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

438
V. I. LENIN
friends in misfortune, but as enemies, as competitors for the very
wretched loom that he sees in his mind’s eye in the remote future.
The small master does not understand his economic insignificance;
he cringes to the buyers-up and the factory owners, hides from his
fellow-weavers where and on what terms he buys his raw materials
and sells his product. Imagining that he is an independent master,
he becomes a voluntary and wretched tool, a plaything in the hands
of the big traders. No sooner does he succeed in dragging himself out
of the mire, in acquiring three or four looms, than he begins to talk
about the troubles of the employer, the laziness and drunkenness
of the weavers, about the necessity of insuring the factory owner
against non-payment of debts. The small master is the incarnation
of industrial servility, just as in the good old days the butler and
the housekeeper were the incarnation of serf servility. So long as the
instruments of production are not entirely divorced from the
producer and the latter still has opportunities of becoming an independent
master, so long as the economic gulf between the buyer-up and
the weaver is bridged by proprietors, small masters and middle-men,
who direct and exploit the lower economic categories and are subject
to the exploitation of the upper ones, the social consciousness of
those who work is obscured and their imagination is distorted by
fictions. Competition arises where there should be solidarity, and
the interests of what are really antagonistic economic groups are
united. Not confining itself to economic exploitation, the present
organisation of silk production finds its agents among the exploited
and lays upon them the task of obscuring the minds and corrupting
the hearts of those who work” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol.
III, pp. 124-126).
VI. MERCHANT’S AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL
IN MANUFACTURE.
THE “BUYER-UP” AND THE “FACTORY OWNER”
From the data given above it is evident that along with
big capitalist workshops we always find an extremely
large number of small establishments at this stage of capitalist
development; numerically, these, as a rule, even
predominate, although they play a quite subordinate role
in the sum-total of production. This retention (and even, as
we have seen above, development) of small establishments
under manufacture is quite a natural phenomenon. Under
hand production, the large establishments have no decisive
advantage over the small ones; division of labour, by creating
the simplest detailed operations, facilitates the rise of
small workshops. For this reason, a typical feature of capitalist
manufacture is precisely the small number of relatively
large establishments side by side with a considerable