2 

p Both theory (thanks largely to Lenin’s works) and life had settled this question beyond all doubt by showing that it was indeed capitalism that was developing in Russia, and not “ people’s production" (as the Narodniks tried to maintain). "Another, higher question has taken its place: capitalism of type α or capitalism of type β ".  [293•3  These two possible paths of development of capitalism in agriculture were called respectively the “Prussian” path and the “American” path.

p The “Prussian” path consists of the slow transformation of old landlord economy, tied by thousands of threads to serfdom and retaining its relics, into a capitalist, “Junker-type” economy of large-scale farming. The old landlord economy adjusts itself to the requirements of the times by making modifications along capitalist lines and carrying through the internal reforms necessarily involved in the transition from labour-service to hired labour. This path, therefore, entails no more than the modernisation of old estates, without detriment to the vital interests of their owners. The old gentry only don new clothes and modify forms of production and forms of appropriating surplus value. Moreover, the inevitable mixing and coexistence of old and new forms of farming restrains the rate of growth of social labour 294 productivity, and the peasants who arc hired to work the land remain without land themselves.

p The “American” path, on the contrary, consists of the revolutionary break-up and expropriation of the landlords’ estates in favour of the peasants, thanks to which agriculture receives an enormous impulse to develop freely, and the opportunity to do so, on the basis of commodity and money relations. This path results in the decisive abolition of the survivals of serfdom, followed by the emergence of two opposite trends—that towards bourgeois enrichment of the land-owning minority of the peasants and that towards the complete proletarianisation of the overwhelming majority of peasants and their separation from all means of production. Thus, the “American” path leads to the growth of a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat on what were formerly the feudal estates. Some fortunate individual peasants become prosperous, while the bulk of peasants live in poverty and are finally ruined. Since, however, the “ American" path involves the rapid and complete destruction of the feudal system and all the survivals of serfdom holding up the further development of society’s productive forces, it undoubtedly represents the historically more progressive path. It is also relatively more progressive for the further reason that it puts an end to the political rule of big estate owners, who usually advocate the most savage forms of political reaction. Because of this, the “American” path extends the democratic basis of the organisation of society, undermining faith in the unshakable and sacred character of large-scale private property, and creating relatively better conditions for the working class to prepare for the socialist revolution, its main historical task.

p In post-Reform Russia both the “Prussian” and the “ American" path of agrarian development were in evidence. The country was, as a whole, ripe for the complete bourgeois transformation of agriculture. The question of this transformation was the national question of bourgeois development in Russia at that time, just as, after the 1848-49 revolution in Germany, her national question was that of the unification of more than thirty states into one state in the interests of bourgeois development. Polemics between the major political parties of Russia centred, as a rule, not on whether radical changes in the existing system of agrarian relations were necessary but on how these changes should be brought about.

p Lenin consistently argued in favour of the “American” path of development as the solution to the agrarian question. The 295 agrarian question, as a question of national significance for bourgeois development in Russia, could be reduced to fulfilling the centuries-old aspirations of the peasantry for land, so that it was, in fact, a peasant question. In 1905-07, 10 million peasant households owned 197.1 million acres of land, while 28,000 "noble and grimy landlords" owned 167.4 million. These enormous inequalities in landownership were the background to the growing peasant struggle for land.  [295•1 

p In the given historical conditions, despite the doctrinaire views of the Russian opportunists, Lenin regarded the peasant movement, the movement for "general redistribution”, as a revolutionary force. The Mensheviks, under the pretence of defending Marxism from Narodism, treated the peasant movement as a reactionary movement. True Marxists, according to Lenin, should not simply reject Narodism outright, but should be able to extract its positive content "as a theory of the mass petty- bourgeois struggle of democratic capitalism against liberal-landlord capitalism, of ‘American’ capitalism against ‘Prussian’ capital- ism".  [295•2 

p The agrarian question was repeatedly on the agenda of the Congresses and Conferences of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

p The first agrarian programme adopted by the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 proved to be unsatisfactory. It lacked "a clear idea of the issue around which the agrarian struggle could and should develop in the process of the bourgeois revolution in Russia—a clear idea of the types of capitalist agrarian evolution that were objectively possible as the result of the victory of one or other of the social forces engaged in this struggle".  [295•3  That first programme, advocating neither the “American” nor the " Prussian" path of bourgeois development in Russia, proposed a kind of middle way between the two. The programme’s mistakes resulted from overestimating the existing degree of capitalist development in farming. When the programme was put to the vote, many Social-Democrats thought that the only survivals of serfdom that remained were the "cut-off lands”, and that history had done the rest of the job of abolishing feudalism, that the remnants of serfdom were not so very significant and represented only one "small detail" in the country’s economic structure.

p The Bolshevik Conference held in Tammcrfors in December 1905 adopted Lenin’s resolution on the agrarian question. This stated that "the Party supports the revolutionary measures of the peasantry, including the confiscation of all state, church, monastery, crown and privately-owned land, making it its principal and constant task to ensure the independent organisation of the rural proletariat, explain to it the irreconcilable conflict between its interests and those of the rural bourgeoisie, and point out the ultimate goal of socialism which alone is capable of doing away with the division of society into classes and all exploitation of man by man".  [296•1 

p A heated debate began inside the Party around the question of who should be entrusted with the management of confiscated land, and whether the Party should direct its efforts to securing the nationalisation of the land or to its municipalisation.

p The Mensheviks (Maslov, Jordania and others) rejected nationalisation and defended the idea of municipalisation. They maintained, for example, that nationalisation was not acceptable because it encroached upon the rights of nations to self- determination, that there was a danger of the bureaucracy inevitable in a class society gaining strength and that nationalisation would not be favoured by the peasants themselves. In general, the Mensheviks regarded nationalisation as Utopian. According to Maslov, in the event of the nationalisation of the land, "we should have not only one Vendee but a general peasants’ uprising".

p Plekhanov tried to uphold his negative attitude towards nationalisation by referring to Russia’s past, to the fact that nationalised land had been the economic basis of Moscow Rus in the period before Peter the Great, so that nationalising the land would mean moving backwards. In answering Plekhanov, Lenin said that this argument either represented an exaggerated liberal-= Narodnik view of Moscow Rus or else was sheer sophistry. Even if one accepted that land was state property in old Moscow Rus, then the state itself was based on a mode of production radically different from capitalism, which only became prevalent in the Russian economy in the second half of the i9th century. Plekhanov also claimed that nationalisation would not abolish the economic basis of tsarism and hence was not a revolutionary measure. Moreover, he said, if under certain circumstances a deposed reactionary regime were to be restored in the political sphere, 297 nationalised land would automatically fall into the hands of such a regime; whereas if the land were to be municipalised, the position would be quite different in the event of a restoration, as the land could not become the property of the old order. Lenin remarked that such “arguments” against nationalisation in favour of municipalisation merely "blocked thought".

p In his speeches at the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1906, and in his book The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-07, and in other works, Lenin put forward and developed an entirely realistic programme for the proletariat in the peasant bourgeois revolution, which received a warm response from the millions of Russian peasants and stood the test of time.

p Petty-bourgeois opponents of a revolutionary solution of the agrarian question, afraid of unleashing the spontaneous forces in the peasant movement, constantly reiterated the need to observe the abstract principle of “justice” as the guide to political practice. Similarly, liberal-bourgeois democrats and bureaucrats, protecting the minority interests of the exploiters, put no small amount of effort into their reflections on the practicability and “desirability” of land reforms from the point of view of the state. Both always opposed taking a sober view of things; their prescriptions presented no threat to the existing order.

p Lenin’s tactics were in practice the complete reverse of those supported by these "revolutionaries of the phrase" and conservatives in action. Lenin repeatedly stressed that when determining the programme and proletarian practical steps it was necessary to proceed from a precise consideration of the country’s economic and political reality. The highest principle and duty guiding a true Marxist should be that of making a concrete scientific analysis of the concrete situation at any time in the interests of the complete triumph of both the immediate aims and the final goals of the proletariat in the class struggle. A true Marxist ought then to determine, on the basis of such an analysis, what measures and line of action can and will attract all the exploited and the oppressed to the banner of the working class.

p Guided thus by truly revolutionary and scientific criteria, by the interests of the proletariat and the majority of peasants, Lenin made a thorough comparative study of the demand for the municipalisation of the land and that for its nationalisation.

p Municipalisation presupposed the transfer of the landlords’ land to organs of local self-government, while small producers 298 were to retain their allotted plots as before. Small producers would, therefore, have been able to obtain land only from the local authorities, and they were to pay for it in money rent. It was quite clear that most of the peasants could not have afforded to obtain land in this way, and this alone provided the grounds for Lenin’s view that the peasants would not favour municipalisation, since they did not want to be, yet again, the object of a “swindle”, as they were in the 1861 Reform.  [298•1  Outside of a fully consistent democratic state system, such "agrarian bimetallism”, as Lenin termed the municipalisation programme, would run counter to the interests of the peasants, who desired only land and freedom, and would in fact mean cheating them. Even if municipalisation were to undermine landlord ownership, it would not touch that other pillar of the Russian Asiatic way of life, with its economic and social backwardness—the medieval system of allotment land tenure. While appearing to satisfy the peasants’ demands for land within the framework of local administrative units by dividing the land into holdings of individual “Zemstvo” organs (local governing bodies), municipalisation would have led to the breaking-up of the all-Russia democratic movement, and would have promoted “localism”, and the isolation and alienation of one region from another.

p "Municipalisation,” Lenin pointed out, "is a reactionary slogan, which idealises the medieval isolation of the regions, and dulls the peasantry’s consciousness of the need for a centralised agrarian revolution".  [298•2 

p The slogan of the Party in the agrarian revolution in Russia must be the nationalisation of land, said Lenin, the transfer of all land exclusively to the state by making it state property, and the distribution of land without compensation among those who till it. The total abolition of private property in the land and the transfer of the land into the hands of the farmers would comprise a vital democratic reform of the socio-economic system permitting farming to develop on a commodity basis unburdened by the medieval allotment system of landownership and, above all, by the remnants of landlord economy. Only nationalisation could abolish at one stroke all the distinctions between the various types of land holding which existed in the country and which were retarding the progress of agriculture. Nationalisation was in the peasants’ interest, creating for the small producer the 299 best conditions possible within the limits of capitalism for developing agriculture on “free” land.

p Private landownership hinders the free application of capital to the land. As Marx showed, the abolition of private property in the land and its transformation into state property is one of the capital’s most cherished dreams. The private owner of land, who played an important role in both the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, becomes a useless canker under capitalism. The radical bourgeois completely understands in theory the need to abolish private landownership, and only does not do so in practice because "he lacks the courage, since an attack on one form of property—a form of the private ownership of a condition of labour—might cast considerable doubts on the other form. Besides, the bourgeois has himself become an owner of land."  [299•1 

p The economic interest of the bourgeoisie in "doing away with" private property in the land results from the fact that a nationalised agriculture can free capital from a host of restraints to its progress. And the less developed capitalism is, the more possible is such nationalisation. But in a mature capitalist society where an extremely sharp class struggle is already in progress between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and where bourgeois relations in production have been completely formed, the state is not likely to dare to "play with fire" by attacking landownership. The mass of the bourgeoisie in such a society is no longer radical and has become reactionary, having in mind the socialist upheaval that is always round the corner. The bourgeois nationalisation of the land therefore is possible only in a “young” bourgeois society.

p In his analysis of the advantages of nationalisation over municipalisation from the point of view of the working class, Lenin devoted some attention to the theory of ground rent, though he considered that in Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value this theory is "made so plain that even the Maslovs should be able to grasp it!"  [299•2 

p Nationalisation of the land puts an end to the existence of absolute ground rent as a kind of tribute the capitalist farmer has to pay to the landed proprietor who does not participate in production but who, only by virtue of his right of ownership, secures an income from his land as a money lender does from 300 the money he lends. With the disappearance of private landownership, absolute ground rent also disappears in the natural course of events. The extra capital released goes to speed up the application of science and technology in agriculture so that the transition from extensive to intensive methods of farming can be made.

p Differential rent, the difference between the price of production on the worst soil and on better soil, which is part of the surplus value and exceeds the average profit on capital, does not disappear (as does absolute ground rent) as a result of nationalisation, but only changes its owner by going into the possession of the collective capitalist—the bourgeois state.

p While welcoming the nationalisation of the land as the slogan of the capitalist renewal of Russia, Lenin always emphasised that a truly radical agrarian revolution was only possible as a consequence of a radical political revolution, when power was in the hands of the revolutionary people. Consistent nationalisation presupposes the establishment of a democratic republic, just as, vice versa, the strengthening and complete triumph of a democratic political system is unthinkable without deep democratic changes in property relations. This universal Marxist-= Leninist truth is, incidentally, confirmed a thousand times by the tremendous wealth of experience of the countries of Asia and Africa that have entered the path of independent development since the Second World War.

p But Lenin never for a moment lost sight of the prospect of the socialist revolution. He taught socialists to "combine the purely proletarian struggle with the general peasant struggle, but not to confuse the two".  [300•1  Russian Social-Democrats, he said, supported the peasants’ demands for the confiscation and nationalisation of the landlords’ land without regarding this measure as in the least a socialist one, without calling it “socialisation”. The process of levelling in land tenure that would supposedly take place in a commodity capitalist economy, of which the Socialist-= Revolutionaries spoke so much, was in fact the purest reactionary utopianism.

Bourgeois nationalisation of the land only clears the way for the proletariat to socialist revolution. It brings freedom for the struggle for socialism: "The democratic struggle is waged,” Lenin wrote, "by the workers together with a section of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty bourgeoisie. On the other 301 hand, the socialist struggle is waged by the workers against the whole of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged".  [301•1