Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/46

 with several hired labourers. They are connected with the "peasantry" only by their rather low standing of culture, their way of living. their personal manual work on their land. This is the most numerous element of the bourgeois class, and a decided enemy of the revolutionary proletariat. The chief attention of the communist parties in the rural districts must be given to the struggle against this element, to the liberation of the labouring and exploited majority of the rural population from the moral and political influence of these exploiters.

After the victory of the proletariat in the towns this class will inevitably oppose it by all means from sabotage to open armed counter-revolutionary resistance. The revolutionary proletariat must therefore immediately begin to prepare the necessary force for the disarmament of every single man of this class, and together with the overthrow of the capitalists in industry the proletariat must deal a relentless crushing blow to this class. In view of this end it must arm the rural proletariat and organize councils in the country, with no room for exploiters, and a preponderant place reserved to the proletarians and the semi-proletarians.

But the expropriation even of the landed peasants can by no means be an immediate object of the victorious proletariat, considering the lack of material, particularly of technical material and further of the social conditions