The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 299)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 299)

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283
are very instructive for our purposes, even though he was speaking of the rural
proletariat and not merely those who hire out for wages at times.
This covers the propertyless peasants, including the completely
landless ones; but the most typical representative of the Russian
rural proletariat is the allotment-holding farmworker, day labourer
[sic], unskilled labourer, building or other worker. Insignificant
scale of farming on a patch of land, with the farm in a state of utter
ruin (particularly evidenced by the leasing of land), inability to exist
without selling labour-power (= “industries” of the indigent
peasants), an extremely low standard of living (probably lower even
than that of the worker without an allotment)—such are the
distinguishing features of this type.
Lenin continued:
It should be added that our literature frequently contains too
stereotyped an understanding of the theoretical proposition that
capitalism requires the free, landless worker. This proposition is
quite correct as indicating the main trend, but capitalism penetrates
into agriculture particularly slowly and in extremely varied forms.**
So, in our case, although it is true that the majority of peasants owned the
land they cultivated, and only 30 percent were landless, it is equally true that the
size and nature of the holding for most peasants did not provide for sufficient
subsistence; thus, a majority of peasants were forced to seek other sources of
income including wage labor to the extent it was available. Before the substantial
increase in the demand for wage labor associated with the war conditions, the
majority of peasants suffered from a process of pauperization in which they were
forced to reduce their consumption levels. Having primarily stayed in their villages
where even the landless had houses gives the wrong impression about the changes
“V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1956), 178-9.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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