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

366
V. I. LENIN
bigger tradeswomen. 2) The subcontractor, who places orders
herself, or buys up goods from the distributors and
delivers them to the big cities, etc. 3) The big tradeswomen
(2 or 3 “firms”), who do business with commission agents, to
whom they send lace and from whom they receive big orders.
It is “practically impossible” for the provincial tradeswomen
to sell their goods to the big shops: “the shops prefer
to do business with the wholesale buyers-up who deliver
the wares in big quantities . . . of the most diverse patterns”;
the tradeswomen are obliged to sell to these “suppliers”;
“it is from them that they learn all the requirements of the
market; it is they who fix prices; in short, but for them, there
is no way out” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission,
X, pp. 2823-2824). Numerous such examples could
be given. But those given are quite sufficient to show how
utterly impossible is small, scattered marketing where
production is for big markets. In view of the scattered
state of the small producers and of their complete differentiation*
large-scale marketing can only be organised by
large capital, which, by virtue of this, reduces the handicraftsmen
to a position of utter helplessness and dependence.
One can therefore judge how absurd are the current Narodnik
theories which recommend helping the “handicraftsmen”
by “organising marketing.” From the purely theoretical
aspect such theories belong to the category of petty-bourgeois
utopias, based on a failure to understand the indissoluble
connection between commodity production and capitalist
marketing.** As for the facts of Russian reality, the
authors of such theories simply ignore them: they ignore
the scattered state of the small commodity-producers and
* Mr. V. V. asserts that the handicraftsman who is under the
sway of merchant’s capital “suffers losses that are fundamentally
quite superfluous” (Essays on Handicraft Industry, 150). Maybe
Mr. V. V. imagines that the differentiation of the small producers is
“fundamentally” a “quite superfluous” phenomenon, i.e., fundamentally
as regards the commodity economy under which the small producer
lives?
** “It is not a matter of the kulak, but of the shortage of capital
among the handicraftsmen,” say the Perm Narodniks (A Sketch of the
Condition of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia, p. 8). But what
is a kulak if not a handicraftsman with capital? The trouble is just
that the Narodniks refuse to investigate the process of differentiation
of the small producers which yields entrepreneurs and “kulaks” from
their ranks.