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

430V. I. LENINsation of the different groups or types of farms as a whole.When the summing up is unsatisfactory, when the-groupingis incorrect or inadequate, the result can be—and this continuallyhappens in the treatment of modern census data—that unusually detailed, excellent data on each separate enterprisedisappear, become lost or are wholly missing whendealing with the millions of farms of the entire country. Thecapitalist system of agriculture is characterised by the relationswhich exist between employers and workers, betweenfarms of various types, and if the distinguishing features ofthese types are taken incorrectly or selected incompletely,then even the best census cannot give a politico-economicpicture of the actual situation.It is clear, therefore, that the methods of summarisingor grouping the data of modern censuses are of extreme importance.Later on we shall examine an exposition of all therather diverse methods used in the best censuses enumeratedabove. For the present let us note that the German census,like the vast majority of the others, gives a full summary,grouping the farms exclusively according to a single feature,namely, the size of the agricultural area of each farm. Onthis basis the census divides all the farms into 18 groups, beginningwith farms of less than one-tenth of a hectare andending with those over 1,000 hectares of agricultural area.That such detailed subdivision is a statistical luxury unjustifiedby politico-economic considerations is felt by the authorsof the German statistics themselves, who provide a summaryof all the data in six—or, by separating a subgroup—seven large groups according to the size of the agriculturalarea. These groups are as follows: farms having less than halfa hectare, one-half to 2, 2 to 5, 5 to 20, 20 to 100, and over100, the last including a subgroup of farms with over 200hectares of agricultural area.The question arises: what is the politico-economic significanceof this grouping? Undoubtedly the land is the chiefmeans of production in agriculture; the amount of land is themost accurate criterion of the dimensions of a farm and,consequently, of its type, i.e., for example, whether it is asmall, medium or large farm, a capitalist farm or one notusing wage-labour. A farm of less than two hectares is usuallyaccounted a small (sometimes called a parcellised or