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

590
V. I. LENIN
has been said above on the formation of a home market
for capitalist society. The home market for capitalism is
created by the parallel development of capitalism in agriculture
and in industry,* by the formation of a class of
rural and industrial employers, on the one hand, and of a
class of rural and industrial wage-workers, on the other.
The main streams of the movement of workers show the main
forms of this process, but by far not all the forms; in what
has gone before we have shown that the forms of this
process differ in peasant and in landlord farming, in the
different areas of commercial agriculture, in the different
stages of the capitalist development of industry, etc.
How far this process is distorted and confused by the
representatives of Narodnik economics is seen most
clearly in §VI of Part 2 of Mr. N. —on’s Sketches, which
bears the significant heading: “The Influence of the Redistribution
of the Social Productive Forces upon the Economic
Position of the Agricultural Population.” Here is how
Mr. N. —on pictures this “redistribution”: “. . . In capitalist
. . . society, every increase in the productive power of
labour entails the ‘freeing’ of a corresponding number of
workers, who are compelled to seek some other employment;
and since this occurs in all branches of production, and this
‘freeing’ takes place over the whole of capitalist society,
the only thing left open to them is to turn to the means of
production of which they have not yet been deprived, namely,
the land” (p. 126). . . . “Our peasants have not been deprived
of the land, and that is why they turn their efforts towards
it. When they lose their employment in the factory, or are
obliged to abandon their subsidiary domestic occupations,
they see no other course but to set about the increased
exploitation of the soil. All Zemstvo statistical returns
* Theoretical economics established this simple truth long ago.
To say nothing of Marx, who pointed directly to the development of
capitalism in agriculture as a process that creates a “home market for
industrial capital” (Das Kapital, I 2 , S. 776, Chapter 24, Sec. 5), 164
let us refer to Adam Smith. In chapter XI of Book I and Chapter IV
of Book III of The Wealth of Nations, he pointed to the most characteristic
features of the development of capitalist agriculture and noted
the parallelism of this process with the process of the growth of the
towns and the development of industry.