The DEVELOPMENT of CAPITALISM in RUSSIA

Chapter VI. Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry

I. The Rise of Manufacture and its Main Features

By manufacture is meant, as we know, co-operation based on division of
labour. In origin, manufacture belongs directly to the above-described
“first stages of capitalism in industry.” On the one hand,
workshops with a more or less considerable number of workers gradually
introduce division of labour, and in this way capitalist simple
co-operation grows into capitalist manufacture. The statistics on the
Moscow industries quoted in the preceding chapter clearly show the process
of this genesis of manufacture: the larger workshops in all fourth
category industries, in some of the third category, and in individual
cases of the second category, systematically apply division of labour on a
wide scale and must therefore be classed as types of capitalist
manufacture. More detailed data on the technique and the economics of some
of these industries will be given below.

On the other hand, we have seen how merchant’s capital in the small
industries, upon reaching its highest stage of development, reduces the
producer to the position of a wage-worker processing the raw material of
others for payment by the piece. If further development leads to the
introduction of systematic division of labour into production and transforms the technique of the small producer, if the
“buyer-up” singles out certain detailed operations and gets
them done by wage-workers in his own workshop, if, parallel with the
distribution of work to be done in the home, and inseparably connected
with it, big workshops with division of labour emerge (belonging very
often to these same buyers-up), we are confronted with a process of the
genesis of capitalist manufacture of another kind. [1]

Manufacture is highly important in the development of capitalist forms of
industry, as the link between handicrafts and small commodity production
with primitive forms of capital, and large-scale machine industry (the
factory). Manufacture is closer to the small industries because it
continues to be based on hand technique, so that the big establishments
cannot, therefore, fully displace the small ones, cannot completely
divorce the industrialist from agriculture. “Manufacture was unable,
either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to
revolutionise that production to its very core ( in ihrer Tiefe ). It towered up as an economic work of art, on the broad foundation
of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic industries.” [2]

What brings manufacture closer to the factory is the rise of the big market, of big
establishments with wage-workers, of big capital, which has brought masses
of propertyless workers under its complete domination.

In Russian literature the prejudice regarding the isolation of so-called
“factory” production from “handicraft” production, regarding the “artificiality” of the former and
the “people’s” character of the latter, is so widespread
that we think it particularly important to examine the data on all the
more important branches of manufacturing industry and to show their
economic organisation after they had grown out of the stage of small
peasant industries, and before they were transformed by large-scale
machine industry.

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Notes:
[1]
For a description of this process of the genesis of capitalist
manufacture, see Marx’s Das Kapital , III, 318-320. Russ
trans.,

267–270. [3] “It was not even in the bosom of the old guilds that manufacture was
born. It was the merchant that became the head of the modern workshop, and
not the old guild-master.” ( Misère de la philosophie ,

190. [4] We have had
occasion elsewhere to enumerate the principal features of the concept
manufacture according to Marx. [ Studies , 179 (See present
edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia . – Ed .)]— Lenin

[2]
Das Kapital , I 2 ,

S. 383. [5] — Lenin

[3]
Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 329-331. [p.385]

[4]
See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy , Moscow, p. 154.
[p.385]

[5]
Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 368. [p.385]