Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/104

 of Socialism in general, and of the transition from Capitalism to Communism in particular); and (3) public farming as a transition from individual farming on a small scale to Socialist farming on a large scale. In this latter case, the question arises as to whether the treatment of the problem by the Soviet legislation satisfies the demand of Socialism.

On the first question it is necessary to bear in mind two fundamental facts: (a) The Bolsheviks, in examining the lessons of the revolution of 1905 (I may refer, for instance, to my own study of the agrarian question in the first Russian revolution), used to point out the democratic and progressive, and even revolutionary value of the claim for "equalizations," and continued to do so in 1917 up to the time of the November revolution; (b) when adopting the Land Socialization law, the crux of which is just that same equalization of land tenure, the Bolsheviks most explicitly declared that that idea was not theirs, that they were not agreed with such a claim, but regarded it as their duty to satisfy it, because it was the claim of the overwhelming majority of the peasantry. We said at the time that the ideas and demands of the majority of the laboring masses ought to be practically tested and discarded by themselves, that such demands could not be abolished or skipped over, and that that the Bolsheviks would help the peasantry in that process of testing the petty bourgeois ideas, in order to pass from them as speedily and as painlessly as possible to the Socialist demands.

A Marxist theoretician, if he wanted to help the working-class revolution by his scientific analysis, ought to have found the necessary answer to the questions: (1) Is it true that the idea of equalized land tenure has a democratic and revolutionary value, that is, possesses the value of carrying through the bourgeois democratic revolution to an end? And (2) did the Bolsheviks act