Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/110

 breaking with Marx, as Kautsky must admit) and at the same time created an agrarian order most elastic from the point of view of the transition to Socialism. From the bourgeois democratic point of view, the revolutionary peasantry in Russia could not proceed any further, since there can be nothing: more "ideal," nothing more "radical," from that point of view, than the nationalization of the land and the equalization of land tenure. It was the Bolsheviks, only the Bolsheviks, who, thanks to the triumph of the proletarian revolution, assisted the peasantry in carrying through the bourgeois democratic revolution to its uttermost limits. By this policy they contributed the utmost possible for the furtherance and the acceleration of the transition to a Socialist revolution.

One can judge by this what an incredible muddle Kautsky has offered to his readers by accusing the Bolsheviks of ignoring the bourgeois character of the revolution, and by himself betraying such a departure from Marxism that the nationalization of the land completely disappears in his arguments, and the least revolutionary (even from the bourgeois point of view) Liberal agrarian reform is put forward as a "fraction of Socialism."

Here we are approaching the third question formulated above, namely, to what extent has the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia foreseen the necessity of passing to Socialist land tillage. Kautsky again has, in this connection, committed something like a forgery in that he quotes only the "theses" of one Bolshevik relating to the problem of transition to collective farming. Having quoted one of these theses, our theoretician triumphantly exclaims: "It is most unfortunate that a problem cannot be solved by merely being called a problem. Collective farming in Russia is so far condemned to remain on paper only. Never yet and nowhere small peasants passed to collective production under the influence of mere theoretical arguments" (p. 50).

Never yet and nowhere has there been such a literary