Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/88

 where the big landlords still enjoy feudal rights and privileges, these rights and privileges must be brushed aside in the course of the struggle for the land which in this case is of paramount importance.

6. In all countries with a real agricultural proletariat, this part of the population is destined to be the most important factor of the rural revolutionary movement. Contrary to the social democrats, who attack the rural proletariat from the back, the Communist Party supports, organises and furthers all the struggles of the agricultural proletariat for the betterment of its economic, social and political conditions. In order to accelerate the revolutionising of the rural proletariat, and in order to train it for the struggle for proletarian dictatorship, which alone can definitely free them from exploitation, the Communist Party supports the rural proletariat in its struggle for a higher real wage and a betterment of the labour, housing and cultural conditions of the entire working class, freedom of assembly, of organisation, of trade union movement, of strikes, of the press, etc.—for at least the same rights and privileges as are enjoyed by the industrial working class—an average yearly eight-hour day, insurance against accidents and old age, prohibition of child labour, professional education, social legislation, at least to the same extent as it exists now for the city proletariat.

7. The Communist Party carries on its struggle for the liberation of the peasants from their servitude through the social revolution.

It struggles against all forms of capitalist exploitation of the poor and middle peasantry and especially against the exploitation by means of the loan and usurers' capital which makes the poor peasants the slaves of their creditors, also against the exploitation by commercial and speculative capital which buys up the surplus agricultural products of the poor peasants at low prices, selling it at high prices to the town proletariat.

The Communist Party works for the elimination of this parasitic speculative capital, and for an alliance between the co-operatives of small peasants and the consumers' co-operatives of the urban proletariat. It struggles against the exploitation of industrial capital, which uses its monopoly rights for artificially raising the prices of manufactured goods. It strives for the supply of means of production (artificial fertilisers, machinery, etc.) to the poor peasantry at low prices. The factory councils are to help in this work by controlling prices.

It also strives against the exploitation of the peasants through the private monopoly of the transportation system, as particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and finally, against the exploitation by the capitalist state, which puts the chief burden of taxation on the shoulders of the poor peasantry in