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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
591
note the fact that the area under cultivation is growing.
. .” (128).
As you see, Mr. N. —on knows of quite a special sort of
capitalism that has never existed anywhere and that no
economist could conceive of. Mr. N. —on’s capitalism does
not divert the population from agriculture to industry,
does not divide the agriculturists into opposite classes.
Quite the contrary. Capitalism “frees” the workers from
industry and there is nothing left for “them” to do but to
turn to the land, for “our peasants have not been deprived of
the land”!! At the bottom of this “theory,” which originally
“redistributes” in poetic disorder all the processes of capitalist
development, lie the ingenious tricks of all Narodniks
which we have examined in detail previously: they lump
together the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat;
they ignore the growth of commercial farming; they concoct
stories about “people’s” “handicraft industries” being
isolated from “capitalist” “factory industry,” instead of
analysing the consecutive forms and diverse manifestations
of capitalism in industry.
V. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BORDER REGIONS.
HOME OR FOREIGN MARKET?
In Chapter I we pointed to the erroneous character of the
theory that links the problem of a foreign market for capitalism
with that of the realisation of the product (pp. 64-65
and foll.). Capitalism’s need of a foreign market is by no
means to be explained by the impossibility of realising the
product on the home market, but by the circumstance that
capitalism is in no position to go on repeating the same
processes of production on the former scale, under unchanging
conditions (as was the case under pre-capitalist regimes),
and that it inevitably leads to an unlimited growth of
production which overflows the old, narrow limits of earlier
economic units. With the unevenness of development inherent
in capitalism, one branch of production outstrips the
others and strives to transcend the bounds of the old field of
economic relations. Let us take, for example, the textile industry
at the beginning of the post-Reform period. Being fairly