V. I.

Lenin

Book Review: R. Gvozdev. Kulak Usury, Its Social and Economic Significance

R. Gvozdev .

Kulak Usury, Its Social and Economic Significance. St. Petersburg, 1899. Publ. N. Garin .

Mr. Gvozdev’s book sums up data gathered by our economic literature on the
interesting question of kulak usurers. The author mentions a number of
indications of the development of commodity circulation and production in
the pre-Reform period that brought about the emergence of trading and
usurer’s capital. He then reviews the material on usury in grain
production, on kulakism in connection with migration, handicraft
industries, and peasants’ auxiliary employments, as well as in connection
with taxation and credit. Mr. Gvozdev rightly points out that
representatives of Narodnik economics have held a wrong view of kulakism,
regarding it as some sort of an “excrescence” on the organism
of “people’s production” and not as one of the forms of
capitalism, closely and indivisibly bound up with the entire Russian
social economy. The Narodniks ignored the connection between kulakism and
the differentiation of the peasantry, the closeness of the village usurer
“bloodsuckers” and others to the “enterprising muzhiks,”
those representatives of the rural petty bourgeoisie in Russia. The
survivals of medieval institutions that still weigh down on our
countryside (social-estate seclusion of the village commune, [2]
the tying of the peasant to his allotment, [3] collective liability, [4]
the social-estate inequality of taxation) create tremendous barriers
against the investment of small amounts of capital in production, against
their employment in agriculture and industry. The natural result of all this is the tremendous prevalence
of the lowest and worst forms of capital , viz., trading and
usurer’s capital. In the midst of a mass of “economically
weak” peasants dragging out an existence of semi- starvation on
their small allotments, the small group of prosperous peasants inevitably
turns into exploiters of the worst type, enslaving the poor by money
loans, winter hiring, [5] etc., etc. Outdated institutions
hindering the growth of capitalism both in agriculture and in industry
thereby reduce the demand for labour-power but, at the same time, do not
protect the peasant from the most shameless and uncurbed exploitation or
even from starving to death. A rough estimate of the sums paid by indigent
peasants to the kulaks and usurers, quoted by Mr. Gvozdev in his book,
shows clearly the groundlessness of the usual comparison made between the
Russian allotment-holding peasantry and the West-European proletariat. In
actual fact the masses of that peasantry are in a far worse condition than
is the rural proletariat in the West; in actual fact our indigent peasants
are paupers and the years in which it is necessary to take extraordinary
measures of help for millions of starving peasants occur with ever-growing
frequency. If the fiscal institutions did not artificially lump together
the prosperous and poor peasantry, the latter would undoubtedly have to be
officially regarded as paupers, which would more accurately and more
truthfully define the attitude of modern society to those strata of the
population. Mr. Gvozdev’s book is valuable because it gives a summary of
data on the process of “non-proletarian impoverishment” [1] and very
justly describes this process as the lowest and worst form of the
differentiation of the peasantry. Mr. Gvozdev is apparently well
acquainted with Russian economic literature, but his book would have
gained had he given less space to quotations from various magazines and
allowed more space for an independent study of the material. The Narodnik
analysis of the available material usually leaves untouched the aspects of
the given question that are most important from the theoretical point of
view. Furthermore, Mr. Gvozdev’s own arguments are frequently too sweeping and general. This must be said,
in particular, of the chapter on handicraft industries. The style of the
book suffers, at times, from mannerisms and haziness.

---
Notes:
[1]
Parvus, The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis .
St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 8, footnote.
— Lenin

[2]
The village (land) commune (Russ. obshchina or mir ) was the communal form of peasant use of land characterised
by compulsory crop rotation and undivided woods and pastures. Its
principal features were collective liability, the periodical
redistribution of the land without the right to refuse the allotment, and
prohibition of purchase or sale of the allotted land.

The Russian village commune dates back to ancient times and in the course
of its historical development it gradually became one of the mainstays of
feudalism in Russia. The landlords and the tsarist government used the
village commune to intensify feudal oppression and to squeeze land
redemption payments and taxes out of the people. Lenin pointed out that
the village commune “does not save the peasant from turning into a
proletarian; actually it serves as a medieval barrier dividing the
peasants who are as if chained to small associations and to categories
that have lost all ‘reason for existence’\thinspace” (see “The Agrarian
Question in Russia To wards the Close of the Nineteenth Century,” present
edition, Vol.15).

Theproblem of the village commune aroused heated debates and brought an
extensive economic literature into existence. Particularly great interest
in the village commune was displayed by the Narodniks, who saw in it the
guarantee of Russia’s evolution to socialism by a special path. By
tendentiously gathering their material, falsifying facts, and employing
so-called “average figures,” the Narodniks sought to prove that the
commune peasantry in Russia possessed a special sort of
“steadfastness,” that the village commune protected the peasants
against the penetration of capitalist relations into their lives and
“saved” them from ruin and class differentiation. As early as
the 1880s, G. V. Plekhanov showed that the Narodnik illusions about
“commune socialism” were unfounded and in the 1890s Lenin
completely refuted the Narodnik theories. Lenin made use of a tremendous
amount of statistical material and countless facts to show how capitalist
relations were developing in the Russian village and how capital, by
penetrating into the patriarchal village commune, was splitting the
peasantry into two antagonistic classes, the kulaks and the poor peasants.

In1906 the tsarist minister Stolypin issued a law favouring the kulaks
which allowed peasants to leave the commune and sell their
allotments. This law marked the beginning of the official abolition of the
village commune system and intensified the differentiation of the
peasantry. In the nine years following the adoption of the law, over two
million peasant families withdrew from the communes.

[3]
Allotment land —land left for the use of the peasants after
the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The allotted land was not permitted to
be sold by the peasants. It was held by the village commune and was
periodically redistributed among the peasants.

[4]
Collective liability was a compulsory measure making the peasants
of each village commune collectively liable for timely and full payments
and for the fulfilment of all sorts of services to the state and the
landlords (payment of taxes and land redemption instalments, provision of
recruits for the army, etc.). This form of bondage was retained after
serfdom had been abolished and remained in force until 1906.

[5]
Winter hiring —the hiring of peasants for summer work by
land lords and kulaks in the winter, when the peasants were particularly
in need of cash and were willing to agree to extortionate terms.