Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

182V. I. LENINIn a footnote on page 481 David promises in the futureto examine the connection between this law and rent, andalso “to examine critically Marx’s attempt to develop andextend the theory of rent, while rejecting the basis givenby Malthus and Ricardo”.We venture to predict that David’s critical examinationwill be a repetition of bourgeois prejudices à la Mr.Bulgakov, or ... à la Comrade Maslov.Let us now examine another radically erroneous thesisof David’s. To refute his apologetics or his distortion ofstatistics is a very thankless task. On the question we arenow about to deal with we have some new data which enableus to contrast a factual picture of reality with the theoriesof present-day philistinism.XILIVESTOCK IN SMALL AND LARGE FARMSThe “critics” or Bernsteinians in the agrarian question,when defending small-scale production, very often referto the following circumstance. Small farmers keep far morecattle on a given unit of land than big farmers. Consequently,they say, the small farmers manure their land better.Their farms are on a technically higher level, for manureplays a decisive role in modern agriculture, and the manureobtained from cattle kept on the farm is far superior to anyartificial fertilisers.Ed. David in his book Socialism and Agriculture attachesdecisive significance to this argument (pp. 326, 526,and 527 of the Russian translation). He writes in italics:“manure is the soul of agriculture” (p. 308), and makes thistruism the main basis of his defence of small-scale farming.He quotes German statistics showing that the small farmskeep far more cattle per unit of land than the big ones. Davidis convinced that these figures definitely decide in his favourthe question of the advantages of large-scale or smallscaleproduction in agriculture.Let us examine this theory and the manurial soul ofagriculture more closely.