Chapter III. The Landowners’ Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy (3)

Labour-service, as has already been observed above, is of exceedingly varied types. Sometimes peasants undertake for a money payment to cultivate with their own implements the fields of the landowner – so-called “job-hire,” “dessiatine employments,” cultivation of “cycles” (i.e., one dessiatine of spring crop and one of winter crop), etc. Sometimes the peasant borrows grain or money, under taking to work off either the entire loan or the interest on it. Under this form a feature peculiar to the labour-service system in general stands out with great clarity – the bondage, the usurious character of this sort of hire of labour. In some cases the peasants work “for trespass” (i.e., undertake to work off the legally established fine for cattle trespass), or work simply “out of respect” (cf. Engelhardt, loc. cit., 56), i.e., gratis, or just for a drink, so as not to lose other “employments” by the landowner. Lastly, labour-service in return for land is very widespread in the shape either of half-cropping or directly of work for land rented, for grounds used, etc.

Very often the payment for rented land assumes the most diverse forms, which sometimes are even combined, so that side by side with money rent we find rent in kind and “labour-service.” Here are a couple of examples: for every dessiatine, 1 1/2 dess. to be cultivated + 10 eggs + 1 chicken + 1 day’s female labour; for 43 dess. of spring crop land 12 rubles per dess., and 51 dess. of winter-crop land 16 rubles per dess. in cash + threshing of so many stacks of oats, 7 stacks of buckwheat and 20 stacks of rye + manuring of not less than 5 dessiatines of rented land with manure from own animals, at the rate of 300 cart-loads per dessiatine (Karyshev, Rentings, p. 348). In this case even the peasant’s manure is converted into a constituent part of the private landowner’s farm! The widespread and varied character of labour-service is indicated by the abundance of terms used for it: otrabotki, otbuchi, otbutki, barshchina, basarinka, posobka, panshchina, postupok, viyemka, etc. (ibid., 342). Sometimes the peasant pledges himself to perform “whatever work the owner orders” (ibid., 346), or in general to “pay heed,” “give ear” to him, to “help out.” Labour-service embraces the “whole cycle of jobs in rural life. It is as labour-service that all operations relating to field-cultivation and grain and hay harvesting get done, firewood is stocked and loads are carted” (346-347), roofs and chimneys are repaired (354, 348), and the delivery-of poultry and eggs is undertaken (ibid.). An investigator of Gdov Uyezd, St. Petersburg Gubernia, quite justly remarks that the types of labour-service to be met with are of the “former, pre-Reform, Corvée character” (349).

Particularly interesting is the form of labour-service for land, so-called labour-service renting and rent payment in kind. In the preceding chapter we have seen how capitalist relations are manifested in peasant renting of land; here we see “renting” which is simply a survival of Corvée economy, and which sometimes passes imperceptibly into the capitalist system of providing the estate with agricultural workers by alloting patches of land to them. Zemstvo statistics establish beyond doubt this connection between such “renting” and the lessors’ own farming. “With the development of their own farming on the private landowners’ estates, the owners had to guarantee themselves a supply of workers at the required time. Hence, there develops in many places the tendency among them to distribute land to the peasants on the labour-service basis, or for a part of the crop together with labour-service. . . .” This system of farming “. . . is fairly widespread. The more frequently the lessors do their own farming, the smaller the amount of land available for leasing and the greater the demand for such land, the more widely does this form of land renting develop” (ibid., p. 266, cf. also 367). Thus, we have here renting of a very special kind, under which the landowner does not abandon his own farm, but which expresses the development of private-landowner cultivation, expresses not the consolidation of the peasant farm by the enlargement of area held, but the conversion of the peasant into an agricultural labourer. In the preceding chapter we have seen that on the peasant’s farm the renting of land is of contradictory significance: for some it is a profitable expansion of their farms; for others it is a deal made out of dire need. Now we see that on the landlord’s farm, too, the leasing of land is of contradictory significance: in some cases it is the transfer of the farm to another person for a payment of rent; in others it is a method of conducting one’s own farm, a method of providing one’s estate with manpower.

Let us pass to the question of the payment of labour under labour-service. The data from various sources are at one in testifying to the fact that the payment of labour where it is hired on a labour-service and bonded basis is always lower than under capitalist “free” hire. Firstly, this is proved by the fact that rent in kind, i.e., on the basis of labour-service and half-cropping (which, as we have just seen, is merely labour-service and bonded hire), is every where, as a general rule, more costly than money rent, very much more costly (ibid., p. 350), sometimes twice as much (ibid., 356, Rzhev Uyezd, Tver Gubernia). Secondly, rent in kind is developed to the greatest degree among the poorest groups of peasants (ibid., 261 and foll.). This is renting from dire need, “renting” by the peasant who is no longer able to resist his conversion, in this way, into an agricultural wage-worker. The well-to-do peasants do what they can to rent land for money. “The tenant takes advantage of every opportunity to pay his rent in money, and thus to reduce the cost of using other people’s land” (ibid., 265) – and we would add, not only to reduce the cost of renting the land, but also to escape bonded hire. In Rostovon-Don Uyezd the remarkable fact was even observed of money rent being abandoned in favour of skopshchina, as rents went up, despite a drop in the peasants’ share of the harvest (ibid., p. 266). The significance of rent in kind, which utterly ruins the peasant and turns him into a farm labourer, is quite clearly illustrated by this fact. Thirdly, a direct comparison between the price of labour in the case of labour-service hire and of capitalist “free” hire shows the latter to be greater. In the above-quoted publication of the Department of Agriculture, Hired Labour, etc., it is calculated that the average pay for the complete cultivation, with the peasant’s own implements, of a dessiatine of land under winter grain is 6 rubles (data for the central black-earth belt for the 8 years, 1883-1891). If, however, we calculate the cost of the same amount of work on a hired labour basis, we get 6 rubles 19 kopeks for the work of the labourer alone, not counting the work of the horse (the pay for the horse’s work cannot be put at less than 4 rubles 50 kopeks, loc. cit., 45). The compiler rightly considers this to be “absolutely abnormal” (ibid.). We would merely observe that the fact that payment for labour under purely capitalist hire is greater than under all forms of bondage and under other pre-capitalist relations has been established not only in agriculture, but also in industry, and not only in Russia, but also in other countries. Here are more precise and more detailed Zemstvo statistics on this question (Statistical Returns for Saratov Uyezd, Vol. I, Pt. III, pp. 18-19. Quoted from Mr. Karyshev’s Rentings, p. 353). (See Table on p. 203.)

Thus, under labour-service (just as under bonded hire combined with usury) the prices paid for labour are usually less than half those under capitalist hire. Since labour service can only be undertaken by a local peasant, and one who must be “provided with an allotment,” the fact of the tremendous drop in pay clearly indicates the importance of the allotment as wages in kind. The allotment, in such cases, continues to this day to serve as a means of “guaranteeing” the landowner a supply of cheap labour. But the difference between free and “semi-free” labour is far from exhausted by the difference in pay. Of enormous importance also is the circumstance that the latter form of labour always presupposes the personal dependence of the one hired upon the one who hires him, it always presupposes the greater or lesser retention of “other than economic pressure.” Engelhardt very aptly says that the lending of money for repayment by labour-service is explained by the greater security of such debts: to extract payment from the peasant on a distraint order is a difficult matter, “but the authorities will compel the peasant to perform the work he has undertaken to do, even if his own grain remains ungathered” (loc. cit., 216). “Only long years of slavery, of serf labour for the lord, have been able to produce the indifference” (only apparent) with which the cultivator leaves his own grain in the rain to go carting somebody else’s sheaves (ibid., 429). Without one or other form of binding the population to their domiciles, to the “community,” without a certain lack of civic rights, labour-service as a system would be impossible. It stands to reason that an inevitable consequence of the above-described features of the labour-service system is low productivity of labour: methods of farming based on labour-service can only be the most stereotyped; the labour of the bonded peasant cannot but approximate, in quality, to the labour of the serf.

The combination of the labour-service and the capitalist systems makes the present system of landlord farming extremely similar in its economic organisation to the system that prevailed in our textile industry before the development of large-scale machine industry. There, part of the operations was done by the merchant with his own implements and with wage-workers (fixing the yarn, dyeing and finishing the fabric, etc.), and part with the implements of peasant handicraftsmen who worked for him, using his material. Here, part of the operations is performed by wage-workers, using the employer’s implements, and another part by the labour and the implements of peasants working on the land of others. There, combined with industrial capital was merchant’s capital, and the handicrafts man, besides being weighed down by capital, was burdened with bondage, the operations of the subcontractor, the truck system, etc. Here, likewise, combined with industrial capital is merchant’s and usurer’s capital accompanied by all forms of pay reduction and intensification of the producer’s personal dependence. There, the transitional system lasted for centuries, being based on a primitive hand-labour technique, and was smashed in some three decades by large-scale machine industry; here, labour-service has continued almost since the rise of Rus (the landowners forced the villeins into bondage as far back as the time of Russkaya Pravda), perpetuating routine technique, and has begun rapidly to give way to capitalism only in the post-Reform epoch. In both cases, the old system merely implies stagnation in the forms of production (and, consequently, in all social relations), and the domination of the Asiatic way of life. In both cases, the new, capitalist forms of economy constitute enormous progress, despite all the contradictions inherent in them.