> Actually, I have a hard time distinguishing between Marx and
> Leninism,too.
Why is it hard to distinguish Marx's claims about what, at a minimum, would have to be done to win peasant support for the political and economic arrangements pointed to in the Civil War in France from what was actually done to Russian peasants (the vast majority of the Russian population) after 1917? Marx didn't recommend cutting peasant incomes in half by intensifying economic exploitation and then meeting resistance to this by enlarging peasant land allotments and using a standing army both to extract the product and to suppress the resistance, did he? The eventual collectivization wasn't one "the peasant arrived at ... of his own accord, from economic reasons," was it?
> where the peasant exists in the mass as private proprietor, where he
> even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states of
> the west European continent, where he has not disappeared and been
> replaced by the agricultural wage-labourer, as in England, the
> following cases apply: either he hinders each workers' revolution,
> makes a wreck of it, as he has formerly done in France, or the
> proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does not belong to the
> proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes
> himself not to) must as government take measures through which the
> peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for
> the revolution; measures which will at least provide the possibility
> of easing the transition from private ownership of land to collective
> ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own accord, from
> economic reasons. It must not hit the peasant over the head, as it
> would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or
> the abolition of his property. The latter is only possible where the
> capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the
> true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is
> the town worker, and so has immediately, not just indirectly, the very
> same interests as him. Still less should small-holding property be
> strengthened, by the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply
> through peasant annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin's
> revolutionary campaign.
Ted