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

C H A P T E R III 79
THE LANDOWNERS’ TRANSITION FROM CORVÉE
TO CAPITALIST ECONOMY
191
From peasant economy we must now pass to landlord
economy. Our task is to examine, in its main features, the
present social-economic system of landlord economy and
to describe the nature of the evolution of this system in
the post-Reform epoch.
I. THE MAIN FEATURES OF CORVÉE ECONOMY
As our starting-point in examining the present system
of landlord economy we must take the system of that economy
which prevailed in the epoch of serfdom. The essence
of the economic system of those days was that the entire
land of a given unit of agrarian economy, i.e., of a given
estate, was divided into the lord’s and the peasants’ land;
the latter was distributed in allotments among the peasants,
who (receiving other means of production in addition, as
for example, timber, sometimes cattle, etc.) cultivated
it with their own labour and their own implements, and
obtained their livelihood from it. The product of this peasants’
labour constituted the necessary product, to employ
the terminology of theoretical political economy; necessary—for
the peasants in providing them with means
of subsistence, and for the landlord in providing him with
hands; in exactly the same way as the product which
replaces the variable part of the value of capital is a necessary
product in capitalist society. The peasants’ surplus labour,
on the other hand, consisted in their cultivation, with
the same implements, of the landlord’s land; the product
of that labour went to the landlord. Hence, the surplus