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

624
V. I. LENIN
general. Besides, what has the question of selling grain in
autumn and buying grain in spring to do with the controversy
over whether or not certain budgets are typical, budgets
which, in examining the problem, I do not use at all?
III
After the thankless job of explaining the things imputed
to me, it is a pleasure to meet, at last, with an objection on
fundamentals, even if formulated in terms of the stern
rebukes (“fetishism,” “utter failure to understand”) which Mr.
Skvortsov evidently considers very convincing, and even if
the critic’s own opinions have had to be surmised rather than
seen plainly stated. Mr. Skvortsov is quite right when he says
that my views “are the central theme of the entire book.”
In order to set off our points of disagreement more sharply,
I will compare two extreme formulations of our opposite
views: Mr. Skvortsov probably thinks (at all events, it
follows from his objections) that the less the land the peasants
received when they were emancipated, and the higher
the price they paid for it, the faster would have been the
development of capitalism in Russia. I think the opposite:
the more the land the peasants received when they were emancipated,
and the lower the price they paid for it, the faster,
wider and freer would have been the development of capitalism
in Russia, the higher would have been the standard of
living of the population, the wider would have been the
home market, the faster would have been the introduction of
machinery into production; the more, in a word, would the
economic development of Russia have resembled that of
America. I shall confine myself to indicating two circumstances
which, in my opinion, confirm the correctness of the latter
view: 1) land-poverty and the burden of taxation have led to
the development over a very considerable area of Russia
of the labour-service system of private-landowner farming,
i.e., a direct survival of serfdom,* and not at all to the
* Incidentally, in my book I definitely advance this thesis (that
labour-service is a survival of serfdom). Mr. Skvortsov says nothing
about this but takes my remark that, fundamentally, labour-service
has existed ever since the time of Russkaya Pravda and storms about
it; he cites a quotation from Klyuchevsky, talks of home markets
in the 12th century, and of commodity fetishism, and asserts that