Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
245
to demand more, and the employers—to offer less (ibid.,
107).* How openly “callous cash payment” reigns here in
the relations between the classes may be seen, for example,
from the following fact: “experienced employers know very
well” that the workers will “give in” only when they have
eaten up their food stock. “A farmer related that when he
came to the market to hire workers . . . he walked among
them, poking with his stick at their knapsacks (sic !): if they
had bread left, he would not talk to them; he would leave
the market” and wait “until the knapsacks in the market
were empty” (from the Selsky Vestnik [Rural Herald],
1890, No. 15, ibid., 107-108).
As under developed capitalism anywhere, so here, we see
that the worker is particularly oppressed by small capital.
The big employer is forced by sheer commercial considerations**
to abstain from petty oppression, which is of little
advantage and is fraught with considerable loss should
disputes arise. That is why the big employers, for example
(those employing from 300 to 800 workers), try to keep
their workers from leaving at the end of the week, and
themselves fix prices according to the demand for labour;
some even adopt a system of wage increases if the price
of labour in the area goes up—and all evidence goes to
show that these increases are more than compensated by
better work and the absence of disputes (ibid., 130-132;
104). A small employer, on the contrary, sticks at nothing.
“The farmsteaders and German colonists carefully ‘choose’
their workers and pay them 15 or 20% more; but the amount
of work they ‘squeeze’ out of them is 50 per cent more”
(ibid., 116). The “wenches” who work for such an employer
* “At harvest time in a good year the worker triumphs, and it
is a hard job to get him to give way. He is offered a price, but he
won’t consider it; he keeps repeating: give me what I ask and it’s
a go. And that is not because labour is scarce, but because, as the
workers say, ‘it’s our turn now.’” (Reported by a volost clerk; Shakhovskoi,
125.)
“If the crop is a bad one and the price of labour has dropped, the
kulak employer takes advantage of this condition to discharge the
worker before the contract has expired, and the worker loses the season
either in seeking work in the same district or in tramping the
country,” a landlord correspondent confesses (ibid., 132).
** Cf. Fr. Engels, Zur Wohnungsfrage. Vorwort. (F. Engels,
The Housing Question. Preface.—Ed.) 92