80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
is bound to develop the petty-bourgeois capitalist way. (p 344) See also note under item number 73 of this bibliography.
81 Notebooks on the Agrarian Qjieslion, 1900-1916, XL,pp 1-542. This posthumous publication contains Lenin's preparatory notes for the analysis of the capitalist agriculture of western Europe, Russia and the USA and for his critique of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories on the agrarian question. Critics of Marx rejected the theory of ground-rent and the law of concentration of production in agriculture^ and denied the advantages of large-scale over small-scale production. They insisted that agriculture developed according to special laws., such as the law of diminishing returns. Lenin defended Marx against these critics. Under capitalism, the erosion of the middle peasantry yields a numerically small but economically powerful rich peasant section at one pole, and a mass of poor peasants at the other. Lenin exposed the so-called ^viability" of the small forms (due allegedly to the small farmer's industry, thrift and hardiness) by showing that small-scale production in agriculture was sustained by backbreaking toil, poor nutrition, destruction of livestock and waste of the soil's productive force. Lenin showed that capitalism in US agriculture tended to grow both through a faster development of large acreage farms in extensive areas and through the establishment of farms with much larger operations on smaller tracts ia the intensive areas. These trends were highlighted by classifying farms into three groups: (i) by their value-product, (ii) by their acreage, and (iii) by their principal source of income, that is, by the manner of specialization.
The summaiy table on pages 440-441 is particularly interesting. An index of sources gives a complete bibliography of Lenin's primary and secondary source material.
[An earlier version of this bibliography was presented at a seminar on the Political Economy of Indian Agriculture held in Calcutta in 1973.]
AMALENDU GUHA
1 For example, V I Lenin, Selected! Works, vol XII : Theory of Agrarian Question, Lawrence and Wishart, London U39, pp 1-335. For a critical review of the ideas of Marx and Lenin on the peasant question, one generally comes across David Mitrany, M.aix against the Peasant : A Study in Social Dogmatism, Weidenfeld andNicolson, London 1951. Although academic in approach, the author is obviously biased in his criticism.
2 Local self-government body dominatad by the nobility, introduced in the central
gubernias in 1864. y Pseudonym for Rosa Luxemburg.
4 Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question, A Review oj ths Tendencies in Modern Agriculture and Agranan Policy, etc.
5 Also consult "The Narodniki and Marx on Russian Capitalism in the 1870S-1880S" in Kyoto University Economic Review, October 1969, vol 39, no 2, pp 1-25.
6 The lands which were cut off from the peasants' allotments in favour of the landlords in 1861. Subsequently, these were leased out by the landlords to the peasants on stringent terms.