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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
327
Progressive deterioration of conditions of production and
increased prices of means of production—an inevitable law
of proprietorship of parcels. Calamity of seasonal abundance
for this mode of production” (III, 2, 341-342. Russ. trans.,
667). 113
“Small landed property presupposes that the overwhelming
majority of the population is rural, and that not social,
but isolated labour predominates; and that, therefore, under
such conditions wealth and development of reproduction,
both of its material and spiritual prerequisites,
are out of the question, and thereby also the prerequisites
for rational cultivation” (III, 2, 347. Russ. trans.,
p. 672). 114
The writer of these lines, far from closing his eyes to the
contradictions inherent in large-scale capitalist agriculture,
ruthlessly exposed them. But this did not prevent him
from appreciating the historical role of capitalism:
“. . . One of the major results of the capitalist mode of
production is that, on the one hand, it transforms agriculture
from a mere empirical and mechanical self-perpetuating
process employed by the least developed part of society
into the conscious scientific application of agronomy, in
so far as this is at all feasible under conditions of private
property; that it divorces landed property from the relations
of dominion and servitude, on the one hand, and, on
the other, totally separates land as an instrument of production
from landed property and landowner. . . . The rationalising
of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes it for
the first time capable of operating on a social scale, and
the reduction ad absurdum of property in land, on the other,
are the great achievements of the capitalist mode of
production. Like all of its other historical advances, it
also attained these by first completely impoverishing the
direct producers” (III, 2, 156-157. Russ. trans., 509-
510). 115
One would think that after such categorical statements
by Marx there could be no two opinions as to how he viewed
the question of the progressive historical role of agricultural
capitalism. Mr. N. —on, however, found one more
subterfuge: he quoted Engels’s opinion on the present agricultural
crisis, which should, in his view, refute the