V. I.

Lenin

New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture

PART ONE—Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America

10. Defects of Conventional Methods of Economic Analysis.
Marx on the Peculiarities Of Agriculture

The grouping of farms by acreage, total or improved, is the only
kind of grouping which was used in the American Census reports
for 1910, and which is used in the great majority of European
countries. Generally speaking, it is indisputable that apart
from fiscal, bureaucratic and administrative reasons there are
scientific considerations arguing the need and correctness of
this kind of grouping. Still it is obviously inadequate for it
completely fails to take account of the intensification of
agriculture, the increasing expenditure of capital per unit of
area in the form of livestock, machinery, improved seeds, better
methods of crop cultivation, etc. Meanwhile, with the exception
of a very few areas and countries with a primitive or purely
extensive agriculture, it is this very process that is most
typical for capitalist countries everywhere. For this reason the
grouping of farms by acreage in the vast majority of cases gives
an oversimplified and entirely inadequate picture of agricultural development in general, and of capitalist
development in agriculture in particular.

When the verbose economists and statisticians who express the
most popular bourgeois views hold forth on the dissimilarity of
conditions in agriculture and industry, the specific nature of
the former, and so on and so forth, one is always tempted to
say: Gentlemen! You yourselves are most to blame for maintaining
and spreading oversimplified and crude notions of evolution in
agriculture! Remember Marx’s Capital . In it you will find references to the extreme variety of forms of land
ownership, such as feudal, clan, communal (and primitive-squatter), state, etc., which capitalism encounters
when it makes its appearance on the historical scene. Capital
subordinates to itself all these varied forms of land ownership
and remolds them after its own fashion, and if one is to
understand, evaluate and express this process in statistical
terms, one must learn to modify the formulation of the question
and the methods of investigation in accordance with the changing
form of the process. Capitalism subordinates to itself all these forms of land ownership: communal-allotment holdings
in Russia; squatter tracts or holdings regulated by free
distribution in a democratic or a feudal state, as in Siberia or
the American Far West; the slave-holding estates in the American
South, and the semi-feudal landholdings of the “purely Russian”
gubernias. In all these cases, the development and victory of
capitalism is similar, though not identical in form. In order to
study and understand the precise nature of the process one must
go beyond the trite petty-bourgeois phrases about “family
farming” or the routine methods of comparing acreage alone.

You will also find that Marx analyses the origin of the
capitalist type of ground-rent and its relationship to its
forerunners in history, such as rent in kind, labour service
(corvée and its survivals); money-rent (quit-rent, etc.). But who among the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois, Narodnik,
economists or statisticians has given any serious thought to
applying these theoretical guiding principles of Marx’s to an
investigation of the rise of capitalism from the slave-holding economy of the American South, or from
the corvée economy in central Russia?

Finally, you will find throughout Marx’s analysis of ground-rent
systematic references to the varied conditions of agriculture
engendered not only by the differences in quality and location
of the land, but also by the differences in the amount of capital invested in it . Now what does application of
capital to land imply? It implies technical changes in agriculture, its intensification, the transition to higher
systems of field cropping, increased use of artificial fertilizers, the wider use and improvement of implements and
machinery, greater employment of hired labour, etc. A record of
the acreage alone will not express all these complex and varied
processes, which all combine to make up the general process of
the development of capitalism in agriculture.

Russian
Zemstvo statisticians, [3] especially those of the “good old”
pre-Revolutionary days, won universal respect because they
avoided the routine approach and took a certain scientific
interest in their business, going beyond its purely fiscal,
bureaucratic and administrative aspects. They were probably the
first statisticians to notice the inadequacy of grouping farms
by acreage alone, and, accordingly, introduced other methods of
classification, such as by sown area, number of draught animals,
employment of hired labour, etc. Unfortunately, the sporadic and
scattered operations of our Zemstvo statistics—in the past
ever what you might call an oasis in the desert of feudal
obscurity, bureaucratic routine, and every kind of stupid
red-tapism—have not yielded any long-term results either
for Russian or European economics.

It should be noted that the grouping of the returns canvassed in
modern agricultural censuses is not such a purely technical or
highly specialized question as may appear at first sight. The
returns contain an immense wealth of complete information on
each enterprise as a unit, but due to the clumsy, thoughtless,
routine approach to tabulation and grouping, this extremely
valuable material is all lost, wasted, and discolored, which
often makes it practically useless for any study of the laws of
agricultural evolution. The returns make it possible to say
quite categorically whether a farm is a capitalist enterprise,
and to what extent; whether its farming operations are intensive, and to what degree, etc.; but when data relating to
millions of farms are tabulated the most essential distinctions,
features and characteristics—which ought to be most effectively brought out , determined and taken
into account—tend to disappear, so that all the economist
gets, instead of a sensible statistical review, is routine,
meaningless columns of figures, a kind of statistical “game of
digits”.

The American Census of 1910 with which we are now concerned is
an excellent example of how first-class material of surpassing
wealth and completeness has been devalued and spoiled by the
routine approach and scientific ignorance of the statisticians. The processing is very much worse than in the
1900 Census, and even the traditional grouping of farms by
acreage has not been fully carried out, so that we have no
possibility of making a comparison between the enterprises in
the various groups, say, as regards their employment of hired
labour, the difference in their systems of field cropping, the
use of fertilizers, etc.

I am compelled, therefore, to turn to the 1900 Census. It gave,
to my knowledge, the world’s only example of the use of
three different methods, instead of one, to group or “classify” (as the Americans say) the great abundance of
material on more than five and a half million farms, collected
in a single country, at a single time, and under a single
program.

It is true that here, too, no classification gives all the
essential characteristics of the type and size of farm. Still
the resultant picture of capitalist agriculture and the
capitalist evolution of agriculture is, as I hope to show, very
much fuller, and reflects the real situation much more correctly
than can ever be the case when the conventional, one-sided and
inadequate single method of classification is used. Given the
opportunity for a fuller study of facts and trends, which may be
safely considered common to all the capitalist countries of the
world, the most serious errors and dogmas of bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois, Narodnik political economy are shown up and
exposed.

Since the data in question are so important I shall have to
examine them in greater detail and employ statistical tables
more frequently than hitherto. Realizing fully that statistical
tables burden the text and make reading more difficult, I have
tried to keep them down to a minimum, and hope the reader will
be lenient with me if I now have to increase that minimum, for
on the analysis of the points examined here depends not only the
general conclusion on the principal question—the trend,
type, character and law of evolution of modern agriculture—but also the general assessment of the data
furnished by modern agricultural statistics which are so often
cited and just as often distorted.

The first grouping—“by acreage”—gives the following picture of American agriculture in 1900:

| | Average per farm |
| --- | --- |
| Size group (acres) | Percentage of farms | Percentage of total acreage | Improved acreage | Outlays
On hired labour ($) | Value of produce [1] ($) | Value of implements
and machinery ($) |
| Under 3 3 to 10 10 to 20 20 to 50 50 to 100 100 to 175 175 to 260 260 to 500 500 to 1000 1,000 and over | 0.7 4.0 7.1 21.9 23.8 24.8 8.5 6.6 1.8 0.8 | _ _ [2] 0.2 0.7 4.9 11.7 22.9 12.3 15.4 8.1 23.8 | 1.7 5.6 12.6 26.2 49.3 83.2 129.0 191.4 287.5 520.0 | 77 18 16 18 33 60 109 166 312 1,059 | 592 203 236 324 503 721 1,054 1,354 1,913 5,334 | 53 42 41 54 106 155 211 263 377 1,222 |
| |
| Average for all farms | | | 72.3 | | 656 | 133 |

It is safe to say that the statistics of any capitalist
country—the inessential particulars apart—would present an absolutely similar picture. This is confirmed by the
latest censuses in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland and
Denmark. As total farm acreage increases from group to group,
there is also an increase in the average improved acreage, the
average value of the produce, the value of implements and
machinery, the value of livestock (I have omitted these figures)
and the expenditure on hired labour (earlier on I pointed out
the significance of the slight exception of the under-3-acre
farms and in part of the 3-to-10-acre farms).

It would seem that it could not be otherwise. The increase in
expenditure on hired labour appears to confirm beyond any doubt
that the division of farms into large and small on the strength
of acreage is entirely in accord with their division into
capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises. Nine-tenths of the
usual arguments about “small-scale” agriculture are based on
identification in this way and on such data.

Let us now consider the average per acre of (all) land, instead of per farm:

| | Per acre of all land in dollars |
| --- | --- |
| Size group (acres) | Outlays on hired labour | Outlays on fertilizers | Value of livestock | Value of implements and machinery |
| Under 3 3 to 10 10 to 20 20 to 50 50 to 100 100 to 175 175 to 260 260 to 500 500 to 1000 1,000 and over | 40.30 2.95 1.12 0.55 0.46 0.45 0.52 0.48 0.47 0.25 | 2.36 0.60 0.33 0.20 0.12 0.07 0.07 0.04 0.03 0.02 | 456.76 16.32 8.30 5.21 4.51 4.09 3.96 3.61 3.16 2.15 | 27.57 6.71 2.95 1.65 1.47 1.14 1.00 0.77 0.57 0.29 |

Allowing for some absolutely negligible exceptions we find a
uniform decline in the characteristics of intensive farming from
the lower groups to the higher.

The conclusion appears to be incontrovertible that “small-scale”
production in agriculture is more intensive than large-scale
production, that the smaller the “scale” of production, the
greater the intensity and productivity of agriculture, and that,
“consequently”, capitalist production in agriculture is
maintained only by the extensive, primitive nature of the
economy, etc.

In fact, the same conclusions are being drawn all the time, on
every hand, in all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois (opportunist-“Marxist” and Narodnik) writings, for when farms
are grouped by acreage (which is not only the most common but
practically the only kind of grouping done) the picture will be
similar for any capitalist country, that is, it will show the
same decline in the characteristics of intensive agriculture
from the lower groups to the higher. There is, for instance, the
celebrated work of the celebrated Eduard
David— Socialism and Agriculture —a collection of bourgeois prejudices and bourgeois lies under the cover of
quasi-socialist catchwords. It uses just that kind of data to
prove the “superiority”, “viability”, etc., of “small-scale”
production.

One factor has especially facilitated such conclusions. It is
that data similar to the above are ordinarily available on the
quantity of livestock; but practically nowhere are data
collected on hired labour—especially in such a summarized
form as expenditure on hired labour. But it is precisely the
data on hired labour that reveal the incorrectness of all such
conclusions. In effect, if the increase, say, in the value of
livestock (or the total number of animals, which is the same
thing) per unit of area down the scale is taken as evidence of
the “superiority” of “small-scale” agriculture, it should be
borne in mind that as we go down the scale this “superiority”
turns out to be connected with increasing expenditure on hired labour! But such an increase in the
expenditure on hired labour—notice that we have all along
been dealing with values per unit of area, per acre, per
hectare, per dessiatine—signifies a growth of the capitalist nature of the enterprise! But the capitalist
nature of the enterprise clashes with the popular notion of
“small-scale” production because small-scale production implies
enterprise which is not based on hired labour.

This seems to create a knot of contradictions. The overall
acreage returns for the size groups indicate that the “small”
farms are non-capitalist, whereas the big farms are. Yet the
very same data show that the “smaller” the enterprise, the more
intensive it is, and the larger its expenditure on hired labour
per unit of land area!

In order to explain this let us consider another type of
grouping.

---
Notes:
[1]
Excluding produce used as feed.
— Lenin

[2]
Less than 0.1%.
— Lenin

[3]