Lenin quotes Struve's comments about certain “peculiarities”, relating to agriculture that Marx was supposed to have acknowledged, in this relation, but whose significance he disputed. However, Struve does not set out exactly what these peculiarities might be. Perhaps he is referring to Marx's comments about the fact that subsistence peasant farmers can cultivate land that capitalist farmers would not. If so, this is hardly an indication of the lack of superiority of the large-scale agricultural production.
Lenin then gives a long quote from Struve, which, he says, makes clear what he meant by these comments. Struve sets out that the development of exchange economy leads to a growth of industrial production, and of the urban areas. The industrial population grows in relation to the rural population. The demand for agricultural commodities rises, and this can only be met by a more rational, capitalist organisation of agriculture. But, this shows the inadequacy of Struve's objectivist method, Lenin says. Struve had correctly set out what was wrong with the Narodnik argument, but it was incomplete, because he did not describe what new classes were created as part of this process, and the new class antagonisms that arises upon it. He fails to set out that, in agriculture, as in industry, the same two classes – bourgeois and proletariat – are created. The Narodniks, in agriculture, as in industry, refer to capitalist production only in terms of the expropriation of the small farms by the big ones, but Struve was quite right to point out that the domination of the economy by commodity production and exchange means that the nature of the production, in the small farms as much as the large, is capitalist production, just as the reality of the “people's industry” was that it was capitalist production.
“The condition and interests of the independent proprietor isolate him from the mass of the producers, who live mainly on wages. While the latter raise the issue of a “fair reward,” which is necessarily the gateway to the fundamental issue of a different system of social economy, the former have a far more lively interest in quite different things, namely, credits, and particularly small “people’s” credits, improved and cheaper implements, “organisation of marketing,” “extension of land tenure,” etc.” (p 430)
Something similar could be said, today, of the petty-bourgeois, in Britain, represented by “White Van Man”, or, in France, by the Gilets Jaunes, who some wish to portray as part of the industrial working-class, but who, actually, comprise this reactionary social strata.
The argument put by Vorontsov that the decline of the nobles' farms and renting of land by peasants, after the Reform, just shows they do not understand what was happening, Lenin says. Under feudal agriculture, the peasants undertook cultivation. They produced their own necessary product, as well as the surplus product of the landlord. The reform broke apart these relations, but what it meant was that instead of peasants providing the landlord with a surplus product, they were employed as wage labourers, and now provided their employer with surplus value. But, also this went along with the expansion of the market, and of commodity production, so that, even for those peasants who did not become wage labourers, their production was now commodity production, geared to the market. So, as those peasant producers competed for market share, some prospered and became capitalist producers, whilst others failed and themselves became proletarians. It was on this basis that some peasants rented additional land, whilst others had to rent it out to them.
“Now it is to this aspect of the matter, to the bourgeois organisation of the new, “rational” agriculture that attention should have been directed. The Narodniks should have been shown that by ignoring the process mentioned they change from ideologists of the peasantry into ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie. “The improvement of people’s production,” for which they thirst, can only mean, under such an organisation of peasant economy, the “improvement” of the petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those who point to the producer who lives under the most highly developed capitalist relations, correctly express the interests not only of this producer, but also of the vast mass of the “proletarian” peasantry.” (p 431)
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