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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
155
is labour-power, while in the other it is goods produced
for sale, with (as we shall see) a considerable employment
of wage-labour, i.e., a product that assumes the form of
capital. In other words, these budgets also show that the
differentiation of the peasantry creates a home market for
capitalism by converting the peasant into a farm labourer,
on the one hand, and into a small-commodity producer,
a petty bourgeois, on the other.
Another, and no less important, deduction from these
data, is that in all the peasant groups farming has to a very
large extent become commercial, has become dependent
upon the market: in no case does the cash part of
income or expenditure fall below 40%. And this percentage
must be regarded as a high one, for we are discussing the
gross incomes of small agriculturists, in which even the
maintenance of cattle is included, i.e., straw, bran, etc.*
Evidently, even the peasantry in the central black-earth
belt (where money economy is, on the whole, more feebly
developed than in the industrial belt, or in the outlying
steppe regions) cannot exist at all without buying and
selling and are already completely dependent on the market,
on the power of money. It is needless to say how tremendously
important this fact is, and how grave the error our Narodniks
commit when they try to hush it up,** being carried
away by their sympathies for the natural economy which
has passed out of existence never to return. In modern
society it is impossible to exist without selling, and anything
that retards the development of commodity production
merely results in a worsening of the conditions of the producers.
“The disadvantages of the capitalist mode of production,”
says Marx, speaking of the peasant, “. . . coincide
here therefore with the disadvantages occasioned by the
imperfect development of the capitalist mode of production.
The peasant turns merchant and industrialist without the
* Expenditure on the maintenance of cattle is almost entirely
in kind: of a total expenditure of 6,316.21 rubles on this item by the
66 households, only 1,535.2 rubles were spent in cash, and of this
sum 1,102.5 rubles were spent by one farmer-entrepreneur who kept
20 horses, evidently for industrial use.
** This error was particularly often met with in the debates
(of 1897) on the significance of low grain prices. 57