world as under Soviet power, and it must be developed until literally all working people are organised in properly constituted, centralised and disciplined trade unions.
8.[22] This same task of developing the productive forces calls for the immediate, extensive and comprehensive employment in science and technology of the specialists who have been left us as our heritage by capitalism, although, as a rule, they are imbued with a bourgeois world outlook and habits. The Party, in close alliance with the trade union organisations, must continue its former line -- on the one hand, there must not be the slightest political concession to this bourgeois section of the population, and any counter-revolutionary attempts on its part must be ruthlessly suppressed, and, on the other hand, there must be a relentless struggle against the pseudo-radical but actually ignorant and conceited opinion that the working people are capable of overcoming capitalism and the bourgeois social system without learning from bourgeois specialists, without making use of their services and without undergoing the training of a lengthy period of work side by side with them.
Although the ultimate aim of the Soviet government is to achieve full communism and equal remuneration for all kinds of work, it cannot, however, introduce this equality straightaway, at the present time, when only the first steps of the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken. For a certain period of time, therefore, we must retain the present higher remuneration for specialists in order to give them an incentive to work no worse, and even better, than they have worked before; and with the same object in view, we must not reject the system of paying bonuses for the most successful work, particularly organisational work.
It is equally necessary to surround the bourgeois specialist with a comradely atmosphere created by working hand in hand with the masses of rank-and-file workers led by politically-conscious Communists in order to promote mutual understanding and friendship between workers by hand and brain whom capitalism kept apart.
The mobilisation of the entire able-bodied population by the Soviet government, with the trade unions participating,
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for certain public works must be much more widely and systematically practised than has hitherto been the case.
In the sphere of distribution, the present task of Soviet power is to continue steadily replacing trade by the planned, organised and nation-wide distribution of goods. The goal is the organisation of the entire population in a single system of consumers' communes that can distribute all essential products most rapidly, systematically, economically and with the least expenditure of labour by strictly centralising the entire distribution machinery.
To achieve this object it is particularly important in the present period, when there are transitional forms based on different principles, for the Soviet food supply organisation to make use of the co-operative societies, the only mass apparatus for systematic distribution inherited from capitalism.
Being of the opinion that in principle the only correct policy is the further communist development of this apparatus and not its rejection, the R.C.P. must systematically pursue the policy of making it obligatory for all members of the Party to work in the co-operatives and, with the aid of the trade unions, direct them in a communist spirit, develop the initiative and discipline of the working people who belong to them, endeavour to get the entire population to join them, and the co-operatives themselves to merge into one single co-operative that embraces the whole of the Soviet Republic. Lastly, and most important, the dominating influence of the proletariat over the rest of the working people must be constantly maintained, and everywhere the most varied measures must be tried with a view to facilitating and bringing about the transition from petty-bourgeois co-operatives of the old capitalist type to consumers' communes led by proletarians and semi-proletarians.
(6) It is impossible to abolish money at one stroke in the first period of transition from capitalism to communism. As a consequence, the bourgeois elements of the population continue to use privately-owned currency notes -- these tokens by which the exploiters obtain the right to receive public wealth -- for the purpose of speculation, profit-making and robbing the working population. The nationalisation
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of the banks is insufficient in itself to combat this survival of bourgeois robbery. The R.C.P. will strive as speedily as possible to introduce the most radical measures to pave the way for the abolition of money, first and foremost to replace it by savings-bank books, cheques, short-term notes entitling the holders to receive goods from the public stores, and so forth, to make it compulsory for money to be deposited in the banks, etc. Practical experience in paving the way for, and carrying out, these and similar measures will show which of them are the most expedient.
(7) In the sphere of finance, the R.C.P. will introduce a graduated income-and-property tax in all cases where it is feasible. But these cases cannot be numerous since private property in land, the majority of factories and other enterprises has been abolished. In the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the state ownership of the principal means of production, the state finances must be based on the direct appropriation of a certain part of the revenue from the different state monopolies to meet the needs of the state. Revenue and expenditure can be balanced only if the exchange of commodities is properly organised, and this will be achieved by the organisation of consumers' communes and the restoration of the transport system, which is one of the major immediate objects of the Soviet government.
12
AGRARIAN SECTION OF THE PROGRAMME
Soviet power, having completely abolished private property in land, has already started on the implementation of a whole series of measures aimed at the organisation of large-scale socialist agriculture. The most important of these measures are the organisation of state farms (i.e., large socialist farms), the encouragement of agricultural communes (i.e., voluntary associations of tillers of the land for large-scale farming in common), and societies and co-operatives for the collective cultivation of the land; cultivation by the state of all uncultivated lands, no matter whom they belong to; mobilisation by the state of all agricultural specialists for vigorous measures to raise farming efficiency, etc.
Regarding all these measures as the only way to raise the productivity of agricultural labour, which is absolutely imperative, the R.C.P. seeks to carry them out as fully as possible, to extend them to the more backward regions of the country, and to take further steps in this direction.
Inasmuch as the antithesis between town and country is one of the root causes of the economic and cultural backwardness of the countryside, one which in a period of so deep a crisis as the present confronts both town and country with the direct threat of ruin and collapse, the R.C.P. regards the eradication of this antithesis as one of the basic tasks of building communism and, alongside the above measures, considers it necessary extensively and systematically to enlist industrial workers for the communist development of agriculture, to promote the activities of the nation-wide Working Committee of Assistance set up by the Soviet government with this aim in view, and so on.
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In all its work in the countryside the R.C.P. will continue to rely on the proletarian and semi-proletarian sections of the rural population, first organising them into an independent force, setting up Poor Peasants' Committees, Party cells in the villages, a specific type of trade union for rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, etc., exerting every effort to bring them closer to the urban proletariat and wresting them from the influence of the rural bourgeoisie and petty-property interests.
As far as the kulaks, the rural bourgeoisie, are concerned, the policy of the R.C.P. is one of decisive struggle against their attempts at exploitation and the suppression of their resistance to Soviet, communist, policy.
With regard to the middle peasants, the policy of the R.C.P. is to draw them into the work of socialist construction gradually and systematically. The Party sets itself the task of separating them from the kulaks, of winning them to the side of the working class by carefully attending to their needs, by combating their backwardness with ideological weapons and not with measures of suppression, and by striving in all cases where their vital interests are concerned to come to practical agreements with them, making concessions to them in determining the methods of carrying out socialist reforms.
NOTES
[18] The following documents are included under the general head "Draft Programme of the R.C.P.(B.)" -- "Rough Draft of the Programme of the R.C.P." and individual chapters and sections of the programme with Lenin's amendments. The full text of the chapter "The Basic Tasks of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia" was first published in the Fourth (Russian) Edition of the
Collected Works. In this edition, too, the "Draft Programme of the R.C.P. (Bolsheviks)", which constituted the first sections of the "Rough Draft of the Programme of the R.C.P." with amendments and addenda by Lenin, and the "Insertion for the Final Draft of the Programme Section on the National Question" were first published. Lenin's proposals for the Draft Programme formed the basis of the Programme of the Communist Party adopted at the Eighth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.).
[p. 97]
[19] See present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 459-63 and Vol. 27, pp. 152-58. [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme" and "Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)", respectively. --
DJR]
[p. 99]
[20] The manuscript remained unfinished. This passage, with amendments, was included in the Programme of the R.C.P.(B.) adopted
by the Eighth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) as Section 5 of the chapter "The General Political Sphere".
[p. 126]
[21] This insertion was included
in toto as Section 4 of the chapter "In the Sphere of National Relations".
[p. 128]
[22] This point of the draft of the economic section of the programme was originally placed third; Lenin later recast it and made it point eight, under which number it was included in the Party Programme.
[p. 136]