Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/12

 And it is no wonder that in such a state of affairs a group of men, having in their hands all that is indispensable, the most necessary things, dominate the rest who possess nothing. Let us take the instance of a poor man from the country coming to town to seek work. Who does he go to? To the proprietor, the man who owns a factory or works. And this same proprietor becomes the complete master of the man's life. If his, the master's loyal servants, directors and bookkeepers, have calculated that it is possible to squeeze more profits out of fresh workers than out of the old ones, then he "gives a job." If not, he tells him to "pass along." At the factory the capitalist is monarch of all he surveys. He is obeyed by all, and his directions are implicitly carried out. The factory is extended or reduced at his will. At his command, through foremen and managers, workmen are employed or dismissed. He decides how long they are to work and what pay they are to get. And all this happens because the factory is his factory, the works, his works; they belong to him, are his private property. It is this right of private property over the means of production that is the cause of the terrible power which is in the hands of capital.

The same thing holds good with regard to land. Take the freest and the most democratic country—the United States. Thousands of workers cultivate land that does not belong to them, land owned by landowning capitalists. Here everything is organised on the plan of a large factory: there are tens and hundreds of electric ploughs, reaping machines, reaping and sheaf-binding machines, at which hired slaves toil from dawn till night. And just as at the factory, they work not for themselves, but for a master. That is because land itself as well as the seeds and machines, in a word, everything, except the working hands, is the private property of the capitalist master. He is autocrat here. He commands and conducts the business in such a way as to convert the very sweat and blood into shining yellow metal. The workmen, grumbling sometimes, obey, and go on making money for the master because he possesses everything, whilst the worker, the poor agricultural labourer, possesses nothing.

But sometimes it so happens that the landowner does not hire labourers, hut lets his land on lease. Here in Russia, for instance, the poor peasantry, holding small allotments hardly enough to pasture a hen, were obliged to rent land from the landowners. They cultivated it with their own horses, ploughs