Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/43

 with the bourgeosie, including the landed and the middle peasantry (see about these classes further down) and not to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois government and the bourgeois class by the proletariat. In the third place, this view holds by the force of inveterate prejudice possessing already a great stability (and connected with all bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices), the incapacity to grasp a simple truth fully proved by the Marxian theory and confirmed by the practice of the proletarian revolution in Russia. This truth consists in the fact that the peasant population of the three classes we have mentioned above, being extremely oppressed, parceled and doomed to live in half-savage conditions in all countries, even in the most advanced, is economically, socially and morally interested in the victory of Socialism; but that it will firmly support the revolutionary proletariat only after the proletariat has taken hold of the political power, after it has done away with the owners of the large estates and the capitalists, after the oppressed masses will be able to see in practice that they have an organized leader and helper sufficiently powerful and firm to support and to guide, to show the right way.

4. The "middle peasantry" consists in the economic sense of small landowners who possess, according to the right of ownership or rent, portions of land, which, although small, never-