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

208
V. I. LENIN
unsuitable for the labour-service system, though for another
reason: having no farm of his own, or possessing a miserable
patch of land, the rural proletarian is not tied down
to it to the extent that the “middle” peasant is, and, as a
consequence, it is far easier for him to go elsewhere and hire
himself out on “free” terms, i.e., for higher pay and without
bondage at all. Hence the universal dissatisfaction of our
agrarians at the peasants leaving for the towns or for “outside
employments” generally, hence their complaints that
the peasants have “little attachment” (see below, p. 250).
The development of purely capitalist wage-labour saps the
very roots of the labour-service system.*
* Here is a particularly striking example. Zemstvo statisticians
explain the comparative incidence of money renting and renting in
kind in various parts of Bakhmut Uyezd, Ekaterinoslav Gubernia,
in the following way:
“Money renting is most widespread ... in the coal and salt-mining
districts, and least widespread in the steppe and purely agricultural
area The peasants, in general, are not eager to go out to work for
others, and are particularly reluctant to accept irksome and badlypaid
work on private estates. Work in the coal mines, in ore-mining
and in metallurgy generally, is arduous and injurious to the worker’s
health, but, generally speaking, it is better paid, and attracts the
worker with the prospect of monthly or weekly wages in cash, as he
does not usually get money when he works on the landlord’s estate,
for the reason that there he is either working in payment of the ‘bit’
of land he has rented, or of straw or grain he has borrowed, or has
managed to get his pay in advance to cover his ordinary needs, etc.
“All this induces the worker to avoid working on estates, and he
does avoid doing so when there is an opportunity of earning money
in some place other than the landlord’s ‘estate.’ And this opportunity
occurs mostly where there are many mines, at which the workers are
paid ‘good’ money. With the ‘pence’ the peasant earns in the mines,
he can rent land, without having to pledge himself to work on an
estate, and in this way renting for money establishes its sway” (quoted
from Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigations, Vol. II, p. 265).
In the steppe, non-industrial divisions of the uyezd, on the other hand,
land renting on a skopshchina and a labour-service basis establishes
its sway.
Thus, to escape labour-service the peasant is ready to flee even
to the mines! Prompt payment in cash, the impersonal form of hire
and regular working hours “attract” the worker to such an extent that
he even prefers the mines underground to agriculture, the agriculture
about which our Narodniks wax so idyllic. The whole point is that
the peasant knows from bitter experience the real value of the labourservice
idealised by the agrarians and the Narodniks, and he knows how
much better are purely capitalist relations.