The DEVELOPMENT of CAPITALISM in RUSSIA

Chapter I. The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists

II. The Growth of the Industrial Population at the Expense of
the Agricultural

In view of the fact that in the epoch preceding commodity economy,
manufacturing is combined with the raw materials industry, and the latter
is headed by agriculture, the development of commodity economy takes the
shape of the separation from agriculture of one branch of industry after
another. The population of a country in which commodity economy is poorly
developed (or not developed at all) is almost exclusively
agricultural. This, however, must not be understood as meaning that the
population is engaged solely in agriculture: it only means that the
population engaged in agriculture, also process the products of
agriculture, and that exchange and the division of labour are almost
non-existent. Consequently, the development of commodity economy eo ipso
means the divorcement of an ever-growing part of the population from
agriculture, i.e., the growth of the industrial population at the expense
of the agricultural population. “It is in the nature of capitalist production to continually reduce the agricultural population as compared with the non-agricultural, because in industry (in the
strict sense) the increase of constant capital at the expense of variable
capital goes hand in hand with an absolute increase in variable capital
despite its relative decrease; on the other hand, in agriculture the
variable capital required for the exploitation of a certain plot of land
decreases absolutely; it can thus only increase to the extent that new
land is taken into cultivation, but this again requires as a prerequisite
a still greater growth of the non-agricultural population” ( Das Kapital , III, 2, 177. Russ. trans.,

p. 526). [2] Thus one cannot conceive of capitalism
without an increase in the commercial and industrial population at the
expense of the agricultural population, and everybody knows that this
phenomenon is revealed in the most clear-cut fashion in all capitalist
countries. It need hardly be proved that the significance of this
circumstance as regards the problem of the home market is enormous, for it
is bound up inseparably both with the evolution of industry and with the
evolution of agriculture; the formation of industrial centres, their numerical growth, and the attraction of the population by them cannot but
exert a most profound influence on the whole rural system, and cannot but
give rise to a growth of commercial and capitalist agriculture. All the
more noteworthy is the fact that the exponents of Narodnik economics
completely ignore this law both in their purely theoretical arguments and
in their arguments about capitalism in Russia (we shall deal at length
with the specific manifestations of this law in Russia later on, in
Chapter VIII). The theories of Messrs. V. V. and N.–on regarding the home
market for capitalism overlook a mere trifle—the diversion of the
population from agriculture to industry, and the influence exerted by this
fact on

agriculture. [1]

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Notes:
[1]
We have pointed to the identical attitude of the West-European
romanticists and Russian Narodniks to the problem of the growth
of industrial population in our article “A Characterisation of
Economic Romanticism. Sismondi and Our Native
Sismondists.”— Lenin

[2]
Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow, 1959, Vol. III, p. 622.

Throughout this book, references to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital
are to the following German editions: Vol. 1–2nd edition, 1872;
Vol. 2–1885 edition; and Vol. 3–1894 edition. References to the
“Russian translation” of Capital are to the one by
N. F. Danielson (1896).