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

192
V. I. LENIN
labour was separated then in space from the necessary
labour: for the landlord they cultivated his land, for themselves
their allotments; for the landlord they worked some
days of the week and for themselves others. The peasant’s
allotment in this economy served, as it were, as wages in
kind (to express oneself in modern terms), or as a means
of providing the landlord with hands. The peasants’ “own”
farming of their allotments was a condition of the landlord
economy, and its purpose was to “provide” not the peasant
with means of livelihood but the landlord with hands.*
It is this system of economy which we call corvée [Russ.:
barshchina] economy. Its prevalence obviously presumes
the following necessary conditions: firstly, the predominance
of natural economy. The feudal estate had to constitute a
self-sufficing, self-contained entity, in very slight contact
with the outside world. The production of grain by the landlords
for sale, which developed particularly in the latter
period of the existence of serfdom, was already a harbinger of
the collapse of the old regime. Secondly, such an economy
required that the direct producer be allotted the means of
production in general, and land in particular; moreover,
that he be tied to the land, since otherwise the landlord
was not assured of hands. Hence, the methods of obtaining
the surplus product under corvée and under capitalist economy
are diametrically opposite: the former is based on
the producer being provided with land, the latter on the
producer being dispossessed of the land.** Thirdly, a
* An extremely vivid description of this system of economy is
given by A. Engelhardt in his Letters from the Countryside (St.
Petersburg 1885, pp. 556-557). The author quite rightly points out
that feudal economy was a definite, regular and complete system, the
director of which was the landlord, who allotted land to the peasants
and assigned them to various jobs.
** In opposing the view of Henry George, who said that the expropriation
of the mass of the population is the great and universal
cause of poverty and oppression, Engels wrote in 1887: “This is not
quite correct historically.... In the Middle Ages, it was not the
expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation
to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. The
peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein,
and made liable to tribute to the lord in labour and in produce” (The
Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, New York, 1887,
Preface, p. III). 80