All the more rapidly is commodity production developing in Russia, all the more complete dominion is being acquired in it by the capitalist mode of production.

The most important part of the means of production (land and factories, tools and machines, railways and other means of communication) is becoming concentrated in the hands of a comparatively insignificant number of capitalists and large landowners, as their private property.

The development of capitalism increasingly augments the number, the scale, and the economic significance of large enterprises, worsens the situation of small independent producers (peasants, handicraftsmen, artisans), transforms some of them into servants and tributaries of capital, displaces others into the ranks of the proletariat.

The further technical progress advances, the greater the possibilities capitalists have of raising the level of exploitation of workers, the more the increase in demand for labor-power lags behind the increase in its supply. Insecurity of existence and unemployment, the oppression of exploitation and every manner of degradation become the lot of ever wider and wider strata of the laboring population.

Industrial crises, which are inevitably called forth by the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, intensify this process still further. Poverty and misery of the masses are combined with the squandering of social wealth as a consequence of the impossibility of finding a market for produced commodities.

Thus, the gigantic development of the productive forces of social and increasingly socialized labor is accompanied by the fact that an insignificant minority of the population monopolizes all the principal benefits of this development. Alongside the growth of social wealth grows social inequality, the gulf deepens and widens between the class of proprietors (the bourgeoisie) and the class of the proletariat[177].

Written between January 25 and February 18 (February 7 and March 3), 1902.

First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany II

Printed from the manuscript