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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
445
themselves: “The operations of both” (the small and the
big buyers-up of nails from the Tver blacksmiths) “are
organised according to one system—when they collect
the nails, they pay partly in money and partly in iron, and
to make the blacksmiths more tractable always have them
working in their homes.”* These words provide a simple
clue to the “vitality” of our “handicraft” industry!
The isolation of the home workers and the abundance
of middle-men naturally lead to widespread bondage, to
all kinds of personal dependence, which usually accompany
“patriarchal” relationships in remote rural districts. Workers’
indebtedness to employers is extremely widespread
in the “handicraft” industries in general, and in domestic
industry in particular.** Usually the worker is not only a
Lohnsklave but also a Schuldsklave.*** Instances were given
above of the conditions in which the worker is placed by
the “patriarchal character” of rural relationships.****
Passing from the description of capitalist domestic
industry to the conditions making for its spread, we must
first make mention of the connection between this system
and the tying of the peasant to his allotment. The lack of
freedom of movement, the necessity of occasionally suffering
monetary loss in order to get rid of land (when payments
for the land exceed returns from it, so that a peasant
who leases his allotment finds himself paying a sum to
the lessee), the social-estate exclusiveness of the peasant
community—all this artificially enlarges the sphere of
* Reports and Investigations, 1, 218. Cf. ibid., 280: statement
by factory owner Irodov that he finds it more profitable to give out
work to hand weavers working in their homes.
** Examples of workers’ indebtedness to employers in the brush
industry of Moscow Gubernia (Statistical Returns for Moscow
Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. I, p. 32), the comb industry (ibid., 261), the toy
industry (Vol. VI, Pt. II, 44), the stone-setting industry, etc., etc.
In the silk industry the weaver is up to his ears in debt to the factory
owner, who pays his taxes and, in general, “rents the weaver as one
rents land,” etc. (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 51-55).
*** Not only a wage-slave, but also a debt-slave.—Ed.
**** “Of course,” we read of the blacksmiths of Nizhni-Novgorod
Gubernia, “here, too, the master exploits the worker’s labour, but to
a lesser degree (?), and moreover it is done patriarchally, as it were,
by common consent (!) without any misunderstandings” (Transactions
of the Handicraft Commission, IV, 199).