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

242
V. I. LENIN
some one and a half million agricultural workers. One and the
same “peasantry” throws on to the market millions of workers
in search of employers—and presents an impressive
demand for wage-workers.
X. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIRED LABOUR IN AGRICULTURE
Let us now attempt to depict the principal features of
the new social relations that take shape in agriculture with
the employment of hired labour, and to define their significance.
The agricultural workers who come to the South in such
FROM MARX
TO MAO
masses belong to the poorest strata of the peasantry. Of
�⋆
the workers who come to Kherson Gubernia, � make the
journey on foot, since they lack the money for railway fare;
“they tramp for hundreds and thousands of versts along
the railway track and the banks of navigable rivers, admiring
the splendid pictures of rapidly-moving trains and
smoothly-gliding ships” (Tezyakov, 35). On the average,
the worker takes with him about 2 rubles*; often enough he
even lacks the money to pay for a passport, and gets a monthly
identity card for ten kopeks. The journey takes from
10 to 12 days, and NOT after such FOR a long tramp (sometimes
undertaken barefoot in the cold spring mud), the traveller’s
feet swell and become calloused and bruised. About
0 of the workers COMMERCIAL
travel on dubi (large boats made out of
rough boards, holding from 50 to 80 persons and usually
packed to the DISTRIBUTION
limit). The reports of an official commission
(the Zvegintsev Commission) 91 note the grave danger of
this form of travel: “not a year passes but that one, two or
even more of these overcrowded dubi go to the bottom with
their passengers” (ibid., 34). The overwhelming majority
of the workers have allotments, but of absolutely insignificant
dimensions. “As a matter of fact,” Mr. Tezyakov quite
justly observes, “all these thousands of agricultural workers
are landless village proletarians, for whom outside employ-
* Money for the journey is obtained by the sale of property, even
household goods, by mortgaging the allotment, by pawning things,
clothes, etc., and even by borrowing money, to be repaid in labour,
from priests, landlords and local kulaks” (Shakhovskoi, 55).