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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
137
the fact of land renting being due to want. On the contrary,
the chart shows the entirely different character of renting
by the poor, who cling to the land (half the households
account for 1 to 2 tenths of the total rented land). There are
peasants and peasants.
The contradictory significance of land renting in “peasant
farming” stands out particularly vividly when we
compare the column on land renting with that on the leasing
out of land (first column to the left, i.e., among the
negative indices). Here we see the very opposite: the principal
lessors of land are the bottom groups (half the households
account for 7 to 8 tenths of the land leased), who
strive to get rid of their allotments, which pass (despite
legal prohibitions and restrictions) into the hands of employer
farmers. Thus, when we are told that the “peasantry”
rent land and that the “peasantry” lease out their
land, we know that the first applies mainly to the peasant
bourgeoisie and the second to the peasant proletariat.
The relation of purchased, rented and leased land to the
allotment determines also the actual land held by the groups
(5th column to the right). In all cases we see that the actual
distribution of the total land at the disposal of the peasants
has nothing in common with the “equality” of the allotments.
Of the households 20% account for 35% to 50%
of the total land, while 50% account for 20% to 30%. In
the distribution of area under crops (next column) the
ousting of the bottom group by the top stands out in still
greater relief, probably because the poor peasantry are
rents that leave the tenant enough to cover wages, interest and the
repayment of invested capital, and employer’s profit (373). And Mr.
Karyshev is not in the least disturbed by the fact that this sort of
theory” appears side by side with the usual Narodnik recipe: “avert”
(398). In order to “avert” capitalist farming Mr. Karyshev advances
the “theory” of capitalist farming! This sort of “conclusion” naturally
crowned the basic contradiction in the book by Mr. Karyshev who,
on the one hand, shares all the Narodnik prejudices and wholeheartedly
sympathises with such classical theoreticians of the petty
bourgeoisie as Sismondi (see Karyshev, Perpetual Hereditary Land-
Hire on the European Continent, Moscow, 1885), but on the other
hand, cannot avoid the admission that land renting gives an “impetus”
(p. 396) to the differentiation of the peasantry, that the “better-off
strata” oust the poorer, and that the development of agrarian relations
leads precisely to agricultural wage-labour (p. 397)