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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
583
manufactories and the inhabitants of non-agricultural centres
engaged in home work for capitalists. The other, and
larger, section has not yet broken with the land, covers its
expenditures in part with the produce that comes from farming
tiny plots of land, and, consequently, forms the type
of allotment-holding wage-worker which we attempted to
describe in detail in Chapter II. In earlier remarks it was
shown that this vast mass of wage-workers has been formed
mainly in the post-Reform period and that it continues
to grow rapidly.
It is important to note the significance of our conclusion
regarding the relative surplus-population (or reserve army
of unemployed) created by capitalism. The data regarding
the total number of wage-workers in all branches of the
national economy bring out very clearly the basic error
committed by the Narodnik economists on this point.
As we have had occasion to observe elsewhere (Studies,
pp. 38-42),* this error lies in the fact that the Narodnik
economists (Messrs. V. V., N. —on and others), who have
talked a great deal about capitalism “freeing” the workers,
have not thought of investigating the concrete forms of
capitalist over-population in Russia; as well as in the fact
that they failed completely to understand that the very
existence and development of capitalism in this country
require an enormous mass of reserve workers. By means of
paltry phrases and curious calculations as to the number of
“factory” workers,** they have transformed one of the basic
conditions for the development of capitalism into proof
* Cf. present edition, Vol. 2, “A Characterisation of Economic
Romanticism.”—Ed.
** Let us recall the argument of Mr. N. —on about the “handful”
of workers, and also the following, truly classic, calculation by Mr.
V. V. (Essays on Theoretical Economics, p. 131). In the 50 gubernias
of European Russia there are 15,547,000 adult male workers belonging
to the peasant estate; of these, 1,020,000 (863,000 in factory industry#
160,000 railway workers) are “united by capital”; the rest are the
“agricultural population.” With the “complete capitalisation of the
manufacturing industries” “capitalist factory industry” will employ
twice as many hands (13.3% in place of 7.6%, while the remaining
86.7% of the population “will remain on the land and be idle during
half the year”). Obviously, comment could only spoil the impression
created by this wonderful specimen of economic science and economic
statistics.