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

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND “CRITICS OF MARX”183The main argument advanced by David and his numerousadherents among the bourgeois economists is a statisticalone. They compare the number of cattle (per unit of land)on different-sized farms, it being tacitly assumed that identicalquantities are compared, i.e., that an equal numberof cattle of a particular kind represents an equal agriculturalvalue, so to speak, on both big and small farms.It is assumed that an equal number of cattle providesan equal quantity of manure, that the cattle on big andsmall farms have more or less the same qualities, andso forth.Obviously, the cogency of the argument in question dependsentirely upon whether this usually tacit assumptionis correct. Is this postulate correct? If we pass from thebare and rough, indiscriminate statistics to an analysisof the socio-economic conditions of small-scale and largescaleagricultural production as a whole we shall find atonce that that postulate takes for granted the very thingthat has still to be proved. Marxism affirms that the conditionsunder which cattle are kept (and also, as we haveseen, the tending of the land and the conditions of theagricultural worker) are worse in small-scale than in largescalefarming. Bourgeois political economy asserts the opposite,and the Bernsteinians repeat this assertion, namely,that thanks to the diligence of the small farmer, cattle arekept under far better conditions on a small farm than ona big one. To find data which would throw light on thisquestion requires quite different statistics from those withwhich David operates. It requires a statistical study notof the number of cattle on different-sized farms, but oftheir quality. Such a study exists in German economicliterature, and perhaps more than one. It is highly characteristicthat David, who filled his book with a mass of irrelevantquotations from all kinds of works on agronomics,completely ignored the attempts to be found in the literatureto reveal the internal conditions of small-scale andlarge-scale farming by means of detailed research. Weshall acquaint the reader with one of those researches undeservedlyignored by David.Drechsler, a well-known German writer on agriculturalquestions, published the results of a monographic “agricul-