Lenin on the Agrarian Question

 

Lenin on the Agrarian Question

Gaurang Sahay

Background

Valdimir Lenin developed his thesis on agrarian question against the prevailing socio-political and economic situations prevailing in Russia. The statute of Emancipation was promulugated in Russia in 1861. Accordingly 22 million private serfs were emanicipated. It happened due to the defeat of Russian Army in the Cremean war. The war happened between French, British and Ottoman Empire on the one hand and Russian Empire on the other hand during 1853 to 1856.

Even after the emancipation of the serfs Russia remained a backward medieval and non-industrial society controlloed by an autocratic and centralised state. In the second half of the nineteenth century a movement against state in Russia tended to be composed exclusively of intellectuals who relied more on moral fervour and rhetoric than on systematic, critical and detailed analysis emerged. This movement is known as populism. The populists were eclectic in drawing on western philosophy: idealism, materialism and various forms of socialism were all grist to their will. Central to their agenda was the defense of the Russian peasant commune called Mir against capitalism, and making it as a basis for socialist society in Russia. When it came to tactics, there were two schools of populist thought: those who believed in the self-emancipation of the people and tried to achieve this through peaceful means or propoganda, and those who believed in the necessity of attacking the autocracy directly through small groups of terrorists.

There was a consistent attempt to propagandise the ideas of second group among the peasantry in the mid 1870s. But it failed leading to the formation of two groups: Chernyiperedel and Narodnaya Volya. Chernyiperedel favoured agrarian reform whereas Narodnaya Volya put the accent on terrorist activity leading to the assassination of the Tsar in 1881.

The 1880s saw the first strong appearance of Marxist thought in Russia. Marxist thought evolved in Russia in the context of constant debate with the populists. Populist understanding of Marxism was quite partial whereas Marxist understanding of populism was ful of ambivalence.

Lenin develoiped his thesis on agrarian question mainly in his book Development of Capitalism in Russia. In Development of Capitalism in Russia a detailed arguments based on zemstvo statistics come together with the more general polemics against Narodnik theory to produce a definitive rebuttal of those who suggested that capitalism had no real foothold in Russia. As was stated in the ‘Preface to the First Edition’, ‘the author has set himself the aim of examining the question of how a home market is being formed for Russian capitalism’, and the work takes the general form of demonstrating how, in all forms of agricultural and industrial production, capitalist relations itself provides the markets that the Narodniks deny. The book is divided into eight chapters whose titles indicate the structure of the argument.

The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists

In the first chapter Lenin summarizes his arguments, outlined in his previous articles, concerning the theoretical errors that lead the Narodniks to argue that a home market is destroyed in the process of capitalist development in Russia, and that in the absence of this home market the alien economic form will wither away. A contrast is established immediately between natural economy as a homogenous economic form, and commodity economy which is conceived as a heterogeneous economic form. The process of movement from one to the other is expressed in the expansion and intensification of a social division of labour which is characteristic of commodity economy. ‘Natural economy’ is seen as the form of economy, as advocated by the Narodniks – patriarchal peasant families, village communities and feudal manors - in which each economic unit engages in all forms of economic activity. With commodity economy on the other hand the number of separate and interdependent branches of the economy steadily multiplies and ‘it is this progressive growth in the social division of labour that is the chief factor in the process if creating a home market for capitalism’. The task for Lenin is thus defined as demonstrating that commodity economy is increasingly established in different branches of economic life, for once established in these branches the development of the division of labour works to conquer these areas for capitalist production and distribution.

The Differentiation of the Peasantry

Chapter two begins by recapitulating the material drawn from Postnikoc, which was discussed above, emphasizing the importance of differentiation between households within the village community and the increasingly complex relations that this gives rise to. The well-to-do peasants are identified as the major purchasers and hirers of land, turning themselves into big landowners and capitalist farmers at the expense of other members of their communes. The extension of cultivated area by these rich peasants is predicated in the availability of reserves of labour to work it, and accordingly it is possible to locate in the communes poor peasants who have either insufficient land, or no stock, or no implements who become wage labourers on the larger farms. Because of the nature of the statistics that Lenin is using, based as they are on varying methods of classification, he is only able to consistently identify the relation of the top to the bottom groups along different dimensions in various regions. The existence of a middle group between the rich and the poor is accordingly a problem, for it can only be consistently identified after the location of the groups on either side of it.

It can be noticed that in working through the statistical examples the middle peasantry is dealt with last, since on most indices its statistical existence is predicated on being mid-way between the two other groups which are consequently discursively prior. But in addition to this, the nature of the middle-peasant household is conceived as independent (while fragile), and therefore as a negation of the economic forces that surround it. Consider this summary from the end of the chapter:

It (middle peasantry) is characterized by the least development of commodity production. The independent agricultural labour of this category of peasant covers his maintenance in perhaps only the best years and under particularly favourable conditions, and that is why his existence is an extremely precarious one. In the majority of cases the middle peasant cannot make ends meet without resorting to loans, to be repaid by labour-service etc., without seeking ‘subsidiary’ employment on the side, which also consists partly in the sale of labour-power etc. Every crop failure flings masses of the middle peasants into the ranks of the proletariat. In its social relations this groups fluctuates between the top group, towards which it gravitates but which only a small minority of lucky ones succeed in entering, and the bottom group, into which it is pushed by the whole course of social evolution.

The precarious existence of middle peasantry or ‘independent’ farmers in a commodity economy is well-illustrated here, but the future that is assigned to them in capitalist relations is one which contains their inevitable annihilation. Their subordinate discursive existence is reflected in their subordination to the activities of rich peasants except in those years when the crops are good enough to ensure independence for a little longer.

The effects of differentiation on the peasantry are demonstrated by Lenin in the second chapter as leading to the formation of two dominant groups, and contrary to the view of the Populists this does not result in the annihilation of a home market, but to the creation of two quite specific ones: among the rural proletariat for articles of consumption, and among the rural bourgeoisie for means of production. The diversity of the activities of both these groups – among the bourgeoisie, for example, engagement in usury and commercial enterprise, among the proletariat in special trades – necessarily enlarges the demand for implements, machines and raw materials, while the increasing dependence of all these forms of activity on a money economy in turn implies that personal consumption is also derivative of market relations. Lenin thus utilizes his analysis of capitalist differentiation of the peasant economy as a demonstration of the error of Narodnik theory.

Lenin in his small book ‘Preliminary Draft Thesis’ talked about six agrarian classes. He has differentiated agrarian classes on the basis of three criteria: 1. The possession of land, 2. Labour hiring versus self employment, and 3. Subsistence versus surplus above subsistence. He termed those agrarian classes as:

1. Agricultural proletariat: This class consists of landless people who live their life by hiring out their labour power as wage labourers.

2. The semi-proletariat or dwarf peasants: People belonging to this class own land but not big enough to sustain their life. The main source of income for this class is hiring out labour power.

3. The small peasants: The peasants belonging to this class own small plot of land but they also sell their labour power during the times of crisis. So the source of income for this class of peasants is both cultivation as well hiring out labour power.

4. The middle peasants: Peasants belonging to this class are self dependent. They neither hire in labour power nor hire out labour power. They do not own land that they cannot cultivate themselves.

5. The big peasants: They own big plot of land. So they cultivate their land mainly by hiring in labour power. But they involve themselves in manual work while doing agriculture.

6. The big landowners: Peasants belonging to this class are different from big peasants because they do not involve themselves in manual work. They are generally descendents of feudal lords.

The Landowners’ Transition from Corvee to Capitalist Economy

The third chapter is an examination of the landowners’ economy, and because of its nature Lenin has to consider the effects of breakdown of feudalism or the Emancipation on the agricultural estates. In feudalistic condition, where the independent farming of the peasant was a condition of the estate economy, the purpose of providing land for such use was related to a condition to provide the landlord with labour. The predominance of the corvee economy that Lenin outlines is conditional upon the general prevalence of natural economy in which peasants are provided with land by a lord and tied to it in such a way that the landlord can exercise direct supervision and compulsion in the allocation of work by the peasant. These relations were shattered with a breakdown in feudalism or by the Emancipation, since the ties of personal dependence were broken, and the provision of providing land by the landlord in return for labour was also thereby terminated. We say here ‘in the long run’, for the provisions of the Settlement were such as to legally perpetuate these forms, by granting households use-rights only over allotment land, and not outright title, and various devices were introduced to perpetuate the role of the landlords beyond the term of the transitional arrangements. However as Lenin points out, since the conditions required for capitalist production did not exist and because the corvee system had been undermined rather than destroyed, the form of transition from feudal to capitalist production on the estates was necessarily hesitant and diverse. The failure to provide households in good agricultural regions with sufficient land for their needs (and the removal of pastures and woods from settlement lands) did, as shown earlier, enable the landlord to provide himself with dependent labour.

Two transitional forms are identified by Lenin as most characteristic: the labour service system, and the capitalist system. In the former the landlord’s land is cultivated with the implements of the neighbouring peasants, while the forms of payments for this service are varied. The latter system involves hired workers who farm the landlord’s land with their own simple tools. The capitalist form of landlord farming is judged to dominate in European Russia, while labour service dominates in other parts; the question is then posed, which of these forms is going to eliminate the other? The answer to this is found by Lenin in the usually disregarded distinction between labour service performed by peasants with implements, and that performed by those without. That is, Lenin differentiates between types of agricultural activity and the kind of equipment necessary. In the case of the former, tasks such as ploughing and carting are included, requiring implements and draught animals; while in the case of the latter, the tasks include reaping, threshing and other operations requiring only simple tools. As noted above, the corvee economy is dependent on natural economy for the supply of labour; but without the ties which compel a peasant to work on the lord’s land it is necessary to rely on economic need. Those well-to-do peasants who possess implements and draught animals have however no such need, while those who do not possess such means of production do. But this rural proletariat, being no longer so directly bound to the landlord, might prefer to earn wages elsewhere, either in industry or for work on peasant farms. Lenin deduces that the development of capitalist wage labour undermines the basis of corvee economy, and that therefore landlord’s economy is increasingly compelled to assume a capitalist character. This is admitted to be a theoretical deduction made in the absence of adequate statistical evidence, but such evidence as there is can be used to demonstrate the nature of the process, if not its rate of development.

Lenin therefore shows in these two chapters that a dual form of capitalist evolution is under way in Russia: the internal differentiation of the natural economy of the peasantry into capitalists and wage labourers, and the transition of estate farming from a feudal basis to a capitalist one. As we shall see, he came to advocate the political support of the first tendency, which in practice meant advocating that it be furnished with the means for its rapid development. In most cases this was principally land that had been removed by the terms of the Emancipation from the control of the peasantry, or in general the landlords’ land itself. The ‘revolutionary road’ outlined in the 1907 ‘Preface’ saw this transfer of land as the most effective way of smashing the relics of serfdom which the landlords’ economy perpetuated, which in turn would lead to an even more rapid development of capitalist differentiation. The alternative to this is the Junker road, in which there is a slow transition to capitalism on the basis of the estates step-by-step breaking the feudal forms which dominate it. In DCR Lenin confines himself to establishing the economic structure of the two forms of capitalist agricultural production and their possible variations, alter using these elements in his construction of a Social Democratic agrarian policy which attempted to comprehend the political opportunities of these variations.

The Growth of Commercial Agriculture

The chapter following that on the landlords’ economy and its transition summarizes the previous discussion into the question: do the changes noted express a growth of capitalism and the home market? This is examined by an investigation of the production of different agricultural goods, noting their requirement for labour and capital, and regional specialization in grain crops, as well as the demands for the competitive production of vegetables, fruit, flax and fairy goods. It is demonstrated for these and other goods that either their production increasingly assumes the form of commodity production, with an intensive use of hired labour and machinery, or their conditions of circulation as goods are those of commodity relations. In the case of dairying, the care of cattle and the chores of milking were often left to small producers, while the processing of milk into butter and cheese was taken over by local industrial concerns equipped with modern machinery. Flax was likewise left to the peasantry, although the attempt to rent more land furthered differentiation among households, apart from the fact that the product had to be sold as a commodity to manufacturers. It was in grain farming, and certain aspects of stock farming, that technical developments were most available and accordingly these sectors of production became increasingly dominated by capitalist forms of production.

In this chapter therefore, unlike in his previous work, Lenin makes explicit use of agronomy to evaluate the economic possibilities of different agricultural investments, and he is able to show how the course of capitalist development in agriculture proceeds in a different fashion to that in manufacturing. While the latter is characterized by increasing specialization on one product or part of a product, agriculture does not divide into such distinct branches but merely specializes in one product or another, while adapting other activities to this product, rather than eliminating them. The consequence is that capitalist agriculture is characterized not by the standardization of industrial products, but by increasing diversity and complexity. This very diversity, among other factors, gives rise to an extensive capitalist market.

The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry, and Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry

Chapters five and six examine the way in which industrial production on a capitalist basis becomes established in peasant handicrafts and transforms the domestic base of such craft production, first into manufacturing, and then into factory production. The development of industry is therefore intricately related to the development of agricultural production, arising in the patriarchal household as a subsidiary occupation to agricultural activities, then in certain trades and areas becoming a major means of subsistence of peasant households, before taking the labour out of the household and into manufactories perhaps owned by rich peasants. This process both independently gives rise to, and draws on, a force of wage labourers who are set to work with machinery (or with hand tools) on detail work that displaces the skills of the artisan production of the household or small workshop. Simple capitalist cooperation is developed in workshops where a number of commodity producers combine under the supervision of merchants or farmers. This in turn grows into capitalist manufacture, and this is in chapter six examined trade by trade.

The purpose of this detailed exposition is to counter the Narodnik view that capitalist production is an artificial elements: in the Russian economy in contrast to the ‘people’s production’ of the handicraft trades. Extensive forays into material from woodworking, felt, samovar and accordion trades leads to the conclusion that they are characterized in their organization of production by a division of labour, which in certain cases opens the way for machinery and the elimination of hand production. These enterprises are not ‘people’s’ any more than they are ‘artificial’: they are developing capitalist enterprises, characterized as such by their internal organisation and by the sale of their products as commodities, and developing indigenously to the Russian economy.

The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry

Lenin’s outline in this and the following chapter on large-scale machine industry follows closely Marx’s account in Capital of the development of capitalist industry, but he cannot be accused of having imposed a model of economic development drawn from England and applied without regard to Russian conditions. As noted above, he drew a distinction between the characteristic form of development of capitalist relations in agriculture and industry, a distinction which rested on the forms of labour available and the characteristics of the enterprise. While David accused Kautsky of conceiving Marx’s model of industrial development as a model of capitalist development in agriculture, the same accusation cannot be leveled at Lenin. The capitalist character of Russian agriculture is derived by Lenin principally from the forms of labour there employed, and the relations into which goods enter on sale by enterprises engaged in cash transactions. The functions of the category ‘social division of labour’ is used primarily to conceptualise the breakdown of a homogenous natural economy, and to express the dispersion of a commodity economy unified by the category ‘market’. While ‘machinery’ plays an important part in the assessment of the level of development of capitalist agriculture, it is not expressive of the extent of capitalist relations.

The Formation of the Home Market

The final chapter of DCR returns the narrative to the point of departure, the question of the home market and the possibility of its existence with the development of capitalist relations in Russia. The construction of the text as a detailed analysis of capitalist forms permits this resumption of the initial problem to assume a quite different status however. Whereas the initial treatment of the errors of Narodnik theorizing on the economy is one which invokes the names of Smith and Marx in a theoretical refutation of underconsumptionist arguments, the final chapter of the book re-establishes this refutation on the basis of the descriptive material that had been presented in the previous chapters. As has been suggested above, this concentration on the home market is simply an expression of the ‘agrarian question’, for the Russian economy was dominated by rural production and the market for capital and consumer goods is thus located in the countryside. While it should not be thought that the book is directed primarily to the ‘peasant question’, the actual location of developing industrial and agricultural capitalist relations necessarily focuses primarily on a peasant, rather than a working-class, population.

Concluding Remarks

This structural characteristic does however mean that the text cannot legitimately be appropriated as a model Marxist account of the peasantry and capitalism, for it addresses not the peasantry-in-general, but rather specific problems confronting Russian Social Democracy. Indeed, DCR has remained a work more often gestured towards than investigated by more recent Marxists, its imposing size and complex arrangement perhaps discouraging easy assessment, promoting a general recognition of its existence while at the same time it remains on the shelves unread. The lack of serious assessments of this memorial of late nineteenth century Russian Social Democracy is truly remarkable.