The Narodniks, like today's petty-bourgeois socialists, and environmentalists, claimed that capitalism ruins agriculture. But, the opposite is true. The previous forms of agriculture were irrational and inefficient. They were unscientific and frequently led to desertification, over-cultivation and over-grazing, soil erosion and other forms of destruction. It was its irrational, inefficient nature that leads to this, as it tried to accommodate the needs of a growing population, in conditions when it was not equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of nature, and its effects on harvests.
The same is seen today where such agriculture persists in regions subject to droughts or to floods. As Marx describes, capitalism arises first in the towns, because its there that a market for a range of manufactured commodities first develops on a sufficient scale to make capitalist production possible. The situation for pre-capitalist agriculture, then, became worse when capitalism, in the towns, meant that a growing demand on agricultural production arose, in the form of a need for more food and raw materials, as both population and living standards rose. The fact that landlords increasingly required money to buy this increased range of manufactured commodities, meant that they moved from Labour Rent, and Rent in Kind, to Money Rent, which meant that peasants had to sell commodities to obtain money.
Eventually, as this pre-capitalist agriculture and primary production can no longer meet the requirements of capitalism in the towns, and when the inability of peasant producers to compete with capitalist production of manufactured goods, in the towns, which the peasants had relied on for a secondary income, capital invades the countryside itself, and begins to convert agriculture and primary production to capitalism. The peasants are ruined, as had been the handicraft workers in the towns before them. They are increasingly proletarianised, in the way that Lenin sets out in "On The So Called market Question".
“It is in the nature of capitalist production that it develops industry more rapidly than agriculture. This is not due to the nature of the land, but to the fact that, in order to be exploited really in accordance with its nature, land requires different social relations. Capitalist production turns towards the land only after its influence has exhausted it and after it has devastated its natural qualities. An additional factor is that, as a consequence of landownership, agricultural products are expensive compared with other commodities, because they are sold at their value and are not reduced to their cost-price. They form, however, the principal constituent of the necessaries.”
What the Narodniks confused was the oppression and destruction of the peasant producer that capitalism brings, with the destruction of agriculture itself. On the contrary, its by destroying the former that capitalism rescues the latter. Capitalism abolishes the irrationality of the former peasant agriculture; it recognises the need to curate the land as a long-term asset, as a source of profit; it puts agriculture on a rational, scientific basis so that the effects of nature upon it can be controlled, for example, by the provision of drainage and irrigation, selection of crops, provision of storage and transport and so on.
“the Marxists say that capitalism, both in manufacturing industry and in agriculture, oppresses the producer, but by raising production to a higher level creates the conditions and the forces for “socialisation.”” (p 488)
Lenin quotes Marx from Capital III,
“The rationalising of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale, and the reduction ad absurdum of property in land, on the other, are the great achievements of the capitalist mode of production. Like all of its other historical advances, it also attained these by first completely impoverishing the direct producers” (Note **, p 488)
Struve accuses Danielson of transferring the categories of capitalism to the peasant agriculture, an economy he claims continued to be more natural than money economy. But, in fact, Danielson's error was that he failed to apply any capitalist categories to the peasant economy, an economy that was already dominated by the market and by capital. It was because Danielson failed to apply capitalist categories to this peasant economy that he arrived at his absurd conclusions of the contraction of the domestic market. It was the fact of the increasing role of capital in agriculture and the expropriation of small producers that led to an expansion of the market, as they now had to meet their requirements from the market rather than from their own production.
“... he argued in purely Narodnik fashion, ignoring the opposite elements within the “village community,” and arguing about the “peasantry” in general. It was this that led to his thesis on the capitalist character of over-population, on capitalism as the cause of the expropriation of the agriculturist, remaining unproven and merely serving to build a reactionary utopia.” (p 489)
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