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

436V. I. LENINers—such is the significance of the “farming” of three millionagricultural “farms” out of the five million in Germany.To conclude the description of these proletarian farms,let us add that almost one-third of them (one million out of3.4 million) do not possess livestock of any kind, two-thirds(2.5 out of 3.4 million) do not have any cattle, more thannine-tenths (3.3 out of 3.4 million) have no horses. The shareof these proletarian farms in the total agricultural productionis minimal: three-fifths of them have less than one-tenth ofall the cattle (2.7 million out of 29.4 million head, reckoningall livestock in terms of cattle), and one-twentiethof all the cultivated area (1.2 out of 24.4 million hectares).FROM MARXTO MAOOne can imagine what confusion and falsity is introducedinto the subject by statistics which lump together in this⋆group of farms of less than two hectares of land millionsof proletarians without horses or cattle and with only akitchen garden or potato field and thousands of big farmers,capitalists, who conduct big cattle-raising or horticulturaland suchlike enterprises on 1-2 dessiatines. That such farmersare contained in this group is evident if only from thefact that out of the 3.4 million (with less than two hectaresof land) 15,428 are farmers each of whom have six ormore workers (taking family and wage-workers together),all of these 15,428 NOT together having FOR123,941 workers, i.e.,an average of eight workers per farm. Taking into accountthe special features of agriculture as regards machinery, sucha number of workersCOMMERCIALis undoubtedly an indication of largescalecapitalist production. That large-scale cattle-raisingfarms are included DISTRIBUTIONamong the mass of proletarian “farms” ofless than two hectares, I have already had to point out onthe basis of the data of the earlier census of 1895 (see mybook: The Agrarian Question, St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 239*).It was quite possible to single out these large-scale farmsby means of the data both on the number of cattle andon the number of workers, but the German statisticiansprefer to fill hundreds of pages with data on five subdivisionsof the group of owners having less than half a hectaredivided into still smaller groups according to the amountof land!* See present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 103-222.—Ed.