The existence of the employer presupposes his correlative, the employee. Thus we are brought close to the fact that there have arisen opposite social classes within the village community.
It must be borne in mind, however, that the lines between the classes in the Russian village are as yet far from being as sharply drawn as in countries with developed capitalism. It would seem that laborers permanently employed outside of their farms must unquestionably be classed among the proletarians. And yet we find the majority of them maintaining the standard of farmers.[108] This is due to the existence of the compound family, the average household numbering two adult male workers, which enables one of them to carry on farming, while the other is employed outside.[109] Only the minority of the households in question that have only one adult worker, and accordingly we find that independent farming has been given up only by the minority of those householders who are permanently employed as farm laborers.[110] These are the genuine rural proletarians with whom the earnings from wage labor constitute the main source of income. Still they are landholders, and inasmuch as they have no live stock of their own, their plots are tilled chiefly by means of wage labor:
| Farm laborers whose plots are | Korotoyak. | Nizhnedevitsk. | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Households. | Per cent. | Households. | Per cent. | |
| Tilled by hired laborers | 371 | 64 | 237 | 66 |
| Leased | 205 | 36 | 124 | 34 |
| In all | 576 | 100 | 361 | 100 |
Thus we have the very peculiar economic type of a wage-laborer who is at the same time employer of wage labor. It is obvious that the characteristics of a modern European proletarian could not properly be extended to the Russian agricultural laborer.
Class distinctions are very easily perceived, of course, when the classes have already ripened to a certain degree. In the embryonic stage, the true tendency of the development going on is disguised by the many transitional forms combining the characteristic features of opposite classes. The peasantist of “the seventies,” whose opinions were influenced by European socialism, had no idea of class antagonism within the ranks of the peasantry themselves, regarding it as confined entirely to the “exploiter”—kulak or miroyed[111]—and his victim, the peasant imbued with the communistic spirit.[112]
The statisticians necessarily started in their investigations with preconceived ideas respecting the uniformity of the peasantry[113] as a class, except in so far as legal discriminations had to be taken into account. The study of the facts brought them subsequently to a recognition of the true position, and in some of the later Reports attempts were made to arrange the data according to class distinctions. The main difficulty in the question is as to what proof should be selected for classification. The characteristics of employer and employee would cover only a minor part of the peasantry of to-day,[114] not to speak of a certain vagueness of the terms, as explained above. Mr. Shtcherbina, Superintendent of the Statistical Department of Voronezh, has classified the peasants according to: 1, the size of their farms, 2, the quantity of stock raised, 3, the number of adult male workers to a household, and 4, to the occupation by which they supplement the insufficient income derived from their plots. The households are accordingly scheduled into 320 minute sections, so as to afford the opportunity of subsequently combining them into wider social classes.
We shall divide the peasantry into three main classes:
I. Those whose income from farming is sufficient to meet all the expenses of the household (taxes included), so as to obviate any need of wage earnings.
Households that pay their expenses by the income from commercial or industrial enterprises and draw a net profit from agriculture, are also included in that class.
II. Farmers who are at the same time wage laborers, either in agriculture, or in industry.