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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
shrinkage of the home market, nevertheless cites the justquoted
contrary assertions of Marx (Sketches, pp. 71 and 114),
it only proves the remarkable ability of that writer to
belabour himself with quotations from Capital.
IV. THE NARODNIK THEORY OF THE IMPOSSIBILITY
OF REALISING SURPLUS-VALUE
The next question in the theory of the home market is the
following. We know that the value of a product in capitalist
production resolves into three parts: 1) the first part replaces
the constant capital, i.e., the value that existed previously
in the shape of raw and auxiliary materials, machines
and instruments of production, etc., and that is merely
reproduced in a certain part of the finished product; 2) the
second part replaces the variable capital, i.e., covers the
maintenance of the worker; and, lastly, 3) the third part
constitutes the surplus-value, which belongs to the capitalist.
It is usually granted (we state the question in the spirit
of Messrs. N.—on and V. V.) that the realisation (i.e., the
finding of a corresponding equivalent, sale in the market)
of the first two parts presents no difficulty, because the
first part goes into production, and the second into consumption
by the working class. But how is the third part—
surplus-value—realised? It cannot, surely, be consumed in
its entirety by the capitalists! So our economists come to
the conclusion that “the way out of the difficulty” of realising
surplus-value is “the acquisition of a foreign market”
(N.—on, Sketches, Part II, §XV in general, and p. 205 in
particular; V. V., “The Excess in the Market Supply
of Commodities” in Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Fatherland
Notes], 1883, and Essays on Theoretical Economics,
St. Petersburg, 1895, p. 179 and foll.). The writers mentioned
explain the need for a capitalist nation to have a foreign
market by the suggestion that the capitalists cannot realise
their products in any other way. The home market in Russia,
they say, is shrinking because of the ruin of the peasantry
and because of the impossibility of realising surplusvalue
without a foreign market, while the foreign market
is closed to a young country that enters the path of
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