Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/102

 ate passing of laws requiring the cessation of all buying and selling of land, the abolition of laws permitting sales of land to the communes by persons intending to liquidate, or permitting the cutting down of forests, etc., for the conservation of forests, fisheries, and other preserves, etc., for the abrogation of all long-term leases, and the revision of those made for shorter periods.

A short reflection on these demands will show the absolute impossibility of securing the aid of capitalists in their realization—in fact, the impossibilty of avoiding a break with the capitalist class, in short, a complete overthrow of their rule.

The confiscation of all private ownership in land means the confiscation of hundreds of millions of bank capital, with which these lands, for the most part, are mortgaged. Is such a measure conceivable unless the revolutionary plan, by the aid of revolutionary methods, shall break down the opposition of the capitalists? Besides, we are here touching the most centralized form of capital, which is bank capital, and which 5s bound by a million threads with all the important centers of the capitalist system of this great nation, which can be defeated only by the equally well-organized power of the proletariat of the cities. Moreover, there is the matter of handing over the highly cultivated estates to the state. Is it not clear that the only "state" which is capable of taking them over and actually administering them in the interest of the toilers, and not for the good of the chinovniks (officials) and of the capitalists themselves must necessarily be a proletarian revolutionary state?

The confiscation of stud-farms, etc., and then of all cattle and immovables, these measures are not only increasingly crushing blows against private ownership of the means of production; they are steps toward Socialism, for the passing over of this property "into its exclusive utilization by the state or the Communes," makes absolutely necessary a huge Socialistic system of agriculture, or, at least, a Socialistic regulation of its functioning.

But, how about "the prohibition of hired labor"? This is an empty phrase, the helpless, unconsciously naive hope of the down-trodden petty farmers who do not see how impossible it is "not to permit" hired labor in the country if it is to continue to be permitted in the cities,—in short, that the "prohibition" of hired labor can never he anything else than a step toward Socialism.

This brings us to the fundamental question of the relations of the workers to the peasants. The Socialist mass movement in Rus-