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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
321
scale industry, the greater, in general, are the fluctuations
in the demand for workers not only in agriculture, but also
in industry.* Therefore, if we presuppose the maximum
development of capitalism, we must also presuppose the maximum
facility for the transfer of workers from agricultural
to non-agricultural occupations, we must presuppose the
formation of a general reserve army from which labourpower
is drawn by all sorts of employers. Fourthly, if we
take the present-day rural employers, it cannot, of course,
be denied that sometimes they experience difficulty in
providing their farms with workers. But it must not be forgotten,
either, that they have a means of tying the workers
to their farms, namely, by allotting them patches of land,
etc. The allotment-holding farm labourer or day labourer
is a type common to all capitalist countries. One of the
chief errors of the Narodniks is that they ignore the formation
of a similar type in Russia. Fifthly, it is quite wrong
to discuss the freeing of the farmer’s winter time independently
of the general question of capitalist surpluspopulation.
The formation of a reserve army of unemployed
is characteristic of capitalism in general, and the specific
features of agriculture merely give rise to special forms of
this phenomenon. That is why the author of Capital, for
instance, deals with the distribution of employment in agriculture
in connection with the question of “relative
surplus-population,”** as well as in a special chapter where he
692 104 .) “In general such large-scale undertakings as railways withdraw
a definite quantity of labour-power from the labour-market,
which can come only from certain branches of economy, for example,
agriculture ...” (ibid., II. B., S. 303). 105
* For example the Moscow Medical Statistics placed the number
of factory workers in this gubernia at 114,381; this was the number at
work; the highest figure was 146,338 and the lowest, 94,214 (General
Summary, etc., Vol. IV, Pt. I, p. 98); in percentages: 128%—100%—
82%. By increasing, in general, the fluctuations in the number of
workers, capitalism evens out, in this respect too, the differences
between industry and agriculture.
** For example, in regard to the agricultural relations of England,
Marx says: “There are always too many agricultural labourers for the
ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs
of the cultivation of the soil” (I 2 , 725), 106 so that, notwithstanding
the permanent “relative surplus-population,” the countryside seems
to be inadequately populated. As capitalist production takes
possession of agriculture, says Marx in another place, a surplus rural