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

76
V. I. LENIN
and reduction of the number of workers, animals, etc., per
unit of crop area, in the case of livestock or industrialcrop
farming, with the adoption of intensive agriculture,
this same progress may find expression, for example, in the
cultivation of root crops, which require more workers per
unit of crop area, or in the acquisition of dairy cattle, the
cultivation of fodder grasses, etc., etc.
The description of the top group of the peasantry must
be supplemented by indicating the considerable employment
of wage-labour. Here are the data for the three uyezds of
Taurida Gubernia:
Groups of households
Percentage Proportion (%)
of farmsof crop area
employing belonging
workersto each group
I. Cultivating no land . . . . . . 3.8 —
II. ” up to 5 dess. . . . 2.5 2
III. ” 5 to 10 ” . . . . 2.6 10
IV. ” 10 to 25 ” . . . . 8.7 38
V. ” 25 to 50 ” . . . . 34.7 34
VI. ” over 50 ” . . . . 64.1 16
Total . . . . . . . . . . . 12.9 100
Mr. V. V., in the above-mentioned article, argued about
this question as follows: he took the farms employing workers
as a percentage of the total number of peasant farms
and arrived at the conclusion that “the number of peasants
resorting to hired labour for the cultivation of the land, as
compared to the aggregate mass of the people, is quite insignificant:
2 to 3, a maximum of 5 peasant farmers out of 100
are all that represent peasant capitalism . . . it” (peasant
farming in Russia employing labourers) “is not a system
firmly rooted in contemporary economic life, but something
fortuitous, such as occurred 100 and 200 years ago” (Vestnik
Yevropy, 1884, No. 7, p. 332). What sense is there in comparing
the number of farms employing workers with the
total number of “peasant” farms, when the latter figure
also includes the plots of farm labourers? Why, by this
method one could also get rid of capitalism in Russian
industry: one would only need to take the families engaging
in industries who employ wage-workers (i.e., the families
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