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

430
V. I. LENIN
in the post-Reform period had it not been preceded by a
long period in which manufacture trained workers. For
instance, the investigators of the “handicraft” weaving
industry of the Pokrov Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, note the
remarkable “technical skill and experience” of the weavers
of Kudykino Volost (where the village of Orekhovo and the
famous Morozov mills are situated): “nowhere. . . do we find
such intensity . . . of labour . . . ; a strict division of labour
between the weaver and the bobbin-hand is invariably practised
here. . . .” “The past . . . has imparted to the Kudykinians
. . . expert skill in the technique of production . . . an
ability to cope with all sorts of difficulties.”* “Factories
cannot be erected in any village and in any number,” we
read in reference to silk weaving: “the factory must follow
the weaver into the villages where, due to migratory labour”
(or, let us add, due to domestic industry), “a contingent of
proficient workers has been formed.”** Establishments like
the St. Petersburg boot factory 141 *** could not have developed
so quickly if in the district around Kimry village, say,
skilled workers who have now taken to migration had not
been developing for centuries, etc. That, incidentally,
is why very great importance attaches to the formation by
manufacture of a whole number of large districts which
specialised in certain trades and trained large numbers of
skilled workers.****
Division of labour in capitalist manufacture disfigures
and cripples the worker, including the “handicraftsman”
who makes single parts. It produces virtuosi and cripples;
the former as rare exceptions, whose skill arouses the
* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, IV, 22.
** Ibid., III, 63.
*** In 1890 it had 514 workers and an output of 600,000 rubles;
in 1894-95, 845 workers, output 1,288,000 rubles.
**** This is very aptly described by the term “wholesale crafts.”
“Beginning with the 17th century,” writes Korsak, “rural industry
began to develop more perceptibly; whole villages, especially those
near Moscow and situated along the high roads, began to engage in
some particular industry; the inhabitants of some became tanners,
of others weavers, and of still others dyers, cartwrights, smiths, etc....
Towards the close of the last century very many of these wholesale
crafts, as some call them, had developed in Russia” (loc. cit., 119-121).