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

592
V. I. LENIN
well developed capitalistically (manufacture beginning to
pass into factory industry), it had gained complete command
of the market of Central Russia. But the big factories, growing
so rapidly, could no longer be satisfied with the former
dimensions of the market; they began to seek a market
further afield, among the new population colonising Novorossia,
the south-east Transvolga region, North Caucasus,
then Siberia, etc. The efforts of the big factories to reach out
beyond the old markets are undoubted. Does it mean that
the areas which served as these old markets could not, in
general, consume a larger quantity of the products of the
textile industry? Does it mean, for example, that the
industrial and central agricultural gubernias cannot, in
general, absorb a larger quantity of wares? No, it does not.
We know that the differentiation of the peasantry, the
growth of commercial agriculture and the increase in the
industrial population have also expanded, and continue to
expand, the home market of this old area. But this expansion
of the home market is retarded by many factors (chief
among them the retention of obsolete institutions which
hinder the development of agricultural capitalism); and the
factory owners will not, of course, wait until the capitalist
development of other branches of the national economy
catches up with that of the textile industry. The mill owners
need a market at once, and if the backwardness of other
branches of the national economy restricts the market in
the old area, they will seek for a market in another area,
or in other countries, or in the colonies of the old country.
What is a colony in the politico-economic sense? It
was stated above that, according to Marx, the main
features of this concept are the following: 1) the existence
of unoccupied, free lands, easily accessible to settlers;
2) the existence of an established world division of labour,
of a world market, thanks to which the colonies can specialise
in the mass production of agricultural produce, receiving
in exchange finished industrial goods “which they would
have to produce themselves under other circumstances” (see
above, p. 258, footnote, Chapter IV, §II). Reference has
been made elsewhere to the fact that the southern and
the eastern border regions of European Russia, which
have been settled in the post-Reform period, bear the