THE ORGANISATION OF AGRICULTURE

landlords had been plundered. Finally, it was made impossible for them to employ wage labour. The rich peasants constitute the class which would have become a landlord class if our revolution had never gone beyond the limits of a bourgeois democratic revolution. They constitute a class which is from its very nature mortally hostile to all attempts in the direction of the socialistic organisation of agriculture. The aim of the rich peasants as a class is to bring about the development of our agricultural system in such a direction that it will come to resemble that of Denmark or of the United States of America. But for the proletarian authority and its socialistic policy, Russian agriculture after the abolition of the old landlord system would with remarkable celerity have developed into a system of bourgeois farming carried on by wage labour, with the aid of greatly improved methods of working the soil. In conjunction therewith there would have come into existence a huge class of semi-proletarian peasants. The rich peasant greeted the revolution inspired by the most rosy hopes and anticipations, but as a result of the revolution he found himself stripped of part of the land which he had owned before it occurred. As long as this class of rich peasants continues to exist, its members will inevitably prove to be irreconcilable enemies of the proletarian State and