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

438V. I. LENINIt was found that the absolute number of wage-workers insuch farms is very great—1.6 million, more than a thirdof the total number of wage-workers. Obviously there arenot a few capitalist enterprises among the general mass(2.1 million) of “peasant” farms. We shall see below theapproximate number and significance of these enterprises,for the present we shall deal in more detail with the relationshipbetween family and wage-labour. Let us see how bigthe average number of workers per farm is:Average number of workers per farmFamily Wage-Groups of farms Total workers workersProletarian Less than 0.5 ha 1.3 1.20.1farms . .{0.5 - 2 ha 1.9 1.7 0.2Peasant2-5 ” 2.9 2.5 0.4farms . .{5-10 ” 3.8 3.1 0.710-20 ” 5.1 3.4 1.7Capitalist 20-100 ” 7.9 3.24.7farms . .{100 ha or more 52.5 1.6 50.9Altogether . . . . 3.0 2.1 0.9We see from this table that, compared with industry,agricultural enterprises are generally of a small size asregards the number of workers. Only owners possessing morethan 100 hectares have over 50 wage-workers: the number ofsuch owners is 23,566, i.e., less than one-half per cent of thetotal number of farms. The total number of wage-workerson these farms is 1,463,974, i.e., a little less than the totalnumber on the two million peasant farms.Among the peasant farms, the group that is seen at onceto stand out from the rest is that with 10-20 hectares: thisgroup has an average of 1.7 wage-workers per farm. If wesingle out only the permanent workers we shall find that theynumber 412,702 for the 412,741 farms of this group (411,940of the farms distributed according to the number of workers).This means that not a single enterprise is able to do withoutpermanent use of wage-labour. That is why we single outthis group as that of “Grossbauer”, big peasant farmers orpeasant bourgeoisie. Usually it is owners of 20 or more hectaresthat are reckoned to belong to this category, but the1907 census has shown that the use of wage-labour in agricultureis more widely distributed than is usually thought,