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

524
V. I. LENIN
receives a tremendous impetus. Mobility of the population
replaces the former immobility and isolation as a necessary
condition of economic life. Secondly, the transfer of factories
into the rural districts shows that capitalism is surmounting
the obstacles which the social-estate seclusion of the
peasant community creates for it, and is even deriving
benefit from this seclusion. While the erection of factories
in the countryside involves quite a few inconveniences,
it does, however, guarantee a supply of cheap labour. The
muzhik is not allowed to go to the factory, so the factory
goes to the muzhik.* The muzhik lacks complete freedom
(thanks to the collective-responsibility system and the
obstacles to his leaving the community) to seek the employer
who gives the greatest advantage; but the employer has a
perfect way of seeking out the cheapest worker. Thirdly,
the large number of rural factory centres and their rapid
growth proves groundless the opinion that the Russian
factory is isolated from the mass of the peasantry, that
it exercises little influence over them. The specific char-
are nearly 3,500 people; near Konstantinovka station, where a number
of works have been erected, a new settlement is being formed;
Yuzovka is now a town with a population of 29,000.... On the sandy
wasteland at Nizhne-Dnieprovsk, near Ekaterinoslav, where a number
of factories are now situated, a new settlement has sprung up with
a population of 6,000. The works at Mariupol has attracted a new
population of 10,000, etc. Populated centres are springing up around
the coal mines” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 50). According to the
Russkiye Vedomosti (November 21, 1897, No. 322), the Bakhmut
Uyezd Zemstvo Assembly has filed an application for the status of
townships to be granted to commercial settlements with a population
of 1,000 and the status of towns to those with a population of
5,000.... “There is to be observed here ... an unparalleled growth of
commercial and factory settlements.... Altogether, there are by now
as many as thirty settlements, which have been springing up and
growing at a truly American pace.... In Volyntsevo, where a huge
metallurgical works with 2 blast furnaces, a foundry and a rolling
mill is nearing completion and will be started in the beginning of
November, there is a population of from 5,000 to 6,000, which has
settled on what only recently was almost uninhabited steppe. With
the influx of a factory population we also observe an influx of traders,
handicraftsmen and small industrialists in general, who anticipate
an easy and rapid sale to the working population of all kinds of goods.”
* “The factory seeks cheap weavers, and finds them in their native
villages.... The factory must follow the weaver....” (Industries of
Vladimir Gubernia, III, 63.)