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

198V. I. LENINon, when quoting figures of livestock owned by the farmsin the various groups, we shall see that there can be noquestion of any really independent and more or less stableagriculture as far as the bulk of these notorious representativesof “small-scale farming” are concerned. 47.2 percent, i.e., nearly half of the farms are proletarian or semiproletarian(those owning no land and those owning upto 2.5 hectares); 25 per cent, i.e., a further quarter of thefarms (2.5 to 10 hectares), belong to needy small peasants—such is the basis of the “prosperity” of agricultural capitalismin Denmark. Of course, land area statistics can giveus only a general idea in total figures of a country withhighly developed commercial livestock farming. As thereader will see, however, the figures of livestock, whichwe examine in detail below, only strengthen the conclusionsthat have been drawn.Now let us see what changes took place in Denmark between1873 and 1895 in the distribution of land as betweenbig and small farms. What strikes us immediately here isthe typically capitalist increase at the extremes, and thediminution in the proportion of medium farms. Takingthe number of agricultural farms (not counting farms withoutland), the proportion of the smallest farms, those upto 2.5 hectares, increased 27.9 per cent in 1873, 31.8 percent in 1885, and 34.8 per cent in 1895. The proportiondiminished in all the medium groups, and only in the highestgroup, 120 hectares and over, did it remain unchanged(0.7 per cent). The percentage of the total land occupiedby the largest farms, 120 hectares and over, increased,being 14.3 per cent, 15.2 per cent, and 15.6 per cent in therespective years; there was also an increase, but not to thesame extent, among the medium peasant farms (those from10 to 40 hectares: 25.5 per cent, 26.5 per cent, and 26.8 percent for the respective years), while the total number offarms in this group diminished. There is an irregular increasein the farms of 2.5 to 10 hectares (9.1 per cent, 9.5per cent, and 9.4 per cent for the respective years) and asteady increase in the smallest farms (1.5 per cent, 1.7 percent, and 1.8 per cent). As a result, we have a very clearlymarked tendency towards growth of the biggest and smallestfarms. To obtain a clearer idea of this phenomenon we