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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
313
ing industry in particular, development of the so-called
peasant “agricultural industries,” i.e., work for hire, etc.).
4) Capitalism enormously extends and intensifies among
the agricultural population the contradictions without
which this mode of production cannot exist. Notwithstanding
this, however, agricultural capitalism in Russia, in
its historical significance, is a big progressive force. Firstly,
capitalism has transformed the cultivator from a “lord
of the manor,” on the one hand, and a patriarchal, dependent
peasant, on the other, into the same sort of industrialist
that every other proprietor is in present-day society.
Before capitalism appeared, agriculture in Russia was the
business of the gentry, a lord’s hobby for some, and a duty,
an obligation for others; consequently, it could not be
conducted except according to age-old routine, necessarily
involving the complete isolation of the cultivator from all
that went on in the world beyond the confines of his
village. The labour-service system—that living survival of
old times in present-day economy—strikingly confirms this
characterisation. Capitalism for the first time broke with
the system of social estates in land tenure by converting
the land into a commodity. The farmer’s product was
put on sale and began to be subject to social reckoning—first
in the local, then in the national, and finally in the international
market, and in this way the former isolation of
the uncouth farmer from the rest of the world was completely
broken down. The farmer was compelled willynilly,
on pain of ruin, to take account of the sum-total of
social relations both in his own country and in other countries,
now linked together by the world market. Even the
labour-service system, which formerly guaranteed Oblomov
an assured income without any risk on his part, without
any expenditure of capital, without any changes in
the age-old routine of production, now proved incapable of
saving him from the competition of the American farmer.
That is why one can fully apply to post-Reform Russia what
was said half a century ago about Western Europe—that
agricultural capitalism hag been “the motive force which
has drawn the idyll into the movement of history.”*
* Misère de la philosophie (Paris, 1896), p. 223; the author contemptuously
describes as reactionary jeremiads, the longings of those