Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM OF MODERN AGRICULTURE429is less detailed on some questions than the earlier censusesof 1882 and 1895 but, on the other hand, it gives for the firsttime an unprecedented wealth of data on wage-labour inagriculture. And the use of wage-labour is the chief distinguishingmark of every kind of capitalist agriculture.We shall therefore endeavour first of all to give a generalpicture of the capitalist system of modern agriculture,relying chiefly on the data of the 1907 German census andsupplementing them with the data of the best agriculturalcensuses of other countries, namely: the Danish, Swiss,American and the last Hungarian censuses. As regards thefact which most of all strikes the eye on a first acquaintancewith the results of the census and which is being most talkedabout, namely, the reduction in Germany of the number oflarge farms (large in agricultural area) and the amount ofland they possess, we shall turn to an examination of thisonly at the end of our work. For this is one of the complicatedfacts which are a function of a series of others, and it isimpossible to understand its significance without first elucidatingseveral much more important and basic questions.IA GENERAL PICTURE OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEMOF MODERN AGRICULTUREThe German agricultural censuses, like all the European(as distinct from the Russian) censuses of the kind, are basedon information collected separately about each agriculturalenterprise. At the same time the amount of information collectedusually increases with each census. For instance,in Germany in 1907, although very important informationon the number of cattle used in field work was omitted (thisinformation was collected in 1882 and 1895), for the firsttime information was collected on the amount of arable landunder various cereals and on the number of family workersand wage-workers. The information about each farm obtainedin this way is quite sufficient for a politico-economic characterisationof the farm. The whole question, the wholedifficulty of the task, is how to sum up these data in sucha way as to obtain an accurate politico-economic characteri-