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

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V. I. LENIN
relationship. This leads, on the one hand, to the expropriation
of the old peasantry, and, on the other, to the peasant
buying out his land and his liberty. The transformation
of rent in kind into money rent is furthermore not only
inevitably accompanied, but even anticipated, by the
formation of a class of propertyless day labourers, who
hire themselves out for money. During their genesis, when
this new class appears but sporadically, the custom necessarily
develops among the more prosperous peasants subject
to rent payments (rentepflichtigen) of exploiting agricultural
wage-labourers for their own account. . . . In this
way, they gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating
a certain amount of wealth and themselves becoming
transformed into future capitalists. The old self-employed
possessors of land themselves thus give rise to a nursery
school for capitalist tenants, whose development is
conditioned by the general development of capitalist
production beyond the bounds of the countryside”
(Das Kapital, III, 2, 332. Russ. trans., 659-660). 70
4) The differentiation of the peasantry, which develops
the latter’s extreme groups at the expense of the middle
“peasantry,” creates two new types of rural inhabitants.
The feature common to both types is the commodity, money
character of their economy. The first new type is the rural
bourgeoisie or the well-to-do peasantry. These include the
independent farmers who carry on commercial agriculture
in all its varied forms (the principal ones of which we shall
describe in Chapter IV), then come the owners of commercial
and industrial establishments, the proprietors of
commercial enterprises, etc. The combining of commercial
agriculture with commercial and industrial enterprises is
the type of “combination of agriculture with industries”
that is specifically peculiar to this peasantry. From among
these well-to-do peasants a class of capitalist farmers is
created, since the renting of land for the sale of grain plays
(in the agricultural belt) an enormous part in their farms,
often a more important part than the allotment. The size
of the farm, in the majority of cases, requires a labour force
larger than that available in the family, for which reason
the formation of a body of farm labourers, and still more
of day labourers, is a necessary condition for the existence