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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY241geoisie (as our Narodniks have imagined it to be)—it was astruggle for the American type of bourgeois developmentas against the Prussian type of bourgeois development.And in those localities of Russia where no serfdom hadexisted, where agriculture was undertaken entirely, or chiefly,by free peasants (for example, in the steppes of theTrans-Volga area, Novorossia, and the Northern Caucasus,which were colonised after the Reform), the growth of theproductive forces and the development of capitalism proceededfar more rapidly than in the central provinceswhich were burdened by survivals of serfdom.*While Russia’s agricultural centre and agriculturalborderlands show us, as it were, the spatial or geographicaldistribution of the localities in which one or the othertype of agrarian evolution prevails, the fundamental featuresof both types of evolution are also clearly evidentin all those localities where landlord and peasant farmingexist side by side. A cardinal mistake of the Narodnikeconomists was that they believed that landlord farmingwas the only source of agrarian capitalism, while they regardedpeasant farming from the point of view of “people’sproduction” and the “labour principle” (that is the viewtaken even now by the Trudoviks, the “Popular Socialists”,and the Socialist-Revolutionaries). We know that this iswrong. Landlord economy evolves in a capitalist way andgradually replaces the labour rent system by “free wagelabour”,the three-field system by intensive cultivation, andthe obsolete peasant implements by the improved machineryemployed on the big private farms. Peasant farmingalso evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a ruralbourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The better the conditionof the “village commune” and the greater the prosperityof the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process ofdifferentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic* I have dealt in detail with the importance of the borderlandsof Russia as colonisation lands during the development of capitalismin The Development of Capitalism in Russia. (St. Petersburg, 1899,pp. 185, 444, et al.) Second edition issued, St. Petersburg, 1908.(See present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 257, 562, 591-96.—Ed.) The ques-tion of the importance of the borderlands in regard to the Social-Democratic agrarian programme will be dealt with separately later on.