Struve begins with the unfounded Malthusian proposition that overpopulation arises because population grows disproportionately to the means of subsistence. On that basis, he concludes that agricultural production is inadequate, and so a rise in productivity is beneficial to “the peasantry” even though he has previously said that “the peasantry” does not exist, because it consists of assorted strata.
If Struve had adopted the method of Marxism, Lenin says, he would have approached the matter differently. He should have started with the actual production relations, in Russia, and not with abstractions. He would then have seen that the oppression of the producer, of the individual peasant, was not a result of chance or whim, or of politics (for example in relation to the size of allotment), but was the result of the domination of capital, “which necessarily comes into being on the basis of commodity economy—he should then have shown how this capital destroys small production and what forms class contradictions assume in the process.” (p 479)
The domination of the individual peasant producer by capital first takes the form of that exploitation by merchant's and usurer's capital. As the peasant must increasingly produce commodities, to obtain money, to pay redemption fees, taxes and so on, the more they are dependent on merchants to sell their products in more distant markets, and they are exploited by usurers who charge large amounts of interest on the money borrowed to cover redemption payments etc. But, as part of this process, as markets also expand, the more the merchants and usurers take over the means of production of the ruined producers, and turn the producers into wage labourers. A portion of the merchant's and usurer's capital, thereby, becomes productive-capital.
This productive-capital takes over agriculture as it finds it, as extensive agriculture. That itself means it assumes particular forms appropriate to this more primitive form of agriculture. But, as markets develop, and production increases, capital steadily transforms agriculture into a more rational and efficient form of production. It becomes more intensive. More small producers are ruined, the average farm size increases, and that facilitates the introduction of machines and more scientific methods that raise productivity and transform production into intensive agriculture, with its own specific forms.
“It would then have been sufficient simply to contrast these two successive forms of bourgeois production and bourgeois exploitation, in order that the “progressive” character of the change, its “advantage” to the producer should be quite evident: in the first case the subordination of labour to capital is covered up by thousands of the remnants of medieval relations, which prevent the producer from seeing the essence of the matter and arouse in his ideologist’s mind absurd and reactionary ideas about the possibility of expecting aid from “society,” etc.; in the second case this subordination is quite free of medieval fetters, and the producer is enabled to engage in and understands the necessity for independent, conscious activity against his “antipode.” Instead of arguments about a “difficult and painful transition” to capitalism we would have had a theory that not only spoke of class contradictions but also really disclosed them in each form of “irrational” and “rational” production, and of “extensive” and “intensive” farming.” (p 479)
Lenin concludes that Struve's Malthusian claim that overpopulation in Russia was due to inadequate production of means of subsistence was not supported by the facts, and was based on an erroneous methodology. The Russian overpopulation was a result of the domination of capital. Struve's claim that overpopulation is a consequence of natural-economic relations is only true, in Russia, insofar as such feudal relations continued to exist, and so added to and complicated the capitalist overpopulation. Such feudal remnants act to hold back the development of capitalist relations, and this makes things doubly hard for the producer. They suffer the evils of feudal production as well as the evils of capitalist production, but, by slowing down capitalist development, they limit the benefits the producer obtains from capitalist production, which offset the evils it inflicts upon them. They suffer both from capitalism and from not enough capitalism. At the same time, Danielson did not prove the capitalist nature of overpopulation in Russia, because he did not analyse the domination of capital in Russian agriculture, where most of the overpopulation was created. Both Danielson and Struve failed to analyse the differentiation of the peasantry into a rural bourgeoisie and proletariat, as a result of capital dominating agriculture.
“This ignoring of class contradictions by Mr. Struve naturally led to the fact that the quite correct thesis of the progressiveness and desirability of technical improvements was expressed in an extremely vague and unsatisfactory form.” (p 480)
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