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

66
V. I. LENIN
reproduction of social capital, and which is actually established
only as the average magnitude of a number of continual
fluctuations—this conformity is constantly disturbed
in capitalist society owing to the separate existence of
different producers working for an unknown market. The
various branches of industry, which serve as “markets” for
one another, do not develop evenly, but outstrip one another,
and the more developed industry seeks a foreign market.
This does not mean at all “the impossibility of the
capitalist nation realising surplus-value,”—the profound conclusion
so readily drawn by the Narodnik. It merely indicates
the lack of proportion in the development of the different
industries. If the national capital were distributed differently,
the same quantity of products could be realised within the
country. But for capital to abandon one sphere of industry
and pass into another there must be a crisis in that sphere;
and what can restrain the capitalists threatened by such a
crisis from seeking a foreign market, from seeking subsidies
and bonuses to facilitate exports, etc.?
Thirdly, the law of pre-capitalist modes of production is
the repetition of the process of production on the previous
scale, on the previous technical basis: such are the corvée
economy of the landlords, the natural economy of the
peasants, the artisan production of the industrialists. The law
of capitalist production, on the contrary, is constant transformation
of the modes of production, and the unrestricted
growth of the scale of production. Under the old modes of
production, economic units could exist for centuries without
undergoing any change either in character or in size, and
without extending beyond the landlord’s manor, the peasant
village or the small neighbouring market for the rural artisans
and small industrialists (the so-called handicraftsmen).
The capitalist enterprise, on the contrary, inevitably outgrows
the bounds of the village community, the local market,
the region, and then the state. Since the isolation and
seclusion of the states have already been broken down by
commodity circulation, the natural trend of every capitalist
industry brings it to the necessity of “seeking a foreign
market.”
Thus, the necessity of seeking a foreign market by no
means proves that capitalism is unsound, as the Narodnik