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

210
V. I. LENIN
out the gubernia. . . . Correspondingly, in many places, despite
the severe drop in grain prices, there was an increase in
the area cultivated by landowners employing regular labour”
(The Influence of Harvests, etc., I, 304). In Tambov Gubernia,
a considerable increase has been observed in the prices
paid for work done by horses: for the three years 1892-
1894, these prices were 25 to 30% higher than for the three
years 1889-1891 (Novoye Slovo, 1895, No. 3, p. 187). This
rise in the cost of work done by horses, a natural result of
the decline in the number of peasant horses, cannot but
entail the ousting of labour-service by the capitalist system.
It is by no means our intention, of course, to use these separate
references in order to prove that labour-service is being
eliminated by capitalism: no complete statistics on this
subject are available. We are merely using them to illustrate
the point that there is a connection between the differentiation
of the peasantry and the elimination of labour-service
by capitalism. General and mass-scale data, which prove irrefutably
that this elimination is going on, relate to the employment
of machinery in agriculture and to the employment
of labour freely hired. But before passing to these data, we
must first deal with the views of the Narodnik economists on
contemporary farming by private landowners in Russia.
V. THE NARODNIK ATTITUDE TO THE PROBLEM
The point that the labour-service system is simply a
survival of corvée economy is not denied even by the
Narodniks. On the contrary, it is admitted—although in an
insufficiently general form—by Mr. N. —on (Sketches, §IX)
and by Mr. V. V. (particularly explicitly in his article “Our
Peasant Farming and Agronomy,” in Otechestvenniye
Zapiski, 1882, No. 8-9). The more astonishing is it that the
Narodniks do their utmost to avoid admitting the clear and
simple fact that the present system of private-landowner
farming is a combination of the labour-service and the capitalist
systems, and that, consequently, the more developed
the former, the weaker the latter, and vice versa. They avoid
analysing the relation of each of these systems to the productivity
of labour, to the payment of the worker’s labour,