Book: The Development of Capitalism in Russia

Overview
Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia analyzes how post-Emancipation Russia had already embarked on a capitalist path, overturning the Populist (Narodnik) claim that the village commune could bypass capitalism. He argues that both agriculture and industry exhibit the essential features of capitalist development: market integration, class differentiation, concentration of production, and the widespread use of wage labor. The book’s central thesis is that Russia’s “peculiarities” are less decisive than the general laws of capitalist evolution operating through national conditions.

Sources and Method
The study is deeply empirical. Lenin mines zemstvo surveys, factory inspectorate reports, agricultural censuses, and price and wage data to show structural shifts rather than isolated anecdotes. He distinguishes statistical categories carefully, household budgets, land use, hiring practices, and output levels, to reveal class divisions masked by legal forms like the commune. Quantification and comparison across regions serve to establish tendencies rather than exceptional cases.

Agrarian Transformation
After the 1861 emancipation, monetary relations penetrated the countryside. Payments, taxes, and rents tethered peasant households to markets. Commodity farming expanded, railways linked regions, and grain exports disciplined local prices. Lenin traces how money-rent replaces labor-rent, how lease markets spread, and how credit binds smallholders to merchant capital. The obshchina (communal landholding) persists formally, but its egalitarian veneer conceals growing inequality in land, tools, and draft animals. The commune becomes an administrative shell through which capitalist relations advance.

Differentiation of the Peasantry
Lenin’s most famous finding is the stratification of the peasantry into distinct classes. A rural bourgeoisie consolidates land via leasing, accumulates implements and livestock, and hires wage labor. A broad middle layer oscillates between self-exploitation and petty hiring, vulnerable to prices and credit. The rural poor lose land or tools, rent out allotments, and sell labor seasonally, forming a rural proletariat. Otkhodniki, seasonal migrant workers, illustrate the flow of labor from village to town, feeding industrial labor markets. This differentiation provides both the home market for industrial goods and the labor supply for factories.

From Handicraft to Factory
In industry, Lenin tracks the passage from household handicrafts and the putting-out system to capitalist manufacture and large-scale machine production. Merchant’s capital organizes scattered producers, advances raw materials, and appropriates surplus through prices, paving the way for direct wage labor. Factory inspection records show concentration of capital, rising mechanization, the lengthening and regulation of the working day, and the prevalence of hired labor even in “small” workshops. Cooperative and artel forms often cloak capitalist relations where control over finance and markets remains concentrated.

The Home Market and National Integration
As richer peasants commodify agriculture and poorer peasants become wage workers, a home market for capitalism expands. Demand for tools, textiles, and consumer goods grows among prosperous strata, while the proletarianized share purchase basic necessities from industry. Railways, grain trade, and regional specialization integrate previously isolated locales into a national market. Thus, capitalism’s advance in the countryside is both cause and consequence of industrial expansion.

Polemics and Political Conclusions
Addressing the Narodnik program, Lenin rejects the idea that the peasant commune can be a springboard to socialism. The commune is already eroded by commodity relations and class struggle within the village. Because capitalism is the dominant tendency, the revolutionary subject is the industrial working class, allied with the rural poor against landlords and the nascent rural bourgeoisie. Democratic tasks, land and political freedoms, cannot be solved by idealizing small production; they require a struggle grounded in the realities of class formation.

Significance
The book supplies Russian Marxism with an empirical foundation, demonstrating that Russia’s development follows general capitalist laws in a specific historical setting. By revealing the class dynamics behind agrarian and industrial change, it sets the strategic horizon for socialist politics: organize the proletariat, expose populist illusions, and harness capitalism’s contradictions toward a broader democratic and socialist transformation.