Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/87

 3. In order to win over the poor peasants (petty farmers, small tenants and a part of the small peasantry) for the revolution, in addition to the agricultural labourers, and in order to insure the benevolent neutrality of the middle peasantry, they must be freed from the influence and the leadership of the big peasantry allied to the big landowners. They must be made to realise that their interests are identical, not with those of the big peasants, but with those of the proletariat, and that, therefore, only the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the Communist party, can be their leader in their struggle. In order to accelerate the alienation of the poor peasants from the leadership of the big landlords and the big peasants, it is not sufficient to draw up a programme or carry on propaganda. The Communist Party must, through continued action in the interests of these peasants, prove that it is actually the party of all the workers and of all the oppressed.

Therefore, the Communist Party must be at the head of every struggle of the agricultural masses against the ruling classes. Linking up with the every-day demands of these workers under the capitalist system, the Communist Party brings together the scattered forces of the rural working class, stimulates its will to fight, supports the struggle by bringing into it the forces of the industrial proletariat and indicates new ways and methods leading to the revolution. The common struggle with industrial workers, and the fact that the latter, under the leadership of the Communist Party, are fighting for the interests of the rural workers and poor peasants, will convince the latter that (1) only the Communist Party mean honestly by them, while all the other, agrarian as well as social democratic parties (in spite of their high-sounding phrases) are intent only on deceiving them, while serving in reality the big landlords and capitalists, and (2) that a radical betterment of the conditions of the workers and poor peasants is impossible within the capitalist system.

5. Our practical militant demands mist be adapted to the various forms of dependence and oppression of the workers, the poor and the middle peasants by big landlords and capitalists, as well as to the interests of the various separate groups.

In the colonial countries, with an oppressed native peasant population, the national liberation struggle is conducted either by the entire population, as for instance in Turkey (in such a case the struggle of the oppressed peasantry against the big landlords will inevitably begin after the victorious solution of the liberation struggle) or the feudal landlords are allied with the imperialist robbers, as for instance in India, where the social struggle of the oppressed peasants coincides with the national liberation struggle.

Territories with strong survivals of feudalism, where the bourgeois revolution has not fully accomplished its task and