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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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productivity of labour in our agriculture to double, there
must be an enormous development of the machine-building
industry, the mining industry, steam transport, the construction
of a mass of new types of farm buildings, shops, warehouses,
canals, etc., etc.). Mr. N. —on here repeats the little
error of reasoning that is customary with him: he skips over
the consecutive steps that are necessary with the development
of capitalism, he skips over the intricate complex of
social-economic changes which necessarily accompany the
development of capitalism, and then weeps and wails over
the danger of “destruction” by capitalism.
IX. WAGE-LABOUR IN AGRICULTURE
We now pass to the principal manifestation of agricultural
capitalism—to the employment of hired labour. This
feature of post-Reform economy was marked most strongly
in the outer regions of south and east European Russia,
in that mass shift of agricultural wage-workers known as
the “agricultural migration.” For this reason we shall first
cite data concerning this main region of agricultural capitalism
in Russia and then examine the data relating to the
whole of Russia.
The tremendous movements of our peasants in search of
work for hire have long ago been noted in our literature.
Reference to them was made by Flerovsky (Condition of the
Working Class in Russia, St. Petersburg, 1869), who tried
to determine their relative incidence in the various gubernias.
In 1875, Mr. Chaslavsky gave a general review of
“agricultural outside employments” (Compendium of Political
Knowledge, Vol. II) and noted their real significance
(“there was formed . . . something in the nature of a semivagrant
population . . . something in the nature of future
farm labourers”). In 1887, Mr. Raspopin gathered together
Zemstvo statistics on this phenomenon and regarded them
not as “employments” of the peasants in general, but as a
process of the formation of a class of wage-workers in agriculture.
In the 90s, the works of Messrs. S. Korolenko, Rudnev,
Tezyakov, Kudryavtsev and Shakhovskoi appeared, thanks
to which a much fuller study of this phenomenon was made.
The principal area to which agricultural wage-workers