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

200
V. I. LENIN
corvée economy,* and which sometimes passes imperceptibly
into the capitalist system of providing the estate with
agricultural workers by alloting patches of land to them.
Zemstvo statistics establish beyond doubt this connection
between such “renting” and the lessors’ own farming. “With
the development of their own farming on the private landowners’
estates, the owners had to guarantee themselves
a supply of workers at the required time. Hence, there
develops in many places the tendency among them to distribute
land to the peasants on the labour-service basis, or
for a part of the crop together with labour-service. . . .”
This system of farming “. . . is fairly widespread. The more
frequently the lessors do their own farming, the smaller the
amount of land available for leasing and the greater the
demand for such land, the more widely does this form of
land renting develop” (ibid., p. 266, cf. also 367). Thus,
we have here renting of a very special kind, under which the
landowner does not abandon his own farm, but which
expresses the development of private-landowner cultivation,
expresses not the consolidation of the peasant farm by the
enlargement of area held, but the conversion of the peasant
into an agricultural labourer. In the preceding chapter we
have seen that on the peasant’s farm the renting of land is of
contradictory significance: for some it is a profitable
expansion of their farms; for others it is a deal made out of
dire need. Now we see that on the landlord’s farm, too, the
leasing of land is of contradictory significance: in some cases
it is the transfer of the farm to another person for a payment
of rent; in others it is a method of conducting one’s own
farm, a method of providing one’s estate with manpower.
Let us pass to the question of the payment of labour
under labour-service. The data from various sources are at
one in testifying to the fact that the payment of labour where
it is hired on a labour-service and bonded basis is always
lower than under capitalist “free” hire. Firstly, this is
proved by the fact that rent in kind, i.e., on the basis of
labour-service and half-cropping (which, as we have just
* Cf. examples given in footnote to pp. 194-195. When corvée
economy existed, the landlord gave the peasant land so that the peasant
might work for him. When land is leased on the labour-service
basis, the economic aspect of the matter is obviously the same.