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

178
V. I. LENIN
approximately � of the population) to membership of the
rural proletariat, i.e., all the horseless and a large part of
the one-horse peasants (this, of course, is only a wholesale,
approximate calculation, one subject to more or less considerable
modifications in the different areas, according to
local conditions). The grounds which compel us to believe
that such a considerable proportion of the peasantry already
belong to the rural proletariat have been advanced above.*
It should be added that our literature frequently contains
too stereotyped an understanding of the theoretical proposition
that capitalism requires the free, landless worker.
This proposition is quite correct as indicating the main
trend, but capitalism penetrates into agriculture particularly
slowly and in extremely varied forms. The allotment
of land to the rural worker is very often to the interests
of the rural employers themselves, and that is why the
allotment-holding rural worker is a type to be found in all
capitalist countries. The type assumes different forms in
different countries: the English cottager is not the same as
the small-holding peasant of France or the Rhine provinces,
and the latter again is not the same as the Knecht in Prussia.
Each of these bears traces of a specific agrarian system, of
a specific history of agrarian relations—but this does not
prevent the economist from classing them all as one type
of agricultural proletarian. The juridical basis of his right
to his plot of land is absolutely immaterial to such a
classification. Whether the land is his full property (as a
* Prof. Conrad considers the criterion for the real peasant in
Germany to be ownership of a pair of draught animals (Gespannbauerngüter),
see Landownership and Agriculture (Moscow, 1896,
pp. 84-85). For Russia the criterion should rather be put higher. In
defining the concept “peasant,” what Conrad takes is the percentage of
persons or households engaged in “hired labour” or “subsidiary
industries” generally (ibid.),—Prof Stebut, who cannot be denied
authority on questions of fact, wrote in 1882: “Since the fall of serfdom,
the peasant with his small economic unit, engaged exclusively in
growing grain, that is to say, principally in the central black-earth
belt of Russia, has in the majority of cases become an artisan, a farm
labourer or a day labourer, for whom agriculture is only a subsidiary
occupation” (“Articles on Russian Agriculture, Its Defects and the
Measures for Its Improvement,” Moscow, 1883, p. 11) Evidently
the artisans here also include wage-workers in industry (building,
etc.) However incorrect this use of terms, it is very widespread in
our literature, even in specifically economic literature.