V. I.

Lenin

Book Review: Parvus. The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis

Parvus. The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis .
Economic essays. Translated from the German by L. Y. St. Petersburg, 1898. Publ. 0. N. Popova (Educational Library, Series 2, No. 2). 142 pp. Price 40 kopeks.

Thisbook, by the gifted German journalist who writes under the pseudonym
of Parvus, consists of a number of essays describing some of the phenomena
of modern world economy, with the greatest attention paid to
Germany. Parvus’ central theme is the development of the world market and
he describes mainly the recent stages of this development in the period of
the decline of England’s industrial hegemony. Of the greatest interest are
his remarks on the role being played by the old industrial countries that
serve as a market for the younger capitalist countries: England, for
example, swallows up an ever-growing amount of German manufactured goods
and at the present time takes from one- fifth to a quarter of the total
German export. Parvus employs the data of commercial and industrial
statistics to describe the peculiar division of labour between the various
capitalist countries, some of whom produce mainly for the colonial market
and others for the European market. In the chapter headed “Towns and
Railways” the author makes an extremely interesting attempt to
describe the most important “forms of capitalist towns” and
their significance in the general system of capitalist economy. The
remaining and greater part of the book (pp. 33-142) is devoted to
questions concerning the contradictions in present-day capitalist
agriculture and the agrarian crisis. Parvus first explains the influence
of industrial development on grain prices, on ground rent, etc. He then
outlines the theory of ground rent developed by Marx in Volume III of
Capital and explains the basic cause of capitalist agrarian crises from the stand point of this
theory. Parvus adds data on Germany to the purely theoretical analysis of
this question and comes to the conclusion that “the last and basic
cause of the agrarian crisis is increased ground rent due exclusively to
capitalist development and the consequent increased price of land.”
“Eliminate these prices,” says Parvus, “and European agriculture will again be able to compete with the Russian and American.”
“Its [private property’s] only weapon against the agrarian crisis
is, with the exception of fortuitous favourable combinations on the world
market, the auctioning of all capitalist landed properties”
(141). The conclusion drawn by Parvus, therefore, coincides, by and large,
with Engels’ opinion; in Volume III of Capital Engels pointed to
the fact that the present-day agricultural crisis makes the ground rents
formerly obtained by European landowners impossible. [2]
We
strongly recommend to all readers who are interested in the questions
mentioned above to acquaint themselves with Parvus’ book. It is an
excellent reply to the current Narodnik arguments on the present
agricultural crisis which are constantly to be met with in the Narodnik
press and which suffer from a most essential shortcoming: the fact of the
crisis is examined in disconnection from the general development of world
capitalism; it is examined, not from the stand point of definite social
classes, but solely for the purpose of deducing the petty-bourgeois moral
on the viability of small peasant farming.

Thetranslation of Parvus’ book, can, on the whole, be considered satisfactory,
although in places awkward and heavy turns of speech are to be met with.

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Notes:
[1]
Nachalo ( The Beginning )—a monthly literary and political magazine that was published in St. Petersburg during the first
months of 1899 by “legal Marxists”; its editors were P. B. Struve,
M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, and others. It published articles by G. V. Plekhanov,
V. I. Zasulich, and others. The magazine was closed down by the tsarist
authorities in June 1899.

[2]
Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. III, 1959, pp. 708-10.