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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
437
the cultural level of the handicraftsmen are striking proof
of this. But that description cannot be extended to the
whole mass of the working personnel in manufacture. The
retention of a vast number of small establishments and
small masters, the retention of connection with the land
and the exceedingly extensive development of work in the
home—all this leads to large numbers of “handicraftsmen”
in manufacture gravitating still towards the peasantry,
towards becoming small masters, towards the past and not
the future,* and clinging to all sorts of illusions about
the possibility (by supreme exertion, by thrift and resourcefulness)
of becoming independent masters.** Here is a
remarkably fair appraisal of these petty-bourgeois
illusions given by an investigator of the “handicraft
industries” of Vladimir Gubernia:
“The final victory of large-scale industry over small industry,
the bringing together of the workers, scattered in numerous work
rooms, within the walls of a single silk mill, is only a matter of time,
and the sooner this victory is achieved the better it will be for the
weavers.
“Characteristic of the present organisation of the silk industry
are the instability and indefiniteness of economic categories, the
struggle between large-scale production, and small production and
agriculture. This struggle drags the small master and the weaver into
fevers of excitement, yielding them nothing but divorcing them from
the land, dragging them into debt and overwhelming them in periods
of depression. Concentration of production will not reduce the weaver’s
wages, but will make it unnecessary to entice workers and intoxicate
them, to attract them with advances that do not correspond
to their annual earnings. With the diminution of mutual competition
factory owners lose interest in expending considerable sums on involving
the weaver in debt. Moreover, large-scale production so
clearly counterposes the interests of the factory owner and the workers,
the wealth of the one and the poverty of the others, that the weaver
cannot develop the desire to become a factory owner himself. Small
production gives the weaver no more than large-scale production
does, but it lacks the stability of the latter and for that reason corrupts
the worker much more deeply. False hopes arise in the mind of
the handicraft weaver, he looks forward to the opportunity of setting
up his own loom. To achieve this ideal he strains himself to the utmost,
falls into debt, steals, lies, regards his fellow-weavers not as
* Exactly like their Narodnik ideologists.
** For isolated heroes of individual endeavour (such as Duzhkin
in V. Korolenko’s Pavlovo Sketches) this is still possible in the period
of manufacture, but, of course, not for the mass of propertyless workers
who perform a single operation.