The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx”

In The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx” Lenin criticized Bulgakov and other works that distort the Marxist understanding of the land question. It was written between June-September 1901 and autumn 1907. It contains 12 polemical articles.

Chapters 1 to 4 were published in the combined issues 2-3 of Zarya in December 1901; 5 to 9 chapters were published in the second issue of Obrazovaniye in February 1906; chapters 10 to 11 were included in the first Vol. of Lenin’s collection The Land Question which is published in St. Petersburg in 1908; the 12th chapter is included in the New Life newspaper published in St. Petersburg in 1908.

The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 5 of the second edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Lenin analyzed the theories of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theorists such as Bulgakov, Hertz, and Eduard David on the land question. He thought that the “law of the diminishing of land fertility” was not tenable and could not be applied to all situations where technology was advancing and production mode was changing, but only to the situation where technology was not changing relatively and conditionally.

Bulgakov and others attributed the increasing poverty of workers to the diminishing of “gifts” in nature. They avoided the essence of the land question and concealed the bad luck of workers brought by private land private ownership and capitalist relations of production. Lenin saw Bulgakov and others as bourgeois apologists. He pointed out that it was not more difficult to produce food, but more difficult for workers to obtain it. This was because the capitalist development raised the land rent and land price, concentrated agriculture in the hands of capitalists of all sizes, and made machines, tools and currencies more concentrated.

Bulgakov also argued that to get sufficient food, it is necessary to constantly increase the amount of labor relatively and regularly, which means to increase the agricultural population. This idea was under the premise that each country only relies on its own natural resources. Lenin criticized Bulgakov’s fallacy by citing Western Europe, the United States, Russia, and other examples to prove that while agriculture has made unquestionable progress, the number of agricultural workers was decreasing in absolute terms.

When Lenin refuted Bulgakov’s view that “the limitation of land productivity is a condition of the appearance of ground-rent”, he pointed out that the formulation of “the productivity of the land is limited” is a mistaken idea, and the correct formulation should be “land is limited”. In capitalist societies, the limited availability of the land results in the monopoly of land management, which inevitably leads to agricultural excess profits from different productive forces formed by different investments, thus forming differential land rent. However, at the same time, the agricultural capitalists in the capitalist society not only manage their own private land but also manage the land rented from the landholders. The landholders demand land rents, that is, absolute land rents, from the agricultural capitalists under the monopoly of the land ownership. Obviously, in the theory of land rent, the mistake of “Marx’s critics” such as Bulgakov, was the confusion of the monopoly of land management with the monopoly of private ownership of lands. In Lenin’s opinion, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish those two kinds of monopolies. Apart from the differential rent arising from the monopoly of land management, it is also necessary to recognize the absolute rent arising from the private ownership of land.

Lenin criticized the ideas of Bulgakov, Hertz, Eduard David, and others on the stability of small-scale peasant economy and the non-capitalization of agriculture. Using statistical materials from Germany and Denmark, Lenin demonstrated and developed Marx’s theory on the law of capitalist development in agriculture. He pointed out formation of the rural proletariat in some capitalist countries in the west did not stop the process of polarization of peasants. It is mainly expressed in the continued expansion of rural to urban migration of agricultural workers and peasants, but the process of development has different paces depending on different characteristics in agriculture.

Bulgakov and others used the tactic of exaggerating the characteristics of agriculture to wipe out the nature of capitalist use of machinery and its relationship with capitalist development. Lenin pointed out that it is an indisputable fact that large farms in western capitalist countries adopt modern technologies such as machines and electricity to eliminate or annex small peasants. The widespread use of machinery in agriculture is a feature of mass production and one of the signs of its superiority over small production. These prove that the law of capitalist economy revealed by Marx is also applicable to capitalist agriculture. The development process of capitalism also occurs in agriculture with all the contradictions inherent in capitalism. The small-scale peasant economy has no future under the capitalist system. The historical progress of the great boost given to agriculture by the capitalist mode of mass production cannot be denied.

Lenin made a special analysis of the agricultural development of Denmark, which was seen as the “ideal country” in the eyes of “critics”. He pointed out that Denmark’s small-scale peasant economy was relatively developed and prosperous, but the basis of the agriculture is large and medium-sized capitalist agriculture and most of the land was concentrated in the hands of a few people. The position of small-scale peasant economy in the agricultural economy was not dominant, and its development trend was to decline and impoverish. Lenin pointed out that the fundamental solution for capitalist agriculture is for the peasants to carry out the revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system under the leadership of the proletariat and get rid of the situation of being enslaved and living in poverty. He concluded that, in the coming revolution, the working peasants can become the reliable allies of the proletariat. In this work, Lenin expounded and developed the Marxist theory of two kinds of land monopoly in agriculture, which are the theory of land rent and the theory of capitalist development law in agriculture. This work laid the foundation for the formulation of the land program of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and the theory of the alliance of workers and peasants.