To proceed. We have shown that the Narodnik theories, while
absurd and reactionary from the standpoint of the struggle for socialism
against the bourgeoisie, turn out to be “rational” (in the sense of
being a specific historic task) and progressive in the bourgeois struggle
against serfdom. The question now arises: when we say that serfdom must
inevitably die out in Russian landownership and in the whole social system
in Russia, when we say that a bourgeois-democratic agrarian revolution is
inevitable, does that mean that this can take place only in one definite
form? Or is it possible in various forms?

That question is of cardinal importance for arriving at correct views
on our revolution and on the Social-Democratic agrarian programme. And
solve this question we must, starting out from the data given above
concerning the economic basis of the revolution.

The pivot of tile struggle is the feudal latifundia which are the most
conspicuous embodiment and the strongest mainstay of the survivals of
serfdom in Russia. The development of commodity production and capitalism
will certainly and inevitably put an end to those survivals. In that
respect Russia has only one path before her, that of bourgeois
development.

But there may be two forms of that development. The survivals of
serfdom may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord
economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i. e.,
either by re form or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed by
having big landlord economies at the head, which will gradually become more
and more bourgeois and gradually substitute bourgeois for feudal methods of
exploitation. It may also proceed by having small peasant economies at the
head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the “excrescence” of the
feudal latifundia from the social organism and then freely develop without
them along the path of capitalist economy.

Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would
call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first
case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord
economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing
expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of
Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case
there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which
confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant
predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a
capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is
transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation
on the land of the feudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the
main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a
bourgeois farmer.

In the economic history of Russia both these types of evolution are
clearly in evidence. Take the epoch of the fall of serfdom. A struggle went
on between the landlords and the peasants over tile method of carrying out
the reform.

Both stood for conditions of bourgeois economic development (without being
aware of it), but the former wanted a development that would preserve to
the utmost the land lord economies, the landlord revenues, and the landlord
(bondage) methods of exploitation. The latter wanted a development that
would secure for the peasants the greatest degree of prosperity possible
with the existing level of agriculture, the abolition of the landlord
latifundia, the abolition of all serf and bondage methods of exploitation,
and the expansion of free peasant landownership. Needless to say, in the
second case the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive
forces would have been wider and more rapid than by peasant
reform, carried out in the landlords’ way. [1]

Only caricature Marxists, as the Narodniks, the opponents of Marxism, tried
to depict them, could have believed that the divorcement of the peasantry
from the land in 1861 guaranteed the development of capitalism. On the
contrary, it would have been a guarantee— and so in fact it turned
out to be—a guarantee of bondage , i.e., semi-serf tenant
farming and labour rent, i. e., corvée economy, which exceedingly
retarded the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive
forces in Russian agriculture. The conflict of interests between the peas
ants and the landlords was not a struggle waged by “people’s
production” or the “labour principle” against the bourgeoisie (as our Narodniks have imagined it to be)—it was a struggle for
the American type of bourgeois development as against the Prussian type of
bourgeois development.

And in those localities of Russia where no serfdom bad existed, where
agriculture was undertaken entirely, or chiefly, by free peasants (for
example, in the steppes of the Trans-Volga area, Novorossia, and the Northern
Caucasus, which were colonised after the Reform), the growth of the productive
forces and the development of capitalism proceeded far more rapidly than in the
central provinces which were burdened by survivals of serfdom. [2]

While Russia’s agricultural centre and agricultural borderlands
show us, as it were, the spatial or geographical distribution of the
localities in which one or the other type of agrarian evolution prevails,
the fundamental features of both types of evolution are also clearly
evident in all those localities where landlord and peasant farming
exist side by side. A cardinal mistake of the Narodnik economists was that
they believed that landlord farming was the only source of agrarian
capitalism, while they regarded peasant farming from the point of view of
“people’s production” and the “labour principle” (that is the view taken even now by the Trudoviks, the
“Popular Socialists”, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries). We
know that this is wrong. Landlord economy evolves in a capitalist way and
gradually replaces the labour rent system by “free wage-labour”, the three-field system by intensive cultivation, and
the obsolete peasant implements by the improved machinery employed on the
big private farms. Peasant farming also evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The
better the condition of the “village commune” and the greater
the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the
process of differentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic classes of capitalist agriculture. Consequently, we see two streams of
agrarian evolution everywhere. The conflict of interests between the
peasants and the landlords which runs like a scarlet thread through the
whole history of post-Reform Russia and constitutes the most important
economic basis of our revolution, is a struggle for one or the other type
of bourgeois agrarian evolution.

Only by clearly understanding the difference between these two types and the
bourgeois character of both , can we correctly explain the agrarian
question in the Russian revolution and grasp the class significance of the
various agrarian programmes put forward by the different parties. [3]

The pivot of the struggle, we repeat, is the feudal latifundia. The
capitalist evolution of these is beyond all dispute, but it is possible in
two forms:, either they will be abolished, eliminated in a revolutionary
manner by peasant farmers, or they will be gradually transformed into
Junker estates (and correspondingly,, the enthralled muzhik will be
transformed into an enthralled Knecht).

---
Notes:
[1]
In the magazine Nauchnoye Obozreniye (May-June 1900), I wrote
on this subject as follows: "... The more the land the peasants
received when they were emancipated, and the lower the price they paid for
it, the faster, wider, and freer would have been the development of
capitalism in Russia, the higher would have been the standard of living of
the population, the wider would have .been the home market, the faster
would have been the introduction of machinery into production; the more, in
a word, would the economic development of Russia have resembled that of
America. I shall confine myself to indicating two circumstances which, in
my opinion, confirm the correctness of the latter view:

(1) land-poverty and the burden of taxation have led to the development
over a very considerable area of Russia of the labour-service system of
private-landowner farming, i. e., a direct survival of serfdom, and not at all to the development of capitalism; (2) it is in our border regions, where serfdom was either entirely unknown,
or was feeblest, and where the peasants suffer least from land shortage,
labour-service, and the burden of taxation, that there has been the
greatest development of capitalism in agriculture.” (See, present edition,
Vol. 3, pp. 624-25.— Ed .) — Lenin

[2]
I have dealt in detail with the importance of the borderlands of Russia
as colonisation lands during the development of capitalism in The Development of Capitalism in Russia . (St. Petersburg, 1899, pp. 185,
444, et al.) Second edition issued, St. Petersburg, 1908. (See present
edition, Vol. 3, pp.. 257, 561, 590-95.— Ed. ) The question of the
importance of the borderlands in regard to the Social-Democratic agrarian
programme will be dealt with separately later on. — Lenin

[3]
The amount of confusion that reigns at times in the minds of Russian
Social-Democrats about the two paths of bourgeois agrarian evolution in
Russia is demonstrated by P Maslov. In Obrazovaniye (No. 3,1907),
he outlines two paths: (1) “capitalism in process of development” and (2)
“a useless struggle against economic development”. “The first path,”. if
you please, “leads the working class and the whole of society towards
socialism; the second path pushes [!] the working class into the arms [!]
of the bourgeoisie, into a struggle between big and small proprietors, into
a struggle from which the working class has nothing to gain but defeat”
(p. .92). In the first place, the “second path” is an empty phrase, a
dream and not a path; it is a false ideology, and not a real possibility of
development. Secondly, Maslov fails to see that Stolypin and the
bourgeoisie are also leading the peasantry along the capitalist road;
consequently, the real struggle is not about capitalism as such, but about
the type of capitalist development. Thirdly, it is sheer nonsense to talk
as if there can be a path in Russia which will not “push” the working
class under the domination of the bourgeoisie Fourthly, it is equally
nonsensical to allege that there can be a “path” on which there will be
no struggle between small and big proprietors. Fifthly, by the use of terms
descriptive of general European categories (big and small proprietors),
Maslov obscures the historical peculiarity of Russia which is of great
significance in the present revolution: the struggle between
petty-bourgeois and big feudal proprietors. — Lenin