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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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significance of this fact, which clearly demonstrates the progressive
historical role of capitalism, and moreover of
purely “people’s” capitalism, which even the most ardent
Narodnik would scarcely dare characterise as “artificial,”
since the overwhelming majority of the centres described
are usually classified under the heading of “handicraft” industry!
The transitional character of manufacture is revealed
here too, since it merely begins the transformation of the
mentality of the population, and only large-scale machine
industry completes it.
V. THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF MANUFACTURE
In all the industries organised on the lines of manufacture
that we have examined, the vast mass of the workers
are not independent, are subordinated to capital, and
receive only wages, owning neither raw material nor finished
product. At bottom, the overwhelming majority of the workers
in these “industries” are wage-workers, although this
relationship never achieves in manufacture the completeness
and purity characteristic of the factory. In manufacture,
merchant’s capital is combined with industrial
capital, is interwoven with it in the most diverse ways,
and the dependence of the operative on the capitalist
assumes a host of forms and shades, from work for hire in
another person’s workshop, to work at home for a “master,”
and finally to dependence in the purchase of raw
material or in the sale of the product. Under manufacture,
side by side with the mass of dependent workers, there
always remains a more or less considerable number of
quasi-independent producers. But all this diversity of forms
of dependence merely covers up the main feature of manufacture,
the fact that the split between the representatives
of labour and of capital is already manifested in full force.
By the time the emancipation of the peasants took place
this split in the larger centres of Russian manufacture had
already been sealed by a continuity of several generations.
In all the “industries” above examined we see a mass of
people whose only means of livelihood is to work in a condition
of dependence upon members of the propertied class;