Theoretical Communism makes a very small place for the farmer in its scheme of things. Pinning all faith to the industrial worker, the prophets of the red creed, from Marx and Engels and Kautsky WYown to Lenin, have regarded the peasant with suspicion if not with hostility. He has been, regarded as the possible ally of the bourgeoisie or even of the aristocracy all the faithful were taught to expect no more from him than neutrality at the best. Theorists} who accept the outlook on life of the factory worker living in a slum' tenement as the normal outlook, find the farmer's mind (dlisconcertingly wholesome. In a "highly industrialized" community the peasant would be put in his place at once as the proletarian: state's servant cultivating the state's land at the discretion and dictation of the state. In a country like Russia in which the industrial class is small and the peasantry constitute es an overwhelming majority, it! is the unpleasant duty of the state to cajole the peasantry into goad! nature while the proletariat is getting a grip on the government! and then in due course to put this class in its place.
This is the course which has been taken in Russia. The results of it have been famine in vast agricultural areas, terrible food shortage for all classes and the starvation of the native industries dependent upon agricultural output. Lenin in 1919, reporting to the 8th congress of the communist party, guoted Kautsky to the following)
"The task of the socialist party is the neutralization of the peasantry; that is to handle the situation so that the Peasantry remains neutral in' the strug-gie between the proletariat and- the bourgeoisie, that the peasantry does not five any active assistance to the bourgeoisie against us."
Tae Prescrence or Lent.
With this as a text Lenin proceeds with infinite tact to warn the comrades against too much zeal in: their efforts to convert the} obdurate farmer to the only true, faith. He devotes three or four; thousan{d words to this caution and mildly chides the comrades with having gone too far, citing: which have come to him In every, line can be read Lenin's knowledge: of the tremendous hostility of the' peasantry to the communistic
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.