p Lenin, who saw the inevitability of revolution in Russia, attached primary importance to the defence of the agrarian theory of Marx and Engcls from the revisionists and all its other “critics”. In a number of his polemical works he routed those "idle men of letters" and people representing official “science”, who tried to distort and then refute Marxism by juggling with facts or even without bothering to employ facts, by sheer speculation and tendentious supposition.

p In his polemics with the adversaries of Marxism—Bulgakov, David, Hertz, Chernov and others—Lenin demonstrated his extremely good theoretical training, his excellent knowledge of the works of Marx and Engels and other Marxist writers, and his skill in applying Marxist conclusions to an analysis of both old and new phenomena in economic life. Lenin did not display blind loyalty to the letter of Marxist doctrine, but showed deep comprehension of its inner dialectics and this is indispensable for independent and creative revolutionary work.

p By defending the purity of Marxism on the agrarian question and holding high the ideological banner of the proletariat, Lenin steadily and convincingly proved the most important points—that the poor sections of the peasantry and the urban proletariat are not social and class oppositcs but natural allies in the struggle against feudal and capitalist ownership and exploitation and that neither the bourgeois-democratic nor the peasant, nor the socialist, proletarian revolution can count on success in the absence of a stable alliance between these two decisive classes of modern society.

p Professor Bulgakov of Kiev took as the starting-point of his theory of agricultural development the “universal” law of diminishing returns from the soil, according to which every fresh investment of labour and capital in the land allegedly yields a constantly diminishing return in terms of produce. The scientific and practical inconsistency of this notorious law, which is one of the favourite dogmas of bourgeois political economy, had been demonstrated by Marx and Engels.

p Engels, at the beginning of his political activities, noted in his "Critical Essays on Political Economy" that bourgeois economists, when calculating costs of production, invariably ignored what he called "the spirit of ingenuity”, the spiritual element of inventiveness. Though science raised production to unprecedented 280 heights, nevertheless it was not taken into account, since it cost capital itself nothing. Engels prophetically predicted that under a rational system of social life "the spiritual element" would be considered an element of production.  [280•1  "Soil fertility can be increased by applying capital, labour and science."  [280•2 

p Some critical remarks concerning "the law of diminishing returns from the soil" were made by Marx in Capital.  [280•3  A theoretical basis for the criticism of this “law” is provided by Marx’s theory of ground rent, in particular by his comprehensive critical analysis (to be found in Volume III of Capital and in Theories of Surplus-Value) of Ricardo’s erroneous idea that differential rent is derived only when there is a successive transition from better land to worse. Marx recognised only the relative unproductivity of farming on a bourgeois basis as compared to industrial productivity. But neither Marx nor Engels went deeply and specifically into the details of "the law of diminishing returns”, and this makes Lenin’s detailed criticism of it all the more valuable.

p In accordance with Marx’s and Engels’s theory, Lenin insisted that such a “universal” law was impossible, i.e., a law which ostensibly operates under all and any socio-economic conditions. It is true that one can observe a relative law at work, but that in extreme cases when further investments of labour and capital do indeed fail to result in a corresponding increase in production. But this can happen only when there is an unchanging level of technology in agriculture. Technical progress excludes stagnation in the growth of the productive forces of agriculture. Technical standards are therefore the main thing to be considered in this question. “Thus”, Lenin wrote, "the ’law of diminishing returns’ does not at all apply to cases in which technology is progressing and methods of production are changing; it has only an extremely relative and restricted application to conditions in which technology remains unchanged."  [280•4  Lenin also indicated that the entire history of the i9th century proved that the action of "the law of diminishing returns from the soil" had been paralysed by the constant progress of technology.

p The adherents of the law spoke of a "golden age" of farming in times immemorial when the tiller of the soil had alleged freedom in his choice of a place to settle and hence of the land on 281 which he produced his daily bread. Bourgeois economists, and the revisionists dancing to their tune, needed such a legend of a "golden age" in order to deprive the peasants of all hope of a better lot and to shift the blame for social injustice onto mother nature—of whom one could expect no more than what she already gave to mankind. Lenin noted that under capitalism the difficulty of getting food existed only for hired hands. The increasing hardship of the workers obviously did not mean that nature had cut back on her gifts to humanity. To think so was to adopt the position of an apologist for the bourgeoisie.

p Bulgakov made an attempt to resurrect the doctrine of Malthus in order to whitewash the capitalist system of distribution. Camouflaging his servility to capital with the air of scientific impartiality and theoretical depth, he fished for imagined contradictions in Marx’s teaching and tried to infer the "law of diminishing returns" directly from Marx’s theory of ground rent. He claimed that Marx’s objections to the “law” were purely formal, because the law rested on Ricardo’s theory of ground rent, which, according to Bulgakov, Marx fully accepted.

p Lenin defended Marx against Bulgakov’s slanderous attacks in a masterly fashion, by bringing out the qualitative difference between Marx’s theory of ground rent and Ricardo’s, and the scientific superiority of the former. Ricardo did not take account of the advance of agricultural techniques and linked the possibility of deriving differential rent solely with the need to cultivate at the same time the worst as well as the better plots of land. Marx proved that differential rent is also derived from the investment of unequal amounts of labour and capital in equally good plots of land, and from the differences in the conditions of delivery of produce from particular plots to the market. Again, Ricardo denied the existence of absolute rent, while Marx proved both its existence and the fact that it is engendered by private ownership of land, and by the great difference between the scientific and technical levels of agriculture and industry.

p Bulgakov saw in the limited productive capacities of the soil and in mankind’s unlimited need for the products of agriculture the condition giving rise to ground rent. Lenin, opposing this idea, developed the analysis of Marx, whose vastly important finding was that the main condition and source of ground rent was a double monopoly—the monopoly of private ownership of the land and through this the monopoly of the land as an object of economic activity, which boils down to the fact that, because 282 the total area of land that can be cultivated is limited, the price of farm produce is determined by the cost of production on the worst land under cultivation at any time, and not by that on average land.

p The monopoly of private landowncrship means that a farmer is obliged to make a payment to the owner of land for using it. This payment is absolute ground rent. A monopoly of private landownership is not, however, essential for the capitalist organisation of agriculture; indeed, it holds back the advance of the productive forces of agriculture along capitalist lines, because absolute ground rent diverts a certain part of the farmer’s revenue—which, but for the monopoly, might be invested in the land to improve its fertility.

p As far as differential rent is concerned it is conditioned by the monopoly of capitalist farming on the land and is wholly independent of the system of private landownership.

p Lenin supplied the following note to the 1908 edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia: "In the second part of Volume II of Theories of Surplus-Value . . . published in 1905, Marx gives an explanation of absolute rent which confirms the correctness of my interpretation (particularly in regard to the two forms of monopoly). . . . Marx definitely draws a distinction here between the limitcdness of land and the fact that land is private property."  [282•1  So Lenin, without at the time being acquainted with the work of Marx in which he made his most clear-cut statement on the two types of monopoly existing in agriculture, arrived at the same conclusions as Marx.

p Bulgakov, Hertz and other “theorists” on the agrarian question dismissed as "pure fantasy" the idea of abolishing the antithesis between town and country. The countryside was presented by them as a realm of perpetual darkness and irremovable backwardness. Of course, Lenin replied to this, agriculture has its own specific features distinguishing it from industry which no social conditions and no level of science and technology can remove. Even with the conversion of farming into large-scale machine industry, it will still always retain its own peculiarities compared to factory industry. But this by no means rules out the possibility of mechanising agricultural processes on a broad scale and, hence, of bringing about a radical change in the character of the labour involved both in the cultivation of the land and in animal husbandry, so that it becomes a variety of industrial labour 283 employing up-to-date scientific and technical means. Fields become grain and vegetable factories, and farm structures become factories for the production of dairy and meat products.

p Progress in the technology of agricultural production inevitably involves changes in the entire appearance of the countryside, and must eventually result in the equalising of urban and rural ways and standards of life. Only unfavourable social factors may sustain the existing antithesis between town and country. In this connection Lenin wrote: "...there arc absolutely no technical obstacles to the enjoyment of the treasures of science and art, which for centuries have been concentrated in a few centres, by the whole of the population spread more or less evenly over the entire country."  [283•1  The ideal of the working-class party is to make the treasures of science and art the property of the whole of society, and the abolishing of the antithesis between town and country is indispensable to realising this ideal.

p Striving to refute Marxism, revisionists manipulated facts in every possible way, and when the facts proved too intransigent, simply postulated whatever suited their fancy. One of the methods of bourgeois and revisionist political economy was to overlook the most significant phenomena of economic life, while making constant references to exclusively “average” figures for production, sales, etc., which could not reflect the position of the majority of small peasant farmers, for whom the relevant figures were well below the average.

p In the new epoch of revolutionary explosions that came in the early 20th century, Russian revisionists (and their colleagues in other countries, especially in Germany) tried very hard to prove that modern economic progress made the creation of a mass social base for the revolution impossible, that socialists would never find a common language with the small peasants who comprised the mass of the rural population in their respective countries (and of the total population in Russia).

p Lenin devoted a considerable part of his work The Agrarian Question and the "Critics of Marx”, the part written after the 1905 revolution, to a fundamental analysis of a book by the German Social-Democrat Eduard David entitled Socialism and Agriculture. This book of David’s, who theorised after the manner of the Russian Narodniks, was regarded by Lenin as the chief revisionist work on the agrarian question.

p By means of the false argumentation and speculation typical 284 of all revisionist literature (Bulgakov, Chernov, Hertz and others), David tried to substantiate his beliefs concerning the tenacity of small peasant farming and its superiority over large-scale production. Hence, his biggest piece of political advice was to refrain from encouraging small peasants oppressed by landlords and capital to change their social position in a revolutionary way and to cease regarding the peasantry as the proletariat’s natural ally. Instead, socialists should put forward a programme which emphasised the “progressive” economic trends in small-scale production and which promoted the healthy “viability” and other advantages of small farming. In other words, the proposal was to avoid interfering in the natural course of events, waiting patiently for the moment when small producers at last revealed all their true “possibilities” and thereby showed a most reasonable evolutionary approach to the solution of socio-economic problems. This meant allowing big capitalist sharks to eat up small farmers to the accompaniment of soft lullabys about social and economic spontaneity working in favour of small farming. In short, small peasant farmers were not to be considered a revolutionary force.

p The spreading of such illusions and estimates of the potential of the peasantry represented a direct threat to the revolutionary movement. A truly revolutionary party, fighting for the interests of the people, could not help reacting to such pleas on behalf of small-scale production, which were, in fact, pleas on behalf of, and direct support for, the bourgeois order.

p By making a thorough study of the real trends of the development of farming, in particular those in Scandinavia, which was presented by the revisionists as a great paradise for small-holders, Lenin confirmed the truth of Marxist agrarian theory. He drew a graphic picture of the "eternal grind" and useless waste of labour to which the small farmer is daily and universally subjected by capitalism.

p Bourgeois theorists who maintained that the small-holding system was the most profitable form of organisation for society, hushed up the fact that small farmers more often than not only made both ends meet by overworking, by making cruel and severe restrictions in their consumption, by undernourishment, not to say semi-starvation, and so on. Lenin cited much irrefutable evidence to show that the conditions of land cultivation and animal husbandry, and the conditions of life of the farmer himself on a small farm arc immeasurably worse than those on a large farm. With this evidence he exposed the false plea of 285 the bourgeois political economists and the Bcrnsteinians that the small farmer’s diligence was creating the basis for a more rational and productive agriculture than large-scale farming. “ Actually,” he wrote, "we see progress in the largest-scale agriculture, stability in the sizes of farms in all groups except the very smallest, and the splitting-up of the farms in this last group. This splitting-up must be ascribed to the decline and impoverishment of small-scale farming. . . ."  [285•1 

p Unlike the bourgeois reformists, Lenin made clear-cut distinctions between the various socio-economic types of holdings, and on the basis of available, though limited statistics, gave the levels of production and the living standards not of the peasants as a whole, as a single social estate, but of the different types of farmer. He investigated the position of prospering capitalist farmers as well as that of needy, poor farmers on the verge of ruin. While reformist writers glossed over the social contradictions in the countryside, and conveyed an idyllic picture of rustic class peace and virtually universal prosperity, Lenin, by scientific analysis, arrived at a clear understanding of the sharpness of the real contradictions between the landlords and the kulaks, on the one hand, and the mass of small farmers on the other, crushed by unending poverty and want and having no wish to continue living under such conditions of exploitation.

p The opponents of Marxism on the agrarian question (David, Pudor and others) turned to the experience of Denmark, which was said to be "an ideal country" where small farming had best adapted itself to the requirements of the market, guaranteeing its steady prosperity, and where one could observe a constant decentralisation of production. Lenin examined official Danish agricultural statistics, including the 1898 cattle census, grouping Danish farms according to their land area, and other official data over a number of decades, and came to the following conclusion: "The ’ideal country’ from the standpoint of the opponents of Marxism on the agrarian question very clearly reveals (despite the socio-economic statistics being still at a low level and lacking analysis) the capitalist agrarian system, the sharply expressed capitalist contradictions in agriculture and livestock farming, the growing concentration of agricultural production, the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale production, and the proletarianisation and impoverishment of the overwhelming majority of the rural population."  [285•2 

By proving the existence of sharp social contradictions in the countryside, and the state of ruin of most peasants, which objectively pushed the great majority of the rural population into alliance with the city proletariat, Lenin brilliantly defended Marxist agrarian theory.