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Special pages :
The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry
First published in 1898 in the miscellany Economic Studies and Essays by Vladimir Ilyin. Published according to the text in Economic Studies and Essays checked with the text in the miscellany The Agrarian Question by Vl. Ilyin, 1908.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 2, pages 353-458.
The article “The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of ‘Handicraft’ Industry “ was written by Lenin when in exile in Siberia in August and September 1897, not later than the 7th (19th) of the latter month. The material contained in this article was used by him in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
The article was first published in 1898 in the miscellany Economic Studies and Essays, and reprinted in 1908 in the miscellany The Agrarian Question.
ARTICLE ONE[edit source]
Perm scientific societies, assisted by the Zemstvo, have undertaken the preparation of an extensive handbook for the 1896 Exhibition in Nizhni-Novgorod under the general title: A Survey of Perm Territory. Enough material has been collected to fill well over three thousand pages, and the whole edition is to consist of eight volumes. As was to be expected, the work was not completed in time for the exhibition, and so far only the first volume, a sketch of the handicraft industries of the gubernia,[1] has been published. For the novelty, wealth and fulness of the material on which it is based, the Sketch is a work of outstanding interest. The material was obtained through a special handicraft census financed by the Zemstvo and taken in 1894-95. This was a house-to-house census, each householder being questioned individually. The information was collected by the Zemsky Nachalniks.[2] The programme of this house-to-house investigation was very broad, embracing the members of the families of master handicraftsmen, the wage-labour employed by them, agriculture, information on the purchase of raw materials, the technique of production, distribution of work according to the months of the year, sale of products, dates on which the establishments were founded, and the indebtedness of handicraftsmen. As far as we are aware, this is perhaps the first time such abundant information has been published in our literature. But to whom much is given, much is required. The very wealth of the material entitles us to demand its thorough analysis by the investigators, but the Sketch is a long way from meeting this demand. Both in the tabulated data and in the method of grouping and analysing them there are many gaps, which the present author has had in part to fill by selecting material from various parts of the book and computing the appropriate data.
Our purpose is to acquaint the reader with the material of the census, the methods by which it has been analysed, and the conclusions to be drawn from the data relative to the economic realities of our “handicraft industries.” We underscore the words “economic realities,” because we only deal with what exists in reality, and why that reality is what it is, and not something else. As to extending the conclusions drawn from the data on Perm Gubernia to “our handicraft industries” in general, the reader will see from what follows that such an extention is quite legitimate, for the forms of “handicraft industry” in Perm Gubernia are exceedingly varied and embrace every possible form ever mentioned in the literature on the subject.
But there is one request we must earnestly make, namely, that the reader draw the strictest possible distinction between two aspects of the following commentary: the study and analysis of the actual facts, on the one hand, and the discussion of the Narodnik views held by the authors of the Sketch, on the other.
I General Data[edit source]
The handicraft census of 1894-95 embraced 8,991 families (excluding the families of wage-workers) in all uyezds of the gubernia, or, in the opinion of the investigators, about 72 per cent of the total number of Perm handicraftsmen; other data point to the existence of 3,484 families more. The basic division according to type adopted in the Sketch is as follows: two groups of handicraftsmen are distinguished (indicated in the tables by the Roman numerals I and II): those who have a farm (I) and those who have not (II); then three sub-groups of each group (Arabic numerals 1, 2 and 3): 1) those who produce for the market; 2) those who work to order for private customers, and 3) those who work to order for buyers-up. In the last two sub-groups the raw material is usually supplied by the customer or the buyer-up. Let us take a look at this method of classifying. The division of handicraftsmen into those who farm land and those who do not is, of course, a sound and necessary method. The large number of landless handicraftsmen in Perm Gubernia, frequently concentrated in industrial settlements, has led the authors to stick to this classification and to use it in the tables. We learn, for example, that 6,638 persons, or one-third of the total number of handicraftsmen (19,970 working members of families and wage-workers in 8,991 establishments) do not farm land.[3] This fact alone shows the fallacy of the common assumptions and assertions that the connection between handicraft industry and agriculture is universal; this connection is sometimes stressed as a specifically Russian feature. If we exclude the rural (and urban) artisans who have been wrongly classed as “handicraftsmen,” we find that 2,268 of the remaining 5,566 families, or over two-fifths of the total number of industrialists working for the market, are landless. Unfortunately, even this basic classification is not adhered to consistently in the Sketch. Firstly, it is applied only to master craftsmen, no similar data being given for wage-workers. This omission is due to the fact that, in general, the census registered only the establishments, the owners, and ignored the wage-workers and their families. In place of these terms, the Sketch employs the very inaccurate expression “families engaged in handicraft industries.” This is inaccurate because families whose members are employed by handicraftsmen as wage-workers are no less “engaged in handicraft industries” than the families which hire them. The absence of house-to-house information on the families of wage-workers (who constitute one-fourth of the total number of workers) is a grave omission in the census. This omission is highly characteristic of the Narodniks, who at once adopt the viewpoint of the small producer and leave wage-labour in the shade. Below we shall find frequent gaps of this kind in the information on wage-workers, but for the moment let us confine ourselves to the remark that although the absence of information on wage-workers’ families is a common feature of the literature on handicrafts, there are exceptions. In the Moscow Zemstvo statistics one occasionally comes across systematic information on wage-workers’ families, and even more so in the well-known inquiry of Messrs. Kharizomenov and Prugavin, Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, which contains house-to-house censuses that register wage-workers’ families on a par with those of masters. Secondly, by including the mass of landless industrialists under the heading of handicraftsmen, the investigators naturally removed the grounds for the common, although absolutely incorrect, method of excluding the urban industrialists from this category. And, indeed, we find that the 1894-95 census includes one town—Kungur (p. 33 of the tables)—but only one. No explanation is given in the Sketch, and it remains a mystery why the census was taken for one town only, and why this particular town was chosen—whether by chance or for some sound reason. This causes no little confusion, and seriously detracts from the value of the general data. On the whole, therefore, the handicraft census repeats the usual Narodnik mistake of separating the country (“handicraftsmen”) from the town, although often enough an industrial district embraces a town and the surrounding villages. It is high time to abandon this distinction, which is due to prejudice and an exaggeration of outdated divisions into social estates.
We have already referred on several occasions to rural and urban artisans, sometimes excluding them from the number of handicraftsmen, and sometimes not. The fact is that these fluctuations are characteristic of all literature on “handicraft” industries, and demonstrate the unsuitability of a term like “handicraftsman” for the purposes of scientific investigation. The generally accepted opinion is that only those who work for the market, the commodity producers, should be regarded as handicraftsmen; but in practice it would be hard to find all investigation of the handicraft industries in which artisans, that is, producers who work for private customers (2nd sub-group in the Sketch) are not counted as handicraftsmen. Both in the Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into the Handicraft Industry and the Industries of Moscow Gubernia you will find artisans classed as “handicraftsmen.” We consider it useless to argue about the meaning of the word “handicraft,” for, as we shall see later, there is no form of industry (except perhaps machine industry) which has not been included under this traditional term, a term that is absolutely useless for scientific investigation. It is certain that a strict distinction must be made between commodity producers who work for the market (1st sub-group) and artisans who fulfil the orders of private customers (2nd sub-group), because of the complete difference in the social and economic significance of these forms of industry. The attempts made in the Sketch to obliterate this distinction (cf. pp. 13 and 177) are very unsuccessful; far more correct is the remark made in another Zemstvo statistical publication on the Perm handicraftsmen to the effect that “the artisans have very few points of contact with the sphere of handicraft industry—fewer than the latter has with factory industry.”[4] Both factory industry and the 1st sub-group of “handicraftsmen” relate to commodity production, which is non-existent in the 2nd sub-group. A no less strict distinction must be made in the case of the 3rd sub-group, the handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up (and manufacturers) and who differ essentially from those of the first two sub-groups. It would be desirable for all investigators of so-called “handicraft” industry to adhere strictly to this division and use precise political-economic terminology, instead of assigning an arbitrary meaning to colloquial terms.
The following table shows the division of the “handicraftsmen” into groups and sub-groups:
Before proceeding to draw conclusions from these figures, let us recall that the town of Kungur was included in Group II, which thus consists of a mixture of urban and rural industrialists. We see from the table that although there is a preponderance of agriculturists (Group I) among the rural industrialists and artisans, they are more backward in the development of forms of industry than those who do not cultivate the land (Group II). Among the former primitive artisanship is far more prevalent than production for the market. The greater development of capitalism among the non-agriculturists is shown by the larger proportion of establishments employing wage-workers, of the wage-workers themselves, and of handicraftsmen who work for buyers up. It may therefore be concluded that the tie with agriculture tends to preserve the more backward forms of industry, and vice versa, that the development of capitalism in industry leads to a break with agriculture. Unfortunately, exact information on this subject is not available, and we have perforce to content ourselves with indirect indications. For example, the Sketch tells us nothing about the division of the rural population of Perm Gubernia into agriculturists and landless people, and so we cannot determine in which of these categories the industries are most developed. There is a similar neglect of the highly interesting question of the territorial distribution of industry (the investigators were in possession of the most exact information on this point, for each village separately), of the concentration of industrialists in the non-agricultural, factory, or trade and industrial settlements generally, of the centres of each branch of industry, and of the spread of the industries from these centres to the surrounding villages. If we add to this that the household statistics showing when the establishments were founded (see § III below) provided an opportunity to determine how the industries developed, that is, whether they spread from the centres to the surrounding villages or vice versa, whether they spread mostly among agriculturists or non-agriculturists, etc., then one cannot help regretting the inadequate analysis of the data. The only information we are able to obtain concerns the distribution of industries by uyezds. To acquaint the reader with these figures we shall group the uyezds as suggested in the Sketch (p. 31): 1) the five “uyezds where the proportion of handicraftsmen working for the market is largest and where, simultaneously, the development of handicraft industry is relatively high”; 2) the five “uyezds where the development of the handicraft industry is relatively weak, and where the handicraftsmen working for the market predominate”; 3) the two “uyezds where it is also at a low level, but where the majority often consists of handicraftsmen who fulfil orders for private customers.” Summarising the principal data for these groups of uyezds we get the following table (see p. 364).
This table enables us to draw the following interesting conclusions. The more highly rural industry is developed in a group of uyezds, 1) the smaller the proportion of rural artisans, i.e., artisan production is to a greater extent replaced by commodity production; 2) the larger the proportion of handicraftsmen who belong to the non-agricultural population, and 3) the more marked the development of capitalist relations and the larger the proportion of dependent handicraftsmen. In the third group of uyezds the rural artisans predominate (77.7 % of all the handicraftsmen); in this case agriculturists predominate (only 5.7% are non-agriculturists) and capitalism is poorly developed: only 7.2% are wage-workers and only 2.7% of the handicraftsmen’s families work for buyers-up, i.e., a total of only 9.9% are dependent handicraftsmen. In the second group of uyezds, on, the contrary, commodity production predominates and is already eliminating handicraft: only 32.5% are artisans. The percentage of handicraftsmen engaged in agriculture drops from 94.3% to 66.2%, the proportion of wage-workers increases more than fourfold—from 7.2% to 32.1%; there is an increase, although not so large, in the proportion of family workers who work for buyers-up, so that the aggregate proportion of dependent handicrafts men is 38.4%, or nearly two-fifths of the total. Lastly, in the first group of uyezds, natural artisan production is still further eliminated by commodity production and employs only one-fifth of the total number of “handicraftsmen” (21.8%), and at the same time the number of non-agricultural industrialists increases to 42.1%; the proportion of wage-workers drops somewhat (from 32.1% to 26%), but on the other hand there is an enormous increase in the proportion of family workers dependent on buyers-up, namely, from 6.3% to 27.4%, so that the aggregate number of dependent handicraftsmen is more than half the total—53.4%. The district with the largest (absolute and relative) number of “handicraftsmen” is the one where capitalism is most developed: the growth of commodity production forces artisan production into the background, leads to the development of capitalism and to the transfer of industries to non-agriculturists, in other words, to the separation of industry from agriculture (or, perhaps, to the concentration of industries among the non-agricultural population). The reader may doubt whether it is right to regard capitalism as being more developed in the first group of uyezds, where there are fewer wage-workers than in the second, but where more handicraftsmen work for buyers-up. Domestic industry, it may be objected, is a lower form of capitalism. But we shall see below that many of these buyers-up are manufacturers who own large capitalist establishments. Here domestic industry is an adjunct of the factory, and signifies a higher degree of concentration of production and capital (some of the buyers-up have 200, 500, even 1,000 persons and more, working for them), a higher degree of division of labour, and, consequently, a more highly developed form of capitalism. This form is to the small workshop of the owner who employs wage-workers as capitalist manufacture is to capitalist simple co-operation.
The figures quoted are sufficient to refute the attempt of the compilers of the Sketch to draw a fundamental contrast between “the handicraft form of production” and “capitalist production”—an assertion which repeats the traditional prejudice of all the Russian Narodniks, headed by Messrs. V. V. and N.-on. The Perm Narodniks assume that the “basic difference” between these two forms is that under handicraft production “labour owns both the instruments and materials of production and all the fruits of labour in the shape of the produce of production” (p. 3). We are now in a position to declare quite emphatically that this is false. Even if we include artisans among the handicraftsmen the majority of them do not fit this definition : this applies, firstly, to the wage-workers, and they represent 25.3%; secondly, to family workers who work for buyers-up, for they own neither the materials of production nor the fruits of their labour, but are merely paid wages—and they constitute 20.8%; and, thirdly, to the family workers of the first and second sub-groups who employ wage-workers, for they own the “fruits” of other labour in addition to their own. They probably constitute about 10% (1,691 of the 6,645 establishments in the first and second sub-groups, or 25.4%, employ wage-workers; in the 1,691 establishments there are probably not less than 2,000 family workers). And so we already have 25.3% + 20.8% + 10% = 56.1% of the “handicraftsmen,” or more than half, who do not fit this definition. In other words, even in a remote and economically backward gubernia like Perm, the “handicraftsmen” who either hire themselves out or hire others, who exploit or are exploited, are already preponderant today. But it would be far more correct for such a computation to exclude artisan production and to take commodity production alone. Artisan production is such an archaic form of industry that even among our native Narodniks, who have repeatedly proclaimed that backwardness is Russia’s good fortune (ä la Messrs. V. V., Yuzhakov and Co.), there has not been a single one who has frankly and openly risked defending it and proclaiming it a “pledge” of his ideals. Artisan production in Perm Gubernia is still very widespread as compared with Central Russia: we need only mention the dyeing industry, for instance. This is a purely artisan industry for the dyeing of peasant homespuns, which in less out-of-the-way parts of Russia have long been superseded by factory-made prints. But even in Perm Gubernia artisan production has been pushed far into the background: even in rural industry, only 29.5%, or less than one-third, of the producers are artisans. If we exclude the artisans, then, we get 14,401 persons who work for the market; of these, 29.3% are wage-workers and 29.5% family workers who work for buyers-up, in other words, 58.8% are dependent “handicraftsmen,”’while another 7% or 8% are small masters employing wage-workers. Thus, about 66%, or nearly two-thirds, of the “handicraftsmen” have two fundamental points of similarity, and not of difference, with capitalism: firstly, they are all commodity producers, and capitalism is nothing but commodity production developed to the full; secondly, the specifically capitalist relations of the purchase and sale of labour-power apply to a large number of them. The compilers of the Sketch try hard to assure the reader that for “weighty” reasons, wage-labour in “handicraft” production has a significance all of its own. We shall examine these assurances and the examples they quote in their proper place (§ VII). Here it will be enough to mention that wherever commodity production prevails and wage-labour is not casually but systematically employed, we have all the features of capitalism. One may say that it is undeveloped, embryonic, that it possesses specific forms, but it is a distortion of the truth to assume a “basic difference” when in reality there is a basic similarity.
Let us, incidentally, mention one other distortion. On p. 5 of the Sketch it is said that “the products of the handicraftsman . . . are made from materials that are chiefly procured locally.” But the Sketch itself provides us with the data to check this point, it shows how the distribution of handicraftsmen engaged in processing livestock produce compares with the distribution of livestock and agricultural produce in the uyezds of the gubernia, how the distribution of those who process plant products compares with the distribution of forests; and how the distribution of those engaged in metal-working compares with the distribution of the pig-iron and malleable iron produced in the gubernia. This comparison shows that 68.9% of the handicraftsmen engaged in processing livestock products are concentrated in three uyezds, which account for only 25.1% of the livestock population, and only 29.5% of the cultivated area. In other words, we find that the very contrary of the above assertion is true, and the Sketch itself at this point declares that “the high degree of development of the industries engaged in processing livestock produce is chiefly dependent on raw materials brought from outside—for instance, in the Kungur and Ekaterinburg uyezds on the raw hides dressed by the local leather factories and handicraft tanneries, from which the material for the boot industry, the principal handicraft in these uyezds, is obtained” (24-25). Hence, handicraft industry in these parts is based not only on the large turnover of the local capitalist leather merchants, but also on semi-manufactures obtained from factory owners, i.e., handicraft industry is a sequel or adjunct to developed commodity circulation and to capitalist leather establishments. “In Shadrinsk Uyezd, the raw material brought from outside is wool, which furnishes the material for the chief industry of the uyezd—the making of felt boots.” Further, 61.3% of the handicraftsmen engaged in processing plant produce are concentrated in four uyezds. Yet these four uyezds contain only 20.7% of the total forest area of the gubernia. On the other hand, in the two uyezds where 51.7% of the forest area is concentrated, there are only 2.6% of the handicraftsmen engaged in processing plant produce (p. 25). In other words, here too we find the contrary to be the case, and here too the Sketch states that the raw material is brought from outside (p. 26).[5] Hence, we observe the very interesting fact that a deep-rooted commodity circulation precedes the development of the handicraft industries (and is a condition for their development). This fact is very important, for it shows, firstly, that commodity economy is long established, handicraft industry being only one of its elements; it shows also how absurd it is to depict our handicraft industry as a sort of tabula rasa still “able” to take a different path. The investigators report, for example, that “handicraft industry” in Perm Gubernia “continues to reflect the influence of those means of communication which determined the commercial and industrial physiognomy of the area not only in the pre-railway days, but even in pre-Reform days” (p. 39). Actually, the town of Kungur was the road junction in the Cis-Urals area: through it passes the Siberian highway which connects Kungur with Ekaterinburg, with branches to Shadrinsk; another commercial highway from Kungur, that of Blagodatnaya Gora, connects the town with Osa. Lastly, the Birsk highway connects Kungur with Krasnoufimsk. “We thus find that the handicraft industry of the gubernia became concentrated in districts around the highway junctions: in the Cis-Urals area—in the uyezds of Kungur, Krasnoufimsk and Osa and in the Trans-Urals area—in the uyezds of Ekaterinburg and Shadrinsk” (p. 39). Let us remind the reader that it is these five uyezds that constitute the group that is first in its development of handicraft industry, and that 70% of the total number of handicraftsmen are concentrated in them. Secondly, this fact shows us that the “organisation of exchange” in handicraft industry, about which the handicraft friends of the muzhik chatter so frivolously, has already been created and by none other than the Russian merchant class itself. Later on we shall find much to confirm this. Only in the third category of handicraftsmen (those who process metal) do we find that the distribution of raw material production and its processing by handicraftsmen correspond: 70% of this category of handicraftsmen are concentrated in the four uyezds producing 70.6% of the total pig-iron and malleable iron. But here the raw material is itself a product of the large-scale metallurgical industry, which, as we shall see, has its “own views” on the “handicraftsman.”
II The “Handicraftsman” and Wage-Labour[edit source]
Let us now summarise the data on wage-labour in the handicraft industries of Perm Gubernia. Without repeating the absolute figures already cited, let us confine ourselves to indicating the most interesting percentages:
We thus see that the percentage of wage-workers is higher among the non-agriculturists than among the agriculturists, and that the difference is chiefly accounted for by the second sub-group: among the farming artisans the proportion of wage-workers is 14.1%, and among the non-agriculturists it is 29.3%, or over twice as high. In the other two sub-groups, the proportion of wage-workers in Group II is slightly higher than in Group I. It has already been said that this results from capitalism being less developed among the agricultural population. Of course, the Perm Narodniks, like all other Narodniks, declare this to be of advantage to the agriculturists. We shall not, at this point, enter into a controversy on the general subject of whether the under-development and backwardness of the given social and economic relations may be regarded as an advantage; we shall merely say that the figures we quote below will show that this is an advantage that gives the agriculturists low earnings.
It is interesting to note that insofar as the employment of wage-labour is concerned the difference between the groups is less than the difference between the sub-groups of the same group. In other words, the economic structure of the industry (artisans—commodity producers—workers for buyers-up) has a greater influence on the extent to which wage-labour is employed than the existence or absence of ties with agriculture. For example, the small agriculturist commodity producer is more akin to the small non-agriculturist commodity producer than to the agriculturist artisan. The proportion of wage-workers in the first sub-group is 29.4% in Group I and 31.2% in Group II, whereas in the second sub-group of Group I it is only 14.1%. Similarly, the agriculturist who works for a buyer-up is more akin to the non-agriculturist who does the same (23.2% and 27.4% wage-workers respectively) than to the agriculturist artisan. This shows us that the general prevalence of capitalist commodity relations in the country tends to reduce to one level the agriculturist and the non-agriculturist engaged in industry. This levelling process is brought out even more saliently by the data on the incomes of handicraftsmen. The second sub-group, as we have said, is an exception; but if, instead of the figures showing the percentage of wage-workers, we take the average number of wage-workers per establishment, we shall find that the agriculturist artisans are more akin to the non-agriculturist artisans (0.23 and 0.43 wage-workers per establishment respectively) than to the agriculturists in the other sub-groups. The average number of workers per establishment among the artisans of both groups is almost the same (1.7 and 1.8), whereas in the sub-groups of each group this average differs very considerably (Group I—2.6 and 1.7; Group II—2.5 and 1.8).
The average figures per establishment in each sub-group also reveal the interesting fact that the number is lowest among the artisans of both groups: 1.7 and 1.8 workers per workshop respectively. This means that production is most scattered among artisans, the individual producers are most isolated, and co-operation in production least practised. First place in this respect is held by the first sub-group of each group, that is, by the small masters who produce for the market. The number of people engaged in the workshops in these sub-groups is the largest (2.6 and 2,5 persons); here handicraftsmen with big families are the most numerous (20.3% and 18.5% have 3 or more workers in the family; the third sub-group of Group I—20.9%—is something of an exception); at the same time the employment of wage-labour is the largest (0.75 and 0.78 wage-workers per workshop); and there is also the largest proportion of big establishments (2.0% and 1.3% of establishments employ six or more wage-workers). Consequently, co-operation in production is here most widespread, because of the most extensive employment of wage-labour, and of members of the family (1.8 and 1.7 family workers per establishment; the third sub-group of Group I, with 1.9 persons, is something of an exception).
This latter circumstance brings us to the highly important question of the relation between family labour and wage-labour employed by “handicraftsmen,” a relation which prompts us to doubt the correctness of the prevailing Narodnik doctrine that wage-labour in handicraft production merely “supplements” family labour. The Perm Narodniks support this view when they argue on p. 55 that “the identification of the interests of the handicraftsmen with those of the kulaks” is refuted by the fact that the most prosperous handicraftsmen (Group I) have the largest number of family workers, whereas “if the handicraftsman were prompted solely by the profit motive, the sole incentive of the kulak, and not by the desire to consolidate and develop his establishment with the aid of all the members of his family, we should expect the proportion of members of the family who devoted their labours to production to be smallest in this sub-group of establishments” (?!). A strange conclusion! How can any conclusion regarding the role of “personal participation in work” (p. 55) be drawn if nothing is said about wage-labour? If the prosperity of handicraftsmen with large families did not indicate kulak tendencies, we should find among them the lowest proportion of wage-workers, the lowest proportion of establishments employing them, the lowest proportion of establishments with a large number of workers (more than five), and the smallest average number of workers per establishment. Actually, however, the most prosperous handicraftsmen (first sub-group) hold first, and not last place in all these respects, and this despite the fact that they have the largest families and the largest number of family workers, and constitute the largest proportion of handicraftsmen with three or more family workers! Clearly, the facts point to the very opposite of what the Narodniks would have them mean: the handicraftsman does, in fact, strive for profit, and by kulak methods; he takes advantage of his greater prosperity (one of the conditions for which is the possession of a large family) to employ wage-labour on a larger scale. Having a larger number of family workers than the other handicraftsmen he uses this to oust the others by hiring the largest number of workers. “Family co-operation, “about which Mr. V. V. and the other Narodniks speak so unctuously (cf. Handicraft Industries, I, p.14), is a guarantee of the development of capitalist co-operation. This, of course, will seem a paradox to the reader who is used to Narodnik prejudices; but it is a fact. To obtain precise data on this subject, one should know not only the distribution of the establishments according to the number of family and of wage-workers (which is given in the Sketch ), but also according to the combination of family and wage-labour. The house-to-house returns furnished every opportunity of making such a combination, of calculating the number of establishments in each category employing one, two, etc., wage-workers and classifying them according to the number of family workers. Unfortunately, this was not done. In order to make up for this omission, if only partially, let us turn to the work already mentioned, Handicraft Industries, where we do find combined tables of establishments classified according to the number of family and wage-workers. The tables are given for five industries, embracing a total of 749 establishments with 1,945 workers (op. cit., 1, pp. 59, 78 and 160; III, pp. 87 and 109). In order to analyse these data with reference to the problem we are now considering, namely, the relation between family labour and wage-labour, we must divide all the establishments into groups according to the total number of workers (for it is the total number of workers which shows the size of the workshop and the degree of co-operation in production), and determine the role of family labour and wage-labour in each group. Let us take four groups: 1) establishments with one worker; 2) establishments with two to four workers; 3) establishments with five to nine workers, and 4) establishments with ten or more workers. This division according to the total number of workers is all the more necessary, as the establishments with one worker and those with ten, for example, obviously represent entirely different economic types; to combine them and strike “averages” would be utterly absurd as we shall see later in the case of the figures given in the Sketch. Grouping the data as indicated, we get the following table:
These detailed figures fully confirm the proposition advanced above, which seemed so paradoxical at first glance, i.e., the larger the total number of workers in an establishment, the larger the number of family workers employed in it, and the more extensive, consequently, the “family co-operation”; but, at the same time, capitalist co-operation also increases, and does so far more rapidly. Despite the fact that they have a large number of family workers, the more prosperous handicraftsmen employ many additional wage-workers. “Family co-operation” is thus the pledge and foundation of capitalist co-operation.
Let us examine the data of the 1894-95 census relating to family and wage-labour. The establishments are divided according to the number of family workers as follows:
The preponderance of one-man establishments should be noted: they constitute more than half the total. Even if we were to assume that all the establishments that combine family labour with wage-labour have no more than one family worker each, we would still find that 2,5000 of them would be run by one man. These are the representatives of the most scattered producers, representatives of the most disunited small workshops—a disunity that is generally characteristic of the much-vaunted "“people’s production.” Let us take a glance at the opposite pole, the largest workshops:
Thus we see that the “small” establishments of the handicraftsmen sometimes attain imposing dimensions: nearly one-fourth of the total number of wage-workers is concentrated in the 85 largest establishments; on an average, each such establishment employs 14.6 wage-workers. These handicraftsmen are already employers, owners of capitalist establishments.[7] Co-operation on capitalist lines is widely employed in them: with 15 workers per establishment, division of labour is possible on a fairly extensive scale, there is a big saving on premises and tools, of which a larger quantity and greater variety can be used. Their purchase of raw material and the sale of the product are necessarily conducted on a large scale; this considerably reduces the cost of raw material and its delivery, facilitates sales, and makes proper commercial relations possible. When we come to consider the data on incomes we shall find confirmation of this in the 1894-95 census. At the moment it will be sufficient to mention these generally-known theoretical propositions. It should, therefore, be clear that the technical and economic features of these establishments also differ radically from those of the one-man workshops, and it is really astonishing that the Perm statisticians should nevertheless have decided to combine them and compute general “averages” from them. It may be said a priori that such averages will be absolutely fictitious, and that the analysis of the household statistics, in addition to dividing the handicraftsmen into groups and sub-groups, should also have divided them into categories based upon the number of workers per establishment (both family and wage-workers). Unless such a division is made, there can be no question of obtaining accurate data on incomes, or on the conditions of purchase of raw material and sale of products, or on the technique of production, or on the relative status of the wage-worker and the owner of the one-man establishment, or on the relation between the big and small workshops—all of which are items of the highest importance for a study of the economics of “handicraft industry.” The Perm investigators endeavour, of course, to underrate the importance of the capitalist workshops. If there are establishments with five or more family workers, they argue, that means that competition between the “capitalist” and the “handicraft form of production” (sic !) can only have significance when the number of wage-workers exceeds five per establishment, and such establishments constitute only 1% of the total. The argument is purely artificial: in the first place, establishments with five family workers and five wage-workers are a pure abstraction, resulting from an inadequate analysis of the facts, for wage-labour is combined with family labour. An establishment with three family workers will, by hiring another three workers, have more than five workers and, compared with the one-man establishments, will occupy an exceptional competitive position. Secondly, if the statisticians really wanted to investigate the question of “competition” between the various establishments, dividing them according to the number of wage-workers they employ, why did they not make use of the data of the house to-house census? Why did they not group the establishments according to the number of workers and show the size of their incomes? Would it not have been more appropriate for statisticians who had such rich material at their disposal to make a real study of the facts, instead of treating the reader to all sorts of stuff of their own invention and hastily abandoning facts in order to “do battle” with the adversaries of Narodism?
“... From the standpoint of the supporters of capitalism, this percentage may, perhaps, be considered sufficient ground for the prediction that the handicraft form must inevitably degenerate into the capitalist form; but in this respect it does not actually represent an alarming symptom at all, especially in view of the following circumstances. . .” (p. 56).
Charming, is it not? Instead of taking the trouble to sift the available material for precise data on the capitalist establishments, the authors combined them with the one-man establishments and then began to controvert imaginary “predictors”!—We do not know what these “supporters of capitalism” who are so repugnant to the Perm statisticians are likely “to predict,” but for our part we can only say that all these phrases merely cover an attempt to evade the facts. And the facts show that there is no special “handicraft form of production” (that is an invention of “handicraft” economists), that the small commodity producers give rise to large capitalist establishments (in the tables we found a handicraftsman employing 65 wage-workers!—p. 169), and that it was the investigators’ duty to group the data in such a way that we could examine this process and compare the various establishments insofar as they approximate capitalist enterprises. The Perm statisticians not only failed to do this themselves, but even deprived us of the opportunity of doing so, for in the tables all the establishments in a given sub-group are lumped together so that it is impossible to separate the factory owner from the one-man producer. The compilers cover up the omission with meaningless aphorisms. The large establishments, you see, constitute only 1% of the total, so that if they are excluded, the conclusions based on the remaining 99% will not be affected (p. 56). But this one per cent, this one-hundredth part, is not commensurate with the others! One large establishment is equal to more than 15 establishments of the one-man producers who account for over 30 “hundredths” (of the total number of establishments)! This calculation relates to the number of workers. And if we take the gross output, or net income, we shall find that one large establishment is not equal to 15, but perhaps to 30 other establishments.[8] One-fourth of all the wage-workers is concentrated in this “one-hundredth” of the establishments, an average of 14.6 workers per establishment. To give the reader some idea of the significance of this latter figure, let us take the figures given for Perm Gubernia in the Collection of Data on Factory Industry in Russia (published by the Department of Commerce and Manufactures). As the figures vary considerably from year to year, we shall take the average for seven years (1885-91). The result for Perm Gubernia is 885 “factories and works” (as understood by the official statistics), with an aggregate output of 22,645,000 rubles and a total of 13,006 wage-workers, which gives us an “average” of 14.6 workers per factory.
In confirmation of their opinion that the large establishments are of no great significance, the compilers of the Sketch refer to the fact that very few (8%) of the number of wage-workers employed by the handicraftsmen are employed by the year, the majority being piece-workers (37%), seasonal workers (30%) and day labourers (25%, p. 51). The piece-workers “usually work in their own homes with their own implements and maintain themselves,” while the day labourers are engaged “temporarily,” like agricultural labourers. That being the case, “we cannot regard the relatively large number of wage-workers as unquestionable proof that these establishments are of the capitalist type” (56). . . . “It is our conviction that neither the piece-workers, nor the day labourers in general constitute the cadres of a working class similar to the West-European proletariat; only those who work regularly throughout the year can form these cadres.”
All praise to the Perm Narodniks for their interest in the relation between the Russian wage-workers and the “West-European proletariat.” The question is an interesting one, there’s no gainsaying that! Nevertheless, from statisticians we would have preferred to hear statements based on fact, and not on “conviction.” For, after all, the mere utterance of one’s “conviction” will not always convince others. . . . Would it not have been better to give more facts, instead of telling the reader about the “convictions” of Mr. X or Mr. Y? How incredibly few facts on the position of the wage-workers, working conditions, working hours in the establishments of various size, the families of the wage-workers, etc., are given in the Sketch. If the only purpose of the argument on the difference between the Russian workers and the West-European proletariat was to hide this omission, we should have to retract our praise. . . .
All we learn about wage-workers from the Sketch is their division into four categories: annual, seasonal, piece and day workers. To get some idea of these categories, we have to turn to the data scattered throughout the book. The number of workers in each category and their earnings are given for 29 industries (out of 43). In these 29 industries there are 4,795 wage-workers, earning a total of 233,784 rubles. In all the 43 industries, there are 4,904 wage-workers with aggregate earnings amounting to 238,992 rubles. Thus, our summary embraces 98% of the wage-workers and their earnings. Here, en regard,[9] are the figures of the Sketch[10] and of our summary:
In the Sketch summary there are either mistakes or misprints. But that is by the way. The point of chief interest is the data on earnings. The earnings of the piece-workers, of whom the Sketch says that “essentially, piece-work is the nearest stage on the road to economic independence” (p. 51—also, no doubt, “according to our conviction”?), are considerably lower than those of the worker employed by the year. If the statement of the statisticians that the master usually finds board for the annual worker, whereas the piece-worker has to find his own, is based on fact and not merely on “conviction,” the difference will be even greater. The Perm master handicraftsmen have chosen a queer way to place their workers on the “road to independence”! It consists in lowering wages. . . . The fluctuations in the working season, as we shall see, are not big enough to explain this difference. Further, it is very interesting to note that a day labourer’s earnings equal 66.7% of an annual worker’s. Hence, each day labourer is occupied on an average for about eight months in the year. Obviously, it would be far more correct to refer to this as a “temporary” diversion from industry (if the day labourers are really diverted from industry of their own accord, and not because the master does not furnish them with work), than as the “predominance of the seasonal element in wage-labour” (p 52).
III “Communal-Labour Continuity”[edit source]
The data collected by the handicraft census which indicate the foundation dates of practically all the establishments investigated are of great interest. Here are the general data on the subject:
Thus, we see that the post-Reform period has stimulated a big development in handicraft industry. It seems the conditions favouring this development have been and are operating with ever-growing force as time goes on, since each succeeding decade has witnessed the opening of more and more establishments. This fact is clear evidence of the intensity with which the development of commodity production, the separation of agriculture from industry, and the growth of commerce and industry in general are proceeding among the peasantry. We say “separation of agriculture from industry,” for this separation begins earlier than the separation of the agriculturists from the industrialists: every enterprise which produces for the market gives rise to exchange between agriculturists and industrialists. Hence, the appearance of such an enterprise implies that the agriculturists cease to produce articles in their homes and purchase them in the market, and to make such purchases the peasant has to sell agricultural produce. The growing number of commercial and industrial establishments thus implies a growing social division of labour, the general basis of commodity economy and of capitalism.[12]
The opinion has been expressed in Narodnik literature that the rapid development of small production in industry since the Reform is not a phenomenon of a capitalist nature. The argument is that the growth of small production proves its strength and vitality, as compared with large-scale production (Mr. V. V.). This argument is absolutely false. The growth of small production among the peasantry signifies the appearance of new industries, the conversion of new branches of raw material processing into independent spheres of industry, progress in the social division of labour, the initial process of capitalist development, while the swallowing-up of small by large establishments implies a further step forward by capitalism, leading to the triumph of its higher forms. The spread of small establishments among the peasantry extends commodity economy and prepares the ground for capitalism (by creating petty masters and wage-labourers), while the swallowing-up of small establishments by manufactories and factories implies that big capitalism is utilising ground that has been prepared. The simultaneous existence of these two, seemingly contradictory, processes in one country actually has nothing contradictory in it: it is quite natural that in a more developed part of the country, or in a more developed sphere of industry, capitalism should progress by drawing small handicraftsmen into the mechanised factory, while in more remote regions, or in backward branches of industry, the process of capitalist development is only in its initial stage and manifests itself in the appearance of new branches and new industries. Capitalist manufacture “conquers but partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate basis (Hintergrund ). If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere. . .” (Das Kapital, I2, S. 779).[13]
The figures showing the dates the establishments were founded are also inadequately treated in the Sketch : all the information given is for uyezds, and not for groups or sub-groups; nor is there any other grouping (according to size of establishment, whether located in the centre of the industry or in the surrounding villages, etc.). Although they did not analyse the census data in accordance with their own system of groups and sub-groups, the Perm Narodniks here too found it necessary to treat the reader to sermons that are amazing for their ultra-Narodnik unctuousness and . . . absurdity. The Perm statisticians have made the discovery that in the “handicraft form of production” there prevails a specific “form of continuity” of establishments, namely, “communal-labour continuity,” whereas the system that prevails in capitalist industry is “property-inheritance continuity,” and that “communal-labour continuity organically converts the wage-worker into an independent master” (sic !), which finds expression in the fact that when the owner of an establishment dies and there are no family workers among the heirs, the industry passes to another family, “perhaps to that of a wage-worker employed in the very same establishment,” and also in the fact that “community land tenure guarantees the labour industrial independence of both the owner of a handicraft industrial establishment and his wage-worker” (pp. 7, 68, et al.).
We have no doubt that this “communal-labour principle of continuity in the handicraft industries,” as invented by the Perm Narodniks, will occupy a fitting place in the history of literature, alongside the sentimental theory of “people’s production” propounded by Messrs. V. V., N.-on, and others. Both theories are of the same mould, both embellish and distort the truth with the help of Manilovian phrases. Everybody knows that the establishments, materials, tools, etc., of the handicraftsmen are private property which is transmitted by inheritance, and not by some sort of communal law; that the village community in no way guarantees independence even in agriculture, let alone industry, and that the same economic struggle and exploitation goes on within the community as outside it. What has been turned into the special theory of the “communal-labour principle” is the simple fact that the small master, owning very little capital, has to work himself, and that the wage-worker may become a master (if he is thrifty and abstemious, of course); examples of this are cited in the Sketch on p. 69. . . . All the theoreticians of the petty bourgeoisie have always consoled themselves with the fact that in small production a worker may become a master, and none of their ideals have ever gone beyond the conversion of the workers into small masters. The Sketch even makes an attempt to cite “statistical data confirming the principle of communal-labour continuity” (45). These data relate to the tanning industry. Out of 129 establishments, 90 (i.e., 70%) have been founded since 1870; yet in 1869 there were 161 handicraft tanneries (according to the “list of inhabited places”), while in 1895 there were 153. That is to say, tanneries have been transferred from some families to others—and this is regarded as the “principle of communal-labour continuity.” It would be absurd, of course, to argue against this anxiety to detect some special “principle” in the fact that small establishments are easily opened and just as easily shut down, freely pass from one hand to another, and so on. Let us only add, with regard to the tanning industry in particular, that, firstly, the dates of origin of the establishments indicate that this industry developed far more slowly than the other industries, and that, secondly, it is absolutely useless to compare 1869 with 1895, for the term “handicraft tannery” is constantly confused with the term “leather factory.” In the 1860s the overwhelming majority of the “leather factories” in Perm Gubernia (according to the factory statistics) had an output valued at less than 1,000 rubles (see the Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Part I, St. Petersburg, 1869. Tables and notes); in the 1890s establishments with an output of less than 1,000 rubles were, on the one hand, excluded from the list of factories, and the list of “handicraft tanneries,” on the other, happened to include many establishments with an output of over 1,000 rubles, some even with an out put of 5,000 rubles, 10,000 rubles and more (Sketch, p. 70, and pp. 149 and 150 of the tables). What is the use of comparing data for 1869 and 1895 when no definite distinction is made between handicraft and factory-type tanneries? Thirdly, even if it were true that the number of tanneries has decreased, might this not mean that many small establishments have been closed down and that larger establishments have been gradually opened in their place? Are we to believe that such a “change” also confirms the “principle of communal-labour continuity”?
And the crowning incongruity is that all this sugary talk about the “communal-labour principle,” the “guarantee of communal-labour independence,” and the like, refers to the tanning industry, where the agriculturist handicraftsmen represent the purest type of petty bourgeois (see below), an industry which is highly concentrated in three large establishments (factories) that have been included in the list side, by side with the one-man handicraft and artisan establishments. Here are the figures showing this concentration:
In all, there are 148 establishments in this industry. Workers: 267 family + 172 wage-workers = 439; aggregate output = 151,022 rubles; net income = 26,207 rubles. Among these establishments there are 3 with 0 family workers + 65 wage-workers = 65. Value of output = 44,275 rubles; net income = 3,391 rubles (p. 70 of the text, and pp. 149 and 150 of the tables).
In other words, in three establishments out of 148 (“only 2.1%,” as the Sketch reassuringly puts it—p. 76) there is a concentration of nearly one-third of the total output of the “handicraft tanning industry,” yielding their owners thousands of rubles of income without their taking any part in production. We shall encounter many similar incongruities in relation to other industries, too. But in describing this industry, the authors of the Sketch paused, by way of exception, to discuss the three establishments mentioned. With regard to one of them we are told that the owner (an agriculturist!) “is apparently occupied exclusively in commerce, having his leather shops in the village of Beloyarskoye and the city of Ekaterinburg” (pp.76-77). This is a specimen of how capital invested in production combines with capital invested in commerce—a fact that should be noted by the authors of the Sketch, who depict “kulakdom” and commercial operations as something adventitious, divorced from production! In another establishment, the family consists of five males, not one of whom works at the trade “the father is engaged in commercial operations connected with his industry, and the sons (varying in age from 18 to 53), all of them educated, have apparently taken to other and more congenial pursuits than transferring hides from one vat to another and washing them” (p. 77). The authors magnanimously concede that these establishments are “capitalist in character”—“but how far the future of these enterprises is ensured on the principle of transmission as inherited property is a question to which only the future can give its decisive answer” (76). How profound! “The future is a question to which only the future can give an answer.” The sacred truth! But does it warrant a distortion of the present?
ARTICLE TWO[edit source]
IV The Agriculture of “Handicraftsmen”[edit source]
The house-to-house census of master handicraftsmen, big and small, provide very interesting data on the agriculture they engage in. Here are the figures, divided according to the sub-groups, as given in the Sketch:
We thus see that the more prosperous the handicraftsmen are as industrialists, the more prosperous they are as agriculturists. The lower they rank in production, the lower they rank in agriculture. The handicraft census data, therefore, fully confirm the opinion already expressed in literature, namely, that the differentiation of the handicraftsmen in industry goes hand in hand with their differentiation as peasants in agriculture (A. Volgin, The Substantiation of Narodism, etc., pp. 211, et. seq.). As the wage-workers employed by the handicraftsmen are on an even lower (or not higher) level than the handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up, we are entitled to conclude that the proportion of impoverished agriculturists among them is even higher. The house-to-house census, as we have already said, did not cover the wage-workers. At any rate, even the figures cited clearly show how ludicrous is the assertion in the Sketch that “community land tenure guarantees the labour industrial independence of both the owner of a handicraft industrial establishment and his wage-worker.”
The absence of detailed information on the agricultural activity of the one-man producers and small and large masters is very acutely felt in the data now under examination. To fill the gap, if only partially, we must turn to the data for the separate industries; sometimes in the Sketch we come across information on the number of agricultural labourers employed by masters,[16] but no general summary is given.
Take the tanner agriculturists—131 households. They employ 124 agricultural labourers, they cultivate 16.9 dessiatines and possess 4.6 horses per household; they have 4.1 cows each (p. 71). The wage-workers (73 annual and 51 seasonal) receive 2,492 rubles in wages, or 20.1 rubles each, whereas the average wage of a worker in the tanning industry is 52 rubles. Here too, therefore, we observe the phenomenon common to all capitalist countries—the status of the agricultural labourer is lower than that of the industrial labourer. The “handicraft” tanners obviously represent the purest type of peasant bourgeoisie, and the celebrated “combination of industry with agriculture” so highly praised by the Narodniks is nothing more than the prosperous owners of commercial and industrial establishments transferring capital from commerce and industry to agriculture, and paying their farm labourers incredibly low wages.[17]
Take the handicraft oil-millers. The agriculturists among them number 173. A household, on the average, cultivates 10.1 dessiatines and possesses 3.5 horses and 3.3 cows. There is no household without at least one horse and a cow. Together, they employ 98 labourers (annual and seasonal) who receive in wages a total of 3,438 rubles, or an average of 35.1 rubles each. “The refuse, or oil-cake that remains after the milling process, serves as excellent cattle feed, thanks to which it is possible to manure the fields on a larger scale. Thus the household derives a triple advantage from the industry: the income from the industry itself, the income from livestock, and a higher yield from the fields” (164). “Agriculture is carried on by them” (the oil-millers) “on a wide scale, and many of them, not contenting themselves with the community allotments they get, also rent land from the poor households” (168). The data showing the distribution of flax and hemp growing by uyezds reveal “a certain connection between the area under flax and hemp and the distribution of the oil-milling industry among the uyezds of the gubernia” (170).
Hence, the commercial and industrial enterprises in this case are those known as technical agricultural industries, the development of which is always characteristic of the progress of commercial and capitalist agriculture.
Take the flour-millers. Most of them engage in agriculture—385 out of 421. A household, on the average, cultivates 11.0 dessiatines and possesses 3.0 horses and 3.5 cows. They employ 307 workers who are also agriculturists and who receive wages totalling 6,211 rubles. Like the oil-milling industry, “flour-milling serves the millers as a means of marketing the produce of their own farms in the most profitable form” (178).
These examples, we think, should be quite sufficient to show how absurd it is to regard the term “handicraftsman agriculturist” as signifying something homogeneous and uniform. All the agriculturists we have cited are representatives of the agricultural petty bourgeoisie, and to combine these types with the rest of the peasantry, including even the ruined households, is to obscure the most characteristic features of reality.
In the concluding part of their description of the oil-milling industry, the compilers try to argue against the “capitalist doctrine” that the stratification of the peasants is capitalist evolution. This proposition, they claim, is based on the “absolutely arbitrary assertion that this stratification is a factor of most recent times and is an obvious symptom of the rapid de facto spread of the capitalist règime among the peasantry despite the existence of de jure community land tenure” (176). The compilers argue that the village community has never precluded property stratifications, but it “does not perpetuate them, does not give rise to classes”; “these transitory stratifications have not become more marked with the lapse of time, but, on the contrary, have been gradually obliterated” (177). Naturally, such an assertion, in substantiation of which the artels (of which more anon, § VII), family divisions (sic !) and land redivisions (!) are cited, can only evoke a smile. To say that the claim that differentiation of the peasantry is growing and spreading is an “arbitrary” one, means to ignore well-known facts: peasants lose their horses and abandon the land on a mass scale and this is coupled with “technical progress in peasant farming” (cf. Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming by Mr. V. V.); the increase in the letting and mortgaging of allotments is coupled with increased land renting; the increase in the number of commercial and industrial establishments is coupled with an increase in the number of migratory industrialists, i.e., vagrant wage-workers; etc. etc.
The house-to-house census should have provided a wealth of material on the highly interesting question of how the incomes and earnings of the agriculturist handicraftsmen compare with the incomes of the non-agriculturists. All the data on this subject are to be found in the tables, but the Sketch gives no summary, and we have had to compile one from the material contained in the book. This summary was based, firstly, on those given in the Sketch for the individual industries. All we had to do in this case was to add together the data for the various industries. But such summaries are not given in tabular form for all industries. In some cases it was clear that mistakes or misprints had crept in—which is only natural in the absence of check totals. Secondly, the summary was based on a selection of figures contained in the descriptions of certain industries. Thirdly, where neither of these sources was available, we had to turn directly to the tables (for example, in the case of the last industry: “mining”). It goes without saying that owing to this diversity in the character of the material contained in our summary, mistakes and inaccuracies were bound to have crept in. Nevertheless, we believe that although the grand totals of our summary do not coincide with the totals of the table, the deductions drawn from it may fully serve their purpose, for whatever corrections might be introduced, the average magnitudes and proportions (and it is these alone that we use for our deductions) would be but slightly changed. For example, according to the totals of the tables in the Sketch, the gross income per worker is 134.8 rubles, and according to our summary it is 133.3 rubles; the net income per family worker is 69.0 rubles and 68.0 rubles respectively; the earnings per wage-worker are 48.7 rubles and 48.6 rubles respectively.
Here are the results of our summary showing gross income, net income, and the earnings of wage-workers in each group and sub-group (see table on page _).
The chief results of this tabulation are as follows:
1) The non-agricultural industrial population takes an incomparably bigger part in industry (relative to their numbers) than the agricultural population. The number of non-agriculturist workers is less than half the number of agriculturist workers. But they account for nearly half the gross output: 1,276,772 rubles out of a total of 2,655,007 rubles, or 48.1%. As regards income from production, that is, the net income of the masters plus the workers’ wages, the non-agriculturists even surpass the agriculturists, accounting for 647,666 rubles out of a total of 1,260,335 rubles, or 51.4%. Consequently, we find that, while they are a minority in numbers, the non-agricultural industrialists do not lag behind the agriculturists in volume of output. This fact is of great importance when we come to judge the traditional Narodnik theory that agriculture is the “main foundation” of so-called handicraft industry.
From this, other conclusions follow naturally:
2) The gross output per non-agriculturist worker (gross income) is considerably higher than that of the agriculturist: 192.2 rubles as against 103.8 rubles, or nearly twice as much. As we shall see later, the working season of the non-agriculturists is longer than that of the agriculturists, but the difference is by no means so very great, so that the higher labour productivity of the non-agriculturists is beyond all doubt. This difference is smallest in the third sub-group—the handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up—which is quite natural.
3) The net income of the non-agriculturist masters, big and small, is more than double that of the agriculturists: 113.0 rubles, as against 47.1 rubles (nearly two-and-a-half times as much). This difference is to be observed in all the sub groups, but it is the biggest in the first, among the handicraftsmen who produce for the market. It goes without saying that this difference is least of all to be explained by the difference in the length of working periods. There can be no doubt that it is due to the fact that the tie with the land lowers the incomes of the industrialists ; the market discounts the incomes derived by the handicraftsmen from agriculture, and the agriculturists have to content themselves with lower earnings. This is probably aggravated by the fact that the agriculturists suffer bigger losses on sales, spend more for materials and are more dependent on the merchants. In any case, it is a fact that the handicraftsman’s tie with the land reduces his earnings. There is no need to say more about the enormous significance of this fact which throws a true light on the meaning of the “power of the soil” in modern society. We need only recall what a tremendous factor low earnings are in preserving methods of production that are primitive and entail bondage, in retarding the use of machinery, and in lowering the workers’ standard of living.[18]
4) The wages of non-agriculturist wage-workers are also everywhere higher than those of agriculturists, but the difference is by no means as great as in the case of the incomes of the masters. Generally, in all three sub-groups, the wage-worker employed by the agriculturist handicraftsman earns an average of 43.0 rubles, while the wage-worker employed by the non-agriculturist earns 57.8 rubles, or one third more. This difference may to a large extent (but not entirely ) be due to the difference in the length of the working season. As to the relation between this difference and the tie with the land, we cannot form a judgement, for we have no data on agriculturist and non-agriculturist wage-workers. Apart from the length of the working season, the difference in the level of requirements, of course, also plays its part.
5) The difference between the size of the masters’ incomes and workers’ wages is incomparably larger in the case of the non-agriculturists than in that of the agriculturists: taking all three sub-groups, the income of a non-agriculturist master is almost double a worker’s wages (113 rubles and 57.8 rubles respectively), whereas among the agriculturists the income of the master is only slightly higher—4.1 rubles more (47.1 and 43.0)! If these figures are astonishing, even more so are those relating to the agriculturist artisans (I, 2), where the income of the master is less than a worker’s wages! But the reason for this will become quite clear later, when we cite data showing the tremendous difference between the size of incomes in large and small establishments. By increasing productivity of labour, the large establishments make it possible to pay wages exceeding the income of the poor, individual handicraftsmen working alone, whose “independence,” in view of their subjection to the market, is quite fictitious. This vast difference between the incomes of the large and the small establishments is to be observed in both groups, but much more so in the case of the agriculturists (due to the more depressed state of the small handicraftsmen). The negligible difference between the income of the small master and the wages of the worker clearly shows that the income of the small agriculturist handicraftsman who employs no wage-workers is not higher, and often even lower than the wages of a hired worker. As a matter of fact, the net income of the master (47.1 rubles per family worker) is the average for all establishments, large and small, for both the owners of factories and of one-man workshops. Naturally, in the case of the big masters, the difference between their net income and the wages of their workers is not 4 rubles, but anything from ten to one hundred times as much, which means that the income of the small one-man workshop is considerably be low 47 rubles; in other words, this income is not higher, but often even lower than the wages of a worker. Handicraft census data on the division of establishments according to net income (see below, § V) fully bear out this seemingly paradoxical conclusion. But these data relate to all the establishments in general, to agriculturists and non-agriculturists alike, and that is why this deduction from the above table is so important: we have learnt that it is the agriculturists whose earnings are lowest, in other words, that “the tie with the land” greatly reduces earnings.
We have already said, when discussing the difference between the incomes of the agriculturists and the non-agriculturists, that this difference cannot be explained by the difference in the length of the working periods. Let us now examine the census data on this subject. One of the items in the census programme, as we learn from the “introduction,” was the investigation of the “intensity of production through out the year, on the basis of the number of family members and wage-workers engaged in production each month” (p. 14). Since this was a house-to-house census, in other words, since each establishment was investigated separately (unfortunately, a specimen of the house-to-house census forms is not appended to the Sketch ), it must be assumed that information regarding the number of workers engaged each month, or the number of working months in the year, was gathered in the case of each establishment. In the Sketch these data are gathered in one table (pp. 57 and 58), in which the number of workers (family and wage-workers together) engaged in each month of the year is given for each of the sub-groups of both groups.
The attempt of the 1894-95 handicraft census to determine with such precision how many months in the year the handicraftsmen work is highly instructive and interesting. Indeed, without such information the data on incomes and earnings would be incomplete, and the statistical calculations would be only approximate. But, unfortunately, the data on working periods have been very scantily analysed: apart from this general table, all we are given is information on the number of workers engaged each month in only a few industries, sometimes divided according to groups, sometimes not; division according to sub-groups has not been made for any industry. The separation of the large establishments from the small would have been particularly valuable in this instance, for we have every reason to expect—both a priori and on the basis of data provided by other investigators of handicraft industry—that the working periods of the big and the small handicraftsmen are not the same. Furthermore, the table itself on page 57 is apparently not free from mistakes or misprints (for example, in the months February, August and November; columns 2 and 3 of Group II have evidently been mixed up, for the number of workers in the third sub-group is larger than in the second). Even when these inaccuracies are corrected (and the corrections are sometimes only approximate), the table gives rise to no little misgiving, which renders the use of it risky. For instance, when we examine the data in the table by sub-groups, we find that in the third sub-group (Group I) the maximum number of workers, 2,911, are engaged in December. Yet, according to the Sketch, the total number of workers in the third sub-group is 2,551. Similarly, in the third sub-group of Group II: maximum number of workers 3,221, actual number 3,077. On the other hand, in the sub-groups the maxima engaged in one of the months are less than the actual number of workers. How is this to be explained? Is it because information on this subject was not gathered for all the establishments? That is very likely, although there is no hint of it in the Sketch. In the case of the second sub-group of Group II, not only is the maximum number of workers (February) larger than the actual number (1,882 and 1,163 respectively), but even the average number of workers engaged in one month (i.e., the quotient obtained by dividing the total number of workers engaged in the twelve months by 12) is higher than the actual number of workers (1,265 and 1,163 respectively)!! Which figure, one asks, did the registrars regard as actual: the average number of workers for the year, the average for some period (winter, say), or the number actually employed in some particular month? An investigation of the monthly number of workers engaged in the separate industries does not help to clear up the puzzle. In the majority of the twenty-three industries for which this information is furnished, the maximum number of workers engaged in any one month of the year is less than the actual number of workers. In the case of two industries, the maximum is higher than the actual number of workers: in the copper-working industry (239 and 233 respectively) and in the forges (Group II—1,811 and 1,269 respectively). The maximum is equal to the actual number of workers in the case of two industries (rope-making and oil-milling, Group II).
This being the case, we cannot use the data showing the number of workers engaged month by month for a comparison with their earnings, with the actual number of workers employed, etc. All that remains is to treat these data regard less of others, and to compare the maximum and the minimum numbers of workers engaged in each month. This is what is done in the Sketch, but the separate months are compared. We consider it more correct to compare winter and summer; for that will enable us to determine how far agriculture diverts workers from industry. We took the average number of workers engaged in winter (October to March) as the standard, and, applying this standard to the number of workers engaged in summer, we arrived at the number of summer working months. By adding up the number of winter and summer months we got the number of working months in the year. Let us illustrate this by an example. In the first sub-group of Group I there were 18,060 workers engaged in the six winter months, which gives us an average of (18,060 : 6 =) 3,010 workers in one month. In the summer, 12,345 workers were employed; in other words, the summer working season is equal to (12,345 : 3,010) 4.1 months. Hence, the working period in the first sub-group of Group I amounts to 10.1 months in the year.
This method of analysing the data seemed to us both the most correct and the most convenient. It is the most correct, because it is based on a comparison of winter and summer months, and hence, on an exact determination of the extent to which agriculture diverts workers from industry. That the winter months have been correctly taken is confirmed by the fact that in the October-March period the number of workers in both groups is higher than the average for the year. There is the greatest increase in the number of workers from September to October, and the greatest decrease from March to April. Incidentally, the choice of other months would have had little effect on the conclusions. We consider the method chosen to be the most suitable because it gives an exact figure for the working period which allows us to compare the groups and sub-groups in this respect.
Here are the data obtained by this method:
These figures lead us to conclude that the difference between the working periods for agriculturists and non-agriculturists is very small : that of the non-agriculturists is only 5% longer. The smallness of this difference gives rise to doubt as to the correctness of the figures. In order to verify them, we have made some calculations and summaries of material scattered throughout the book and have arrived at the following results:
The Sketch furnishes data on the monthly employment of workers in 23 of the 43 industries, the data are given according to groups in the case of 12 (13)[19] of them but not in the case of the remaining 10 groups. We find that in three of the industries (pitch and tar, dyeing and brick-making) the number of workers is higher in summer than in winter: in the six winter months only 1,953 workers are engaged in all three industries as against 4,918 in the six summer months. In these industries there is a great preponderance of agriculturists over non-agriculturists, the former constituting 85.9% of the total number of workers. It was obviously quite wrong to combine these, so to speak, summer industries with the others in the grand totals for groups, as that meant combining unlike things and artificially raising the number of summer workers in all industries. There are two ways of correcting the error which results from this. The first is to deduct the figures for these three industries from the totals given in the Sketch for Groups I and II.[20] The result is a working period of 9.6 months for Group I, and of 10.4 months for Group II. Here the difference between the two groups is bigger, but still very small–8.3%. The second method of correcting the error is to combine the figures for the twelve industries for which the Sketch gives information on the monthly employment of workers in Groups I and II separately. This will embrace 70% of the total number of handicraftsmen, and, what is more, the comparison between Groups I and II will be more correct. We find that in the case of these twelve industries the working period in Group I is only 8.9 months, and in Group II, 10.7 months, while for the two groups together it is 9.7 months. The working period of the non-agriculturists is now 20.2% longer than that of the agriculturists. The agriculturists do not work for 3.1 months in summer, the non-agriculturists for only 1.3 months. Even if we take the maximum difference in the working periods in Groups II and I as the standard, we shall find that not only the differences in the gross output of the workers of Groups I and II, or in the net incomes of their establishments, but even the differences in the wages of agriculturist and non-agriculturist wage-workers cannot be explained by the difference in the length of the working periods. Consequently, the conclusion drawn above, namely, that the tie with the land reduces the handicraftsmen’s earnings, remains fully valid.
We must therefore conclude that the compilers of the Sketch are mistaken in their desire to explain the difference between the earnings of the agriculturists and non-agriculturists by the difference in the length of the working periods. Their mistake was due to their not attempting to express the differences in the working periods by exact figures, and this led them astray. For example, on page 106 of the Sketch it is stated that the difference between the earnings of the agriculturist and the non-agriculturist furriers “is chiefly determined by the number of working days devoted to industry.” Yet the earnings of the non-agriculturists in this industry are from two to four times greater than those of the agriculturists (65 and 280 rubles respectively per family worker in the first sub-group, and 27 and 62 rubles in the second sub-group), whereas the working period of the non-agriculturists is longer by only 28.7% (8.5 months as compared with 6.6).
The fact that the tie with the land lowers earnings could not escape the attention even of the compilers of the Sketch ; but they expressed it in the usual Narodnik formula on the “superiority” of the handicraft to the capitalist form: “by combining agriculture with industry, the handicraftsman . . . is able to sell his wares cheaper than those of the factory” (p. 4); in other words, he can manage on smaller earnings. But where is the “superiority” of the tie with the land, if the market already so dominates the whole of the country’s industrial life that it discounts this tie by lowering the earnings of the agriculturist handicraftsman: if capital can take advantage of this “tie” to exert greater pressure on the agriculturist handicraftsman, who is less able to defend his interests, to choose a different master, a different customer, or a different occupation? The lowering of wages (and of industrial earnings in general) when the worker (or the small industrialist) has a plot of land is something common to all capitalist countries, and is perfectly well known to all employers who have long ago appreciated the vast “superiority” of workers tied to the land. Only in the decadent West do they bluntly call a spade a spade, but in our country the lowering of wages, the lowering of the living standard of the working population, the delay in introducing machinery, and the perpetuation of all sorts of bondage is referred to as the “superiority” of “people’s production,” which “combines agriculture with industry.”. . .
In concluding our review of the 1894-95 census data on the working period, we cannot refrain from once again expressing our regret that the data obtained have been so incompletely analysed, nor from voicing the hope that this defect will not deter other investigators of this interesting problem. One cannot but admit that the method of investigation—determination of the number of workers employed each month—was very well chosen. Above we have given data for the working period by groups and sub-groups. There was some possibility of verifying the data for the groups. But it is utterly impossible to verify the data for the sub-groups, since the book furnishes absolutely no information on the differences in the length of the working period in the various sub-groups. Therefore, in citing these data, we make the reservation that we cannot guarantee their absolute reliability; and if we draw further conclusions, it is only for the purpose of raising this question and drawing the investigators’ attention to it. The most important conclusion is that the smallest difference in the working periods in Groups I and II is in the first sub-group (only 1% in all: 10.1 months and 10.0 months); in other words, It is the most prosperous handicraftsmen and the biggest and wealthiest agriculturists who are least diverted from agriculture. The difference is largest in the case of the artisans (second sub-group: 9.5 months and 10.4 months), that is, the industrialists and middle agriculturists least affected by commodity production. It would appear that the prosperous agriculturists are diverted so little from agriculture either because of their larger families or their greater exploitation of wage-labour in industry or their hiring of agricultural labourers, and that the artisans are most diverted from agriculture because they have been less differentiated as agriculturists, have retained patriarchal relations to a great extent, and work directly for agricultural customers who reduce their orders in the summer.[21]
The “tie with agriculture,” the census reveals, has a very marked influence on the literacy of the handicraftsmen;—literacy among wage-labourers has unfortunately not been investigated. It appears that the non-agricultural population[22] is far more literate than the agricultural, and this feature is to be observed for both men and women in all sub-groups without exception. Here are the census figures (in percentages) on this subject in extenso (p. 62):
It is interesting to note that in the case of the non-agricultural population literacy is spreading far more rapidly among the women than among the men. The proportion of literate males in Group II is 1 ½ to 2 times as great as in Group I, while the proportion of literate females is 2 ½ to 5 ¾ times as great.
Summarising the conclusions drawn from the 1894-95 census on the subject of “agriculture connected with industry,” we may take it as demonstrated that the tie with agriculture:
1) preserves the most backward forms of industry and retards economic development;
2) reduces the handicraftsmen’s earnings and income, so that the most prosperous sub-groups of agriculturist masters earn, in general and on the average, less than the least prosperous non-agriculturist sub-groups of wage-workers, to say nothing of the non-agriculturist masters. The masters of Group I have very low incomes even when compared with the wage-workers of that group—sometimes they are slightly higher and sometimes even lower than the workers’ wages.
3) retards the cultural development of the population whose consumption level is lower than that of the non-agriculturists and whose standard of literacy is far behind that of the latter.
These conclusions will be useful later for our assessment of the Narodnik programme of industrial policy.
4) Differentiation among the agriculturist handicraftsmen is seen to run parallel to that of the industrialists. The higher (more prosperous) categories of agriculturists constitute a pure type of peasant bourgeoisie who employ regular and day labourers to run their farms.
5) The working period of the agriculturists is shorter than that of the non-agriculturists, but the difference is very small (5% to 20%).
V Large and Small Establishments.—The Incomes of the Handicraftsmen[edit source]
We must dwell in greater detail on the data of the 1894-95 census on incomes from handicrafts. The attempt to collect household data on incomes is very instructive, and it would be quite wrong to confine ourselves to general “averages” for the sub-groups (given above). We have already, on more than one occasion, referred to the fictitious nature of “averages” derived by adding together individual handicraftsmen and owners of big establishments and then dividing the total obtained by the number of the components. Let us endeavour to assemble the data contained in the Sketch on this subject in order to illustrate this method clearly and prove its fictitious nature and to demonstrate that in scientific investigations and in analysing house-to-house census data handicraftsmen must be grouped in categories according to number of workers (family and wage-workers) employed in the workshop, and all the census data arranged in accordance with these categories.
The compilers of the Sketch must have noted the all too obvious fact of higher incomes in the big establishments, and tried to minimise its significance. Instead of giving precise census data on the large establishments (which they could have selected with no difficulty), they again confined themselves to general discussions, arguments and inventions against conclusions which the Narodniks find unpleasant. Let us examine these arguments.
“If in such” (big) “establishments we meet with a family income disproportionately larger than that of the small establishments, we must not lose sight of the fact that a considerable part of this income is mainly the reproduction of the value, firstly, of a certain portion of the fixed capital transmitted to the product, secondly, of the labour and expenses connected with commerce and transport which play no part in production, and, thirdly, of the value of food supplied to wage-workers who receive their board from the masters. These facts” (facts, indeed!) “limit the possibility of certain illusions arising which give an exaggerated notion of the advantages of wage-labour in handicraft industry or, what amounts to the same thing, of the capitalist element” (p. 15). That it is highly desirable in all investigations “to limit” the possibility of illusions is something which nobody, of course, doubts, but for this it is necessary to combat “illusions” by means of facts, facts taken from the household census, and not by citing one’s own opinions, which are themselves sometimes mere “illusions.” Is not, indeed, the authors’ argument about commercial and transport expenses an illusion? Who does not know that these expenses per unit of product are far smaller for the big producer than the small producer,[23] that the former buys his material cheaper and sells his product dearer, knowing how (and being in a position) to choose time and place? The handicraft census, too, mentions these generally known facts—cf. pp. 204 and 263, for example—and one cannot but regret that the Sketch contains no facts about expenses on the purchase of raw materials and the sale of the product by big and small industrialists, by handicraftsmen and buyers up. Further, as regards the wear and tear of fixed capital, here again the authors, while combating illusions, are themselves the victims of an illusion. Theory tells us that large expenditures on fixed capital diminish the part of the value per unit of product that represents wear and tear and is transmitted to the product. “An analysis and comparison of the prices of commodities produced by handicrafts or manufactures, and of the prices of the same commodities produced by machinery, shows generally that, in the product of machinery, the value due to the instruments of labour increases relatively, but decreases absolutely. In other words, its absolute amount decreases, but its amount, relatively to the total value of the product, of a pound of yarn, for instance, increases” (Das Kapital, I<2, S. 406).[24] The census also reckoned the costs of production, which include (p. 14, point 7) “repair of tools and fixtures.” What reason is there to believe that omissions in the registration of this point are to be met with more frequently among the big than among the small masters? Would not rather the contrary be the case? As to board provided for wage-workers, there are no facts on this point in the Sketch at all: we do not know exactly how many workers board with their masters, how frequent are the omissions in the census on this point, how often agriculturist masters feed their wage-workers with produce from their farms, and how often the masters entered the workers’ board under expenditure on production. Similarly, no facts on the inequality in the length of the working period in the big and the small establishments are given. We do not deny that the working period in the big establishments is very likely longer than in the small ones, but, firstly, the differences in income are out of all proportion to the differences in the length of the working period; and, secondly, it remains to be stated that the Perm statisticians have been unable to offer a single weighty argument, based on precise data, against the precise facts of the house-to-house census (given below), and in support of the Narodnik “illusions.”
We have obtained the data for the large and small establishments in the following way: we examined the tables appended to the Sketch, noted the large establishments (wherever they could be picked out, that is, wherever they were not lumped together with the mass of establishments in a general total), and compared them with the general totals given in the Sketch for all the establishments of the same group and sub-group. This question is so important that we hope the reader will not reproach us for the numerous tables we give below: in tables the facts stand out more saliently and compactly.
Felt-boot industry:
Thus, the “average” income per family worker, 75 rubles, was obtained by adding together incomes of 222 rubles and 41 rubles. It appears that, after deducting the ten large establishments[25] with 14 family workers, the remaining establishments show a net income that is below the wages of a wage-worker (41.2 against 45.6 rubles), while in the large establishments wages are still higher. The productivity of labour in the large establishments is more than double (168.0 and 82.4 rubles), the earnings of a wage-worker nearly double (53 rubles and 28 rubles), while the net income is five times higher (222 and 41 rubles). Obviously, no talk about differences in the working period or any other argument can eliminate the fact that the big establishments have the highest labour productivity[26] and the highest income, while the small handicraftsmen, for all their “independence” (first sub-group: those who work independently for the market) and their tie with the land (Group I), earn less than wage-workers.
In the carpentry trade the “net income” of the first sub-group of Group I “averages” 37.4 rubles per family worker, whereas the average earnings of a wage-worker in the same sub-group are 56.9 rubles (p. 131). It is impossible to pick out the big establishments from the tables, but it can scarcely be doubted that this “average” income per family worker was obtained by combining the highly profitable establishments employing wage-workers (who, after all, are not paid 56 rubles for nothing) with the dwarf workshops of the small “independent” handicraftsmen, who get much less than a wage-worker.
Next comes the bast-matting industry:
Thus, almost half the total output is concentrated in eleven of the ninety-nine establishments. In them, productivity of labour is more than double; the wages of the workers are also higher; and net income is more than six times the “average” and nearly ten times as high as that of the others, i.e., the smaller establishments. The latter have incomes but slightly higher than a worker’s wages (34 and 26 rubles respectively).
Rope and string industry[27] :
Thus, here too the general “averages” show a higher income for the family workers than for the wage-workers (90 against 65.6 rubles). But 4 of the 58 establishments account for over half the total output. In these establishments (capitalist manufactories of the pure type)[28] productivity of labour is almost three times the average (800 and 286 rubles) and over five times that of the remaining, i.e., smaller, establishments (800 and 146 rubles). Workers’ wages are much higher in the factories than in the small masters’ workshops (84 and 45 rubles). The net income of the manufacturers is over 1,000 rubles per family as compared with the “average” of 90 rubles and with the 60.5 rubles of the small handicraftsmen. The income of the small handicraftsman is, therefore, lower than a worker’s wages (60.5 and 65.6 rubles).
The pitch and tar industry:
Although this industry is, in general, a small one that employs very few wage-workers (20%) we again find the same purely capitalist phenomenon of the superiority of the large (relatively large) establishments of the independent handicraftsmen in the agricultural group. And yet pitch and tar production is a purely peasant, “people’s” industry! In the large establishments labour productivity is over three times, workers’ wages about one-and-a-half times and net income about eight times the “average”; their net income, moreover, is ten times as high as that of other handicraft families who earn no more than the average wage-worker, and less than a wage-worker in the larger establishments. Let us note that pitch and tar production is chiefly a summer occupation, so that differences in the working period cannot be very great.[29]
The baking industry:
Thus, here again, the averages for the entire sub-group are absolutely fictitious. The large establishments (of small capitalists) account for over half the total output, yield a net income six times the average and 14 times that of the small masters, and pay their workers wages exceeding the incomes of the small handicraftsmen. We do not mention productivity of labour; three or four of the large establishments produce a more valuable product—treacle.
The pottery industry. Here again we have a typical small peasant industry with an insignificant number of wage-workers (13%), very small establishments (less than two workers per establishment) and a predominance of agriculturists. And here too we get the same picture:
Here, consequently, it is at once apparent from the “average” figures that the wage-worker’s earnings are higher than the family worker’s income. By treating the large establishments separately, we get the explanation of this contradiction, which we have already recorded in numerous instances. In the large establishments labour productivity, wages and masters’ incomes are all incomparably higher, while the small handicraftsmen get less than the wage-workers and less than half the earnings of the wage-workers in the best-organised shops.
The brick industry:
Thus, here too, the “average” income of a family worker is lower than the earnings of a wage-worker. Here again it is to be explained by combining the big establishments—which are distinguished by a considerably higher labour productivity, higher payment of wage-workers, and a very high (comparatively) income—and the small establishments, the income of whose owners is about half the earnings of the wage-workers in the big establishments.
We might go on citing figures for other industries too,[30] but we think that those given are more than enough.
Let us now summarise the conclusions that follow from the facts examined:
1) The combining of large and small establishments results in absolutely fictitious “average” figures, which give no conception of the real state of affairs, obscure cardinal differences, and present as homogeneous something that is heterogeneous, of mixed composition.
2) The data for a number of industries show that the large establishments (where a large number of workers are engaged) are distinguished from the average and small establishments:
a) by an incomparably higher productivity of labour;
b) by better payment of wage-workers, and
c) by a far higher net income.
3) All the large establishments we have selected, without exception, employ wage-labour on an incomparably larger scale (than the average-sized establishments in the given industry), the proportion of wage-labour being substantially greater than that of family labour. The value of their output is as much as 10,000 rubles, while the number of wage-workers employed is ten and more per establishment. These large establishments, therefore, represent capitalist workshops. The census data consequently reveal the prevalence of purely capitalist laws and relations in the celebrated “handicraft” industry; they reveal the absolute superiority of the capitalist workshops, based on the co-operation of wage-workers, over the one-man workshops and small workshops in general—a superiority both in productivity of labour and in remuneration for labour, even of wage-workers.
4) In the case of a number of the industries the earnings of the small independent handicraftsmen prove to be no higher, and often even lower, than the earnings of wage-workers in the same industry. This difference would be even greater if to the wage-workers’ earnings were added the value of the board received by some of them.
We have dealt with this last conclusion separately because the first three concern phenomena that are universal and inevitable under the laws of commodity production, whereas the last does not contain phenomena that are everywhere inevitable. We accordingly formulate this concept as follows: because of lower labour productivity in small establishments and the defenceless position of their owners in the market (especially in the case of agriculturists), it is possible that the earnings of an independent handicraftsman may be lower than those of a wage worker—and the facts show that this very often is the case.
The validity of our calculations is beyond question, for we have taken a number of industries, not choosing them at random, but taking all those where the tables allowed us to deal with the large establishments separately; we have not taken individual establishments, but all those of the same kind, and in every case compared with them several large establishments in different uyezds. But it would be desirable to express the phenomena described in a more general and more precise form. Fortunately, the Sketch contains material that enables us to satisfy this desire in part. This is the material on the division of establishments according to net income. In the case of certain industries, the Sketch indicates how many establishments have a net income of up to 50, 100, 200 rubles, etc. It is these data that we have combined. We find that there are data available for 28 industries,[31] embracing 8,364 establishments, or 93.2% of the total number (8,991). In all, in these 28 industries there are 8,377 establishments (income figures are not given for 13 establishments), with 14,135 family and 4,625 wage-workers, or 18,760 in all, which constitutes 93.9% of the total number of workers. Naturally, from these data covering 93% of the handicraftsmen we are fully entitled to draw conclusions regarding all of them, for there are no grounds for assuming that the remaining 7% differ from these 93%. Before presenting our summary, it is necessary to make the following remarks:
1) In thus classifying the material, the compilers of the Sketch have not always strictly adhered to uniform and identical headings for the groups. For example, they have “up to 100 rubles,” “less than 100 rubles,” and sometimes even “100 rubles each.” The top and bottom limits of the category are not always indicated, that is, sometimes the classification begins with the category “up to 100 rubles,” sometimes with that of “up to 50 rubles,” “up to 10 rubles,” and so on; sometimes the classification ends with the category “1,000 rubles and over,” sometimes the categories “2,000 to 3,000 rubles” and others are introduced. None of these inaccuracies is of any serious importance. We have unified all the categories contained in the Sketch (there are fifteen of them: up to 10, up to 20, up to 50, up to 100, up to 200, up to 300, up to 400, up to 500, up to 600, up to 700, up to 800, up to 900, up to 1,000, 1,000 and over, and 2,000 to 3,000 rubles), and we have eliminated all minor inaccuracies and misunderstandings by assigning them to one or another of these categories.
2) The Sketch only indicates the number of establishments in certain income categories, but does not indicate the income of all the establishments in each category. Yet it is these latter figures that we need most. We have therefore assumed that the aggregate income of the establishments in any category is determined with sufficient accuracy by multiplying the number of establishments by the average income, that is, by the arithmetical mean of the maximum and minimum of the given category (for example, 150 rubles in the case of the 100 to 200 ruble category, etc.). Only in the case of the lowest two categories (up to 10 rubles and up to 20 rubles) have the maximum incomes (10 rubles and 20 rubles respectively) been taken instead of the averages. Verification has shown that this method (one generally permissible in statistical calculations) yields results that approximate very closely to reality. For instance, the aggregate net income of the handicraft families in these 28 industries, according to the Sketch, amounts to 951,653 rubles, while according to our approximate figures, based on the income categories, it amounts to 955,150 rubles, an excess of 3,497 rubles = 0.36%. Consequently, the difference or error is less than 4 kopeks in 10 rubles.
3) From our summary we learn the average income per family (in each category), but not per family worker. To determine the latter, another approximate calculation had to be made. Knowing the division of families according to the number of family workers (and separately—according to the number of wage-workers employed), we assumed that the lower the income of a family, the smaller its size (i.e., the smaller the number of family workers per establishment) and the fewer the establishments employing wage-workers. On the contrary, the higher the income per family, the larger the number of establishments employing wage-workers and the larger the family, that is, the number of family workers per establishment is larger. Obviously, this assumption is the most favourable for anyone who might want to contest our conclusions. In other words, whatever other assumption was made, it would only help to reinforce our conclusions.
We now give a summary showing the division of the handicraftsmen according to the income of their establishments.
These data are too detailed and have therefore to be combined under simpler and clearer headings. Let us take five income categories of handicraftsmen: a) poor, with incomes of up to 50 rubles per family; b) in straitened circumstances, with incomes of 50 to 100 rubles per family; c) medium, with incomes of 100 to 300 rubles per family; d) well-to-do, with incomes of 300 to 500 rubles per family, and e) affluent, with incomes of over 500 rubles per family.
According to the data showing the incomes of establishments we shall add to these categories a rough division of establishments according to the number of family and wage workers they employ.[32] We get the following table (see p. 417).
These data lead to very interesting conclusions, which we shall now enumerate, taking the handicraftsmen category by category:
a) Over one-fourth of the families (28.4%) come under the category of poor, with an average income of about 33 rubles per family. Let us assume that this is the income of only one family worker, that all in this category are one man producers. In any case the earnings of these handicrafts men are considerably lower than the average earnings of wage-workers employed by handicraftsmen (45.85 rubles). If the majority of these one-man producers belong to the lower (3rd) sub-group, that is, work for buyers-up, this means that the “masters” pay those who work at home less than wage-workers employed in the workshop. Even if we assume that the working period of this category is the shortest, their earnings are nevertheless at the poverty level.
b) Over two-fifths of the total number of handicraftsmen (41.8%) belong to the group of families in straitened circumstances, who have an average income of 75 rubles per family. Not all of these are one-man establishments (the previous category was assumed to consist solely of one-man producers): about half the families have two family workers each, and hence the average earnings per family worker are only about 50 rubles, i.e., not more, or even less, than the earnings of a wage-worker employed by a handicraftsman (apart from wages, amounting to 45.85 rubles, part of the wage-workers also receive their board) Thus, judged by their earnings, seven-tenths of the total number of handicraftsmen are on a par with, and some even at a lower level than, the wage-workers employed by handicraftsmen. Astonishing as this conclusion is, it fully conforms to the facts quoted above on the superiority of large establishments over small. The low income level of these handicraftsmen can be judged by the fact that the average wage of an agricultural labourer employed by the year in Perm Gubernia is 50 rubles, in addition to board.[33] Consequently, the standard of living of seven-tenths of the “independent” handicraftsmen is no higher than that of agricultural labourers!
The Narodniks, of course, will say that these earnings are only supplementary to agriculture. But in the first place, has it not been established long ago that only a minority of the peasants are able to derive enough from agriculture to maintain their families, after land redemption payments, rent and farm expenses are deducted? And please note that we are comparing the handicraftsman’s earnings with the wages of a farm labourer who receives his board from his master. Secondly, seven-tenths of the total number of handicraftsmen must also include non-agriculturists. Thirdly, even if it turns out that agriculture covers the maintenance of the agriculturist handicraftsmen of these categories, the drastic effect of the tie with the land in reducing earnings still remains beyond all doubt.
Another comparison: in Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, the average earnings of a wage-worker employed by a handicraftsman are 33.2 rubles (p. 149 of the tables), while the average earnings of a person employed at “his own” works, that is, of an ironworker from among the former professional[34] peasants, are estimated by the Zemstvo statisticians at 78.7 rubles (Material for a Statistical Survey of Perm Gubernia. Krasnoufimsk Uyezd. Zavodsk District, Kazan, 1894), or over twice as much. And it is a generally known fact that the wages of ironworkers from among the former possessional peasants are always lower than wages of “free” workers in the factories. One can, therefore, see that reduced consumption, a miserable standard of living, is the price paid for the celebrated “independence” of the Russian handicraftsman “based on an organic tie between industry and agriculture”!
c) In the category of “medium” handicraftsmen we have included families with incomes of 100 to 300 rubles, or an average of about 180 rubles per family. They constitute almost one-fourth of the total number (24.1%). Absolutely, their income is very, very low: counting two-and-a-half family workers per establishment, it amounts to about 72 rubles per family worker—a very inadequate sum, and one which no factory worker would envy. Compared, however, with the incomes of the mass of handicraftsmen this sum is fairly high! It appears that even this meagre “sufficiency” is only secured at the expense of others: the majority of the handicraftsmen in this category employ wage-workers (roughly about 85% of the masters employ wage-labourers, and the average for the 2,016 establishments is over one wage-worker per establishment). Hence, in order to fight their way out of the mass of poverty-stricken handicrafts men, this category, under the existing commodity-capitalist relations, have to win a “sufficiency” for themselves from others, have to engage in economic struggle, to squeeze out the mass of the small producers still further and become petty bourgeois. Either poverty and the lowering of their standard of living to the nec plus ultra, or (for a minority ) the building-up of their (absolutely very meagre) welfare at the expense of others—such is the dilemma with which commodity production confronts the small producer. Such is the language of facts.
d) The category of well-to-do handicraftsmen embraces only 3.8% of the families, those with an average income of about 385 rubles, or about 100 rubles per family worker (assuming that under this heading come masters with 4 or 5 family workers per establishment). Such an income, about double the earnings of a wage-worker, is already based on a considerable employment of wage-labour: all the establishments in this category employ an average of about 3 wage-workers per establishment.
e) The affluent handicraftsmen, those with an average income of 820 rubles per family, constitute only 1.9% of the total. This category partly includes establishments with 5 family workers, and partly establishments with no family workers at all, that is, those based exclusively on wage-labour. On an average, this amounts to about 350 rubles of income per family worker. The high incomes of these “handicraftsmen” accrue from the large number of wage-workers employed, averaging about 10 persons per establishment.[35] These are already small manufacturers, owners of capitalist workshops, and to include them among the “handicraftsmen,” together with the one-man establishments, rural artisans and even domestic producers who work for manufacturers (and sometimes, as we shall see below, for these same affluent handicraftsmen!) only testifies, as we have already remarked, to the utter vagueness and haziness of the term “handicraft.”
In concluding our examination of the census data on handicraftsmen’s incomes we must make the following remark. It might be said that the concentration of incomes in the handicraft industries is not very high: 5.7% of the establishments account for 26.5% of the total income, and 29.8% for 64.4%. Our reply to this is that, firstly, even this degree of concentration shows how totally unsuitable and unscientific are sweeping arguments about “handicraftsmen,” and “average” figures relating to them. Secondly, we should not lose sight of the fact that these data do not include buyers-up, with the result that the income division is highly inaccurate. We have seen that 2,346 families and 5,628 workers work for buyers-up (third sub-group); consequently, here it is the buyers-up who get the principal income. Their separation from the mass of the producers is absolutely artificial and entirely unwarranted. Just as it would be wrong to describe the economic relations in large-scale factory industry without mentioning the size of the manufacturers’ incomes, so is it wrong to describe the economics of “handicraft” industry without mentioning the incomes of the buyers-up—incomes obtained from the same industry in which handicraftsmen are also engaged, and constituting part of the value of goods produced by handicraftsmen. We are therefore entitled, in fact we are obliged, to conclude that the actual distribution of incomes in handicraft industry is far more uneven than was shown above, for the categories which include the largest industrialists of all have been omitted.
ARTICLE THREE[edit source]
VI What Is A Buyer-Up?[edit source]
Above we called the buyers-up the biggest of the industrialists. From the ordinary Narodnik viewpoint, this is heresy. It is customary to depict our buyers-up as individuals who take no part in production, who are extraneous and alien to industry itself, and depend “solely” on exchange.
This is not the place to dwell in detail on the theoretical fallacies contained in this view, which is based on a failure to understand the general and principal groundwork, foundation, or background of present-day industry (handicraft industry included)—namely, commodity economy, of which merchant capital is an essential component, and not a casual and incidental adjunct. Here we must stick to the facts and figures of the handicraft census, and our task will now be to examine and analyse the data on buyers-up. A circumstance favouring this examination is the fact that handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up have been put into a separate sub-group (the third). But this advantage is outweighed by the great number of omissions and uninvestigated factors, which rather seriously complicates our inquiry. No data are available on the number of buyers-up, on large buyers-up and small, on their ties with the well-to-do handicraftsmen (ties of origin, ties between the commercial operations of the buyer-up and production in his workshop, etc.), on the business of the buyer-up. The Narodnik prejudice of treating the buyer-up as extraneous prevented most investigators of handicraft industry from examining business done by buyers-up, although this is obviously a prime and principal question for the economist. A careful and detailed study should be made of the business methods of the buyer up, how his capital is built up, how this capital operates in the purchase of raw material and the sale of the product, what are the conditions (social and economic) in which capital operates in these spheres, what expenses he incurs in organising purchases and sales, how these expenses vary according to the amount of merchant capital and the volume of purchases and sales, and what conditions sometimes induce the buyer-up to process the raw material partly in his own workshops and then to give out the semi-finished product to domestic workers for further processing (the final finishing process sometimes being done by the buyer up himself), and sometimes to sell the raw material to small industrialists, in order, later, to buy their wares in the market. A comparison should be made between the cost of production of an article turned out by a small handicraftsman, by a large producer in a workshop where several wage-workers are employed, and by a buyer-up who gives out material to be worked up by domestic workers. The unit of investigation should be each enterprise, that is, each separate buyer-up, and it is necessary to determine the amount of his turnover, the number of persons working for him in his workshop or workshops, or in their own homes, the number of workers he employs to acquire raw materials, to store them and the finished product, and to sell the latter. A comparison should be made between the technique of production (number and quality of implements and fixtures, division of labour, etc.) used by the small master, the workshop owner who employs wage-workers, and by the buyer-up. Only such an economic investigation can give an exact scientific answer to the questions: what is a buyer-up, what is his significance in the economic process and in the historical development of the forms of industry under commodity production. The absence of such information in the conclusions of the house-to house census, which made a detailed study of all these questions for each handicraftsman, cannot but be regarded as a serious omission. Even if it was impossible (for some reason or another) to register and investigate the business of each buyer-up, much of this information could have been drawn from the household data on handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up. Instead, we find nothing in the Sketch but hackneyed Narodnik phrases, such as: the “kulak” is “essentially alien to production itself” (p. 7)—the kulak category being extended to include both buyers-up and owners of assembly workshops, on the one hand, and usurers, on the other; “wage-labour is governed not by its technical concentration, as in the case of the factory (?), but by the monetary dependence of the handicraftsmen . . . one of the forms of kulakism” (309-10); “the source of the exploitation of labour . . . lies in the function of exchange, and not in the function of production” (101); or what we often meet with in the handicraft industries is not the “capitalisation of production,” but the “capitalisation of the process of exchange” (265). Of course, we have no intention of accusing the Sketch investigators of originality: they simply borrowed wholesale the maxims scattered so profusely in the works of, say, “our well-known” Mr. V. V.
In order to judge the true value of such phrases, we have only to remember, for example, that in one of our principal industries, textiles, the “buyer-up” was the immediate forerunner, the father, of the big manufacturer engaged in large-scale machine production. All our textile industries began with supplying yarn to be worked up by handicraftsmen at home; this, in other words, was work for the “buyer-up,” for the “kulak,” who, while possessing no workshop of his own (“was alien to production”), “merely” supplied the yarn, and took the finished goods. Our good Narodniks did not even attempt to investigate the origin of these buyers-up, their genealogical connections with the owners of small workshops, their role as organisers of the buying of raw materials and the selling of products, the role of their capital in concentrating means of production, in gathering together masses of scattered small handicraftsmen, in introducing division of labour, and in creating the elements of what is not only large-scale production but which is also becoming machine production. Our good Narodniks confined themselves to whining and complaining about this “deplorable,” “artificial,” etc., etc., phenomenon; they consoled themselves with the belief that this was not the “capitalisation” of production, but “merely” of the process of exchange, and talked sentimentally about “different paths for the fatherland.” Meanwhile these “artificial” and “unsubstantial” “kulaks” kept on following their old path, continued to concentrate capital, to “gather together” means of production and producers, to extend their purchases of raw materials, to further the division of production into separate operations (warping, weaving, dyeing, finishing, etc.) and to transform scattered, technically backward capitalist manufacture, based on hand labour and servitude, into capitalist machine industry.
An exactly similar process is now taking place in the bulk of our so-called “handicraft” industries; and the Narodniks in just the same way shun an investigation of realities as they develop, in just the same way replace a discussion of the origin of existing relations and their evolution by a discussion of what might be (if what is were not), in just the same way-console themselves with the thought that so far these are “merely” buyers-up, and in just the same way idealise and paint in rosy colours the worst forms of capitalism—worst in technical backwardness, economic imperfection, and the social and cultural conditions of the working masses.
Let us turn to the data of the Perm handicraft census. Wherever necessary, we shall endeavour to make good the above-mentioned omissions by drawing upon Handicraft Industries of Perm Gubernia, etc., a book to which we have already referred. Let us first of all pick out the industries which account for the bulk of the handicraftsmen employed by buyers-up (third sub-group). For this purpose we shall have to turn to our own summary, which (as already mentioned) does not coincide with the Sketch figures.
Thus, about nine-tenths of the handicraftsmen working for buyers-up are concentrated in these seven industries. It is to these industries that we shall turn first.
Let us begin with the bootmaking industry. The overwhelming majority of the bootmakers who work for buyers up are in Kungur Uyezd, the centre of the leather industry in Perm Gubernia. A large number of handicraftsmen work for leather manufacturers: on p. 87 of the Sketch mention is made of 8 buyers-up, who have 445 establishments working for them.[36] All these buyers-up have been leather goods manufacturers “for ages,” and their names may be found in the Directory of Factories for 1890 and 1879, and in the notes to the Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Issue I for 1869.[37] The leather goods manufacturers cut out the leather and in this form distribute it to the “handicraftsmen” to be sewn. The lasting is done separately, by several families, who work to the order of the manufacturers. Generally speaking, a whole number of “handicraft” industries are connected with the leather goods factories, that is, a whole series of operations are done in the home. These include 1) dressing of hides and skins; 2) sewing of uppers; 3) gluing of leather clippings into boards for stiffeners; 4) making of screws for boots; 5) making of brads for boots; 6) last making; 7) preparation of ash for the tanneries; 8) making of “tan” (from willow bark). The scrap and waste of the leather industry are used by the felt and glue-making industries (Handicraft Industries, III, pp. 3-4, et al.). In addition to detailed division of labour (i.e., division of the production of an article into several operations performed by different persons), a commodity division of labour has arisen in this industry: each family (sometimes even each street in a handicraft village) produces one kind of foot wear. There is an amusing point we must mention—in Handicraft Industries, etc., the “Kungur leather industry” is declared to be a “typical expression of the idea of the organic connection between factory and handicraft industry to their mutual advantage” (sic !) . . . the factory entering into a correct (sic !) association with handicraft industry, with the object, in its own interests (exactly!), of developing and not reducing . . . its capacity (III, p. 3). For example, Fominsky, the manufacturer, was awarded a gold medal at the 1887 Ekaterinburg Exhibition not only for the excellent quality of his leather, but also for his “extensive operations, which furnish work for the surrounding population “ (ibid., p. 4, author’s italics). Indeed, of the 1,450 persons he employed, 1,300 were domestic workers. Of the 120 persons employed by Sartakov, another manufacturer, 100 were domestic workers, etc. Hence the Perm manufacturers vie very successfully with the Narodnik intellectuals in implanting and developing handicraft industries. . . .
The organisation of the bootmaking industry in Krasnoufimsk Uyezd (Handicraft Industries, I, pp. 148-49) is in every way analogous; the leather goods manufacturers also stitch leather boots, partly in their workshops, partly by giving the work out to domestic workers. One of the biggest of the owners of a leather and boot establishment employs about 200 regular workers.
We are now in a position to form a fairly clear idea of the economic organisation of the bootmaking and of many other allied “handicraft” industries. They are nothing but branches of large capitalist workshops (“factories,” according to the terminology used in our official statistics), performing nothing but detailed operations in the large-scale capitalist manufacture of leather goods. The entrepreneurs have organised the buying of materials on a broad scale, have set up factories for tanning the hides, and have established a whole organisation for the further processing of the leather based on the division of labour (as the technical condition) and wage-labour (as the economic condition): some of the operations (such as cutting out leather for boots) are performed in their workshops, others are performed by “handicraftsmen” who work for them in their homes, the employers determining the amount of output, the rates of payment, the kind of goods to be made, and the quantity of each kind. They have also organised the wholesale marketing of the product. Obviously, in scientific terminology this is nothing but capitalist manufacture, in part already passing into the higher form of factory industry (inasmuch as machines and machinery are used in production: the big leather factories have steam engines). To single out parts of this system of manufacture as a separate “handicraft” form of production is a patent absurdity, which only obscures the basic fact that wage-labour prevails in the leather goods production and bootmaking and that the entire trade is under the sway of big capital. Instead of comical arguments on the desirability of a “co-operative organisation of exchange” in this industry (Sketch, p 93), it would not be amiss to make a detailed study of its actual organisation, a study of the conditions which make it preferable for the manufacturers to give out work to be done in the home. The manufacturers undoubtedly find it more profitable, and we shall understand why if we bear in mind the low earnings of the handicraftsmen in general, and in particular of the handicraft agriculturists and those of the third sub-group. By giving out material to be worked up at home, the employers lower wages, economise on premises, partly on implements, and on supervision, evade the not always welcome demands made on manufacturers (they are not manufacturers but merchants!), get workers who are more scattered, disunited, and less capable of self-defence, and also unpaid taskmasters for these workers—“middle men,” “subcontractors” (as they are called in our textile industry under the system of giving out yarn to be used in the home)—in the shape of those handicraftsmen they employ and who, in their turn, employ wage-workers (it was found that the 636 families who make boots for buyers-up employ 278 wage-workers). We have already seen from the general table that these wage-workers (in the third sub-group) receive the lowest wages of all. And this is not surprising, for they are subjected to double exploitation: exploitation by their own employer who squeezes his “own little profit” out of the workers, and exploitation by the leather goods manufacturer who gives out material to the small masters. We know that these small middlemen, who are well familiar with local conditions and with the personal characteristics of the workers, are particularly prolific in inventing different forms of extortion, in practising bondage hiring, the truck system,[38][39] etc. The excessive working hours in these workshops and “handicraftsmen’s huts” are common knowledge, and one cannot help regretting that the 1894-95 handicraft census has furnished practically no information on subjects so important for the study of our native sweating system,[40] with its host of middlemen who intensify the pressure on the workers and its utterly shameless and unrestricted exploitation.
On the organisation of the felt-boot industry (the second largest as regards the absolute number of families working for buyers-up) the Sketch, unfortunately, gives practically no information whatever. We have seen that in this industry there are handicraftsmen who employ dozens of wage-workers, but whether they give out work to be done at home, get part of the operations done outside their workshops,[41] was not made clear. Let us only note a fact mentioned by the investigators, that the sanitary conditions in the felt-boot industry are extremely unsatisfactory (Sketch, p. 119; Handicraft Industries, III, 16)—intolerable heat, excessive dust, stifling atmosphere. And this in the cottages the handicraftsmen live in! The natural result is that they are unable to stand more than fifteen years of this work and end as consumptives. I. I. Molleson, an investigator of workshop sanitary conditions, says: “The chief contingent of felt-boot makers consists of workers between the ages of 13 and 30. They are nearly all easily recognisable by their pallor, dull complexion, and their languid and sickly appearance “ (III, p. 145, author’s italics). The practical conclusion drawn by this investigator is: “It should be made incumbent on the employers to build workshops (felt-boot) of much larger size, so as to provide a specified constant volume of air per worker”; the “workshops should be designed exclusively for work, and it should be strictly forbidden to allow workers to sleep in them at night” (ibid.). In other words, the sanitary inspectors demand the building of factories for these handicraftsmen and the prohibition of work in the home. One cannot help hoping that this recommendation will be acted upon, for it would promote technical progress by eliminating a host of middlemen and would pave the way for the regulation of working hours and working conditions; in a word, it would eliminate the most crying abuses in our “people’s” industry.
Among the buyers-up in the bast-matting industry is a merchant named Butakov, who, we learn from information for 1879, had a bast-matting factory in the town of Osa, which employed 180 workers.[42] Has this manufacturer to be regarded as “alien to production itself,” just because he has found it more profitable to give out the work to be done at home? It would also be interesting to know in what way the buyers-up who have been thrown out of the list of handicraftsmen differ from those “handicraftsmen” who, having no family workers, “purchase bast and give it out to craftsmen to make into matting and sacks on their own looms” (Sketch, 152)—a striking illustration of the confusion into which the investigators have been led by Narodnik prejudices. The sanitary conditions in this industry will also not bear criticism—overcrowding, filth, dust, damp, foul smells and long working hours (12 to 15 a day), all of which turns the centres of the industry into veritable “hotbeds of famine typhus,”[43] of which, in fact, there have been frequent outbreaks.
On the organisation of work for buyers-up in the ironworking industry, we again learn nothing from the Sketch and are again obliged to turn to Handicraft Industries, etc., which contains a very interesting description of this industry in Nizhni-Tagil. The manufacture of trays and other articles is divided among several establishments: forging, tinning, and decorating. Some of the handicraft masters have establishments of all these kinds, and are consequently manufacturers of the pure type. Others perform one of the operations in their own workshops and then give out the articles to handicraftsmen for tinning and decorating in their homes. Here, consequently, the uniformity of the economic organisation of the industry—both when the work is given out to be done in the home and when several detail workshops belong to one master—stands out very clearly. The handicraftsmen who act as buyers-up, giving out work to be done at home, are among the biggest masters (of whom there are 25) who have organised the most profitable purchase of raw material and the marketing of the product on a large scale; these twenty-five handicraftsmen (and they alone) take their goods to the fair or have their own shops. In addition to them, the big “manufacturer traders” are also buyers-up; they exhibited their wares at the Factory Department of the Ekaterinburg Exhibition. The author of the book classes them under “factory-handicraft (sic !) industry” (Handicraft Industries, I, pp. 98-99). Thus, on the whole, we get a very typical picture of capitalist manufacture, interwoven in the most diverse and fantastic ways with small establishments. In order to demonstrate clearly how little the division of industrialists into “handicraftsmen” and “manufacturers,” into producers and “buyers-up,” helps us to understand these complex relations, let us take the figures given in this book and show the economic relations in the industry in a table:
And now we shall be told that the buyers-up, like the usurers, are “alien to production itself,” that their domination merely implies the “capitalisation of the process of exchange,” and not the “capitalisation of production”!
Another highly typical instance of capitalist manufacture is the chest-making industry (Sketch, pp. 334-39; Handicraft Industries, I, pp. 31-40). It is organised as follows: a few big proprietors who own workshops employing wage-workers purchase the materials, partly manufacture the goods in their own workshops, but mainly give out material to small detailed workshops, subsequently assembling the various parts of the chest in their own workshops and sending the finished article to market. Division of labour—the typical condition and technical basis of manufacture—is widely employed in production: the making of a complete chest is divided into ten or twelve detailed operations each performed by different handicraftsmen. Thus, the organisation of the industry consists in combining detail workers (Theilarbeiter, as they are called in Das Kapital) under the command of capital. Why capital prefers to give out work to be done at home rather than employ wage-workers in a workshop is made quite clear by the data provided in the 1894-95 handicraft census on the establishments of the Nevyansk Factory, Ekaterinburg Uyezd (one of the centres of the industry), where, side by side with assembly workshops, we also meet with detail handicraftsmen. Hence a comparison between the two is quite possible. Here are comparative figures given in a table (on p. 173 of the tables):
Before examining this table, we must say that if we had taken the data for the entire first and third sub-groups (Sketch, p. 335) and not for the Nevyansk Factory alone, the conclusions would have been the same. The gross income in the two sub-groups obviously cannot be compared, for the same material passes through the hands of various detail workers and through the assembly workshops. But the data for incomes and wages are characteristic. We find that the wages of hired workers in the assembly workshops are higher than the incomes of the dependent handicraftsmen (100 rubles and 89 rubles respectively), notwithstanding the fact that the latter exploit wage-workers in their turn. But the wages of these latter are less than half those of the workers in the assembly workshops. Why, then, should our employers not prefer “handicraft” industry to factory industry, when the former yields them such substantial “advantages”! We find a fully analogous organisation of production for the buyers-up in the vehicle-building industry (Sketch, p. 308, et. seq.; Handicraft Industries, I, p. 42, et. seq.)—the same assembly workshops, whose owners are “buyers-up” (and work-distributors, work-givers) in relation to the handicraftsmen who make the parts, and the earnings of the wage-worker in the workshop are again higher than the income of the dependent handicraftsman (not to mention his wage-worker). These higher wages are recorded for both agriculturists (Group I) and non-agriculturists (Group II). In the cabinet-making industry, the buyers-up are the furniture shops in the city of Perm (Sketch, 133; Handicraft Industries, II, 11) that supply the handicraftsmen with models when placing orders, and in this way, incidentally, have “gradually improved the technique of production.”
In the tailoring trade, the ready-made clothing shops in Perm and Ekaterinburg give out material to be made up by handicraftsmen. As we know, an exactly similar organisation of the tailoring and dressmaking industry also exists in other capitalist countries, in Western Europe and America. The difference between the “capitalist” West and Russia, with her “people’s industry,” is that this state of affairs is called the Schwitz-system[45] in the West and means are sought to combat this worst of all systems of exploitation; the German tailors, for example, demand that the masters should build factories (that is, are “artificially implanting capitalism,” as the Russian Narodnik would put it)—whereas in our country this “sweating system” is benignly called “handicraft industry” and its superiority to capitalism is argued and discussed.
We have now examined all the industries in which the vast majority of handicraftsmen employed by buyers-up are engaged. What are the results of our review. We have become convinced of the absolute unsoundness of the Narodnik contention that the buyers-up, and even the assembly workshop masters, are mere usurers, elements alien to production, and so on. Despite the above-mentioned inadequacy of the Sketch data, despite the absence in the census programme of questions about the business conducted by the buyers-up, we have succeeded in establishing, for most of the industries, intimate ties between the buyers-up and production—even their direct participation in production, “participation” as owners of shops which employ wage-workers. Nothing could be more absurd than the opinion that working for buyers-up is merely the result of some abuse, of some accident, of some “capitalisation of the process of exchange” and not of production. The contrary is true: working for a buyer-up is a special form of production, a special organisation of economic relations in production—an organisation which has directly sprung from small commodity production (“petty people’s production,” as it is customary to call it in our lofty literature), and which to this day is connected with it by a thousand threads; for it is the most prosperous petty masters, the most go-ahead “handicraftsmen,” who lay the basis for this system by extending their operations through supplying work to domestic workers. Work for buyers-up is directly associated with the capitalist workshop employing wage-workers, and often just constitutes an extension of it or one of its departments; it is simply an adjunct of the factory, understanding this latter expression in the generally accepted and not the scientific sense. In the scientific classification of forms of industry in their successive development, work for buyers-up belongs to a considerable extent to capitalist manufacture, since 1) it is based on hand production and on the existence of many small establishments; 2) it introduces division of labour between these establishments and develops it also within the workshop; 3) it places the merchant at the head of production, as is always the case in manufacture, which presupposes production on an extensive scale, and the wholesale purchase of raw material and marketing of the product; 4) it reduces those who work to the status of wage-workers engaged either in a master’s workshop or in their own homes. These features, as we know, are typical of the scientific conception of manufacture as a special stage in the development of capitalism in industry (see Das Kapital, I, Kapital XII).[46] This form of industry, then, already implies the deep-going rule of capitalism, being the direct predecessor of its last and highest form—large-scale machine industry. Work for the buyer-up is consequently a backward form of capitalism, and in contemporary society this backwardness has the effect of seriously worsening the conditions of the working people, who are exploited by a host of middlemen (the sweating system[47] ), are disunited, are compelled to content themselves with the lowest wages and to work under the most insanitary conditions and for extremely long hours, and—what is most important—under conditions which render public control of production extremely difficult.
We have now concluded our review of the 1894-95 handicraft census data. This review has fully confirmed the statement made above regarding the utter meaninglessness of the term “handicraft industry,” We have seen that this term has been used to cover the most diverse forms of industry, we might even say: practically every form of industry known to science. And, indeed, the term has been made to include patriarchal artisans who work for private customers using the customers’ own materials and receiving remuneration sometimes in kind, sometimes in cash. Further, it has been made to include representatives of an entirely different form of industry—the small commodity producers who work together in families. It has been made to include owners of capitalist workshops who employ wage-workers, and also these wage-workers themselves, who sometimes number several dozen to an establishment. It has been made to include manufactory owners who possess capital in considerable quantity and command a whole system of detail workshops. It has likewise been made to include workers employed at home for capitalists. In all these subdivisions, both agriculturists and non-agriculturists, peasants and town dwellers have equally been regarded as “handicraftsmen.” The confusion is by no means peculiar to this particular investigation of the Perm handicrafts. Not at all. It is to be met with whenever and wherever anything is said or written about “handicraft” industry. Anybody who is familiar, for example, with the Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry knows that it, too, classes all these categories as handicraftsmen. And it is a favourite method of our Narodnik economists to lump together this endless variety of forms of industry, to call this jumble “handicraft,” “people’s” industry, and—risum teneatis, amici![48] —to contrast this meaningless hodge podge with “capitalism,” with “factory industry.” This admirable method, which testifies to the remarkable profundity and erudition of its initiator, was, if we are not mistaken, “theoretically justified” by Mr. V. V., who on the very first pages of his Essays on Handicraft Industry takes the official figures for the number of “factory” workers in Moscow, Vladimir and other gubernias, compares them with the number of “handicraftsmen,” and finds, of course, that “people’s industry” in Holy Russia is developed to a far greater extent than “capitalism.” But our “authoritative” economist very wisely remains silent on the fact, established time and again by investigators,[49] that the overwhelming majority of these “handicraftsmen” also work for manufacturers. The compilers of the Sketch, faithful to Narodnik prejudices, have used the same method. Although the total annual output of “handicraft” industry in Perm Gubernia amounts to only 5 million rubles,[50] and that of “factory” industry to 30 million rubles, “the number of persons employed in factory industry amounts to 19,000 and in handicraft industry, to 26,000” (p. 364). The classification, you see, is almost touching in its simplicity:
a) | Factory workers . . . . | 19,000 |
b) | Handicraftsman . . . . | 26,000 |
Total: | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 45,000 |
Naturally, such a classification offers endless scope for reflections on the “possibility of a different path for the fatherland”!
But it is not for nothing that we have before us the data of the handicraft household census which investigated the forms of industry. We shall attempt to give a classification that corresponds to the census data (of which the Narodnik classification is a sheer mockery) and to the various forms of industry. We shall apply the percentages revealed by the census for 20,000 workers, to the higher figure of 26,000 derived by the authors from other sources.
We are fully aware that there are errors even in this classification: it does not include factory owners, but does include handicraftsmen who employ dozens of wage-workers; some manufactory owners have been included accidentally, but not specified, while others have not been included, having been discarded as “buyers-up”; it includes urban artisans of one town, but not of eleven other towns, and so on. At any rate, this classification is based on the census data on forms of industry, and the errors mentioned are errors in these data, and not errors of classification.[51] In any case, this classification gives an accurate idea of the real state of affairs, it explains the real social and economic relations of the various participants in industry, and, consequently, their status and their interests—and such an explanation is the supreme task of any scientific economic investigation.
VII “Gratifying Features” of Handicraft Industry[edit source]
We might be accused of one-sidedness, of accentuating only the dark sides of handicraft industry, were we to pass over in silence the facts mentioned in the Sketch which are intended to stress its “bright side” and “gratifying features.”
We are told, for example, that wage-labour in handicraft industry has a character of its own, for here the wage worker lives in “close contact” with the master, and “may” himself become a master. The “gratifying feature” here, then, is the benign wish to turn all workers into small masters![52] Incidentally, not all—only some, for “the tendency to exploit the labour of others is undoubtedly characteristic of all men in general, including the handicraftsman” (Sketch, p. 6). This sentence is simply inimitable for the naïvetè with which “all men” are without further ado identified with the petty bourgeois! It is not surprising that those who look at the world through petty-bourgeois spectacles should discover such remarkable truths. On p. 268, a small factory employing eight wage-workers and with an output of 10,000 rubles is proclaimed to be “by its labour situation (sic !) a handicraft enterprise in the strict sense of the term.” On pp. 272–74, we are told how another small manufacturer (employing seven wage-workers and five apprentices, and with an output of 7,000 rubles) erected a blast furnace on a site rented from a village community and applied to the Handicraft Bank for a loan of 5,000 rubles with which to erect a furnace, explaining that his “whole enterprise is of purely local interest, inasmuch as the ore will be mined on community allotments by the local peasants themselves.” The bank refused the loan for purely formal reasons. And the Sketch uses this as a peg on which to hang an attractive picture of the conversion of this enterprise into a co-operative: “this will undoubtedly please the employer, as one who has at heart the interests of the fellow community members around him and not only those of the industry.” The enterprise “embraces numerous labour interests of the fellow community members, who will be mining ore and felling timber and carrying them to the factory.” “Householders will deliver ore, charcoal, etc., to the factory, just as the womenfolk deliver milk to the public cheese factory. Of course, this presupposes a more complex organisation than that of a public cheese factory, especially if the local skilled and unskilled labourers are employed in running the business itself, that is, smelting iron from ore.” How idyllic! Manual labourers (“fellow community members”) will “deliver” ore, fuel and the rest “to the factory,” just as peasant women deliver milk to the cheese factory! We will not deny that the Handicraft Bank can (if its bureaucratic organisation does not prevent it) perform the same sort of service as other banks in developing commodity production and capitalism, but it would be very sad indeed if it were at the same time to develop the pharisaism and Manilov chit-chat of loan-seeking employers.
So far we have seen how enterprises employing large numbers of wage-workers have been proclaimed “handicraft” on the ground that their owners work themselves. But for petty bourgeois people this condition would be rather restrictive, and so the Sketch endeavours to expand it: it appears that an enterprise which “is conducted solely with the help of wage-labour” may also be a handicraft enterprise, provided that its “success” depends upon the owner’s “personal participation” (p. 295), or even if the owners “are obliged to confine their participation to the various worries involved in running the industry” (p. 301). Our Perm Narodniks are making splendid “progress,” are they not? “Personal labour” — “personal participation”—“various worries.” Mein Liebchen, was willst du noch mehr?[53][54] Wage-labour in the brick industry, it appears, yields “special advantages” (302) to the wage-labourers, whom the brick kilns provide with “supplementary earnings”; yet the owners of these kilns often experience “a shortage of money for the hire of workers.” The Sketch concludes that such owners should be granted credit facilities by the Handicraft Bank, “assigning such enterprises, according to a note to Article 7, point 3 of the Handicraft Bank Statutes, to specially deserving cases” (p. 302). Not very well put, but very impressive and portentous! “In conclusion,” we read at the end of the description of the brick industry, “we find sufficient grounds for declaring that among the peasants in the brick industry the interests of masters and wage-workers have so much in common that although no artels have been formally registered in this industry, actually there is a strong tie of companionship between the masters and their wage-workers” (305). We would refer the reader to the statistical picture of these “ties of companionship” given above. It is also a curious fact—as a specimen of the confusion existing in Narodnik economic concepts—that the Sketch defends wage-labour and paints it in rosy colours by asserting that the kulak is not a master employing wage-workers, but an owner of money capital who “exploits labour in the person of the master handicraftsman and his wage-workers”(!), and at the same time launches into the most irrational and immoderate defence of the kulaks: “kulakism, in whatever gloomy colours it may be painted, is so far a necessary wheel in the exchange mechanism of handicraft production. . . . Kulakism should undoubtedly be regarded as a blessing insofar as the successes of the handicraft industry are concerned, when compared with a situation under which the handicraftsman would be without work were there no kulak or no finances available” (p. 8).[55] How long will this “insofar” last? If it were said that merchant and usury capital is a necessary factor in the development of capitalism, a necessary wheel in the mechanism of a poorly developed capitalist society (such as ours), that would be true. Thus interpreted, the word “insofar” would mean: insofar as the innumerable restrictions on freedom of industry and freedom of competition (especially among the peasantry) continue to preserve the most backward and most pernicious forms of capitalism in our country. Only we fear that this interpretation will not be to the liking of-the Perm or any other Narodniks!
Let us now go over to the artels, those most direct and most important expressions of the alleged community principles which the Narodniks insist on finding in the handicraft industries. It will be interesting to examine the handicraft household census data for the entire gubernia, a census whose programme specifically included the registration and study of artels (p. 14, point 2). We are accordingly in a position not only to acquaint ourselves with the various types of artels, but also to learn how widespread they are.
Take the oil-milling industry. “Domestic artels in the strict sense of the term”: in the villages of Pokrovskoye and Gavryata, two oil-mills are owned by five brothers, who have separated to form individual households, but who use the mills in turn. These facts are of “profound interest,” for “they throw light on the contract conditions of communal labour continuity in the handicraft industries.” Obviously, such domestic “artels are an important precedent to the spreading of factory-type industries among the handicraftsmen on co operative lines” (pp. 175-76). So then, the artel, in the strict sense of the term, as a precedent to co-operation and, as an expression of the communal principle, consists in property held in common by unseparated heirs !! If that is so, then obviously the true palladium of the “communal principle” and “co-operation” is Roman civil law and Volume X of our code,[56] with its institutions of the condominium, i.e., property held in common by heirs and non-heirs!
“In the flour-milling industry ... the peasants’ artel spirit of enterprise found most vivid expression in peculiar domestic forms.” Many of the mills are jointly used by associations or even by whole villages. Use of the mills: the most widespread method is by rotation; then comes division of the net proceeds into shares proportionate to the expenses incurred by each partner; in “such cases the associated owners very rarely take part themselves in production which is usually done by wage-labour” (p. 181; the same is true of the pitch-boiling artels—p. 197). Truly an amazing peculiarity, and an amazing display of the artel principle—the common property of petty owners who jointly hire workers! On the contrary, the fact that the handicraftsmen use the mills, pitch-boiling plants and smithies in rotation testifies to the astonishing disunity of the producers, whom even common property cannot induce to work co-operatively.
“One of the forms of artel organisation” is the “artel smithies” (239). With the object of economising fuel, the master smiths jointly operate one smithy, hiring one labourer to work the bellows (economy in workers!) and renting both the premises and the hammer from the smithy owner in return for a special payment. And so, the hiring out of articles that are the private property of one person to others for money is “artel organisation”! Verily, Roman law fully deserves to be called the code of “artel organisation”! . . . “In the artel organisation . . . we find fresh evidence of the absence of class crystallisation in production among the handicraftsmen—evidence of the same merging of different strata of agriculturists and handicraftsmen that we observed in the case of the artel flour mills” (239). And after this, there are malicious persons who still dare to speak of the differentiation of the peasantry!
Hitherto, therefore, we have not had a single instance of handicraftsmen combining to buy raw materials or to market the product, not to mention combination in production itself! Nevertheless, such combinations exist. The Perm Gubernia handicraft household census registers as many as four of them. They were all formed with the help of the Handicraft Bank—three in the vehicle-building trade, and one in the production of agricultural machines. One of the artels employs wage-labour (two apprentices and two hired “auxiliary” workers). In another, two partners use a smithy and a workshop belonging to a third partner, for which be receives special payment. They buy raw material and market the product in common, but they work in separate workshops (except in the case of the smithy and workshop rented for cash). Together, these four artels embrace 21 family workers. The Perm Handicraft Bank has functioned for several years. Let us assume that it will now “unite” (for the renting of a neighbour’s smithy) not 20, but 50 family workers a year. All the 15,000 handicraft family workers will then be “united” in “artel organisations” in exactly 300 years. And when that job is done, they will begin “to unite” the handicraftsmen’s wage-workers. . . . And the Perm Narodniks exult: “These cardinal economic conceptions, evolved by the independent workings of the handicraftsmen’s minds, serve as a firm pledge of the economic progress of industry among them, based on labour’s independence of capital, for these facts speak not only of an elemental, but of a fully conscious aspiration of the handicraftsmen for labour independence” (p. 333). Have mercy, gentlemen! It is impossible, of course, to picture Narodism without Manilovian phrase-mongering, but, after all, there’s a limit to everything! Not one of the artels, as we have seen, expresses the “principle of labour’s independence of capital”: they are all artels of masters and small masters, many of them employing wage-workers. There is no co-operation in these artels; even the joint purchase of raw materials and sale of the product is ridiculously rare and embraces a surprisingly insignificant number of masters. It may be safely said that there is no capitalist country in the world where a register of nearly 9,000 small establishments, with 20,000 workers, would reveal such astonishing dispersion and backwardness of the producers; where among the latter one would find only a score or so cases of property owned in common, and less than a dozen cases of three to five owners uniting to buy raw materials and sell the product! Such dispersion would be the surest indication of unrelieved economic and cultural stagnation, if we did not, fortunately, see that capitalism is day by day uprooting patriarchal handicraft, with the parochialism of its small self-sufficing proprietors, and breaking down the small local markets (on which small production depends), replacing them by the national and the world market, compelling the producers, not only of a village like Gavryata, but of a whole country, and even of several countries, to enter into association with each other, forming associations that are no longer merely of masters, big and small, and confronting them with far wider problems than that of buying timber or iron more cheaply, or selling nails or carts more profitably.
VIII The Narodnik Programme Of Industrial Policy[edit source]
Since practical recommendations and measures are always connected with what is considered to be “gratifying” and promising in reality, one knows a priori what wishes for the handicraft industry would be expressed in the Sketch since it has reduced all “gratifying features” to drawing a rose-coloured picture of wage-labour in petty economy and an exalted notion of the extremely scanty and one-sided associations of small proprietors. These wishes, a rehash of the usual Narodnik recipes, amaze one by their contradictory character, on the one hand, and by their inordinate exaggeration of commonplace “measures,” converted by phrase-mongering into solutions of great problems, on the other. At the very beginning of the Sketch, in the introduction, before the census data are even dealt with, we meet with verbose statements about the “task of handicraft credit” being “to over come (sic !) the money shortage,” about the “co-operative organisation of exchange between production and consumption” (p. 8), about “spreading artel organisations,” establishing handicraft warehouses, technical advice bureaus, technical schools, and the like (p. 9). These statements recur in the book over and over again. “The economics of the industry must be so reorganised as to place the handicraftsmen in possession of money; or, to put it more plainly, to emancipate the handicraftsman from the kulak” (119) “The task of our time” is to effect “the emancipation of the handicraftsman by means of credit,” etc. (267). “Exchange processes must be rationalised,” measures must be adopted “to implant rational principles of credit, exchange and production in peasant farming” (362); what is needed is the “economic organisation of labour” (sic!—p. 363), “the rational arrangement of the economics of the national economy,” and so on, and so forth. All this, as we see, is the familiar Narodnik panacea, tacked on to the census data. And, as though in final confirmation of their Narodnik orthodoxy, the compilers did not fail to condemn money economy in general, and for the reader’s edification inform him that artisan production “performs a valuable service to the national economy, by affording it the opportunity to avoid the conversion of natural economy into money economy.” “The national economy is vitally interested in demanding that the raw materials it produces be worked up on the spot, as far as possible without the intervention of money in the exchange processes” (p. 360).
Here we have the Narodnik programme expounded with a fullness and frankness that leave nothing to be desired! We say the “Narodnik programme,” for we are interested, not in what distinguishes the compilers of the Sketch from other Narodniks, but, on the contrary, in what they have in common. What interests us is the practical Narodnik programme for the handicraft industries in general. It is easy to see that the main features of this programme are saliently stressed in the Sketch : 1) condemnation of money economy and sympathy for natural economy and primitive artisan production; 2) various measures for the encouragement of small peasant production, such as credits, technical developments, etc.; 3) the spreading of associations and societies of all kinds among the masters, big and small—raw material, warehousing, loan-and-savings, credit, consumers’ and producers’ societies; 4) “organisation of labour”—a current phrase in all and sundry Narodnik good intentions. Let us examine this programme.
To take first the condemnation of money economy: as far as industry is concerned, it is already of a purely Platonic character. Even in Perm Gubernia, artisan production has already been forced far into the background by commodity production, and is in such a pitiful state that we find the Sketch itself talking about the desirability of “emancipating the handicraftsman from dependence,” in other words, of abolishing the artisan’s dependence on the private customer “by seeking means of extending the marketing area beyond the local consumption demand” (p. 33). In other words, condemnation of money economy in theory and a desire to convert artisan production into commodity production in practice! And this contradiction is by no means peculiar to the Sketch, it is characteristic of all Narodnik projects: however much they may kick against commodity (money) economy, realities driven out of the door fly in at the window, and the measures they advocate only serve to develop commodity production. Credit is an illustration of this. In their plans and proposals the Narodniks cannot dispense with commodity economy. The Sketch, for example, does not even hint that the proposed reforms should not be based on commodity economy. On the contrary, all it wants is rational principles of exchange, the co-operative organisation of exchange. Commodity economy remains, and is only to be reformed on rational lines. There is nothing new in this utopia; it had many an eminent exponent in the old economic literature. Its theoretical unsoundness was disclosed long ago, so that there is no need to dwell on the subject here. Instead of uttering absurd phrases about the necessity of “rationalising” economy, would they not do better first “to rationalise” their notions of the existing economy, of the socio-economic relations existing among that extremely variegated and dissimilar mass of “handicraftsmen” whose destinies our Narodniks wish to decide so bureaucratically and frivolously from above? Has not actual life shown us time and again that Narodnik practical measures, concocted in accordance with supposedly “pure” ideas on “organisation of labour,” etc., lead in practice to nothing but encouragement and support for the “enterprising muzhik,” the small manufacturer or the buyer-up and all the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie in general? This is not fortuitous, it is not because individual measures are imperfect or unsuitable. On the contrary, given the general basis of commodity economy, it is the petty bourgeois above all and before all who inevitably and necessarily make use of credits, warehouses, banks, technical advice and the like.
But, it may be objected, if that is so, if the Narodniks in the practical measures they suggest, unconsciously and involuntarily serve to develop the petty bourgeoisie, and, hence, capitalism in general, why should their programme be attacked by people who on principle regard the development of capitalism as a progressive process? Is it reasonable to attack practical and useful programmes because their ideological integument is wrong, or, to put it mildly, debatable, for surely nobody will deny the “usefulness” of technical education, credits and of producers’ societies and associations?
These are not imaginary objections. In one form or another, in one connection or another, they are constantly to be heard in the replies to the arguments levelled against the Narodniks. We shall not dwell here on the point that even if such objections were justified, they do not in the least refute the fact that the dressing-up of petty-bourgeois projects as the most exalted social panaceas is in itself a cause of grave social harm. We intend to put the question on the practical footing of the vital and immediate needs of the times, and to judge the Narodnik programme from this deliberately narrowed viewpoint.
Although many of the Narodnik measures are of practical value in serving to develop capitalism, nevertheless, taken as a whole, they are 1) supremely inconsistent, 2) lifelessly doctrinaire, and 3) paltry compared with the actual problems with which developing capitalism confronts our industry. Let us explain. We have shown, firstly, how inconsistent the Narodniks are as practical men. Side by side with the measures indicated above, which are usually described as a liberal economic policy, and which have always been inscribed on the banners of bourgeois leaders in the West, the Narodniks contrive to cling to their intention of retarding contemporary economic development, of preventing the progress of capitalism, and of supporting small production, which is being bled white in the struggle against large-scale production. They advocate laws and institutions which restrict the freedom of the mobilisation of land and freedom of movement, and which retain the peasantry as a closed social estate, etc. Are there, we ask, any reasonable grounds for retarding the development of capitalism and big industry? We have seen from the census data that the notorious “independence” of the handicraftsmen is no guarantee that they will not be subordinated to merchant capital, to exploitation in its worst form; that actually the condition of the vast bulk of these “independent” handicraftsmen is often more wretched than that of the handicraftsmen’s wage-workers, and that their earnings are astonishingly low, their working conditions (from the standpoint of sanitation and hours) highly unsatisfactory, and production scattered, technically primitive and undeveloped. Are there, we ask, any reasonable grounds for perpetuating the police laws which reinforce the “tie with the land,” and forbid the breaking of a tie that appeals so strongly to the Narodniks?[57] The data of the 1894-95 “handicraft census” in Perm Gubernia are clear proof of the utter absurdity of artificial measures to tie the peasants to the land. All these measures do is reduce their earnings, which, wherever the “tie with the land” exists, are less than half those of the non-agriculturists; they lower the standard of living, increase the isolation and disunity of producers scattered throughout the villages and render them more defenceless than ever against the buyer-up and subcontractor. At the same time, the fact that the peasants are tied to the land hinders the development of agriculture, without, however, being able to prevent the rise of a rural petty-bourgeois class. The Narodniks avoid raising the question: should the development of capitalism be retarded or not? They prefer to discuss “the possibility of different paths for the fatherland.” But anybody who begins to talk about immediate practical measures thereby adopts the existing path.[58] Do whatever you like “to drag” the fatherland on to a different path! Such efforts will arouse no criticism (except-the criticism of laughter). But do not defend that which artificially retards present-day development, do not drown the problem of removing the obstacles from the existing path in talk about a “different path.”
Here is another thing that should be borne in mind when judging the Narodniks’ practical programme. We have already seen that the Narodniks try to formulate their ideas as abstractly as possible, to present them as the abstract demands of “pure” science or “pure” justice, and not as the real needs of real classes having definite interests. Credit—that vital need of every master, big and small, in capitalist society—is presented by the Narodnik as a sort of element in the system of the organisation of labour; masters’ associations and societies are depicted as the embryonic expression of the idea of co-operation in general, of the idea of “handicraft emancipation,” etc., whereas everybody knows that all such associations actually pursue aims which have nothing in common with such lofty matters, but are simply connected with the size of these masters’ incomes, with the growing strength of their position and with their increasing profits. To thus convert commonplace bourgeois and petty-bourgeois wishes into a sort of social panacea only emasculates them, robs them of their vitality, of the guarantee of their urgency and practicability. The Narodnik endeavours to present the urgent needs of each proprietor, buyer-up, or merchant (credits, associations, technical assistance) as general questions towering above individual interests. The Narodnik imagines that he is thereby enhancing their significance, exalting them, whereas actually he is only converting a vital matter that interests certain specific groups of the population into a philistine wish, into armchair speculation, bureaucratic “reflections on the benefits” of things. Directly connected with this is a third circumstance. Not realising that such practical measures as credits and artels, technical assistance, etc., reflect the needs of developing capitalism, the Narodnik is unable to voice the general and fundamental needs of this development, and instead proposes paltry, casually selected, half measures which in themselves are incapable of exerting any serious influence and are inevitably doomed to failure. Had the Narodnik openly and consistently adopted the standpoint of an exponent of the needs of social development along capitalist lines, he would have been able to note the general conditions, the general demands of this development, and he would have seen that, given these general conditions (the chief of them, in the present case, being freedom of industry), all his petty projects and measures would be achieved automatically, that is, by the activities of the interested parties themselves, whereas, by ignoring these general conditions and proposing nothing but practical measures of an utterly incidental character, he is only beating about the bush. Let us, by way of illustration, take the question of the freedom of industry. On the one hand, it is so much the general and fundamental question of questions concerning industrial policy, that an examination of it is particularly appropriate. On the other hand, the specific conditions of the Perm area furnish interesting corroboration of the cardinal importance of this question.
The metallurgical industry, as we know, is the major feature of the economic life of the area and has laid a very specific impress on it. Both the history of the area’s colonisation and its present condition are closely connected with the needs of the Urals iron industry. “Generally speaking, the peasants were settled in the Urals in order to furnish hands for the ironmasters,” we read in the letter of Babushkin, a resident of Nizhniye Sergi, quoted in the Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry.[59] And these artless words very faithfully depict the tremendous part played by the ironmasters in the life of the area, their significance as landlords and factory owners combined, accustomed to undivided and unrestricted rule, as monopolists who base their industry on possessional rights and not on capital and competition. The monopoly basis of the Urals metallurgical industry has been reflected in law, in the well-known Article 394 of Volume VII of the Code of Laws (Mining Statute), an article about which so much has been and is still being written in literature on the Urals. This law, promulgated in 1806, provides, firstly, that the sanction of the mining authority shall be required for mining towns to open any factory and, secondly, forbids the opening in the ironworks area of “any manufactory or factory whose operation chiefly depends on the action of fire, necessitating the use of coal or wood.” In 1861 the Urals ironmasters particularly insisted on the inclusion of this law in the terms governing the emancipation of the peasants, and Article 11 of the regulations for ironworkers reiterates the same prohibition.[60] The report of the Board of the Handicraft Industrial Bank for 1895 states, among other things, that “most numerous of all, however, are complaints against the ban imposed by officials of the Department of Mines and the possessional works owners on the opening of fire-using establishments within the areas under their jurisdiction, and against all sorts of restrictions on the operations of the metal trades” (Sketch, p. 223). Thus, the traditions of the “good old days” have been preserved intact in the Urals to this day, and the attitude towards small peasant industry in this region fully harmonises with the “organisation of labour” which ensured the ironmasters a supply of factory workers tied to their locality. These traditions are very strikingly illustrated in the following report in Permskiye Gubernskiye Vedomosti,[61] No. 183, 1896, quoted in the Sketch and rightly referred to there as being “highly eloquent.” Here it is: “The Ministry of Agriculture and State Property requested the Urals ironmasters to discuss the possibility of the ironworks taking measures to encourage the development of handicraft production in the Urals. The ironmasters informed the Ministry that the development of handicraft industry in the Urals would be detrimental to big industry, for even today, when handicrafts are poorly developed in the Urals, the population are unable to furnish the works with the required number of hands[62] ; if the population were to find jobs that could be done at home, the ironworks would risk being brought to a complete standstill” (Sketch, p. 244). This report evoked the following exclamation from the compilers of the Sketch : “Of course, freedom of industry is a prime and essential condition of all industry, whether large, medium or small. . . . In the name of freedom of industry, all its branches should be legally equal. . . . The metal-working handicraft industries of the Urals should be freed from all exceptional fetters imposed by the ironmasters to restrict their natural development” (ibid. Our italics). Reading this heartfelt and perfectly just defence of “freedom of industry,” we were reminded of the story about the metaphysical philosopher who delayed climbing out of a pit while he pondered over the nature of the rope that had been thrown him. At last he decided: “It is nothing but a rope”![63] In the same way, the Perm Narodniks ask disdainfully about freedom of industry, freedom of capitalist development, freedom of competition: What is freedom of industry?—Simply a bourgeois demand! Their aspirations soar much higher; it is not freedom of competition they want (what a low, narrow, bourgeois aspiration!), but “organisation of labour.”. . . But these Manilovian dreams have only to come “face to face” with prosaic and unadorned reality, and that reality immediately smells of such an “organisation of labour “ that the Narodnik forgets all about the “harmfulness” and “danger” of capitalism, about the “possibility of different paths for the fatherland,” and calls for “freedom of industry.”
We repeat, we regard this desire as fully justified and consider that this view (shared not only by the Sketch, but by practically every author who has written on this subject) does credit to the Narodniks. But . . . what is one to do? It is impossible to say a word in praise of the Narodniks without immediately following it up with a big “but”—but we have two important remarks to make in this connection.
First. We can be sure that the overwhelming majority of the Narodniks will indignantly deny the correctness of our identifying “freedom of industry” with “freedom of capitalism.” They will say that the abolition of monopolies and of the survivals of serfdom is “simply” a demand for equality, that it is in the interest of the “entire” national economy in general and of peasant economy in particular, and not of capitalism at all. We know that the Narodniks will say this. But it will be untrue. Over a hundred years have elapsed since the days when “freedom of industry” was regarded in this idealistic abstract way, as a fundamental and natural (cf. the word italicised in the Sketch ) “right of man.” Since then the demand for “freedom of industry” has been advanced and achieved in a number of countries, and everywhere this demand has expressed the discrepancy between growing capitalism and the survivals of monopoly and regulation, everywhere it has served as the watchword of the advanced bourgeoisie, and every where it has resulted in the complete triumph of capitalism, and nothing else. Theory has since fully explained the absolute naïvetè of the illusion that “freedom of industry” is a demand of “pure reason,” of abstract “equality,” and has shown that freedom of industry is a capitalist issue. The achievement of “freedom of industry” is by no means a “legal” reform only; it is a profound economic reform. The demand for “freedom of industry” is always indicative of a discrepancy between the legal institutions (which reflect production relations that have already outlived their day) and the new production relations, which have developed in spite of the old institutions, have outgrown them and demand their abolition. If the order of things in the Urals is now evoking a general cry for “freedom of industry,” it means that the traditional regulations, monopolies and privileges that benefit the landlord ironmasters are restricting existing economic relations, existing economic forces. What are these relations and forces? These relations are the relations of commodity economy. These forces are the forces of capital, which guides commodity economy. We have only to remember the “confession” of the Perm Narodnik quoted above: “Our entire handicraft industry is in bondage to private capital.” And, even without this confession, the handicraft census data speak quite eloquently for themselves.
Second remark. We welcome the defence of freedom of industry by the Narodniks. But we make this welcome contingent on its being conducted consistently. Does “freedom of industry” merely consist in abolishing the ban on the opening of fire-using establishments in the Urals? Does not the fact that the peasant has no right to leave his village community, or to engage in any industry or pursuit he likes, constitute a far more serious restriction on “freedom of industry”? Does not the absence of freedom of movement, the fact that the law does not recognise the right of every citizen to choose any town or village community in the country as his place of domicile, constitute a restriction on freedom of industry? Does not the peasant community, with its social-estate exclusiveness—the fact that members of the trading and industrial class cannot enter it—constitute a restriction on freedom of industry? And so on, and so forth. We have enumerated far more serious, more general and widespread restrictions on freedom of industry, restrictions that affect all Russia, and the entire mass of the peasantry most of all. If “large, medium and small” industries are to have equal rights, should not the small industries be granted the same right to alienate land as is enjoyed by the large industries? If the Urals mining laws are “exceptional fetters, restricting natural development,” do not collective responsibility, the inalienability of allotments and the special social-estate laws and regulations governing trades and occupations, migration and transfer from one social estate to another, constitute “exceptional fetters”? Do they not “restrict natural development”?
The truth is that on this question, too, the Narodniks have betrayed the half-heartedness and two-facedness that are characteristic of every Kleinbürger ideology. On the one hand, the Narodniks do not deny that in our society there are a host of survivals of the “organisation of labour” whose origin dates back to the days of apanage rights, and which are in crying contradiction to the modern economic system and to the country’s entire economic and cultural development. On the other hand, they cannot help seeing that this economic system and development threaten to ruin the small producer, and, fearful for the fate of this palladium of their “ideals,” the Narodniks try to drag history back, to halt development, beg and plead that it be “forbidden,” “not allowed,” and cover up this pitiful reactionary prattle with talk about “organisation of labour,” talk that can only sound as a bitter mockery.
The chief and fundamental objection we have to make to the practical Narodnik programme for modern industry should now, of course, be clear to the reader. Insofar as the Narodnik measures are part of, or coincide with, the reform which, since the days of Adam Smith, has been known as freedom of industry (in the broad sense of the term), they are progressive. But, firstly, in that case, they contain nothing specifically “Narodnik,” nothing that gives special support to small production and “special paths” for the fatherland. Secondly, this favourable side of the Narodnik programme is weakened and distorted by the substitution of partial and minor projects and measures for a general and fundamental solution of the problem—freedom of industry. Insofar, however, as Narodnik aspirations run counter to freedom of industry and endeavour to retard modern development, they are reactionary and meaningless, and their achievement can bring nothing but harm. Let us illustrate this by examples. Take credit. Credit is an institution of most developed commodity circulation, of the most developed, nation-wide turnover of commodities. Wherever achieved, “freedom of industry” inevitably leads to the formation of credit institutions as commercial enterprises, to the breaking-down of the peasants’ social-estate exclusiveness, to their mingling with the classes which make most frequent resort to credit, to the independent formation of credit societies by interested persons, and so on. On the other hand, what value can there be in credit measures conferred on the “muzhiks” by Zemstvo officials and other “intellectuals” if the laws and institutions keep the peasantry in a condition which precludes the possibility of a proper, developed commodity circulation, in a condition in which labour service is far easier, far more practicable, attainable and workable than property responsibility (the foundation of credit)? Under these conditions, credit measures will always be something adventitious, an alien growth planted in absolutely uncongenial soil; they will be still-born, some thing only dreamy intellectual Manilovs and well-meaning officials could give birth to, and which the real traders in money capital will always jeer at. So as to make no unfounded assertion, let us quote the opinion of Yegunov (in the article mentioned above) whom nobody can suspect of—“materialism.” Speaking in reference to handicraft warehouses, he says: “Even under the most favourable local conditions, a stationary warehouse, and the only one in the whole uyezd at that, never can and never will replace a perpetually mobile and personally interested trader.” In reference to the Perm Handicraft Bank, we are told that in order to obtain a loan the handicraftsman must hand in an application to the bank or its agent and name his guarantors. The agent comes, verifies his statement, gathers detailed information about his business, etc., “and this whole pile of documents is sent, at the handicraftsman’s expense, to the head office of the bank.” If it decides to grant the loan, the bank sends (through the agent, or through the volost administration) a bond for signature, and only when the borrower has signed it (his signature being certified by the volost authorities) and sent it back to the bank, does he receive his money. If an artel applies for a loan, a copy of the articles of association is required. It is the function of the agents to see that loans are expended for the specific purposes for which they have been granted, that the business of clients is run on sound lines, etc. “Obviously, in no way can it be said that handicraftsmen can easily obtain bank loans; it may be safely said that the handicraftsman will far more readily turn to the local moneyed man for a loan than submit to all the trying formalities we have described, pay postage, notary’s and local government fees, patiently wait all the months that elapse between the moment the need for the loan arises and the day it is granted, and put up with supervision for the whole period of the loan” (op. cit., p. 170). The Narodnik view on some sort of anti-capitalist credit is just as absurd as the incongruous, clumsy and useless at tempts (using wrong methods) to get done by “intellectuals” and officials things that have everywhere and always been the business of traders.
Technical education. There is hardly need, we think, to dwell on this subject . . . except to remind the reader of the project, worthy of “eternal memory,” of our well-known progressive writer, Mr. Yuzhakov, to implant agricultural gymnasia in Russia, at which poor peasant men and women would work off the cost of their education by serving, for example, as cooks or laundresses.[64] ... Artels: but who does not know that the chief obstacle to their spreading is the traditions of the very same “organisation of labour” which has found expression in the Urals mining laws? Who does not know that wherever freedom of industry has been introduced in full it has always led to an unparalleled blossoming and development of all sorts of societies and associations? It is very comical at times to see our Narodniks trying to represent their opponents as enemies of artels, associations, etc., in general. The boot, of course, is on the other foot! The fact is that if you want to look for the idea of association and for the means of implementing it, you must not look back, to the past, to patriarchal artisan and small production, which are the cause of the extreme isolation, disunity and backwardness of the producers, but forward, to the future, towards the development of large-scale industrial capitalism.
We are perfectly aware of the haughty contempt with which the Narodnik will regard this programme of industrial policy that is being opposed to his own. “Freedom of industry”! What an old-fashioned, narrow, Manchester School[65] bourgeois aspiration! The Narodnik is convinced that for him this is an überwundener Standpunkt,[66] that he has succeeded in rising above the transient and one-sided interests on which this aspiration is based, that he has risen to a profounder and purer idea of “organisation of labour.” . . . Actually, however, he has only sunk from progressive bourgeois ideology to reactionary petty-bourgeois ideology, which helplessly vacillates between the desire to accelerate modern economic development and the desire to retard it, between the interests of small masters and the interests of labour. On this question, the latter coincide with the interests of big industrial capital.
- ↑ A Survey of Perm Territory. A Sketch of the State of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia. Published out of funds provided by the Perm Gubernia Zemstvo. Perm, 1896, pp. II + 365 + 232 pp. of tables, 16 diagrams and a map of Perm Gubernia. Price: 1 ruble 50 kopeks.—Lenin —Lenin
- ↑ In 1889 the tsarist government introduced the administrative post of Zemsky Nachalnik in order to increase the power of the landlords over the peasants. The Zemsky Nachalniks were appointed from among the local landed nobility, and were given enormous power, not only administrative but also juridical, over the peasants, including the right to have peasants arrested and flogged.
- ↑ Actually, more than one-third are landless, for the census covered only one town. But of that more anon. —Lenin
- ↑ The Handicraft Industries of Perm Gubernia at the Siberian-Urals Science and Industry Exhibition in Ekaterinburg, 1887, by Y. Krasnoperov, in three parts, Perm, 1888-89, Part I, p. 8. We shall quote from this valuable publication, briefly referring to it as Handicraft Industries and indicating the part and the page. —Lenin
- ↑ These two types of handicraftsmen—those processing livestock and plant produce—make up 33% + 28% = 61% of the total number. Metal working engages 25% of the handicraftsmen (p. 20). —Lenin
- ↑ Computed from the data in the Sketch (p. 54 and total number of wage-workers). —Lenin
- ↑ The overwhelming majority of our “factories” (so called in the official statistics), actually 15,000 out of 23,000, employ less than 16 workers. See Directory of Factories for 1890. —Lenin
- ↑ We shall presently give data showing the distribution of establishments according to net income. We learn that the aggregate net income of 2,376 establishments with the lowest income (up to 50 rubles) = 77,900 rubles, while that of 80 establishments with the highest income = 83,150 rubles. The average per “establishment,” therefore, is 32 rubles and 1,039 rubles respectively. —Lenin
- ↑ For purposes of comparison.—Ed.
- ↑ P. 50. The Sketch does not summarise the figures for earnings. —Lenin
- ↑ The earnings of an annual worker are taken as 100. —Lenin
- ↑ Consequently, if Mr. N.-on’s attacks on the “separation of industry from agriculture” were not the platonic lamentations of a romanticist, he should also bewail the appearance of every handicraft establishment. —Lenin
- ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 748.
- ↑ In the Sketch there is an obvious misprint in this column (see p. 58), which we have corrected. —Lenin
- ↑ In the Sketch there is an obvious misprint in this column (see p. 58), which we have corrected. [DUPLICATED "*".] —Lenin
- ↑ It is well known that among the peasants even industrial workers are often compelled to perform agricultural work. Cf. Handicraft Industries, etc., III, p. 7. —Lenin
- ↑ The seasonal labourer in agriculture always receives more than half the yearly wage. But let us assume that in this case the seasonal labourers receive only half the wage of the annual worker. The wage of an annual worker will then be (2,492 : (73 + <51/2)) = 25.5 rubles. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average wages over a period of 10 years (1881-91) for a farm labourer employed by the year in Perm Gubernia was 50 rubles with board. —Lenin
- ↑ On this last point (which is the first in importance) we would say that it is unfortunate that the Sketch furnishes no data on the standard of living of the agriculturists and non-agriculturists. But other investigators have noted that it is a common phenomenon for the living standard of the non-agriculturist industrialists to be incomparably higher than that of the “raw” agriculturists, and this is equally true of Perm Gubernia. Cf. Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry in Russia published by the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property, Vol. III, Yegunov’s article. The author points to the completely “urban” standard of living in some of the landless villages, to the endeavour of the non-agriculturist handicraftsman to dress and live “as decent people do” (European clothes, even to the starched shirt- samovar, larger consumption of tea, sugar, white bread, beef, etc.). The author draws on the family budgets contained in Zemstvo statistical publications. —Lenin
- ↑ There is only one group in the horn industry—Group I. —Lenin
- ↑ The distribution of the workers in these three industries between Group I and Group II is done approximately, 85.9% being taken as the standard for Group I. —Lenin
- ↑ There is an exception: the dyeing industry is run entirely by artisans, and summer work is greater than winter work. —Lenin
- ↑ We would remind the reader that only one town (and that uyezd centre) was here included by way of exception: only 1,412, or 29.6 per cent, of the 4,762 family workers in Group II are town dwellers. —Lenin
- ↑ It goes without saying that only handicraftsmen in the same sub-group can be compared, and that a commodity producer cannot be compared with an artisan or a handicraftsman who works for a buyer-up. —Lenin
- ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 390.
- ↑ But these are by no means the largest establishments. From the division of establishments according to number of wage-workers (p. 113) it may be calculated that in three establishments there are 163 wage-workers, or an average of 54 per establishment. Yet these are also regarded as “handicraft establishments” and are added together with the one-man workshops (of which there are no less than 460 in the industry) to obtain general “average”! —Lenin
- ↑ In one of the establishments” the introduction of a wool-carding machine was mentioned (p. 119). —Lenin
- ↑ There is apparently a misprint or error in the table on p. 158: in Irbit Uyezd the net income is more than the 9,827 rubles shown in the total. We had to change this table according to the data in the tables appended to the Sketch. —Lenin
- ↑ Cf. Handicraft Industries, pp. 46-47, as well as the description of the industry given in the Sketch, p. 162, et. seq. It is most typical that “these employers were once real handicraftsmen and that is why they have always been fond of giving themselves that name.” —Lenin
- ↑ It may be seen from the Sketch that in the pitch and tar industry both the primitive method of distilling pitch in pits and the more perfected cauldron, and even cylindrical boiler, methods are employed (p. 195). The household census furnished material showing the distribution of these different methods, but it was not utilised, the large establishments not being treated separately. —Lenin
- ↑ Cf. vehicle building, p. 308 of the text and pp. 11 and 12 of the tables; chest making, p. 335; tailoring, p. 344, etc. —Lenin
- ↑ These data are also available for the lace-, lock- and accordion making industries, but we omit them, as they do not record establishments according to the number of family workers. —Lenin
- ↑ The 8,377 establishments in the 28 industries are divided according to the number of family and wage-workers as follows: no family workers—95 establishments; 1 worker—4,362; 2 workers—2,632; 3 workers—870; 4 workers—275; 5 workers and over—143. The establishments employing wage-workers number 2,228, and are divided as follows: 1 wage-worker—1,359; 2 workers—447; 3 workers—201; 4 workers—96; 5 workers and more—125. The wage workers total 4,625, and their aggregate wages total 212,096 rubles (45.85 rubles per worker). —Lenin
- ↑ The cost of board is 45 rubles per annum, according to the figures—average for 10 years (188l-91)—of the Department of Agriculture. (See S. A. Korolenko, Hired Labour, etc.) —Lenin
- ↑ By a decree of Peter I issued in 1721 merchant factory owners were given the right to purchase peasants for work in their factories. The feudal workers attached to such enterprises under the possessional right were called “possessional peasants.”
- ↑ Of the 2,228 establishments employing wage-workers in these 28 industries, 46 employ 10 wage-workers or more—a total of 887, or an average of 19.2 wage-workers per establishment. —Lenin
- ↑ These include two buyers-up (Ponomaryov and Fominsky) who have 217 establishments working for them. Altogether, there are 470 bootmaking establishments working for buyers-up in Kullgur Uyezd. —Lenin
- ↑ The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Issue I, St. Petersburg, 1869, p 225
- ↑ These words are in English in the original. —Ed.
- ↑ The truck system—the system of paying the workers wages in the shape of goods and foodstuffs from the employer’s shop. This system was additional exploitation of the workers, and in Russia, was particularly widespread in the areas where handicraft industry flourished.
- ↑ These words are in English in the original. —Ed.
- ↑ The felt industry in the Arzamas and Semyonov uyezds of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia is organised on those lines. See Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry and the Material of the Nizhni-Novgorod Zemstvo Statistical Department. —Lenin
- ↑ Directory of Factories for 1879. The matting makers working for buyers-up are mostly concentrated in Osa Uyezd. —Lenin
- ↑ Sketch, p. 157. —Lenin
- ↑ Per establishment. —Lenin
- ↑ Sweating system. —Ed.
- ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 336-68.
- ↑ These words are in English in the original. —Ed.
- ↑ Restrain your laughter, friends!—Ed.
- ↑ If nothing more, see Mr. Kharizomenov’s article, “The Importance of Handicraft Industry,” in Yuridichesky Vestnik,[17] 1883, Nos. 11 and 12, which contains a summary of the statistical material then available. —Lenin
- ↑ Not to mention the curious way in which this figure was arrived at. For instance, the largest component is the flour-milling industry (1,200,000 rubles), arrived at by including the total value of the grain ground by the millers! In the tables and in the description given in the Sketch, only the gross income of 143,000 rubles was taken (see p. 358 and note). The bootmaking industry accounts for 430,000 rubles, a substantial part of which consists of the turnover of the Kungur factory owners ; and so on, and so forth. —Lenin
- ↑ The objection may be raised that the wage-workers employed by artisan handicraftsmen (20% of the wage-workers employed by handicraftsmen) should be classed under artisan and not commodity production. But here labour-power is itself a commodity, and its purchase and sale is an essential feature of capitalism. —Lenin
- ↑ Not a word is said as to how this “close contact” reacts on the system and correctness of payment, the methods of hire, the enslavement of the worker, the truck system [these words are in English in the original. —Ed.], and so on. —Lenin
- ↑ What more would you have, my dear? —Ed.
- ↑ Lenin quotes from Heine’s poem “Du hast Diamanten und Perlen . . .” (“Thou hast diamonds and pearls”).
- ↑ We find the same idea expressed in Handicraft Industries, I, p. 39, et. seq., in a controversy with the newspaper Dyelovoi Korrespondent,[6] which said that the kulaks (masters of assembly workshops in the chest-making industry) should not be included in the Handicraft Section. “Our entire handicraft industry,” we read in reply, “is in bondage to private capital, so that if only those handicraftsmen who trade in their own goods were included in the Handicraft Section it would be as empty as an eggshell.” A highly significant admission, is it not? Using the data of the census, we have shown above the meaning of this “bondage to private capital” which holds the handicraft industries in its grip. —Lenin
- ↑ Vol. X, part I, of the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire.
- ↑ The Sketch, too, speaks very enthusiastically of the advantages of the village community and of the harm of the “freedom to mobilise” landed property, which, it claims, would result in the emergence of a “proletariat” (p. 6). This contrasting of the community with freedom to dispose of land is an excellent illustration of the most reactionary and noxious feature of the “community.” It would be interesting to know whether there is a single capitalist country in which a “proletarian” earning from 33 to 50 rubles a year would not be classed as a pauper ? —Lenin
- ↑ And that this existing path is the development of capitalism has not, as far as we know, been denied by the Narodniks themselves, either by Mr. N.-on, or by Mr. V. V., or by Mr. Yuzhakov, etc., etc. —Lenin
- ↑ Part XVI, pp 594-95. Cited in Handicraft Industries, I, p. 140. —Lenin
- ↑ See Handicraft Industries, I pp. 18-19.—Sketch, pp. 222, 223, and 244.—Yegunov’s article in Volume III of Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry in Russia published by the Ministry of State Property and Agriculture. In publishing Yegunov’s article, the Ministry, in a comment, makes the reservation that the author’s views “substantially differ from the opinion and information of the Department of Mines.” In Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, for example, as many as 400 smithies were closed down under these laws. Cf. Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry, Part XVI, article by V. D. Belov, “Handicraft Industry in the Urals and Its Connection with Metallurgy.” The author relates that the handicraftsmen, fearing to incur the severity of the law, hide their machines. One handicraftsman built a furnace on wheels to cast ironware, so as to make it easier to hide (op. cit., p. 18)! —Lenin
- ↑ Permskiye Gubernskiye Vedomosti (Perm Gubernia Record )—an official paper that appeared weekly, and then daily, in Perm from 1838 to 1917.
- ↑ Let us explain for the benefit of the reader that our iron industry statistics have repeatedly shown that the number of workers employed in proportion to output is considerably higher in the Urals than in the Southern or Polish iron districts. Low wages—the result of the workers being tied to the land—keeps the Urals at a much lower technical level than the South or Poland. —Lenin
- ↑ Cf. I. I. Khemnitser’s fable “The Metaphysician,” in which the metaphysician is the embodiment of empty theorising.
- ↑ See next article. —Lenin
- ↑ There will be some, no doubt, who think that “freedom of industry” precludes such measures as factory legislation, etc. By “freedom of industry” is meant the abolition of all survivals of the past that hinder the development of capitalism. But factory legislation, like the other measures of modern so-called Socialpolitik, presupposes an advanced development of capitalism and, in its turn, furthers that development. —Lenin
- ↑ Discarded viewpoint. —Ed.