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

196V. I. LENINbeing excessively dispersed, we shall combine these groupsinto six larger groups.The main conclusion to be drawn first of all from thesedata—one which bourgeois political economists and therevisionists who follow in their footsteps usually lose sightof—is that the bulk of the land in Denmark is owned byfarmers engaged in capitalist agriculture. There can be nodoubt that not only farmers owning 120 hectares and overrun their farms with the aid of hired labour, but also thoseowning 40 hectares or more. These two higher groups accountedfor only 11 per cent of the total number of farmsin 1895, but they owned 62 per cent, or more than threefifthsof the total land. The basis of Danish agricultureis large-scale and medium capitalist agriculture. All thetalk about a “peasant country” and “small-scale farming”is sheer bourgeois apologetics, a distortion ofthe facts by various titled and untitled ideologists ofcapital.It should be mentioned in this connection that in Denmark,as in other European countries where the capitalistsystem of agriculture is fully established, the share of thehigher capitalist groups in the whole national economychanges only slightly in the course of time. In 1873, 13.2per cent of the capitalist farms occupied 63.9 per cent ofall the land; in 1885, 11.5 per cent of the farms occupied62.3 per cent of the land. This stability of large-scale farmingmust always be borne in mind when comparing thedata for different years; for it is often possible to noticein the literature that the main features of the given socioeconomicsystem are glossed over by means of such comparisonsconcerning changes in details.As in other European countries, the mass of small farmsin Denmark account for an insignificant part of the totalagricultural production. In 1895, the number of farmswith areas of up to 10 hectares accounted for 72.2 per centof the total number of farms, but they occupied only 11.2per cent of the land. In the main, this ratio was the samein 1885 and in 1873. Often the small farms belong to semiproletarians—aswe have seen, the German statistics borethis out fully in regard to farms of up to two hectares, andpartly also in regard to farms of up to five hectares. Later