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

274
V. I. LENIN
a ruinously cheap price rather than manufacture them in
their own workshops. This fact, which testifies to the extreme
degradation of the small producer, and to his being able
to keep going in modern society only by endlessly reducing
his requirements, is turned by Mr. V. V. into an argument
in favour of small “people’s” production! . . . “We are entitled
to draw the conclusion that our big farmers . . . do not display
a sufficient degree of independence. . . . The peasant,
however . . . reveals greater ability to effect real farming
improvements” (Progressive Trends, 77). This lack of
independence is expressed in the fact that “our dairy farmers
. . . buy up the peasants’ (cows) at a price rarely amounting
to half the cost of raising them—usually at not more
than a third, and often even a quarter of this cost”
(ibid., 71). The merchant’s capital of the stock farmers has
made the small peasants completely dependent, it has turned
them into its cowherds, who breed cattle for a mere song,
and has turned their wives into its milkmaids.* One would
think that the conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is
no sense in retarding the transformation of merchant’s capital
into industrial capital, no sense in supporting small
production, which leads to forcing down the producer’s
standard of living below that of the farm labourer. But
* Here are two descriptions of the living standard and living
conditions of the Russian peasant in general. M. Y. Saltykov, in
Petty Things of Life, writes about the “enterprising muzhik” as follows:
“The muzhik needs everything, but what he needs most of all ...
is the ability to exhaust himself, not to stint his own labour.... The
enterprising muzhik simply expires at it” (work). “His wife and grown
up children, too, all toil worse than galley-slaves.”
V. Veresayev, in a story entitled “Lizar” (Severny Kurier [Northern
Courier], 1899, No. 1), tells the story of a muzhik in the Pskov
Gubernia named Lizar, who advocates the use of drops, etc., “to prevent
an increase.” “Subsequently,” observes the author, “I heard from
many Zemstvo doctors, and particularly from midwives, that they
frequently have similar requests from village husbands and wives.”
“Moving in a certain direction, life has tried all roads and at last has
reached a blind alley. There is no escape from it. And so a new solution
of the problem is naturally arising and increasingly maturing.”
The position of the peasant in capitalist society is indeed hopeless,
and in Russia with its village communities, as in France with its
smallholders, leads “naturally” not to an unnatural . . . solution of
the problem,” of course, but to an unnatural means of postponing the
doom of small economy. (Note to 2nd edition.)