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

314
V. I. LENIN
Secondly, agricultural capitalism has for the first time
undermined the age-old stagnation of our agriculture;
it has given a tremendous impetus to the transformation of
its technique, and to the development of the productive
forces of social labour. A few decades of “destructive work”
by capitalism have done more in this respect than entire
centuries of preceding history. The monotony of routine
natural economy has been replaced by a diversity of forms
of commercial agriculture; primitive agricultural implements
have begun to yield place to improved implements
and machines; the immobility of the old-fashioned farming
systems has been undermined by new methods of agriculture.
The course of all these changes is linked inseparably
with the above-mentioned phenomenon of the specialisation
of agriculture. By its very nature, capitalism in agriculture
(as in industry) cannot develop evenly: in one place
(in one country, in one area, on one farm) it pushes forward
one aspect of agriculture, in another place another aspect,
etc. In one case it transforms the technique of some, and
in other cases of other agricultural operations, divorcing
them from patriarchal peasant economy or from the patriarchal
labour-service. Since the whole of this process is
guided by market requirements that are capricious and not
always known to the producer, capitalist agriculture, in
each separate instance (often in each separate area, sometimes
even in each separate country), becomes more onesided
and lopsided than that which preceded it, but, taken
as a whole, becomes immeasurably more many-sided and
rational than patriarchal agriculture. The emergence of
who thirst for a return to the good old patriarchal life, simple
manners, etc., and who condemn the “subjection of the soil to the
laws which dominate all other industries.” 102
We are fully aware that to the Narodniks the whole of the argument
given in the text may appear not only unconvincing but positively
unintelligible, But it would be too thankless a task to analyse
in detail such opinions as, for example, that the purchase-and-sale
of the land is an “abnormal” phenomenon (Mr. Chuprov, in the debate
on grain prices, p. 39 of the verbatim report), that the inalienability
of the peasants’ allotments is an institution that can be defended, that
the labour-service system of farming is better, or at all events no
worse, than the capitalist system, etc. All that has been said above
goes to refute the political and economic arguments advanced by the
Narodniks in support of such views.