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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
447
surplus-population created by capitalism. No one has
talked so much about the “freeing” of the Russian workers
by capitalism as have Messrs. V. V., N. —on and other
Narodniks, but none of them has taken the trouble to
analyse the specific forms of the “reserve army” of labour that
have arisen and are arising in Russia in the post-Reform
period. None of the Narodniks has even noticed the trifling
detail that home workers constitute what is, perhaps, the
largest section of our “reserve army” of capitalism.* By
distributing work to be done in the home the entrepreneurs
are enabled to increase production immediately to the
desired dimensions without any considerable expenditure of
capital and time on setting up workshops, etc. Such an
immediate expansion of production is very often dictated by
the conditions of the market, when increased demand
results from a livening up of some large branch of industry
(e.g., railway construction), or from such circumstances
as war, etc.** Hence, another aspect of the process which
* This error of the Narodniks is all the more gross in that the
majority of them want to follow the theory of Marx, who most
emphatically stressed the capitalist character of “modern domestic
industry” and pointed especially to the fact that these home workers
constitute one of the forms of the relative surplus-population characteristic
of capitalism. (Das Kapital, I 2 , S. S. 503 u. ff.; 668 u. ff.;
Chapter 23, §4 particularly.) 146
** A small example. In Moscow Gubernia, the tailoring industry
is widespread (Zemstvo statistics counted in the gubernia at
the end of the 1870s a total of 1,123 tailors working locally and 4,291
working away from home); most of the tailors worked for the Moscow
ready-made clothing merchants. The centre of the industry is the
Perkhushkovo Volost, Zvenigorod Uyezd (see data on the Perkhushkovo
tailors in Appendix I to Chapter V, Industry No. 36). The Perkhushkovo
tailors did particularly well during the war of 1877. They
made army tents to the order of special contractors; subcontractors
with 3 sewing-machines and ten women day workers “made”
from 5 to 6 rubles a day. The women were paid 20 kopeks per day.
“It is said that in those busy days over 300 women day workers from
various surrounding villages lived in Shadrino (the principal village
in the Perkhushkovo Volost)” (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia,
Vol. VI, Pt. II, loc. cit., 256). “At that time the Perkhushkovo tailors,
that is, the owners of the workshops, made so much money that
nearly all of them built themselves fine homes” (ibid.). These hundreds
of women day workers who, perhaps, would have a busy season once
in 5 to 10 years, must always be available, in the ranks of the reserve
army of the proletariat.