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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
economists like to picture matters. Quite the contrary. This
necessity demonstrates the progressive historical work
of capitalism, which destroys the age-old isolation and
seclusion of systems of economy (and, consequently, the
narrowness of intellectual and political life), and which
links all countries of the world into a single economic
whole.
From this we see that the two latter causes of the need
for a foreign market are again causes of a historical character.
In order to understand them one must examine each
separate industry, its development within the country, its
transformation into a capitalist industry—in short, one
must take the facts about the development of capitalism in
the country; and it is not surprising that the Narodniks take
the opportunity to evade these facts under cover of worthless
(and meaningless) phrases about the “impossibility” of
both the home and the foreign markets.
IX. CONCLUSIONS FROM CHAPTER I
Let us now sum up the theoretical propositions examined
above, which have a direct bearing on the problem of the
home market.
1) The basic process of the formation of a home market
(i.e., of the development of commodity production and of
capitalism) is the social division of labour. This consists
of various forms of processing raw materials (and various
operations in this processing) separating from agriculture
one after another and becoming independent branches
of industry, which exchange their products (now commodities)
for the products of agriculture. Thus, agriculture
itself becomes industry (i.e., produces commodities), and
the same process of specialisation takes place in it.
2) A direct conclusion from the preceding proposition is
the law governing all developing commodity economy, and
the more so capitalist economy—the industrial (i.e., nonagricultural)
population grows faster than the agricultural
and diverts an ever-growing part of the population
from agriculture to manufacturing industry.
3) The separation of the direct producer from the means of
production, i.e., his expropriation, signifying the transition
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