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

154
V. I. LENIN
Naturally, the combining of workers and employers in
one category and the striking of an “average” budget provide
a picture of “moderate sufficiency” and of a “moderate”
net income: income 491 rubles, expenditure 443 rubles,
balance 48 rubles, including 18 rubles in cash. But that
sort of average is absolutely fictitious. It simply conceals
the utter poverty of the mass of peasants in the bottom
groups (a and b, i.e., 30 budgets out of 66), who with their
trivial incomes (120 to 180 rubles per family gross income)
are unable to make ends meet and live mainly by regular
farm labouring and day labouring.
An exact calculation of income and expenditure in cash
and kind enables us to determine the relation of the differentiation
of the peasantry to the market, for which only
cash income and expenditure are important. The proportion
of the cash part of the budget to the total budget in the
various groups is as follows:
Percentage of cash part
of expenditure to of income to
gross expenditure gross income
a) 57.10 54.6
b) 46.47 41.4
c) 43.57 45.7
d) 41.47 42.3
e) 46.93 40.8
f) 60.18 59.2
49.14 47.9
We see, consequently, that the percentage of the cash
income and expenditure increases (expenditure with particular
regularity) from the middle groups to the extreme ones.
The farming is of the most sharply expressed commercial
character in the case of the peasant with no horses and of the
one with many. This means that both live mainly by selling
commodities, except that in the one instance the commodity
It is a deficit resulting not from inability to satisfy minimum requirements,
but from increased requirements out of proportion to the
income of the given year.