Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
ceeded to “correct” Mr. Karyshev in their own way. Here is
how Mr. N. —on does it, “using,” as he says (p. 153, note),
Mr. N. Kablukov’s arguments against Mr. Karyshev. In §IX
of his Sketches, Mr. N. —on discusses land renting and the
various forms it assumes. “When a peasant,” he says, “has
sufficient land to enable him to obtain his livelihood by
tilling his own, he does not rent any land” (152). Thus, Mr.
N. —on flatly denies the existence of entrepreneur activity
in peasant land renting and the grabbing of rentable land by
rich peasants engaged in commercial crop growing. His proof?
Absolutely none: the theory of “people’s production” is not
proved, but laid down as law. In answer to Mr. Karyshev, Mr.
N. —on quotes a table from the Zemstvo abstract for Khvalynsk
Uyezd showing that “the number of draught animals
being equal, the smaller the allotment the more must this
deficiency be compensated by renting” (153),* and again,
“if the peasants are placed in absolutely identical conditions
as regards the possession of animals, and if they have
sufficient workers in their households, then the smaller the
allotment they have, the more the land they rent” (154). The
reader will see that such “conclusions” are merely a quibble
at Mr. Karyshev’s inaccurate formulation, that Mr. N. —on’s
empty trifles simply obscure the issue of the connection
between land renting and prosperity. Is it not self-evident
that where an equal number of draught animals is possessed,
the less land a household has, the more it rents? That goes
without saying, for it is the very prosperity whose differences
are under discussion that is taken as equal. Mr. N. —on’s
assertion that peasants with sufficient land do not rent land
is not in any way proved by this, and his tables merely show
that he does not understand the figures he quotes: by comparing
the peasants as to amount of allotment land held, he
brings out the more strikingly the role of “prosperity” and the
grabbing of rentable land in connection with the leasing of
land by the poor (leasing it to these same well-to-do peasants,
of course.)** Let the reader recall the data we have quoted on
* An exactly similar table is given by the statisticians for
Kamyshin Uyezd. Statistical Returns for Saratov Gubernia, Vol. XI
Kamyshin Uyezd, p. 249 and foll. We can just as well, therefore,
make use of the data for the uyezd we have taken.
** That the data quoted by Mr. N. —on refute his conclusions
has already been pointed to by Mr. P. Struve in his Critical Remarks.
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