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matter what you proclaim of whatever laws you publish, the result will be most unsatisfactory. One man will fuss about on his allotment, another on his, and if they continue to live apart without mutual aid and common work, they will gradually come to look upon the land as their private property, and no laws from above would be of any use. Common cultivation of the soil is what should be aimed at.
In agriculture, just as in industry, it is easiest to carry on production on a large scale. With large-scale production it is possible to use good agricultural machines effecting a saving of all kinds of material, to arrange the work according to one single plan, to put every workman to the most suitable job, and to keep a strict account of everything, thus preventing undue waste of either materials or labour-power. Our task, therefore, does not at all consist in making every peasant a manager of his own small allotment, but in making the poorer peasants join a common scheme of work on the largest possible scale.
How is this to be done? This can and must be done in two ways: first, co-operative cultivation of what were formerly big estates; and secondly, by organising agricultural labour communes.
In the estate's of former Landowners where the land was not leased to the peasants as a whole, and where there existed the private direction of the landlord, the estate was, of course, ever so much better managed than the peasants'. The evil was that the entire profits fell into the hands of the landowners, who oppressed the peasants. And here again there is one thing clear to the Communists: just as there is no sense whatever in the factory workers plundering the factory plant, to share them between themselves, in ruining the factory, so would it be equally senseless for the peasants to act in the same manner on the land. On the big private estates there is often much that is valuable: horses, cattle, different kinds of implements, stocks of seeds, reaping and other kinds of agricultural machines, and so on. In other estates, again, there are dairies, cheese churns, quite large works in fact. And it would be senseless to plunder all that and drag it away to the different cottages. The village exploiters would be interested in that, knowing that sooner or later all these things would fall into their hands again, as they would buy up the poor men's shares.
The exploiting country shark clearly understands that such a sharing will in the end be to his "benefit." But the interests
