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

194
V. I. LENIN
immediately after the Reform, to import machinery
and even workers from abroad could not but end in a
fiasco. The other reason why the transition to the capitalist
conduct of affairs was not possible at once was that the old
corvée system of economy had been undermined, but not yet
completely destroyed. The peasants’ farms were not
entirely separated from those of the landlords, for the latter
retained possession of very essential parts of the peasants’
allotments: the “cut-off lands,” 82 the woods, meadows,
watering places, pastures, etc. Without these lands (or easement
rights) the peasants were absolutely unable to carry on
independent farming, so that the landlords were able to
continue the old system of economy in the form of labourservice.
The possibility of exercising “other than economic
pressure” also remained in the shape of the peasants’
temporarily-bound status, 83 collective responsibility,
corporal punishment, forced labour on public works, etc.
Thus, capitalist economy could not emerge at once, and
corvée economy could not disappear at once. The only possible
system of economy was, accordingly, a transitional
one, a system combining the features of both the corvée
and the capitalist systems. And indeed, the post-Reform
system of farming practised by the landlords bears precisely
these features. With all the endless variety of forms characteristic
of a transitional epoch, the economic organisation
of contemporary landlord farming amounts to two main
systems, in the most varied combinations—the labourservice*
system and the capitalist system. The first
consists in the landlord’s land being cultivated with the
implements of the neighbouring peasants, the form of
payment not altering the essential nature of this system
(whether payment is in money, as in the case of job-hire,
or in produce, as in the case of half-cropping, or in land
or grounds, as in the case of labour-service in the narrow
sense of the term). This is a direct survival of corvée
economy,** and the economic characterisation of the latter,
* We are now replacing the term “corvée” by the term “labour-service”
since the latter expression corresponds in greater measure to post-
Reform relations and is by now generally accepted in our literature.
** Here is a particularly striking example: “In the south of Yelets
Uyezd (Orel Gubernia),” writes a correspondent of the Department