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

240V. I. LENINBoth stood for conditions of bourgeois economic development(without being aware of it), but the former wanted adevelopment that would preserve to the utmost the landlordeconomies, the landlord revenues, and the landlord(bondage) methods of exploitation. The latter wanted a developmentthat would secure for the peasants the greatestdegree of prosperity possible with the existing level of agriculture,the abolition of the landlord latifundia, theabolition of all serf and bondage methods of exploitation,and the expansion of free peasant landownership. Needlessto say, in the second case the development of capitalismand the growth of the productive forces would have beenwider and more rapid than by peasant reform, carried outin the landlords’ way.* Only caricature Marxists, as theNarodniks, the opponents of Marxism, tried to depict them,could have believed that the divorcement of the peasantryfrom the land in 1861 guaranteed the development of capitalism.On the contrary, it would have been a guarantee—and so in fact it turned out to be—a guarantee of bondage,i.e., semi-serf tenant farming and labour rent, i.e., corvéeeconomy, which exceedingly retarded the development ofcapitalism and the growth of the productive forces in Russianagriculture. The conflict of interests between the peasantsand the landlords was not a struggle waged by “people’sproduction” or the “labour principle” against the bour-* In the magazine Nauchnoye Obozreniye (May-June 1900), Iwrote on this subject as follows: “...The more the land the peasantsreceived when they were emancipated, and the lower the price theypaid for it, the faster, wider, and freer would have been the developmentof capitalism in Russia the higher would have been the standardof living of the population, the wider would have, been the homemarket, the faster would have been the introduction of machineryinto production; the more, in a word, would the economic developmentof Russia have resembled that of America. I shall confine myselfto indicating two circumstances which, in my opinion, confirm thecorrectness of the latter view: (1) land-poverty and the burden of taxationhave led to the development over a very considerable area ofRussia of the labour-service system of private-landowner farming,i.e., a direct survival of serfdom, and not at all to the developmentof capitalism; (2) it is in our border regions, where serfdom was eitherentirely unknown, or was feeblest, and where the peasants sufferleast from land shortage, labour-service, and the burden of taxation,that there has been the greatest development of capitalism in agriculture.”(See present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 624-25.—Ed.)