Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International/Chapter 3
Theses of the Executive Committee on the Agrarian
Question.
1. No one but the city industrial proletariat, led by the Communist Party. can save the labouring masses in the country from the pressure of capital and landlordism, from dissolution and from imperialistic wars, ever inevitable as long as the capitalist régime endures. There is no salvation for the peasants except to join the Communist proletariat, to support with heart and soul its revolutionary struggle to throw off the yoke of the landlords and the bourgeoisie.
On the other hand the industrial workers will be unable to carry out their universal historic mission, and to liberate humanity from the bondage of capital and from war, if they shut them selves within their separate guilds, their narrow trade interests, and restrict themselves self-sufficiently to a desire for the improvement of their sometimes tolerable bourgeois conditions of life. That is what happens in most advanced countries possessing a "labour aristocracy", which forms the basis the would-be Parties of the Second International, being in fact the worse enemies of Socialism, traitors to it, bourgeois jingoes, agents of the bourgeoisie within the Labour movement. The proletariat becomes a truly revolutionary class, truly Socialist in its actions, only by acting as the vanguard of all those who work and are being exploited, as their leader in the struggle for the overthrow of the oppressors; and this cannot be achieved without carrying the class struggle into the country, without making the labouring masses of the country all gather around the Communist Party of the town proletariat, without the peasants being educated by the town proletariat.
2. The labouring and exploited masses in the country which the town proletariat must lead on to the fight, or at the least win over on its side, are represented in all capitalist countries by the following classes:
In the first place by the agricultural proletariat, the hired labourers (by the year, by the job, by the day) making their living by wage labour in capitalistic agricultural establishments. The independent organization of this class, separated from the other groups of the country population (in a political, military, professional, cooperative, educational sense) an energetic propaganda among it, in order to win it over to the side of the Soviet power and of the dictatorship of the proletariat—such is the fundamental task of the Communist Parties in all countries.
In the second place the semi-proletariat or small peasants, those who make their living partly by working for wages in agricultural and industrial capitalist establishments, partly by toiling on their own or a rented parcel of land yielding but a part of the necessary food produce for their family. This class of the rural population is rather numerous in all capitalistic countries, but its existence and Its peculiar position is hushed up by the representatives of the bourgeoisie and the yellow "Socialists" affiliated to the Second International. Some of these people intentionally cheat the workers, but others follow blindly the average views of the public and mix up this special class with the whole mass of the "peasantry". Such a method of bourgeois deceit of the workers is used more particularly in Germany and France than in America and other countries. Provided that the work of the Communist Party is well organised, this group is sure to side with the Communists, the conditions of life of these half-proletarians being very hard, and the advantages the Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat would bring them being enormous and immediate.
In the third place the little proprietors, the small farmers who possess by the right of ownership or on rent small portions of land which satisfy the needs of their family and of their farming without requiring any additional wage labour. This part of the population as a class gains everything by the victory of the proletariat, which brings with it: (a) liberation from the payment of rent or of a part of the crops (for instance the métayers in France, the same arrangement in Italy, etc.) to the owners of large estates. (b) Abolition of all mortgages. (c) Abolition of many forms of pressure and dependence on the owners of large estates (forests and their use, etc.). (d) Immediate help or the farming from the proletarian power (permitting use by peasants of the agricultural implements and partly the buildings on the big capitalist estates expropriated by the proletariat, immediate transformation by the proletarian state power of all rural cooperatives and agricultural companies, which under the capitalist rule were chiefly supporting the wealthy and the middle peasantry, into institutions primarily for support of the poor peasantry, that is to say, the proletarians, semi-proletarians, the small peasants), etc.
At the same time the Communist Party should be thoroughly aware that during the transitional period leading from capitalism to Communism, i. e. during the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least some partial hesitations are inevitable in this class, in favour of unrestricted free trade and free use of the rights of private property. For this class, being a seller of commodities (although on a small scale), is necessarily demoralised by profit-hunting and habits of proprietorship. And yet, provided there is a consistent proletarian policy, and the victorious proletariat deals relentlessly with the owners of the large estates and the landed peasants, the hesitations of the class in question will not be considerable, and cannot change the fact that on the whole this class will side with the proletarian revolution.
3. All the three groups of the agrarian population taken together constitute its majority in all capitalist countries. This guarantees in full the success of· the proletarian revolution, not only in the towns but in the country as well. The contrary view is very widely spread, but it holds only by a systematic cheating on the part of bourgeois science and statistics. They hush up by every means any mention of the deep chasm which divides the rural classes we have indicated and the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, as well as the half proletarian and small peasants on one hand, and the landed peasants on the other. It holds further because of the incapacity and the failure of the heroes affiliated to the yellow Second International and the "labour aristocracy", demoralised by imperialistic privileges, to do genuine propaganda work for the benefit of the proletarian revolution, organizing work among the poor in the country. All the attention of the opportunists was given and is being given now to the arrangement of theoretical and practical agreements with the bourgeosie, including the landed and the middle peasantry (see about these classes further down) and not to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois government and the bourgeois class by the proletariat. In the third place, this view holds by the force of inveterate prejudice possessing already a great stability (and connected with all bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices), the incapacity to grasp a simple truth fully proved by the Marxian theory and confirmed by the practice of the proletarian revolution in Russia. This truth consists in the fact that the peasant population of the three classes we have mentioned above, being extremely oppressed, parceled and doomed to live in half-savage conditions in all countries, even in the most advanced, is economically, socially and morally interested in the victory of Socialism; but that it will firmly support the revolutionary proletariat only after the proletariat has taken hold of the political power, after it has done away with the owners of the large estates and the capitalists, after the oppressed masses will be able to see in practice that they have an organized leader and helper sufficiently powerful and firm to support and to guide, to show the right way.
4. The "middle peasantry" consists in the economic sense of small landowners who possess, according to the right of ownership or rent, portions of land, which, although small, nevertheless may (1) yield usually under capitalist rule not only a scanty provision for the family and the needs of the farming, but also a possibility to get a certain surplus which, at least in the best years, could be transformed into capital; and (2) need to employ (for instance in a family of two or three members) wage labour. As a concrete example of the middle peasantry in an advanced capitalist country we may take in Germany, according to the registration of 1907, a group with farms tilling from five to ten acres and in which farms the number of hired agricultural labourers makes about a third of the whole number of farms in this group[1]. In France, the country of a greater development of special cultures, for instance the vine yards, requiring special treatment and care, the corresponding group employs wage labour probably in a somewhat larger proportion.
The revolutionary proletariat cannot make it its object, at least for the nearest future, and for the beginning of the period of the proletarian dictatorship, to win this class over to its side. It will be sufficient to neutralise it—to make it take a neutral position in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeosie. The hesitations of this class in siding with one or the other force are inevitable, and in the beginning of the new epoch its preponderent tendency in the advanced capitalist countries will be to side with the bourgeoisie. The ideas and feelings of the possessing class are those prevailing in these countries. This leads to a direct interest in profit-hunting, in "free" trade and private property, and to an antagonistic attitude toward the hired workers. The victorious proletariat will immediately improve the position of this class by doing away with rent and by the abolition of mortgages. The proletarian power should by no means abolish at once private property in most of the capitalist countries, but it will at least not only secure to the small and the middle peasantry the ownership of their portions of land but enlarge these portions, giving the peasants the ownership of the whole area they used to rent (abolition of rent payment).
The combination of such measures with a relentless struggle against the bourgeoisie guarantees the full success of the neutralisation policy. The transition to collective agriculture must be managed with much circumspection and step by step, and the proletarian state power must proceed by the force of example without any violence toward the middle peasantry.
5. The landed peasants (Grossbauern) are capitalists in agriculture, managing their land usually with several hired labourers. They are connected with the "peasantry" only by their rather low standing of culture, their way of living. their personal manual work on their land. This is the most numerous element of the bourgeois class, and a decided enemy of the revolutionary proletariat. The chief attention of the communist parties in the rural districts must be given to the struggle against this element, to the liberation of the labouring and exploited majority of the rural population from the moral and political influence of these exploiters.
After the victory of the proletariat in the towns this class will inevitably oppose it by all means from sabotage to open armed counter-revolutionary resistance. The revolutionary proletariat must therefore immediately begin to prepare the necessary force for the disarmament of every single man of this class, and together with the overthrow of the capitalists in industry the proletariat must deal a relentless crushing blow to this class. In view of this end it must arm the rural proletariat and organize councils in the country, with no room for exploiters, and a preponderant place reserved to the proletarians and the semi-proletarians.
But the expropriation even of the landed peasants can by no means be an immediate object of the victorious proletariat, considering the lack of material, particularly of technical material and further of the social conditions necessary for the socialisation of such land. In some probably exceptional cases parts of their estates will be confiscated if they are leased in small parcels, or if they are specially needed by the surrounding small-peasant population. A free use must also be secured to this population, on definite terms, of a part of the agricultural machinery of the landed peasants, etc. As a general rule, however, the state power must leave to the landed peasants their land. confiscating it only in case of resistance to the power of the labouring and exploited peasants. The experience of the Russian proletarian revolution, whose struggle against the landed peasants became very complicated and very long because of a series of particular circumstances, has nevertheless shown that this class has been at least taught what it costs to make the least attempt at resistance, and is now quite willing to serve loyally the ends of the proletarian State. It begins even to be penetrated, although very slowly, by a respect for the power which protects every worker and deals relentlessly with the idle rich.
The special conditions which have complicated and prolonged the struggle of the Russian proletariat against the landed peasantry, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, consist chiefly in the fact that after the coup d'état of October 25 (November 7,1917), the Russian revolution traversed a stage of "generally democratic", actually bourgeois democratic, struggle of the peasantry as a whole against the landowners, and there was further the low standard of living and scarcity of the city proletariat, and finally the enormous distances and exceedingly bad transport conditions. As far as these adverse conditions do not exist in the advanced countries, the revolutionary proletariat in Europe and America must prepare with much more energy and carry out a much quicker and more complete victory over the resistance of the landed peasantry, depriving it of the least possibility to resist. This is of the utmost need, considering that until such a complete, absolute victory is won, the masses of the rural proletariat, the semi-proletarians and the small peasants will not acknowledge the stability of the proletarian State power.
6. The revolutionary proletariat must proceed to an immediate and unconditional confiscation of all the estates of the landowners and the big landlords, that is, of all those who systematically employ wage labour, directly or through their tenants, exploit all the small (and partly sometimes the middle) peasantry in their neighbourhood, do not share in the manual work and are mostly the descendants oi the feudal class (the nobility in Russia, Germany, Hungary, the restored seigneurs in France, the lords in England, the former slave-owners in America) or financial magnates who have become particularly rich, or a mixture of these two classes of exploiters and idlers.
No propaganda can be admitted in the ranks of the communist parties in favour of an indemnity to be paid to the owners of large estates for their expropriation. In the present conditions prevailing in Europe and America this would mean a treason to Socialism and the imposition of a new tax on the labouring and exploited masses, who have already suffered most from the war—which has increased the number of millionaires and multiplied their wealth.
In regard to the management of the estates confiscated by the victorious proletariat from the owners of large landed property, the prevailing practice in Russia, because of economic backwardness, was that of a partition of this landed property for the benefit ot the peasantry, and comparatively rare exceptions were the preservation of the so-called "Soviet Farm", managed by the proletarian State at its expense, and transforming the former wage labourers into workers employed by the State, and into members of the councils managing these Farms. In the advanced capitalist countries the Communist International considers that it should be a prevailing practice to preserve the large agricultural establishments and manage them on the lines of the "Soviet Farms" in Russia.
But it would be the greatest mistake to exagerate or to standardize this rule, and never to admit the free gift of a part of the land expropriated from the neighbourhood.
In the first place, the usual reason against it, pointing to the technical advantage of the big farming, amounts very often to a substitution of the worst opportunism to an undeniable theoretical truth, which is treason to the revolution. The proletariat has no right, whenever the success of the revolution is at stake, to halt because of a temporary decrease of production, just as the bourgeois enemies of slave ownership in North America did not halt because of the temporary falling off of the cotton industry as a result of the civil war of 1863–1866. The bourgeoisie cares only for industrial production as such, whereas the working and exploited population is chiefly concerned with the overthrow of the exploiters and the securing of conditions which would give a chance to the workers to work for their own benefit, and not the benefit of the capitalist. To secure the victory of the proletariat and its stability, is the first and the fundamental task of the proletariat. And there is no safeguard of this stability possible without the neutralisation of the middle peasantry, and without securing the support of a large part if not of the whole mass of the small peasantry.
In the second place not only the enlargement but even the preservation of large production in agriculture requires a fully developed country proletariat with a ripe revolutionary consciousness, a thorough professional training and an experience in political organisation. Wherever such conditions are not available and there is no possibility to entrust the work to conscious and competent workers, all experiments of a hasty transition to the management by the State of large farming establishments would only compromise the proletarian power. The organisation of "Soviet Farms" requires an extreme care and a solid preparation.
In the third place all capitalist countries, even the most advanced, have still some remnants extant of medieval forms of semi-servitude, exploiting the small peasants of the neighhourhod for the benefit of the owners of large estates, as for example the "Instleute" in Germany, the "métayers" in France, the farmers paying the rent out of the profits in the United States (not only the negroes are being exploited in the Southern States in this particular way, but also the whites). In such cases the proletarian state must transfer the land rented by small peasants to the former farmers for their free use, as there Is no other economic and technical base, and it cannot be created all at once.
If just at first after the proletarian coup d'état the immediate confiscation of the big estates becomes absolutely necessary, and moreover also the banishment or the internment of all land-owners as leaders of the counter revolution and relentless oppressors of the whole country population, the proletarian power, in proportion to its consolidation not only in the towns but in the country as well, must systematically strive to take advantage of all the forces of this class. of all those who possess valuable experience, learning, organisational gifts, and must use them (under special control of the most reliable communist workers) to organise the gross agriculture on Socialist principles.
7. The victory of Socialism over capitalism, the consolidation of Socialism will be definitely guaranteed at the time when the proletarian State power after having definitely subdued all resistance of the exploiters and secured for itself a complete solidity and full submission will reorganise the whole industry on the base of gross collective production and a new technical base (founded on the electrification of agriculture). This alone will afford a possibility of such a radical help in the technical and the social sense, accorded by the town to the backward and dispersed country. that this help will create a material base for an enormous increase of the productivity of agricultural and the general farming work, and will incite the small farmers by the force of example and the care for their own profit to pass to the gross collective machine agriculture. This undeniable theoretical truth, nominally acknowledged by all Socialists, is in fact being distorted by the opportunism prevailing in the yellow Second International and among the leaders of the German and the English "Independents", as well as the French Longuetists, etc. The distortion consists in turning the attention to a comparatively distant and beautifuly rosy future, driving it away from the immediate problems of the present hard transition period and the preparation for this future. In practice this amounts to the preaching of a conciliation with the bourgeosie and "social peace", that is to say of complete treason to the cause of the proletariat struggling now under conditions of unheard-of destruction and pauperization created all over the world by the war and in the face of an unheard-of enrichment and impudence of a batch of millionaires caused by the same war.
Most particularly in the country a real possibility of successful struggle for socialism requires in, the first place that all Communist parties educate in the industrial proletariat the consciousness of the necessity of sacrifice on its part and the readiness to sacrifice itself for the overthrow of the bourgeosie and the consolidation of the proletarian power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is based on the proletariat knowing how to organize and to lead the working and the exploited masses, and the vanguard being ready for the greatest sacrifices and for heroism. In the second place a possibility of success requires that the labouring and the most exploited masses in the country experience an immediate and great improvement of their position caused by the victory of the proletariat and at the expense of the exploiters. Unless this is done, the industrial proletariat cannot depend on the support of the country and cannot secure the provisionment of the towns with foodstuffs.
8. The enormous difficulty of organisation and education for the revolutionary struggle of the agrarian labouring masses placed by capitalism in conditions of particular oppression, dispersion and often a middleaged dependence, require from the Communist Parties a special attention in regard for to the strike movement in the rural districts. It requires an enforced support and a wide development of mass strikes of the agrarian proletarians and half proletarians. The experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, confirmed and enlarged now by the experience of Germany and other advanced countries, shows that only the development of mass strike struggle (under certain conditions the small peasants are also to be drawn into these strikes) will shake the inactivity of the country population, arouse a class consciousness and the consciousness of the necessity of class organisation in the exploited masses in the country, and show them the obvious practical use of their joining the town workers.
The Congress of the Communist International denounces as traitors those Socialists—unfortunately there are such not only in the yellow Second International but also among the three most important European parties who have left the Second International—who are not only indifferent in regard to the strike struggle in the country but who oppose it (as does Kautsky) on the ground that it might cause a falling-off of the production of foodstuffs. No programs and no solemn declarations have any value if the fact is not there in evidence, testified by actual deeds, that the Communists and the labour leaders know how to put above all the development of the proletarian revolution and its victory, and are ready to make the utmost sacrifices for the sake of this victory. Unless this is a fact, there is no issue, no escape from starvation, dissolution and new imperialistic wars.
It is also necessary to mention in particular that the leaders of the old Socialism and the representatives of the "Labour aristocracy", who are making now verbal concessions to Communism and pass even nominally into its ranks to preserve their popularity in the working masses, which are becoming rapidly revolutionised, that these all are to be tested in regard to their allegiance to the proletarian cause, and their ability to take responsible posts in a work where the development of revolutionary consciousness and the revolutionary struggle is of a particular keenness, where the resistance of the landowners and the bourgeoisie (landed peasants, exploiters) is particularly violent, where the difference between the conciliatory Socialists and the revolutionary Communists shows with the greatest clearness.
9. The Communist parties must make all efforts possible to start as soon as possible setting up councils in the country, and these councils must be chiefly composed of hired labourers and half-proletarians. Only in connection with the mass strike struggle and by means of the most oppressed class will the councils be able to serve fully their ends and become sufficiently firm to dominate (and further on to include into their midst) the small peasants. But if the strike struggle is not yet developed, and the ability to organise the agrarian proletariat is weak because of the hard oppression by the land owners and the landed peasants, and also because of the want of support from the industrial workers and their unions, the organisation of the soviets in the rural districts will require a long preparation by means of creating small Communist cells, of enforced propaganda expounding in a most popular form the demands of the Communists and illustrating the reasons of these demands by specially convincing cases of exploitation and pressure, by systematic excursions of industrial workers into the country. etc.
- ↑ These are the exact figures: number of farms from 5 to 10 acres 652,798 (out of 5,736,082); they have all sorts of hired workers, 487,704—the number of workers with their families (Familienangehörige) being 2,013,633. In Austria, according to the registration of 1910 there were 383,351 farms In this group, 126,136 of them employing hired labour; 146,044 hired workers, 1,215,969 workers with their families. The total number of farms in Austria amounts to 2,856,349.