Page 1464 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘One may easily be led into error in basing any
conclusion on the general vocation of a people,’ said
Metrov, interrupting Levin. ‘The condition of the laborer
will always depend on his relation to the land and to

capital.’
And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea,
Metrov began expounding to him the special point of his
own theory.
In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not
understand, because he did not take the trouble to
understand. He saw that Metrov, like other people, in
spite of his own article, in which he had attacked the
current theory of political economy, looked at the position
of the Russian peasant simply from the point of view of
capital, wages, and rent. He would indeed have been
obliged to admit that in the eastern—much the larger—
part of Russia rent was as yet nil, that for nine-tenths of
the eighty millions of the Russian peasants wages took the
form simply of food provided for themselves, and that
capital does not so far exist except in the form of the most
primitive tools. Yet it was only from that point of view
that he considered every laborer, though in many points
he differed from the economists and had his own theory of
the wage-fund, which he expounded to Levin.

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