Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/109

 could not but know Marx's references to the fact that land nationalization is the most consistent demand of the bourgeoisie. Kautsky could not but know the controversy of Marx with Rodbertus, and the remarkable arguments of Marx in his "Theories of Surplus Value," where the revolutionary importance of land nationalization from a bourgeois democratic point of view is set out with particular clearness. The Menshevik, P. Masloff, who has so disastrously been chosen by Kautsky as an adviser, used to deny that the Russian peasants would agree to the nationalization of all (including peasants') lands. To an extent, this view of Masloff's might have been connected with his "original" theory (which was in reality but a repetition of the bourgeois critics of Marx), his repudiation of absolute rent, and his recognition of the "law" (or "fact," as Masloff used to call it) of diminishing returns. In point of fact, however, already the revolution of 1905, had shown that the overwhelming majority of the peasants in Russia both those who were members of the village Commune, and those who were not, were in favor of the nationalization of the entire land. The revolution of 1917 confirmed this fact and, after the assumption of power by the proletariat, realized it. The Bolsheviks remained faithful to Marxism in that they did not attempt (contrary to Kautsky's charges levelled at us without the least proofs) to "skip over" the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks, first of all, assisted the most radical, most revolutionary, the nearest to the proletariat, champions of the peasants among the bourgeois-democratic ideologists, namely, the Left Social Revolutionaries, in carrying out what practically constituted the nationalization of the land. Private property in land was abolished in Russia as from November 7th, 1917, that is, from the first day of the proletarian and Socialist revolution.

This act laid the foundation, the most perfect from the point of view of the development of Capitalism (without