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

530
V. I. LENIN
production. In a word, the change-over described is of the
same progressive significance as the replacement of the
manufactory by the factory.*
Building was originally also part of the peasant’s round
of domestic occupations, and it continues to be so to this day
wherever semi-natural peasant economy is preserved. Subsequent
development leads to the building workers’ turning into
specialist artisans, who work to customers’ orders. In the
villages and small towns the building industry is largely
organised on these lines even today; the artisan usually
maintains his connection with the land and works for a very
narrow circle of small clients. With the development of capitalism,
the retention of this system of industry becomes
impossible. The growth of trade, factories, towns and railways
creates a demand for types of buildings that are architecturally
and dimensionally different from the old buildings
of the patriarchal epoch. The new buildings require very
diverse and costly materials, the co-operation of masses of
workers of the most varied specialities and a considerable
length of time for their completion; the distribution of
these new buildings does not correspond at all to the traditional
distribution of the population; they are erected in
large towns or suburbs, in uninhabited places, along
railways in process of construction, etc. The local artisan
turns into a migratory worker and is hired by an entrepreneur
contractor, who gradually thrusts himself in between
* Mr. N.—on, in dealing with the replacement of the lumber by
the coal industry (Sketches, 211, 243), confined himself, as usual, to
mere lamentations. Our romanticist tries not to notice the trifling
fact that behind the capitalist coal industry stands the equally capitalist
lumber industry, which is marked by incomparably worse forms
of exploitation. But he dwells at length on the “number of workers”!
What are some 600,000 British miners compared to the millions of
unemployed peasants?—he asks (211). To this we reply: that capitalism
creates a relative surplus-population is beyond doubt, but Mr.
N.—on has absolutely failed to see the connection between this and
the requirements of large-scale machine industry. To compare the
number of peasants engaged in various occupations even casually
and irregularly with the number of specialist miners engaged exclusively
in coal extraction, is absolutely senseless. Mr. N. —on resorts
to such devices only in order to hide the fact of the rapid growth in
Russia of both the number of factory and mine workers, and of the
commercial and industrial population in general, since that mars
his theory.