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

428
V. I. LENIN
personal dependence and exploitation.* The disappearance
of apprenticeship is connected with a higher development
of manufacture and with the advent of large-scale
machine industry, when machines reduce the period of training
to a minimum or when such simple single operations
arise as can be done even by children (see above example
of Zagarye).
The retention of hand production as the basis of manufacture
explains its comparative immobility, which is
particularly striking when compared with the factory.
The development and extension of division of labour
proceeds very slowly, so that for whole decades (and even
centuries) manufacture retains its form once it has been
adopted; as we have seen, quite a number of the industries
examined are of quite ancient origin, yet no great changes
in methods of production have been observed in the
majority of them until recently.
As for division of labour, we shall not repeat here the
commonly known tenets of theoretical economics concerning
the part it plays in the process of development of the
productive powers of labour. On the basis of hand production
no other progress in technique was possible except by
division of labour.** Let us merely note the two major
circumstances that make clear the need for division of
labour as a preparatory stage for large-scale machine industry.
Firstly, the introduction of machines is possible only
when the production process has been split into a number
of the simplest, purely mechanical operations; machines are
* Let us confine ourselves to one example. In the village of
Borisovka, Graivoron Uyezd, Kursk Gubernia, there is an icon-painting
industry, employing about 500 persons. The majority of the craftsmen
hire no workers, but keep apprentices, who work from 14 to 15
hours a day. When a proposal was made to set up an art school, these
craftsmen strongly opposed it, for fear of losing the gratuitous labourpower
of their apprentices (Reports and Investigations, I, 333). In
domestic industry the conditions of children under capitalist manufacture
are no better than those of apprentices, since the domestic
worker is compelled to lengthen the working day and exert all the
efforts of his family to the utmost.
** “The domestic form of large-scale production and manufacture
are an inevitable and to a certain extent even a desirable way out
for small independent industry when it covers a large district” (Kharizomenov,
in Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1883, No. 11, p. 435).