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

204
V. I. LENIN
has undertaken to do, even if his own grain remains ungathered”
(loc. cit., 216). “Only long years of slavery, of serf
labour for the lord, have been able to produce the indifference”
(only apparent) with which the cultivator leaves
his own grain in the rain to go carting somebody else’s
sheaves (ibid., 429). Without one or other form of binding
the population to their domiciles, to the “community,” without
a certain lack of civic rights, labour-service as a system
would be impossible. It stands to reason that an inevitable
consequence of the above-described features of the labourservice
system is low productivity of labour: methods of
farming based on labour-service can only be the most
stereotyped; the labour of the bonded peasant cannot but
approximate, in quality, to the labour of the serf.
The combination of the labour-service and the capitalist
systems makes the present system of landlord farming
extremely similar in its economic organisation to the
system that prevailed in our textile industry before the
development of large-scale machine industry. There, part
of the operations was done by the merchant with his own
implements and with wage-workers (fixing the yarn, dyeing
and finishing the fabric, etc.), and part with the implements
of peasant handicraftsmen who worked for him, using
his material. Here, part of the operations is performed by
wage-workers, using the employer’s implements, and
another part by the labour and the implements of peasants
working on the land of others. There, combined with
industrial capital was merchant’s capital, and the handicraftsman,
besides being weighed down by capital, was burdened
with bondage, the operations of the subcontractor, the trucksystem,
etc. Here, likewise, combined with industrial capital
is merchant’s and usurer’s capital accompanied by all
forms of pay reduction and intensification of the producer’s
personal dependence. There, the transitional system lasted
for centuries, being based on a primitive hand-labour technique,
and was smashed in some three decades by large-scale
machine industry; here, labour-service has continued almost
since the rise of Rus (the landowners forced the villeins into
bondage as far back as the time of Russkaya Pravda 87 ), perpetuating
routine technique, and has begun rapidly to give
way to capitalism only in the post-Reform epoch. In both