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

358
V. I. LENIN
take it easy somewhat, and to engage mainly in the last two
business functions” (i.e., purchase of materials and sale
of goods). “As soon as the number of wage-workers reaches
10 or exceeds this figure, the proprietor not only gives up
manual labour but practically ceases to supervise his workers:
he appoints a foreman for the purpose. . . . He now
becomes a small capitalist, a ‘born master’” (Isayev, Industries
of Moscow Gubernia, I, 52-53). The statistics we have
cited graphically confirm this description, showing a
decline in the number of family workers with the appearance
of a considerable number of wage-workers.
The general significance of capitalist simple co-operation
in the development of capitalist forms of industry is described
by the author of Capital as follows:
“Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition
to peasant agriculture and to the carrying on of
independent handicrafts whether in guilds or not. . . . Just
as the social productive power of labour that is developed
by co-operation, appears to be the productive power of
capital, so co-operation itself, contrasted with the process of
production carried on by isolated independent labourers,
or even by small employers, appears to be a specific form of
the capitalist process of production. It is the first change
experienced by the actual labour-process, when subjected
to capital. . . . The simultaneous employment of a large number
of wage-labourers, in one and the same process, which
is a necessary condition of this change, also forms the
starting-point of capitalist production. . . . If then, on the
one hand, the capitalist mode of production presents itself to
us historically, as a necessary condition to the transformation
of the labour-process into a social process, so, on the
other hand, this social form of the labour-process presents
itself, as a method employed by capital for the more profitable
exploitation of labour, by increasing that labour’s
productiveness.
“In the elementary form, under which we have hitherto
viewed it, co-operation is a necessary concomitant of all
production on a large scale, but it does not, in itself, represent
a fixed form characteristic of a particular epoch in the
development of the capitalist mode of production. At the
most it appears to do so, and that only approximately, in