1. What is a program?
Every party pursues definite aims, whether it be a party of landowners or capitalists, on the one hand, or a party of workers or peasants, on the other. Every party must have definite aims, for otherwise it is not a party. If it be a party representing the interests of landowners, it will pursue the aims of landowners; it will endeavour to tighten the grasp of the owners upon the soil; to hold the peasants in bondage; to secure a high price for the produce of the land-owners’ estates; to hire labour cheaply; to rackrent the farms. If it be a party of capitalists and factory owners, it will likewise have its own aims: to procure cheap labour, to keep the workers well in hand, to find customers to whom the wares can be sold at the highest possible price, to obtain ever larger profits, for this purpose to compel the workers to toil harder — but, above all, so to arrange matters that the workers will have no tendency to allow their thoughts to turn towards ideas of a new social order; let the workers think that there always have been masters and always will be masters. Such are the aims of the factory owners. It is self-evident that the workers and peasants will have utterly different aims from these, seeing that their interests are utterly different from those of the capitalists and landowners. People used to say: “What is wholesome for a Russian is death to a German.” It would, in fact, be more accurate to say: “What is wholesome for a worker is death to a landowner or capitalist.” That is to say, the worker has certain things to do, the capitalist other things, and the landowner yet others. Not every landowner, however, thinks out logically what is the best way of getting the last farthing out of the peasants; many landowners are drunk most of the time, and do not even trouble to consider their bailiff’s reports. The same thing happens in the case of the