LENIN ON THE AGRARIAN QUESTION 79 suppress even the big peasant by force.59 Lenin recommended that the counter-revolutionary activity of the kulaks was to be resisted, but that they need not be completely expropriated. Alliance with the middle peasant was to be built. 77 Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist Internationale XXXI, pp 152-164. Lenin classified the peasantry into five classes: (i) agricultural proletariat, (ii) semi-proletariat, (iii) small peasantry, (iv) middle peasantry and (v) rich peasantry. 78 The Theses on the Agrarian Question, Adopted by the Communist Party of France, written on 11 December 1921, first published in 1922, XXXII, pp 131-137. Lenin noted that the French theses were wrong in their contention that ^the concentration of property proclaimed by Marxist theoreticians did not proceed according to rule in agriculture." Marx had never regarded concentration in Agriculture as a simple and straightforward process. The immediate application of ^integral* communism to small-peasant farming in France or anywhere else would be a profound error. French farming statistics were poor, inferior to German, American, Swiss and Danish, and they did not give an exact idea of the area of land cultivated on capitalist lines. 79 Letter to PP Maslov, December 1893, XXXIII, pp 37-38. ^The disintegration of our small producers (the peasants and handicraftsmen)", wrote Lenin to Maslov in December 1894, appears to be the basic and principal fact explaining our urban and large-scale capitalism, dispelling the myth that the peasant economy represents some special structure (it is the same bourgeois structure with the sole difference that it is still shackled to a far greater extent by feudal fetters), and making it patent that what are called ^workers" are not a handful of specially circumstanced people but simply the outer layers of the vast mass of peasants who already derive their livelihood more from the role of their labour power than from their own husbandry. Russian agrarian reforms, Lenin said, stemmed from the development of commodity economy. 80 The Tax in Kind: the Significance of the New Economic Policy and Its Conditions, written and published 1921; XXXII, pp 329-365. Lenin emphasized inter alia his May 1918 definition of the elements (constituent parts) of the various socio-economic structures in the contemporary Russian economy. ^*No one can deny," he wrote, the existence of all these five stages (or constituent parts), of the five forms of economy — from the patriarchal, i e, semi-barbarian, to to the socialist system. That the small peasant ^structure", partly patriarchal, partly petty-bourgeois, predominates in a small peasant country is self-evident....Once you have exchange the small economy