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

400
V. I. LENIN
diverting the population from agriculture and increasingly
widening the rift between the rich and the poor. The
people subsist on meagre food; they dress “more smartly than
before,” “but beyond their means,” in clothing that is entirely
bought. “The population has succumbed to the spirit of
industry and trade.” “Nearly all who have no craft carry on
some trading. . . . Under the influence of industry and trade,
the peasant has, generally speaking, become more unreserved,
and this has made him more developed and resourceful.”*
The celebrated wooden-spoon industry of the Semyonov
Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, is close to capitalist
manufacture in its organisation. True, there are no big workshops
standing out from among the mass of small workshops
and dominating them, but we find a deeply-rooted division
of labour and the complete subjection of the mass of part-job
workers to capital. Before it is ready, the spoon passes through
no less than 10 hands, the buyers-up getting some of the
operations done by specially hired workers or giving them
out to specialist workers (for example, for varnishing);
some of the villages specialise in particular operations
(for example, the village of Dyakovo specialises in spoonfinishing
to the order of the buyer-up, at piece rates; the
villages of Khvostikovo, Dianovo and Zhuzhelka specialise
in varnishing, etc.). The buyers-up purchase the timber
wholesale in the Samara and other gubernias, where they
send parties of hired workers; they own warehouses for raw
material and manufactured goods, supply the most
valuable material to handicraftsmen for processing, etc.
The mass of workers doing part jobs merge into a single,
complex mechanism of production, entirely under the sway
of capital. “It is all the same to the spoon-makers whether
they work for hire at the master’s cost and on his premises,
or are occupied in their own cottages, for in this
industry, as in others, everything has been weighed, measured
and counted. The spoon-maker never earns more than
* It will be appropriate here to note in general the process of
development of capitalism in the timber industry. The timber merchants
do not sell the timber raw; they hire workers to dress it and to make
various wooden articles, which they then sell. See Transactions of
the Handicraft Commission, etc., VIII, pp. 1268, 1314. Also Statistical
Returns for Orel Gubernia, Trubchevsk Uyezd.