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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
“Die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft in der kapitalistischen
Gesellschaft”*).**
This book (which we received when the greater part of
the present work had already been set up in type) is, after
Vol. III of Capital, the most noteworthy contribution to
recent economic literature. Kautsky investigates the “main
tendencies” in the capitalist evolution of agriculture; his
purpose is to examine the diverse phenomena in modern
agriculture as “particular manifestations of one general
process” (Vorrede,*** VI). It is interesting to note how
far the main features of this general process in Western
Europe and in Russia are identical, notwithstanding the tremendous
peculiarities of the latter, in both the economic
and non-economic spheres. For example, typical of modern
capitalist agriculture in general is the progressive division
of labour and the employment of machinery (Kautsky,
IV, b, c), a phenomenon also noticeable in post-Reform
Russia (see later, Chapter III, §§VII and VIII; Chapter
IV, particularly §IX). The process of the “proletarisation
of the peasantry” (the heading of Chapter VIII of Kautsky’s
book) is manifested everywhere in the spread of wagelabour
in every form among the small peasants (Kautsky,
VIII, b); we see the parallel of this in Russia in the formation
of a huge class of allotment-holding wage-workers (see later,
Chapter II). The existence of a small peasantry in every
capitalist society is due not to the technical superiority of
small production in agriculture, but to the fact that the small
peasants reduce the level of their requirements below that
of the wage-workers and tax their energies far more than
the latter do (Kautsky, VI, b; “the agricultural wageworker
is better off than the small peasant,” says Kautsky
repeatedly: S. 110, 317, 320); the same thing is also to be
observed in Russia (see later, Chapter II, §XI, C 4 ). It is
natural, therefore, that West-European and Russian Marxists
should agree in their appraisal of such phenomena as
“agricultural outside employments,” to use the Russian term,
or the “agricultural wage-labour of migratory peasants,”
* The Agrarian Question, Part I. “The Development of Agriculture
in Capitalist Society.”—Ed.
** There is a Russian translation.
*** Preface.—Ed.
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