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

338
V. I. LENIN
III. THE GROWTH OF SMALL INDUSTRIES AFTER THE
REFORM. TWO FORMS OF THIS PROCESS AND ITS
SIGNIFICANCE
From the foregoing there also emerge the following
features of small production that merit attention. The
appearance of a new industry signifies, as we have already
observed, a process of growing social division of labour.
Hence, such a process must necessarily take place in every
capitalist society, to the extent that a peasantry and seminatural
agriculture still remain to one degree or other, and
to the extent that diverse ancient institutions and traditions
(due to bad means of communication, etc.) prevent largescale
machine industry from directly replacing domestic
industry. Every step in the development of commodity
economy inevitably leads to the peasantry producing an
ever-increasing number of industrialists from their ranks;
this process turns up new soil, as it were, prepares new
regions in the most backward parts of the country, or new
spheres in the most backward branches of industry, for
subsequent seizure by capitalism. The very same growth of
capitalism manifests itself in other parts of the country,
or in other branches of industry, in an entirely different
way; not in an increase but in a decrease in the number of
small workshops and of home workers absorbed by the factory.
It is clear that a study of the development of capitalism
in the industry of a given country requires that the
strictest distinction be made between these processes; to
mix them up is to lead to an utter confusion of concepts.*
* Here is an interesting example of how these two different
processes occur in one and the same gubernia, at one and the same
time and in one and the same industry. The spinning-wheel
industry (in Vyatka Gubernia) is ancillary to the domestic production
of fabrics. The development of this industry marks the rise of commodity
production, which embraces the making of one of the instruments
for the production of fabrics. Well, we see that in the remote parts
of the gubernia, in the north, the spinning wheel is almost unknown
(Material for a Description of the Industries of Vyatka Gubernia,
II, 27) and there “the industry might newly emerge,” i.e., might make
the first breach in the patriarchal natural economy of the peasants.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the gubernia this industry is already
declining, and the investigators believe that the probable cause of
the decline is “the increasingly widespread use among the peasantry