will be increased if they are enabled to participate in improved methods of agriculture. This can be achieved by enabling all the poor peasants to join forces in artels or in the communal cultivation of the land.
The reason why the rich peasant has so great an influence is because he is a successful farmer. But the farming of the rich peasant remains petty-bourgeois peasant agriculture. If the poor peasants combine to form communes they will be able to avail themselves of better agricultural methods than those ordinarily employed in peasant farming, and will thus from the economic outlook become as strong as the middle peasants, and even as strong as the rich peasants. The dictatorship of the poor peasants in rural life can be built up upon this economic foundation, upon the material superiority of the member of the commune over the small farmer. But it will not be a dictatorship of the poor peasants in the strict sense of the term; it will not be the rule of “paupers and loafers” of which the rich peasants used to complain (not without reason) in the days of the committees of the poor peasants. It will be the rule of the vanguard of the rural workers, the rule of that minority which is two centuries ahead of the majority.