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

496
V. I. LENIN
increases. Every new mile of railway, every new workshop,
every iron plough acquired by a rural bourgeois increases
the demand for the products of ore-mining. Although from
1851 to 1897 the consumption of pig-iron, for example, in
Russia increased from 14 pounds per head to 13 poods,
even this latter amount will have to increase very considerably
before it approaches the size of the demand for pigiron
in the advanced countries (in Belgium and England it
is over 6 poods per inhabitant).
V. IS THE NUMBER OF WORKERS IN LARGE CAPITALIST
ENTERPRISES GROWING?
Having examined the statistics of the factory and
mining industries, we can now attempt to answer this
question, one which has so much engaged the attention of
the Narodnik economists, and which they have answered
in the negative (Messrs. V. V., N. —on, Karyshev and
Kablukov have asserted that the number of factory
workers in Russia is increasing—if it is increasing—
more slowly than the population). Let us observe first of
all that the question must be whether an increase is taking
place in the commercial and industrial population at the
expense of the agricultural population (of this below), or
whether an increase is taking place in the number of
workers employed in large-scale machine industry. It cannot
be asserted that the number of workers in small industrial
establishments or in manufactories must increase in a
developing capitalist society, for the factory constantly
eliminates the more primitive forms of industry. Our
factory statistics, however, as was shown in detail above,
do not always refer to the factory in the scientific sense of
the term.
To examine the data on the question that interests us,
we must take, firstly, the returns for all branches, and,
secondly, the returns for a long period. Only if we do that
is there a guarantee that the data will be more or less comparable.
We take the years 1865 and 1890, a stretch of
twenty-five years in the post-Reform period. Let us
sum up the available statistics. The factory statistics
give the fullest data for 1865; for European Russia they