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

310
V. I. LENIN
mation effected in the small cultivator by capitalism is everywhere
the same. The more rapid the increase in the number
of towns, the number of factory, commercial and industrial
townships, and the number of railway stations, the more
extensive is the area of the transformation of our “villagecommunity
man” into this type of peasant. We should not
forget what was said in his day by Adam Smith—that
improved communications tend to convert every village
into a suburb.* Remote areas cut off from the outside world,
already an exception, are with every passing day increasingly
becoming as rare as antiquities, and the cultivator is
turning with ever-growing rapidity into an industrialist
subjected to the general laws of commodity production.
In thus concluding the review of the data on the growth
of commercial agriculture, we think it not superfluous to
repeat here that our aim has been to examine the main (by
no means all) forms of commercial agriculture.
IX. CONCLUSIONS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CAPITALISM
IN RUSSIAN AGRICULTURE
In chapters II-IV the problem of capitalism in Russian
agriculture has been examined from two angles. First we
examined the existing system of social and economic relations
in peasant and landlord economy, the system which
has taken shape in the post-Reform period. It was seen that
the peasantry have been splitting up at enormous speed into
a numerically small but economically strong rural bourgeoisie
and a rural proletariat. Inseparably connected with this
“depeasantising” process is the landowners’ transition from
the labour-service to the capitalist system of farming. Then
we examined this same process from another angle: we took
as our starting-point the manner in which agriculture is
transformed into commodity production, and examined
the social and economic relations characteristic of each of
the principal forms of commercial agriculture. It was shown
that the very same processes were conspicuous in both
* “Good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the
expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly
upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town.” Op.
cit., Vol. I, pp. 228-229.