The Narodniks attempted to base their argument on the concept of land poverty, of an inadequate allotment size. They attempted to prove this by comparing the position of the former state peasants with that of the former landlords peasants, the former having, on average, a larger allotment. But. This was nonsensical. The difference in average allotment size, between these two groups was relatively small, and the difference between peasant households within each group was far larger than the difference between the two groups themselves.
Krivenko is forced to acknowledge that the poor peasants become dispossessed and the richer peasants are able to buy or rent additional land, so what difference does allotment size make? After all, the peasants were not given their allotment for free, but had to buy them, usually going into debt to do so.
“It is high time to abandon this meaningless talk about land poverty, which explains nothing (because the peasants are not given allotments free but have to buy them); it only describes a process, and moreover describes it inaccurately, because one should not speak about the land alone, but about the means of production in general, and not say that the peasants have a “poor” supply of them, but that they are being freed from them, are being expropriated by growing capitalism.” (p 232)
Krivenko says that they do not think that agriculture can or should be separated from manufacturing industry, yet, as Lenin points out, his previous recognition of the extent of money economy and exchange, implies such a separation, and Krivenko continues,
“and that the separation of the labourer from the land and the instruments of production is being effected not by capitalism alone, but also by other factors that precede and promote it.” (p 232)
But, there was nothing artificial or exogenous about this separation. Division of labour itself goes back to the primitive commune, pre-dating trade. But, commodity production and exchange, which requires the prior existence of a social division of labour, (or else there is no basis for trade to occur) then encourages a further increase in the social division of labour. As soon as direct producers begin to produce commodities, so as to obtain money, exchange-value incarnate, there is a logical necessity to increasingly produce those commodities which will provide the greatest amount of exchange-value for the least expenditure of labour. In other words, each producer has an incentive to produce those commodities in which they have some comparative advantage, i.e. where the individual value of their output is lower than the market value.
It does not matter that a direct producer only produces potatoes as commodities in order to exchange them for the carrots, wine, linen and so on required for their own direct consumption, C-C, or, in a money economy C-M-C. The fact is that the direct producer will be encouraged to produce potatoes rather than carrots, parsnips or some other commodity, if and only if, they have some comparative advantage in doing so.
If the market values of the above commodities are such that the prices are £1 per kg of potatoes, carrots, and £1 per litre of wine, and £1 per metre of linen, then, if a direct producer can produce potatoes at an individual exchange-value of £0.80, they will increasingly focus their labour on producing potatoes, because, on this basis, for every 48 mins they spend producing potatoes, they will be able to get, in exchange, the equivalent of 1 hour of labour embodied in these other commodities. The only reason they would focus on producing, say, carrots, instead of potatoes, is if they had an even greater comparative advantage in producing carrots compared to potatoes, so that for example 45 mins spent on carrot production enabled them to obtain 60 mins of labour embodied in wine, cloth and so on. This means that, even if commodity production forms only a small part of the production of the direct producer, a dynamic is necessarily established whereby they will specialise in the production of commodities for which they have a comparative advantage. The more the market expands, and the economy becomes a money economy, the more will they engage in this commodity production as the most effective means of meeting their own immediate needs for consumption.
Commodity production and exchange necessarily leads to the development of money, and an expansion of the market and money economy. That, in turn, leads to an increasing social division of labour, and a dependence on the market to meet consumption requirements, which leads to a further development of the market and money economy. This expansion of the market and money economy means that some producers fail and others succeed. Those that fail lose their means of production and become wage labourers, now wholly dependent on the market. Those that succeed accumulate money, they buy up means of production from those that failed, and these means of production now confront their former owners as capital. Their former owners, now as wage labourers, can only use these means of production if they hand over to their new owners an amount of free labour, surplus value. The capitalist producer, now in search of further competitive advantage, extends the division of labour inside the workshop, dividing up the production of each commodity into a series of separate tasks, each performed by a different type of detail worker. Eventually, large-scale machine industry is introduced with the worker reduced to being a machine minder.
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