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

274V. I. LENIN“secondly, nowhere in the world has capitalist production,since Henry VII, dealt so ruthlessly with the traditionalrelations of agriculture and so adequately mouldedits conditions and made them subject to itself. England isin this respect the most revolutionary country in the world.All historically inherited relations—not only the positionof the villages, but the very villages themselves, not onlythe habitations of the agricultural population, but thispopulation itself, not only the ancient economic centres,but the very economy itself—have been ruthlessly sweptaway where they were in contradiction to the conditionsof capitalist production in agriculture, or did not correspondto those conditions. The German, for example, findseconomic relations determined by the traditional commonland relations [Feldmarken], the position of economiccentres, and particular conglomerations of the population.The Englishman finds that the historical conditions of agriculturehave been progressively created by capital sincethe fifteenth century. The technical expression customaryin the United Kingdom, the ‘clearing of estates’, does notoccur in any continental country. But what does this ‘clearingof estates’ mean? It means that, without regard forthe local population—which is driven away, for existingvillages—which are levelled to the ground, for farm buildings—whichare torn down, for the kind of agriculture—which is transformed at a stroke, being converted for examplefrom tillage to pasture, all conditions of production, insteadof being accepted as they are handed down by tradition,are historically fashioned in the form necessary underthe circumstances for the most profitable investment ofcapital. To that extent, therefore, no landed property exists;it allows capital—the farmer—to manage freely, since itis only concerned about the money income. A Pomeranianlandowner, his mind full of his ancestral [angestammten]common lands, economic centres, and the agricultural collegium,etc., is quite likely, therefore, to hold up his handsin horror at Ricardo’s ‘unhistorical’ views on the developmentof agricultural relations. That only shows that henaïvely confuses Pomeranian and English conditions. Butit cannot be said that Ricardo, who here starts out fromEnglish conditions, is just as narrow in his view as the