p But the principal and only basis of our public economy is agriculture, Mr. V. V. and Co. generally say. The development of capitalist economy in this field, the application to the land of "private business capital" is hindered by the village commune, which has always been an impregnable buttress against capitalism. In our country large-scale agriculture, far from ousting small farming, is increasingly giving way to it. Big landowners and leaseholders are speculating only on a rise in land rent and are leaving agriculture to the peasant. But peasant economy, is bound to bring victory for the peasant, not capitalist, forms of economy.

p Although throughout the whole of this argument error is closely interwoven with truth, the truth it contains is by no means convincing. Agriculture is nearly everywhere the most backward branch of national production, a branch which capitalism began to take over only after establishing itself firmly in industry proper: "Modern industry alone, and finally, supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic agriculture.” That is why it is not logical to conclude that bourgeois relations of production are inexistent or even absolutely impossible in a country on the grounds that they have not yet spread to agriculture. Mr. Tikhomirov thinks, for example, that during the Great Revolution the French bourgeoisie was so strong that it was able to prevent the establishment of selfgovernment by the people.  [243•*  And yet right up to the Revolution, the application of "Private business capital" to the land was prevented by numerous survivals of feudal relations, agriculture was in an alarming state of decay, landowners preierred to live in towns and to rent out their lands either to sharecroppers or to bourgeois leaseholders; the latter, like our modern “Razuvayevs”iS3 gave not the slightest 244 thought to the correct cultivation of the land but in their turn rented out to the peasants the land they had leased and were concerned only with the most profitable conditions for doing so.  [244•*  Did that prevent the bourgeois from being victorious or capitalism from being triumphant in France? If not, why should it have not only a strong, but, as the Narodniks think, a decisive influence on all production relations in our country? It may be argued there were no longer any communes in France at that time. Very well. But in France, as in the whole of "Western Europe”, there was the feudal regime and there were at one time guilds which greatly hindered the development of capitalism and "cramped production instead of facilitating it”. These “fetters”, however, did not stop the course of social and economic development. The time came when "they had to be broken up and they were broken up”. What insures the Russian village commune against the same fate?

p Mr. Nikolai—on, who has a more thorough knowledge of our economy after the Reform than all the Russian revolutionary and conservative exceptionalists put together, will not hesitate to acknowledge that the very "Act ’ (on peasants freed from feudal dependence) was in our country the "swan song of the old production process" and that the legislative activity that followed it, and which was aimed in the very opposite direction , "had by its results more substantial influence on the entire economic life of the people" than the peasant reform. In this author’s opinion, "the application of capital to the land, the fulfilment of its historic mission, is hindered in our country by the ’Act’, which allotted the instruments of labour to the producers. But capitalist economy is promoted by the whole of the state’s post-Reform economic activity.... The capitalist tendency, however, is apparently prevailing. All data point to an increase in the number of producers expropriated: the decrease in the producer’s share of the product and the increase in the capitalist’s going on before our eyes compel an increasing number of the former to abandon the land, not to ’dress’ it. Thus a very curious thing is going on in the village commune itself: the mir is beginning to allot the poorest land to unenterprising peasants (they won’t cultivate it anyhow) and the periods between the redistributions of the land belonging to the enterprising householders are continuing to be extended, so that we are in presence of the transformation of communal exploitation 245 to individual".  [245•*  Mr. Tikhomirov -completely ignores the conclusions of Mr. Nikolai—on’s remarkable study and expressly maintains that in our country "the peasants still own 120,628,246 dessiatines of land".  [245•**  He forgets that the substance of the question is not the legal standards but the economic facts.  These facts show that in very many places the village commune has been so distorted by unfavourable influences that from a means of protecting the producers against capitalist exploitation it is already becoming a powerful instrument of the latter. So as not to speak without proof, let us once more take the people "as they are" and examine the contemporary Russian situation from that point of view.

But first of all a few general remarks on the history of primitive agrarian communism.