Why eliminate the landlords? Its way of survival reveals why.
The image of the landlords of the past was not glamorous, and they were considered a symbol of "vitriol", "meanness" and "exploitation". For example, according to historical records, Zhu Yuanzhang lived in poverty when he was a child, and he couldn't even afford a coffin, so he had to ask the local landlord for help, but the landlord did not give him anything, but humiliated him.
Similarly, during the Jinggangshan period, if the peasants of Huangnuotan wanted to borrow money from the big landlord Zhou Deyu to borrow grain, they had to work for him for 10 days free of charge before they could borrow one or two stone grains. Despite the hardships of life, in order to fill his stomach, Huang Nuotan still had to swallow his anger and work more than 12 hours a day.
These are all manifestations of the landlord class, but if we deeply understand the historical roots and survival methods of the landlords, we will understand why the landlord class must be eliminated in our country.
1. The origin and essence of slavery: Dating back to the period of slave society, we can see the earliest manifestation of oppression and exploitation - slavery. In this society, the slave owner class brutally oppressed and exploited the slave class by virtue of its possession of the means of production and the slaves themselves, thus creating irreconcilable contradictions with the slave class.
It can be said that the essence of slavery is the possession and exploitation of slaves by slave owners, which is also the ultimate expression of oppression and exploitation. In ancient times, slaves were regarded as living possessions, such as the "cattle people" in ancient China and the "talking tools" in ancient Rome.
The wheel of history is rolling forward, and countless civilizations have achieved the long history of mankind. However, the dark side of this cannot be ignored. The pyramids of ancient Egypt, the civilization of ancient Greece, and the mighty Roman Empire were all built on slavery.
The tragic plight of African slaves is a painful history in human history, forever imprinted in our memory. Although the British Empire, France, and the United States all outlawed slavery in 1833, 1848, and 1865, respectively, this was less than 200 years old.
Compared with the five or six thousand years of human civilization, this is undoubtedly a very recent thing. Let us remember this period of history, cherish the hard-won peace and freedom, and constantly promote the progress of human society.
In the old days, slaves were seen as property that could be bought and sold at will, and they were often the spoils of war, in large quantities, and therefore extremely cheap. According to the records of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the value of seven "fields" and five slaves was only equivalent to the harvest of 2,000 "bing".
Five slaves were not even worth as much as a horse and a bundle of silk, and if compared to a horse, each slave was worth only a quarter or a fifth of a horse.
In 1672, the Royal African Company of Great Britain obtained the exclusive right to transport slaves from Africa to the Spanish colonies, including the English philosopher John Locke.
This event seems to herald the coming period of large-scale transportation of slaves to the New World. In 1708, the Royal African Company bought and sold in Virginia for £20-30 per slave.
By 1740, the number of slaves in Virginia had reached 60,000, double the number 10 years earlier.
Despite the brutality of the slave-owning class's oppression of slaves, the slaves' resistance never stopped. In this struggle, the emerging landlord class seized the opportunity to overthrow the slave owners themselves by taking advantage of the slave revolt and becoming the ruling class themselves.
Although in the period of slave society, the new landlord class, as the representative of the mode of production, played a role in promoting the development of social production, in feudal society they carried out harsh economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants.
The way of survival of feudal landlords: possession and exploitation In feudal society, the way of survival of the feudal landlord class is mainly reflected in the possession of land and the exploitation of peasants.
They exploited the peasants by collecting rent, including labor rent, rent in kind, and money rent. In addition, they used unpaid labor, usury, and hired labor to further exploit the peasants.
In the Song Dynasty, the exploitation of peasants by feudal landlords was quite common. For example, in some places in the Song Dynasty, the system of local officials was practiced, and these local officials were actually representatives of the local feudal landlord class.
They occupied all the forests and land in the area, and the exploitation of the peasants was mainly through labor rent.
When the peasants cultivated the landlord's land, they were required to perform labor for the landlord, and they also had to give gifts on festivals or the landlord's ceremonies. As a feudal hereditary ruling class, the landlords controlled the fate of the peasants and had the right to live and kill and take what they wanted, and the peasants could only be at their mercy.
For example, the Huang clan, a local official in Shanglintu County, forcibly seized as much as 5,000 mu of local people's land, covering 10 townships in four counties, including forests, orchards, and towns.
Huang's attitude is arrogant, there is no one in his eyes, and he acts recklessly, and once posted such a couplet at the door of his home: "Go out for three days and walk your own way, and you don't eat other people's grass for thousands of miles." ”
Huang is greedy, disregarding the rights and interests of employees, and uses various means to deduct exploitation. He even manipulated the rods and used iron sticks and balls to make fake scales to deceive his hired workers.
In addition, every year he hires 250 long-term and short-term workers, but these workers have a meager income, and they can only earn more than 100 catties of coarse grain in a year, which is difficult to maintain a basic life.
What is particularly distressing is that the long-term workers need to work until the 23rd day of the lunar month before they can go home for the New Year, and the working hours are not less than 12 hours a day.
Pan Yong, a farmer living in a poor rural village, has been working for the Huang family for generations with his family in a dilapidated thatched hut without any land. All year round, they don't have enough to eat, they don't have enough clothes, and they can't get ** when they're sick.
Pan Yong's eldest daughter, Pan Dingli, became seriously ill due to overwork, but when she was dying, the Huang family ruthlessly kicked her out of the house and brutally took her life.
During the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang successfully ascended to the throne, but he still regarded himself as a representative of the landlord class. During the war, he repeatedly emphasized the maintenance of the feudal system, and after the unification of the Ming Dynasty, he even encouraged his subordinates to plunder land.
He said to Liu Ji's son: "You are a big landlord, and you have a servant to call a servant, and a companion to call a servant." ”
Zhu Yuanzhang attached great importance to the landlord class, and he met with the big landlords who owned more than seven hectares of land, and said to these "rich households and senior citizens": "Anyone who can perform a symmetrical purpose can get a beautiful official." ”
In addition, he appointed those who had a lot of land as "grain chiefs" in the hope that they would be able to manage those who had little food, because he believed that "man has constant production and perseverance." He believes that it is very important for the rich people in the world to grow up in the fields and understand civil affairs.
During the Qing Dynasty, the landlord class controlled a large amount of land and brutally exploited the peasants. Despite the impact of foreign capitalism on the feudal natural economic basis of the countryside, the feudal relationship between land and exploitation remained unchanged.
As more and more peasants went bankrupt, the phenomenon of land annexation within the landlord class became more and more serious, and most of the land was concentrated in the hands of a few large landlords.
Lu'an, Li Hongzhang in the late Qing Dynasty, Huoqiu and other places all had large-scale land occupations. Ding Dingqing, Tu Langxuan, Shi Yeqin, and other landlords occupied a large area of land in Lu'an County, Li Hongzhang occupied a large area of land in the area from Wuhu in Anhui Province to Xinyang in Henan Province, and Zhang Jingyao occupied more than 780,000 mu of land in Huoqiu County.
The land of Lijiaweizi in Huoqiu County spans 4 counties in Anhui and Henan provinces, with more than 200,000 mu, of which 15 are in Huoqiu County60,000 acres. Li Mengeng, the owner of the polder, boasted that "horses run hundreds of miles without eating other people's grass, and people travel hundreds of miles without drinking other people's water", showing their extreme control and greed for land.
In that turbulent era, the peasants were exploited by the landlord class and the local tyrants and gentry. Take a county as an example, although *** had ordered the exemption of arrears, the county still imposed a heavy levy for two years, and even attached a demand.
In addition, farmers also need to pay various taxes, such as fir tax, oil tax, tooth tax, pawn tax, field contract tax, chicken, duck and fish tax, paper shed tax, grave land tax, customs duties, salt tax, real estate tax, slaughter tax, etc.
Tan Youyu, a local landowner, earns more than 1,000 stone a year in rental income. If tenant farmers fail to pay their rents on time, they will be held accountable by the government. In addition, they face the threat of usury, and the usual interest rate is money.
Third, valley four, and when the green and yellow are not connected, the interest rate is even as high as more than 100%.
If it cannot be repaid within one year, the interest will continue to accrue; If they fail to repay it for many years, they will also need to mortgage their homes.
Tenant swapping is a brutal form of exploitation that each generation has to endure. The landlord picks the most fertile land and chooses the farmer according to his needs.
At the time of the tenant change, the landlords would demand high rents from each household, resulting in many peasants being unable to afford it and having to leave their homes and be displaced. This form of exploitation prevented the peasants from living in peace and contentment, living in poverty.
3. Awakening the productive forces: The purpose of the land reform is to enable the landlord class to no longer hinder social development, release the labor force, and promote the improvement of the productive forces. They rarely invest in industry except for the purchase of land, and lack the motivation to promote productivity progress.
The landlord class hired tenant farmers and yeoman farmers in large numbers, limiting the labor needed for industry and hindering social production and technological progress. Therefore, the landlord class has become an obstacle to social production, the most backward and reactionary class, and it is necessary to carry out land reform and awaken the productive forces.
In the early course of our Party's leadership of the New Democratic Revolution, the elimination of the landlord class was regarded as a firm proposition. Our party has always led the peasant class in resistance and struggle, trying to change social injustice.
On August 7, 1927, our party convened the famous "87 Conference" to conduct in-depth discussions on class changes. Some people proposed "confiscation of the land of large landlords" and "reduction of rent for small landlords".
However, ** has a deep understanding of the formation of various classes in Chinese society, and he puts forward a different point of view.
On the land issue, he considered the issue of small landowners to be at the heart of the problem, and the challenge now was not to confiscate the land of small landowners. If only the land of the big landlords is confiscated, then in many places where there are no big landlords, the peasant associations will not be able to function normally, and the feudal landlord ownership system will not be abolished fundamentally.
On the 18th of the same month, at the first meeting of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee after the reorganization of Hunan, the land issue was discussed again. In light of the actual situation in Hunan, he reiterated his stance of "confiscating all landlords' land."
He insisted that land confiscation necessarily required a clear objective. In China, the number of large landlords is scarce, and the number of small landlords is high. If only the land of the large landowners were confiscated, the land available for confiscation would be very limited.
The amount of land confiscated is limited, but the demand for land by poor peasants is enormous. If the land of the big landlords is confiscated, then the needs of the peasants cannot be satisfied.
Only by confiscating all the land and distributing the landlords' land to the peasants can the peasants' needs be truly satisfied.
In May 1945, the Communist Party of China issued the "May Fourth Directive", which kicked off land reform. After three years of hard work, this reform finally achieved the great goal of "the tiller has his land."
In Yongshou County, Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, for example, before the land reform began, the county set up a land consolidation committee and a peasant association, and dispatched more than 300 county, district, and township cadres and primary school teachers to thoroughly sort out the land throughout the county.
New copywriting: In the process of land reform in Yongshou County, we carried out the consolidation of scattered land, and conducted an inventory of unregistered land, and found that there were 1050,000 acres of "black fields" were concealed by the landlords.
This mapping operation allowed us to basically grasp the distribution of land resources in the county. Before this reform, large tracts of land in Yongshou County were monopolized by a small number of landlords, who had only 481 people but owned about 150,000 acres of land, with more than 30 acres of land per capita.
However, the per capita land owned by poor peasants and hired peasants is less than 2 mu.
Agrarian reform made the peasants the owners of the land, and they actively engaged in agricultural production, and the yields of many crops increased dramatically. The peasants expressed their heartfelt gratitude for the agrarian reform, calling it "one of the most important events of the ages."
Zhou Libo, the famous writer in "The Storm", vividly shows the scene of the history of land reform. In the work, land reform is seen as the starting point of Yuanmaotun's earth-shaking transformation.
Yuanmaotun, this prototype is located in a valley of Zhangguangcailing, a branch of Changbai Mountain, and its real name is "Yuanbaotun". Because Zhou Libo's creative inspiration came from his experience of participating in land reform, this humble mountain village has been praised as "China's first village in land reform".
In 1949, we eliminated feudal ownership through land reform, and the landlord class as a class ceased to exist. Most of them who are able to work have become self-supporting laborers.
The most representative example is the last emperor Pu Yi. In 1979, after the review of the masses and the approval of the county, the vast majority of landlords were taken off.
At this point, the landlord class has been completely eliminated in our country. References include Li Ingeny's The Impulse of Capital: The Root of the World's Deep Contradictions, The History of the Communist Party of China in Tiandong Vol. 1 1926-1949 edited by the Party History Office of the Tiandong County Committee of the Communist Party of China, Capital in China by Cui Zhanfeng, The History of the Communist Party of China Yongshou by the Party History Research Office of the Yongshou County Committee of the Communist Party of China, and The History of Lu'an in Anhui Province by the Party History and Local History Research Office of the Lu'an Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China Volume 1 1923-1949.