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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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separate types of commercial agriculture renders possible
and inevitable capitalist crises in agriculture and cases of
capitalist overproduction, but these crises (like all capitalist
crises) give a still more powerful impetus to the development
of world production and of the socialisation of
labour.*
Thirdly, capitalism has for the first time created in Russia
large-scale agricultural production based on the employment
of machines and the extensive co-operation of workers.
Before capitalism appeared, the production of agricultural
produce was always carried on in an unchanging, wretchedly
small way—both when the peasant worked for himself
and when he worked for the landlord—and no “community
character” of land tenure was capable of destroying this
tremendously scattered production. Inseparably linked
with this scattered production was the scattered nature
of the farmers themselves.** Tied to their allotment, to
their tiny “village community,” they were completely
fenced off even from the peasants of the neighbouring village
* The West-European romanticists and Russian Narodniks
strongly emphasise in this process the one-sidedness of capitalist
agriculture, the instability created by capitalism, and crises—and
on this basis deny the progressive character of capitalist advance as
compared with pre-capitalist stagnation.
** Accordingly, notwithstanding the difference in the forms of
land tenure, one can fully apply to the Russian peasant what Marx
said of the small French peasant: “The small-holding peasants form a
vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without
entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode
of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing
them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France’s
bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants.
Their field of production (Produktionsfeld), the small holding, admits
of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science
and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent,
no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family
is almost self-sufficient, it itself directly produces the major part of
its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through
exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding,
a peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding,
another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a
village, and a few score of villages make up a Department. In this
way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition
of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack
of potatoes.” (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Hmb.,
1885, S. 98-99.) 103