The DEVELOPMENT of CAPITALISM in RUSSIA

Chapter III. The Landowners’ Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy

IV. The Decline of the Labour-Service System

The question now arises: in what relation does the labour-service system
stand to the post-Reform economy of Russia?

First of all, the growth of commodity economy conflicts with the
labour-service system, since the latter is based on natural economy, on
unchanging technique, on inseparable ties between the landlord and the
peasant. That is why this system is totally impracticable in its complete
form, and every advance in the development of commodity economy and
commercial agriculture undermines the conditions of its practicability.

Next we must take account of the following circumstance. From the
foregoing it follows that labour-service, as practised in present-day
landlord farming, should be divided into two types: 1) labour-service that
can only be performed by a peasant farmer who owns draught animals and
implements (e. g., cultivation of “cycle dessiatine,” ploughing, etc.), and 2) labour-service that can be performed by a rural
proletarian who has no implements (for example, reaping, mowing,
threshing, etc.). It is obvious that for both peasant and landlord
farming, the first and the second type of labour-service are of opposite
significance, and that the latter type constitutes a direct transition to
capitalism, merging with it by a number of quite imperceptible
transitions. In our literature labour-service is usually referred to in
general, without this distinction being made. Yet in the process of the
elimination of labour-service by capitalism the shifting of the centre of
gravity from the first type of labour-service to the second is of enormous
importance. Here is an example from Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia : “On the majority of the estates . . . the
cultivation of the fields and the crops, i.e., the jobs on the careful fulfilment of which the harvest depends, are done by regular workers,
whereas the harvesting, i.e., the job in the performance of which
promptness and speed are the prime consideration, is given to neighbouring
peasants to be done in return for money lent, or for the use of pasture
and other grounds” (Vol. V, Pt. 2, p. 140). On such farms most of
the hands are hired on the labour-service basis, but the capitalist system
undoubtedly predominates, and the “neighbouring peasants” are
at bottom turned into rural workers, similar to the “contract day
labourers” in Germany, who also have land and also hire themselves
out for a definite part of the year (see above, p. 179, footnote). The
enormous drop in the number of horses owned by peasants and the increase
in the number of horseless households as a result of the crop failures of
the

90s [1]

could not but exert great influence in accelerating this process of the elimination
of labour-service by the capitalist system. [2]

Finally, one of the most important reasons for the decline of the
labour-service system should be sought in the differentiation of the peasantry. The connection between labour-service
(of the first type) and the middle group of the peasantry is
clear and a priori – as we have already observed above – and
can be proved by Zemstvo statistics. For example, the abstract for Zadonsk
Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia, gives returns of the number of farms doing
job-work, in the various groups of peasantry. Here are the data in
percentages:

From the above it is clear that participation in job-work is less
prevalent in the two extreme groups. The largest percentage of households
taking job-work is to be found in the middle group of the peasantry. Since
job-work is also frequently assigned in Zemstvo statistical abstracts to
the category of “employments” in general, we see here, consequently, an example of the typical “employments” of the
middle peasantry – exactly as in the preceding chapter we acquainted
ourselves with the typical “employments” of the bottom and top
groups of the peasantry. The types of “employments” examined
there express the development of capitalism (commercial and industrial
establishments and the sale of labour-power), whereas the type of
“employments” mentioned here, on the contrary, expresses the
backwardness of capitalism and the predominance of labour-service (if we
assume that in the sum-total of “job-work” the predominant
jobs are such as we have assigned to labour-service of the first type).

The greater the decline of natural economy and of the middle peasantry,
the more vigorously is labour-service bound to be eliminated by
capitalism. The well-to-do peasants cannot, naturally, serve as a basis
for the labour-service system, for it is only dire need that compels the
peasant to undertake the worst-paid jobs, jobs that are ruinous for his
own farm. But the rural proletariat are equally unsuitable for the labour-service system, though for another reason:
having no farm of his own, or possessing a miserable patch of land, the
rural proletarian is not tied down to it to the extent that the
“middle” peasant is, and, as a consequence, it is far easier
for him to go elsewhere and hire himself out on “free” terms,
i.e., for higher pay and without bondage at all. Hence the universal
dissatisfaction of our agrarians at the peasants leaving for the towns or
for “outside employments” generally, hence their complaints
that the peasants have “little attachment” (see below,

p. ). The development of purely capitalist wage-labour saps
the very roots of the labour-service system. [3]

It is supremely important to note that this inseparable connection between
the differentiation of the peasantry and the elimination of labour-service
by capitalism – a connection so obvious in theory – has long been noted
by agricultural writers who have observed the various methods of farming
on the landlord estates. In the preface to his collection of articles on
Russian agriculture written between 1857 and 1882, Prof. Stebut points out
that . . . “In community peasant agriculture the farmer-industrialists are becoming differentiated from the farm labourers . The former, who are becoming cultivators on a big scale,
are beginning to employ farm labourers and usually cease to take job-work,
unless they find it absolutely necessary to enlarge their crop area
somewhat, or to obtain the use of pasture land, which in most cases cannot
be done except by taking job-work; the latter, on the other hand, cannot
take any job-work for lack of horses. Hence the obvious necessity for a transition , and a speedy transition, to farming based on wage-labour , since the peasants who still take job-work by the
dessiatine are, due to the feeble state of their horses and to the
multitude of jobs they undertake, beginning to turn out work that is bad
from the viewpoint both of quality and of promptness of fulfilment”
(p. 20).

References to the fact that the ruin of the peasantry is leading to the
elimination of labour-service by capitalism are also made in current
Zemstvo statistical material. In Orel Gubernia, for example, it has been
observed that the drop in grain prices ruined many tenants and that the
land owners were compelled to increase the area cultivated on capitalist
lines. “Simultaneously with the expansion of the area cultivated by
the landlords, we observe everywhere a tendency to replace job-work by the
labour of regular farm hands and to do away with the use of
peasants’ implements . . . a tendency to improve the cultivation of
the soil by the introduction of up-to-date implements . . . to change the
system of farming, to introduce grass crops, to expand and improve
livestock farming and to make it profitable” ( Agricultural Survey of Orel Gubernia for 1887-88 , pp. 124-126. Quoted from
P. Struve’s Critical Remarks , pp. 242-244). In Poltava
Gubernia, in 1890, when grain prices were low, there was observed “a
diminution in peasant renting of land . . .

throughout the gubernia. . . . Correspondingly, in many places, despite
the severe drop in grain prices, there was an increase in the area
cultivated by landowners employing regular labour” ( The Influence of Harvests , etc ., I, 304). In Tambov Gubernia, a
considerable increase has been observed in the prices paid for work done
by horses: for the three years 1892-1894, these prices were 25 to 30%
higher than for the three years 1889-1891 ( Novoye Slovo , 1895,
No. 3, p. 187). This rise in the cost of work done by horses, a natural
result of the decline in the number of peasant horses, cannot but entail
the ousting of labour-service by the capitalist system.

It is by no means our intention, of course, to use these separate
references in order to prove that labour-service is being eliminated by
capitalism: no complete statistics on this subject are available. We are
merely using them to illustrate the point that there is a
connection between the differentiation of the peasantry and the
elimination of labour-service by capitalism. General and mass-scale data,
which prove irrefutably that this elimination is going on, relate to the
employment of machinery in agriculture and to the employment of labour
freely hired. But before passing to these data, we must first deal with
the views of the Narodnik economists on contemporary farming by private
landowners in Russia.

---
Notes:
[1]
The horse census of 1893-1894 in 48 gubernias revealed a drop of 9.6% in
the number of horses possessed by all horse owners, and a drop of 28,321
in the number of horse owners. In Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Ryazan, Orel,
Tula and Nizhni-Novgorod gubernias, the decline in the number of horses
between 1888 and 1893 was 21.2%. In seven other gubernias of the
black-earth belt the decline between 1891 and 1893 was 17%. In 38
gubernias of European Russia in 1888-1891 there were 7,922 260 peasant
households, of which 5,736,436 owned horses; in 1893-1894, there were in
these gubernias 8,288,987 households, of which 5,647,233 owned
horses. Consequently, the number of horse-owning households dropped by
89,000, while the number of horseless increased by 456,000 The percentage
of horseless households rose from 27.6% to 31.9% ( Statistics of the Russian Empire , XXXVII. St. Petersburg, 1896.) Above we have shown
that in 48 gubernias of European Russia the number of horseless households
rose from 2.8 million in 1888-1891 to 3.2 million in 1896-1900 – i.e.,
from 27.3% to 29.2%. In four southern gubernias (Bessarabia,
Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, Kherson), the number of horseless households rose
from 305,800 in 1896 to 341,600 in 1904, i.e., from 34.7% to 36.4%
( Note to 2nd edition .)— Lenin

[2]
Cf. also S. A. Korolenko, Hired Labour , etc ., pp. 46-47, where, on the basis of the horse censuses of 1882 and 1888,
examples are cited of how the drop in the number of horses possessed by
peasants is accompanied by an increase in the number of horses possessed
by private landowners.— Lenin

[3]
Here is a particularly striking example. Zemstvo statisticians explain the
comparative incidence of money renting and renting in kind in various
parts of Bakhmut Uyezd, Ekaterinoslav Gubernia, in the following way:

“Money renting is most widespread . . . in the coal and
salt-mining districts, and least widespread in the steppe and purely
agricultural area The peasants, in general, are not eager to go out to
work for others, and are particularly reluctant to accept irksome and
badly paid work on private estates. Work in the coal mines, in ore-mining
and in metallurgy generally, is arduous and injurious to the
worker’s health, but, generally speaking, it is better paid, and
attracts the worker with the prospect of monthly or weekly wages in cash,
as he does not usually get money when he works on the landlord’s
estate for the reason that there he is either working in payment of the
‘bit’ of land he has rented, or of straw or grain he has
borrowed, or has managed to get his pay in advance to cover his ordinary
needs, etc.

“All this induces the worker to avoid working on estates, and
he does avoid doing so when there is an opportunity of earning money in
some place other than the landlord’s ‘estate.’ And this
opportunity occurs mostly where there are many mines, at which the workers
are paid ‘good’ money. With the ‘pence’ the peasant earns in the mines, he can rent land, without having to pledge
himself to work on an estate, and in this way renting for money
establishes its sway” (quoted from Results of Zemstw Statistical Investigations , Vol. II, p. 265). In the steppe, non-industrial
divisions of the uyezd, on the other hand, land renting on a skopshchina
and a labour-service basis establishes its sway.

Thus, to escape labour-service the peasant is ready to flee even to
the mines! Prompt payment in cash, the impersonal form of hire and
regular working hours “attract” the worker to such an extent
that he even prefers the mines underground to agriculture, the agriculture
about which our Narodniks wax so idyllic. The whole point is that the
peasant knows from bitter experience the real value of the labour-service
idealised by the agrarians and the Narodniks, and he knows how much better
are purely capitalist relations.— Lenin