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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
355
Summing up the conclusions that follow from the data
we have analysed, we must say that the economic system of
the small peasant industries is typically petty bourgeois,
the same as that which we have seen among the small
farmers. The expansion, development and improvement of
the small peasant industries cannot take place in the present
social and economic atmosphere except by generating
a minority of small capitalists on the one hand, and a
majority of wage-workers, or of “independent craftsmen” who
lead a harder and worse life than the wage-workers, on
the other. We observe, consequently, in the smallest peasant
industries the most pronounced rudiments of capitalism—of
that very capitalism which various economists
of the Manilov 121 type depict as something divorced from
“people’s production.” From the viewpoint of the home market
theory the facts we have examined are also of no little
importance. The development of small peasant industries
leads to an expansion of the demand by the more prosperous
industrialists for means of production and for labour-power,
which is drawn from the ranks of the rural proletariat. The
number of wage-workers employed by village artisans
and small industrialists all over Russia should be quite
impressive, if in the Perm Gubernia alone, for example,
there are about 6,500.*
* Let us add that in other gubernias, besides Moscow and Perm,
the sources note quite analogous relations among the small commodityproducers.
See, for instance, Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. II,
house-to-house censuses of shoemakers and fullers; Transactions of
the Handicraft Commission, Vol II—on the wheelwrights of Medyn
Uyezd; Vol. II—on the sheepskin dressers of the same uyezd; Vol.
III—on the furriers of Arzamas Uyezd, Vol. IV—on the fullers of
Semyonov Uyezd and on the tanners of Vasil Uyezd, etc. Cf. Nizhni-
Novgorod Handbook, Vol. IV, p. 137,—A. S. Gatsisky’s general
remarks about the small industries speak of the rise of big workshops.
Cf, Annensky’s report on the Pavlovo handicraftsmen (mentioned
above), on the classification of families according to weekly earnings,
etc., etc. All these sources differ from the house-to-house census data
we have examined only in their incompleteness and poverty. The
essence of the matter, however, is identical everywhere.