The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia
V.I. Lenin

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/handicraft/index.htm

V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

## ARTICLE ONE

### (I. General Data.—II. The “Handicraftsman” and Wage-Labour.—III.“Communal-Labour Continuity”)

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. [5] 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

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. [2] 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.” [3] 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). [4] 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.”

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] Actually, more than one-third are landless, for the census
covered only one town. But of that more anon.
— Lenin

[3] 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

[4] 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

[5] 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.

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

### II

## The “Handicraftsman” and Wage-Labour

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:

TRAPPED INSIDE JPEG:

wage-workers [1]

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. [2] 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. [3] 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 , [4] are the figures of the Sketch [5] and of our summary:

TRAPPED INSIDE JPEG:

wage-workers [6]

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).

## Notes

[1] Computed from the data in the Sketch (p. 54
and total number of wage-workers).
— Lenin

[2] 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

[3] 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

[4] For purposes of
comparison.— Ed .

[5] P. 50. The Sketch does not
summarise the figures for earnings.
— Lenin

[6] The earnings of an annual worker are taken as 100.
— Lenin

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

### III

## “Communal-Labour Continuity”

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. [1]

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 , I 2 ,

S. 779). [2]

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?

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] Karl
Marx, Capital , Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 748.

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

## ARTICLE TWO

### (IV. The Agriculture of “Handicraftsmen.”—V. Large and Small Establishments.—The Incomes of the Handicraftsmen)

### IV

## The Agriculture of “Handicraftsmen”

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 :

TRAPPED INSIDE JPEG:

Horses [1] Cows [2]

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, [3] 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. [4]

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. [5]

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) [6] 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. [7] 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. [8]

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 [9] 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%).

## Notes

[1] In the Sketch there is an
obvious misprint in this column (see p. 58), which we have
corrected.
— Lenin

[2] In the Sketch there is an
obvious misprint in this column (see p. 58), which we have
corrected.


— Lenin

[3] 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

[4] 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

[5] 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

[6] There is
only one group in the horn industry—Group I.
— Lenin

[7] 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

[8] There is an exception: the dyeing industry is
run entirely by artisans, and summer work is greater than winter
work.
— Lenin

[9] 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

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

### V

## Large and Small Establishments.—The Incomes of the Handicraftsmen

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, [1] 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). [12] 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 [2] 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 [3] 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.

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 [4] :

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) [5] 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. [6]

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, [7] 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, [8] 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. [9] 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. [10] 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 [13] 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. [11] 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.

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] 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

[3] “In one of the
establishments” the introduction of a wool-carding machine was
mentioned (p. 119).
— Lenin

[4] 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

[5] 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

[6] 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

[7] 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

[8] 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

[9] 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

[10] 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

[11] 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

[12] Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 390.

[13] 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.”

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

## ARTICLE THREE

### (VI. What Is a Buyer-Up?—VII.“Gratifying Features” of Handicraft Industry.—VIII. The Narodnik Programme of Industrial Policy!

### VI

## What Is A Buyer-Up?

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. [1] 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. [14] 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 , [2] [15] 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 , [3] 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, [4] 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. [5] 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,” [6] 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):

TRAPPED INSIDE JPEG:

808.5 [7]

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 [8] 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). [16] 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 [9] ), 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 ! [10] — 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, [11] 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, [12] 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. [13] 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.

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] These words are in English in the
original. — Ed .

[3] These
words are in English in the original. — Ed .

[4] 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

[5] Directory of Factories for 1879 . The matting
makers working for buyers-up are mostly concentrated in Osa Uyezd.
— Lenin

[6] Sketch , p. 157.
— Lenin

[7] Per establishment.
— Lenin

[8] Sweating system. — Ed .

[9] These words are in English in the
original. — Ed .

[10] Restrain your laughter, friends!— Ed .

[11] 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

[12] 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

[13] 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

[14] The Ministry of Finance Yearbook , Issue I, St. Petersburg,
1869, p 225

[15] 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.

[16] Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 336-68.

[17] Yuridichesky Vestnik ( The Legal Messenger )—a
monthly magazine, bourgeois-liberal in trend, published in Moscow from 1867 to 1892.

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

### VII

## “Gratifying Features” of Handicraft Industry

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! [1] 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 ? [2] [4] 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). [3] 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, [5] 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.

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] What more would you have, my dear?
— Ed .

[3] 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

[4] Lenin quotes from Heine’s poem “ Du hast
Diamanten und Perlen . . .” (“Thou hast diamonds and pearls”).

[6] Dyelovoi Korrespondent ( Business Correspondent )—a
commercial and industrial newspaper that appeared in Ekaterinburg (now
Sverdlovsk) from 1886 to 1898. Its columns contained informative items,
announcements, articles on economic problems, and reviews.

[5] Vol. X, part I, of the Code of Laws of the Russian
Empire .

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V. I. Lenin

## The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry

### VIII

## The Narodnik Programme Of Industrial Policy

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? [1] 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 . [2] 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 . [3] 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. [4] 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 , [9] 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 [5] ; 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”! [10] 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. [6] ... 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 [7] bourgeois aspiration! The Narodnik is convinced
that for him this is an überwundener

Standpunkt , [8] 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.

## Notes

[1] 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

[2] 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

[3] Part XVI, pp 594-95. Cited in Handicraft Industries , I, p. 140.
— Lenin

[4] 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

[5] 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

[7] 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

[8] Discarded viewpoint. — Ed .

[9] Permskiye Gubernskiye Vedomosti ( Perm Gubernia
Record )—an official paper that appeared weekly, and then daily, in Perm from 1838 to 1917.

[10] Cf. I. I. Khemnitser’s fable “The
Metaphysician,” in which the metaphysician is the embodiment of empty theorising.