Lenin On America Part 3:The agrarian Question in Russia in the close of the nineteenth century

Mainestategop ^ | 1918 | V Lenin

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For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interesting

EXCERPT

The two ways I have indicated of "solving" the agrarian question in developing bourgeois Russia correspond to the two paths of development of capitalism in agriculture. I call these two paths the Prussian and the American paths. The characteristic feature of the first is that medieval relations in landowning are not liquidated at one stroke, but are gradually adapted to capitalism, which because of this for a long time retains semi-feudal features. Prussian landlordism was not crushed by the bourgeois revolution; it survived and became the basis of "Junker" economy, which is essentially capitalistic, but involves a certain degree of dependence of the rural population, such as the Gesindeordnung,[72] etc. As a consequence, the social and political domination of the Junkers was consolidated for many decades after 1848, and the productive forces of German agriculture developed far more slowly than in America.

There, on the contrary, it was not the old slave-holding economy of the big landowners that became the basis of capitalist agriculture (the Civil War smashed the slave-owners' estates), but the free economy of the free farmer working on free land -- free from all medieval fetters, from serfdom and feudalism on the one hand, and from the fetters of private property in land, on the other. Land was given away in America, out of its vast resources, at a nominal price; and it is only on a new, fully capitalist basis that private property in land has now developed there.

Both these paths of capitalist development quite clearly emerged in Russia after 1861. (End of feudalism in Russia) The progress of landlord farming is undoubted, and the slowness of this progress is not accidental, but inevitable so long as the survivals of serfdom remain. It is also beyond doubt that the freer the peasants are, the less they are weighed down by the remnants of serfdom (in the south, for example, all these favourable conditions exist), and finally, the better, all in all, the peasants are provided with land, the greater is the differentiation among the peasantry and the more rapid is the process of forming a class of rural capitalist farmers. The whole question of the further development of the country boils down to this: which of the two paths of development will ultimately prevail, and, correspondingly, which class will carry through the necessary and inevitable change -- the old land owning gentry or the free peasant farmer?

Commentary:Though Lenin welcomed the American revolution as a stumbling block to British Imperialism, Communists view the American revolution primarily as a revolution for landowners and the wealthy. They forget however that it brought about an end to the same policies that they would impose on us; policies that undermine freedom. America had freedom in abundance without interference by the state. This meant that more people could own property regardless of how poor they were.

In fact it was this very concept that allowed America to prosper. Examples abound of poor penniless immigrants and their families coming to America and moving from rags to riches, including Russian peasants, many of them Jews who suffered persecution at the hands of the Czar. These migrants and their descendants now live in great prosperity. Not so for the descendants of the October Revolution who suffered continued pestilence.

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PING!

[BGHater]

Maybe of Interest.Wall Street & the Bolshevik Revolution

[blackminorca]

Good Post:
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“He shows that the American government intervened on the behalf of Leon Trotsky, who was detained by Canadian authorities, so he could travel to Russia and agitate for the Reds. Apparently Trotsky might have been German instead of Russian, but in the end I guess we’ll never know for sure. Both Trotsky and Lenin were sent into Russia with money and assistance from foreign governments to stir up trouble.

This book also goes into detail on the 1917 American Red Cross mission to Russia which had more bankers than doctors. William Thompson, then a Director of the New York Fed, gave $1 million to the Reds for propaganda purposes. He then brought enough of his Wall Street buddies on board that the Bolsheviks were their guys, to bring the White House over to their side. Wilson’s influential advisor at that time was Edward Mandell House, who in Phillip Dru: Administrator stated that he believed in socialism as envisioned by Karl Marx, but with a spiritual leavening. With advisors as such, it was not so difficult.

House also used his influence to get Red agitator Minor, who drew a cartoon showing Wall Street types fawning over Marx in the introduction to the book, off the hook after being arrested by military authorities in France for distributing subversive Bolshevik propaganda. “

[GOP Poet]

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[LomanBill]

 >>In fact it was this very concept that allowed America to prosper.

 

 

Yep.

But on anual visits back to what's left of my wife's family farm and the surrounding community, I observe that this concept has increasingly been discarded and replaced with the idiology that drove the creation of Chinese Communist "Capitalists"; for which Orwell's Oligarchical Collectivism seems descriptive.