Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/104

 only be done by co-operation with the workers, under their lead, and not "in agreement" with the capitalists.

Only the revolutionary proletariat can actually carry out the above plan of the impoverished peasants. For the revolutionary proletariat is actually going about the task of abolishing hired labor, and by the only real approach, namely, by overthrowing Capitalism, and not by forbidding the hiring of labor. The revolutionary proletariat is actually going to confiscate the lands, the property on them, the agricultural corporations—which is exactly what the peasants want.

Here is the change to be made in the outline of the workers' appeal to the peasants: We, the workers, want to give you, and do give you, that which the impoverished peasantry wants and seeks without always knowing where to find it We, therefore, are defending our interests against the capitalists, and these interests are those of the vast majority of the peasantry.

Let me remind the reader of what Engels said, not long before his death, concerning the agrarian question. Engels emphasized the point that nothing was further removed from the minds of Socialists than the intention of expropriating the smaller peasants, and that the latter should be made to see the advantage of the machine-process, Socialist agriculture, by the force of example alone. The war has now placed before Russia, in a practical form, this very question. Of farm property there is little. Simply confiscate it, and "do not divide" the highly cultivated estates.

The peasants have begun to see this. Need made them see it. The war made them see it. The farm accessories are not worth taking. They must be husbanded. But management on a large scale means the conservation both of labor on these accessories, and of many other things.

The peasants want to retain their small holdings and to arrive at some place of equal distribution. So be it. No sensible Socialist will quarrel with a pauper peasant on this ground. If the lands are confiscated, so long as the proletarians rule in the great centers and all political power is handed over to the proletariat, the rest will take care of itself, will be a natural outcome of the "power of example"; practice itself will do the teaching. The passing of political power to the proletariat, that is the whole thing. Then all the essential, fundamental, real points of the peas-