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

332
V. I. LENIN
of articles to the order of a consumer.* The raw materials
may belong either to the customer-consumer or to the artisan,
and payment for the latter’s work is made either in
cash or in kind (artisan’s premises and keep, remuneration
with part of the product, for example, flour, etc.). While
constituting an essential part of urban life, artisan production
is to be met on a considerable scale in the rural districts
too, where it serves as a supplement to peasant farming.
A certain percentage of the rural population consists
of specialist-artisans engaged (sometimes exclusively,
sometimes in conjunction with agriculture) in tanning, bootmaking,
tailoring, blacksmithery, dyeing of homespun
fabrics, finishing of peasant-made woollens, flour-milling,
etc. Owing to the extremely unsatisfactory state of our economic
statistics we have no precise data on the degree
to which artisan production is spread throughout Russia;
but isolated references to this form of industry are scattered
through nearly all descriptions of peasant farming and
investigations of what is called “handicraft” industry,**
and are even to be found in official factory statistics.***
The Zemstvo statistical returns, in registering peasant
industries, sometimes single out a special group, “artisans”
(cf. Rudnev, loc. cit.), but this category (according
* Kundenproduktion. Cf. Karl Bücher, Die Entstehung der
Volkswirtschaft, Tübingen, 1893. (Work done to order. Cf. Karl
Bücher, The Rise of the National Economy.—Ed.) 119
** It would be impossible to cite quotations in support of this:
innumerable references to artisan production are scattered throughout
all investigations of handicraft industry, although according to the
most accepted view, artisans do not come within the category known
as handicraftsmen. We shall have more than one occasion to see how
hopelessly indefinite is the term “handicraft.”
*** The chaotic condition of these statistics is illustrated particularly
vividly by the fact that no criteria have yet been decided
on for distinguishing handicraft from factory establishments. In
the 60s, for example, village dyeing sheds of a purely handicraft type
were classified with the latter (The Ministry of Finance Yearbook,
Vol. I, pp. 172-176), and in 1890, peasant fulling mills were mixed
up with woollen factories (Orlov’s Directory of Factories and Works,
3rd ed., p. 21), etc. Nor is the latest List of Factories (St. Petersburg,
1897) free from this confusion. For examples, see our Studies,
pp. 270-271. [See also present edition, Vol, 4, “On the Question of Our
Factory Statistics.”—Ed.]