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   U.S. AGRICULTURE AND TASKS OF THE PARTY   371

to respond to the persistent influence of the class to which they belong - the petty bourgeoisie. Such an "agrarian section" would tend to split from the Party and form precisely another party of small agrarians, revolutionary in phrases, a counterpart of the Social Revolutionary Party of Russia. Organizing small agrarians is one thing. Organizing them in a block inside the party of the proletariat is quite another thing.
   9. Following the general line which the program of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International sets forth for such developed capitalist countries as the United States, where the Communists raise the demand for direct seizure of power by the proletariat and the proletarian dictatorship, where in the economic sphere the moment of revolutionary transference of power must mean the expropriation of the whole of large scale industry, the Communist Party of the United States also stands for the expropriation of large scale production in agriculture and (C. I. Program) for:
   "...organization of a large number of State Soviet farms and, in contrast to this, a relatively small portion of the land to be transferred to the peasantry...; a rapid rate of Socialist development generally, and of collectivization of peasant farming in particular."
   We do not contend that the majority of American farmers are poor because they do not farm more land, or that it is necessary to give each (or perhaps any) farmer more acreage. What has made miserable and what will make impossible the lives of the small commodity producer is capitalism, the extortions which landlords, banks and trading capitalists (all interwoven parts of finance capital) load upon him. To dispel his inherent petty bourgeois illusions and win him to the side of the revolutionary proletariat, it is necessary not only to point out abstractly how and by whom he is plundered, but to bring him into struggle for demands comprehensible to him.
   Standing unequivocally for nationalization of all land and socialization of all production, the Communist Party does not, however, demand that this be completely carried out at once on the day of seizure of power by the proletariat. All the "transference of land" to the farmers necessary to carry out in the United States is a permission to use the land the poor and middle farmers now occupy, freed from rentals extorted by landlords and mortgage payments to the bankers. While large scale production in agriculture, whether great or small in acreage, with modern machinery and hired labor, will at once pass into the hands of the proletarian State power, the