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

528
V. I. LENIN
Regarding Tikhvin Uyezd, Novgorod Gubernia, we read:
“Agriculture . . . constitutes an auxiliary source of income,
although in all official statistics you will find that the people
engage in farming. . . . All that the peasant gets to meet
his essential needs is earned in felling and floating lumber
for the lumber industrialists. But a crisis will set in soon:
in some five or ten years, no forests will be left. . . .” “The men
who work in the lumber camps are more like boatmen 155 ;
they spend the winter in the forest-encircled lumber camps . . .
and in the spring, having lost the habit of working at home,
are drawn to the work of lumber floating; harvesting and
haymaking alone make them return to their homes. . . .”
The peasants are in “perpetual bondage” to the lumber industrialists.*
Vyatka investigators note that the hiring
season for lumbering is usually arranged to coincide with
tax-paying time, and that the purchase of provisions from
the employer greatly reduces earnings. . . . “Both the treefellers
and the wood-choppers receive about 17 kopeks per
summer day, and about 33 kopeks per day when they work
with their own horses. . . . This paltry pay is an inadequate
remuneration for labour, if we bear in mind the extremely
insanitary conditions under which it is done,”** etc., etc.
Thus, the lumber workers constitute one of the big sections
of the rural proletariat; they have tiny plots of land
and are compelled to sell their labour-power on the most
disadvantageous terms. The occupation is extremely irregular
and casual. The lumbermen, therefore, represent that
form of the reserve army (or relative surplus-population in
* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VIII, pp. 1372-
1373, 1474. “Thanks to the requirements of the lumber industry there
have developed in Tikhvin Uyezd the blacksmith, tanning, fur and
partly the boot trades; the first makes boat-hooks, and the others
boots, sheepskin coats and mittens.” Incidentally, we see here an
example of how the making of means of production (i.e., the growth
of Department I in capitalist economy) gives an impetus to the making
of articles of consumption (i.e., Department II). It is not production
that follows consumption, but consumption that follows production.
** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, XI, pp. 399-400,
405, 147. Cf. the numerous references in the Zemstvo Returns for
Trubchevsk Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, to the fact that “agriculture is
of secondary importance,” and that the principal part is played by
industries, particularly lumbering (Statistical Returns for Trubchevsk
Uyezd, Orel, 1887, particularly remarks on villages).