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

440
V. I. LENIN
special sorts of products, etc. In short, the closest and most
inseparable tie between merchant’s and industrial capital is
one of the most characteristic features of manufacture.
The “buyer-up” nearly always merges here with the manufactory
owner (the “factory owner,” to use the current but
wrong term, which classifies every workshop of any size
as a “factory”). That is why, in the overwhelming majority
of cases, data on the scale of production of the big
establishments in themselves give no idea of their real
significance in our “handicraft industries,”* for the owners of
such establishments have at their command the labour, not
only of the workers employed in their establishments, but
of a mass of domestic workers, and even (de facto) of a mass
of quasi-independent small masters, in relation to whom they
are buyers-up.”** The data on Russian manufacture thus
bring out in striking relief the law established by the
author of Capital, namely, that the degree of development
of merchant’s capital is inversely proportional to the
degree of development of industrial capital. 143 And
indeed, we may characterise all the industries described in
§II as follows: the fewer the big workshops in them, the more
is “buying-up” developed, and vice versa; all that changes
is the form of capital that dominates in each case and that
* Here is an example illustrating what has been said above. In
the village of Negino, Trubchevsk Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, there is an
oil works employing 8 workers, with an output of 2,000 rubles (Directory
for 1890). This small works would seem to indicate that the role
of capital in the local oil-pressing industry is very slight But the
slight development of industrial capital is merely indicative of an
enormous development of merchant’s and usurer’s capital. From the
Zemstvo statistical returns we learn of this village that of 186
households 160 are completely in the grip of the local factory owner,
who even pays all their taxes for them, lends them all they need (and
that over many, many years), receiving help at a reduced price in
payment of debt. The mass of the peasants in Orel Gubernia are in a
similar state of bondage. Can one, under such circumstances, rejoice
over the slight development of industrial capital?
** One can therefore imagine what sort of picture one gets of the
economic organisation of such “handicraft industries” if the big
manufactory owners are left out of account (after all, this is not
handicraft, but factory industry!), while the “buyers-up” are depicted as
being “virtually quite superfluous and called into being solely by
the failure to organise the sale of products” (Mr. V. V., Essays on
Handicraft Industry, 150)!