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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
385
and transforms the technique of the small producer, if
the “buyer-up” singles out certain detailed operations and
gets them done by wage-workers in his own workshop, if,
parallel with the distribution of work to be done in the
home, and inseparably connected with it, big workshops
with division of labour emerge (belonging very often to
these same buyers-up), we are confronted with a process
of the genesis of capitalist manufacture of another
kind.*
Manufacture is highly important in the development of
capitalist forms of industry, as the link between handicrafts
and small commodity production with primitive forms
of capital, and large-scale machine industry (the factory).
Manufacture is closer to the small industries because it
continues to be based on hand technique, so that the big
establishments cannot, therefore, fully displace the small
ones, cannot completely divorce the industrialist from
agriculture. “Manufacture was unable, either to seize upon
the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise
that production to its very core (in ihrer Tiefe).
It towered up as an economic work of art, on the broad
foundation of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic
industries.”** What brings manufacture closer to the
factory is the rise of the big market, of big establishments
with wage-workers, of big capital, which has brought
masses of propertyless workers under its complete
domination.
In Russian literature the prejudice regarding the
isolation of so-called “factory” production from “handicraft”
* For a description of this process of the genesis of capitalist
manufacture, see Marx’s Das Kapital, III, 318-320. Russ. trans.,
267-270. 130
“It was not even in the bosom of the old guilds that manufacture
was born. It was the merchant that became the head of the modern
workshop, and not the old guild-master.” (Misère de la philosophie,
190. 131 We have had occasion elsewhere to enumerate the principal
features of the concept manufacture according to Marx. [Studies,
179 (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95
in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)]
** Das Kapital, I 2 , S. 383. 132