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As a result, there has been phenomenal growth in the population of the poor, who have to live in small houses, in hovels. It is a painful thing that they live in miserable conditions. But the problem of providing them with good houses will not be solved by pulling down the big ones.
I say that if the big ones are destroyed, the small ones will also perish. They have come in the wake of the big ones. In a way, the nine surviving children, who used to die in the past, owe their lives to the big houses. It is because of capitalism that the worker gets employment and wages and houses to live in. That worker will die if you expropriate capital and distribute it.
Our efforts should be to raise the workers to the height of the capitalists. On the contrary, we are trying to pull down the latter to the level of workers. We have to strive to turn the small houses into big houses. And to do so we will have to construct bigger and still bigger houses. Then alone we can attain to socialism, and not otherwise.
But very often false reasoning comes in our way. This is happening in communist China. They think that by destroying the big houses, they will raise the height of the small ones. This is not possible. Surely the big house will go, but that will not help the poor. If the poor people, with small houses, could build big houses, they would have done it a long time back. No, with the destruction of the rich, the poor will return to their old inertia, their habitual lethargy.
Before being removed from his high office in Russia, Khrushchev had made a very significant statement which is worth considering. He said that the greatest problem that his country was facing was that no one was wiling to work, that the youth of Russia was not at all interested in doing anything. It is strange that the workers of Russia, the young men of that socialist country, are not willing to work. They are lapsing into lethargy and laziness. Stalin had forced them to work, and so the way he was treated after his death is understandable. His dead body was removed from he grave in Red Square facing the Kremlin, where he used to acknowledge the salutes of his people for decades.
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