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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
387
weavers specialise in producing various sorts of cloth. The
selection of some operations to be done in the home does
not, of course, make any change whatever to the economic
structure of this type of industry. The workrooms or homes
where the weavers work are simply external departments
of the manufactory. The technical basis of such industry
is hand production with extensive and systematic division
of labour; from the economic point of view we see here
the formation of large capital which controls the purchase
of raw materials and the sale of wares on an extremely
extensive (national) market, and under whose complete sway
are a mass of proletarian weavers; a few large establishments
(manufactories in the narrow sense of the term) dominate
a mass of small ones. Division of labour leads to the
emergence of specialist artisans from among the peasantry;
non-agricultural centres of manufacture arise, such as
the village of Ivanovo in Vladimir Gubernia (in 1871 it
became the town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and is now a
centre of large-scale machine industry), the village of
Velikoye in Yaroslavl Gubernia, and many other villages
in Moscow, Kostroma, Vladimir and Yaroslavl gubernias,
which have now turned into factory towns.* In our economic
literature and statistics the industry organised in this
way is usually split up into two parts: peasants who work
in their homes, or in not particularly big workrooms,
workshops, etc., are classed under “handicraft” industry,
while the bigger workrooms and workshops are placed among
the “factories and works” (and, moreover, quite fortuitously,
since no definitely established and uniformly applied rules
exist as to the separation of small establishments from big
ones, of workrooms from manufactories, of workers occupied
in their homes from workers occupied in the workshop of the
capitalist).** Naturally, such classification, which places
some wage-workers on one side, and some masters who hire
these very wage-workers (in addition to the workers in
their establishments) on the other, is nonsense from the
scientific viewpoint.
* For a list of the most important towns of this type, see next
chapter.
** Examples of such confusion will be given in the next chapter.