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

382
V. I. LENIN
a similar kind: sometimes even the peasants of one and the
same village are divided into two quite distinct categories:
“Mr. X’s former peasants” and “Mrs. Y’s former peasants.”
All this diversity was natural and necessary in
the Middle Ages, in the remote past; at the present time,
however, the preservation of the social-estate exclusiveness
of the peasant communities is a crying anachronism
and greatly worsens the conditions of the toiling masses,
while at the same time not in the least safeguarding them
against the burdens of the new, capitalist era. The Narodniks
usually shut their eyes to this fragmentation, and
when the Marxists express the view that the splitting up
of the peasantry is progressive, the Narodniks confine
themselves to hackneyed outcries against “supporters of
land dispossession,” thereby covering up the utter fallacy
of their views about the pre-capitalist countryside. One
has only to picture to oneself the amazing fragmentation
of the small producers, an inevitable consequence of
patriarchal agriculture, to become convinced of the progressiveness
of capitalism, which is shattering to the very
foundations the ancient forms of economy and life,
with their age-old immobility and routine, destroying the
settled life of the peasants who vegetated behind their
medieval partitions, and creating new social classes striving
of necessity towards contact, unification, and active
participation in the whole of the economic (and not only
economic) life of the country, and of the whole world.
If we take the peasants who are handicraftsmen or small
industrialists we shall find the same thing. Their interests
do not transcend the bounds of the small area of
surrounding villages. Owing to the insignificant area
covered by the local market they do not come into contact
with the industrialists of other districts; they are in
mortal terror of “competition,” which ruthlessly destroys
the patriarchal paradise of the small handicraftsmen and
industrialists, who live lives of stagnant routine undisturbed
by anybody or anything. With respect to these
small industrialists, competition and capitalism perform a
useful historical function by dragging them out of their
backwoods and confronting them with all the issues that
already face the more developed strata of the population.