Capitalism And Agriculture

“In this book Lenin deals with a Narodnik writer who had criticised Kautskys book on the Agrarian question (written at a time when Kautsky was still a Marxist). Lenin makes clear a number of fundamental characteristics of the development of capitalism in agriculture—the proportion of constant to variable capital increases in agriculture as in inductry; there takes place a concentration of land-ownership in the hands of landlords and mortgage corporations; large-scale production supplants small-scale not merely by increase in the area of farms but also by increase of intensity of production on a small area: there is growth of wage labour and of the utilisation of machinery. He then shows further how the development of capitalist agriculture is hampered by various difficulties and contradictions particularly ground rent the growth of the urban at the expense of rural population and competition of cheap grain from newly developed areas overseas where the producers are not burdened by ground rent.” —Maurice Cornforth