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

236
V. I. LENIN
measures that develop and facilitate it, and at the same time
to ignore the fact that machinery in Russian agriculture is
employed in the capitalist manner, means to sink to the viewpoint
of the small and big agrarians. Yet what our Narodniks
do is precisely to ignore the capitalist character of the
employment of agricultural machinery and improved implements,
without even attempting to analyse what types of
peasant and landlord farms introduce machinery. Mr. V. V.
angrily calls Mr. V. Chernyayev “a representative of capitalist
technique” (Progressive Trends, 11). Presumably
it is Mr. V. Chernyayev, or some other official in the Ministry
of Agriculture, who is to blame for the fact that the
employment of machinery in Russia is capitalist in character!
Mr. N. —on, despite his grandiloquent promise “not
to depart from the facts” (Sketches, XIV), has preferred to
ignore the fact that it is capitalism that has developed the
employment of machinery in our agriculture, and he has even
invented the amusing theory that exchange reduces the
productivity of labour in agriculture (p. 74)! To criticise
this theory, which is proclaimed without any analysis of
the facts, is neither possible nor necessary. Let us confine ourselves
to citing a small sample of Mr. N. —on’s reasoning.
“If,” says he, “the productivity of labour in this country were
to double, we should have to pay for a chetvert (about six
bushels) of wheat not 12 rubles, but six, that is all” (234).
Not all, by far, most worthy economist. “In this country”
(as indeed in any society where there is commodity economy),
the improvement of technique is undertaken by individual
farmers, the rest only gradually following suit. “In this
country,” only the rural entrepreneurs are in a position
to improve their technique. “In this country,” this progress
of the rural entrepreneurs, small and big, is inseparably
connected with the ruin of the peasantry and the creation of
a rural proletariat. Hence, if the improved technique used on
the farms of rural entrepreneurs were to become socially
necessary (only on that condition would the price be reduced
by half), it would mean the passing of almost the whole of
agriculture into the hands of capitalists, it would mean the
complete proletarisation of millions of peasants, it would
mean an enormous increase in the non-agricultural population
and an increase in the number of factories (for the