Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/48

 actually bourgeois democratic, struggle of the peasantry as a whole against the landowners, and there was further the low standard of living and scarcity of the city proletariat, and finally the enormous distances and exceedingly bad transport conditions. As far as these adverse conditions do not exist in the advanced countries, the revolutionary proletariat in Europe and America must prepare with much more energy and carry out a much quicker and more complete victory over the resistance of the landed peasantry, depriving it of the least possibility to resist. This is of the utmost need, considering that until such a complete, absolute victory is won, the masses of the rural proletariat, the semi-proletarians and the small peasants will not acknowledge the stability of the proletarian State power.

6. The revolutionary proletariat must proceed to an immediate and unconditional confiscation of all the estates of the landowners and the big landlords, that is, of all those who systematically employ wage labour, directly or through their tenants, exploit all the small (and partly sometimes the middle) peasantry in their neighbourhood, do not share in the manual work and are mostly the descendants oi the feudal class (the nobility in Russia, Germany, Hungary, the restored seigneurs in France, the lords in England, the former slave-owners in America) or financial magnates who have become partic-