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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
235
age), and in 1895, 1.69% (from 7 to 14 years of age). Among
local workers on estates in Elisavetgrad Uyezd, Kherson
Gubernia, children constituted 10.6% (ibid.).
Machines increase the intensity of the workers’ labour.
For example, the most widespread type of reaping machine
(with hand delivery) has acquired the characteristic name
of “lobogreyka” or “chubogreyka,”* since working with it
calls for extraordinary exertion on the part of the worker:
he takes the place of the delivery apparatus (cf. Productive
Forces, I, 52). Similarly, intensity of labour increases with
the use of the threshing machine. The capitalist mode of
employing machinery creates here (as everywhere) a powerful
stimulus to the lengthening of the working day. Night
work, something previously unknown, makes its appearance
in agriculture too. “In good harvest years . . . work on
some estates and on many peasant farms is carried on even
at night” (Tezyakov, loc. cit., 126), by artificial illumination—torchlight
(92). Finally, the systematic employment
of machines results in traumatism among agricultural workers;
the employment of young women and children at
machines naturally results in a particularly large toll of injuries.
The Zemstvo hospitals and dispensaries in Kherson
Gubernia, for example, are filled, during the agricultural
season, “almost exclusively with traumatic patients” and
serve as “field hospitals, as it were, for the treatment of the
enormous army of agricultural workers who are constantly
being disabled as a result of the ruthless destructive work of
agricultural machines and implements” (ibid., 126). A special
medical literature is appearing that deals with injuries
caused by agricultural machines. Proposals are being made
to introduce compulsory regulations governing the use of
agricultural machines (ibid.). The large-scale manufacture of
machinery imperatively calls for public control and regulation
of production in agriculture, as in industry. Of the
attempts to introduce such control we shall speak below.
Let us note, in conclusion, the extremely inconsistent
attitude of the Narodniks towards the employment of machinery
in agriculture. To admit the benefit and progressive
nature of the employment of machinery, to defend all
* Literally “brow-heater” or “forelock-heater.”—Ed.