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

540
V. I. LENIN
is provided by the latest factory statistics. The List of
Factories and Works (data for 1894-95) gives information
on the number of days in the year during which
each factory operates. Mr. Kasperov hastened to use these
data in support of the Narodnik theories when he calculated
that “on the average, the Russian factory works 165 days a
year,” that “35% of the factories in this country work less
than 200 days a year.”* It goes without saying that in
view of the vagueness of the term “factory,” such overall
figures are practically valueless, since they do not indicate
how many workers are employed for specific numbers of
days in the year. We have computed the appropriate figures
of the List for those large factories (with 100 and more
FROM MARX
TO MAO
workers) which, as we have seen above (§VII), employ
�⋆
about w of the total number of factory workers. It turns
out that the average number of working days per year in the
different categories was as follows: A) 242; B) 235; C) 273,**
and for all the large factories, 244. If we calculate the average
number of working days per worker we will get 253
working days per year as the average number per worker
of a large factory. Of the 12 sections into which the various
trades are divided in the List, only in one is the average
number of working days, for the bottom categories, below
200, namely in section NOT XI (food FOR products): A) 189; B) 148;
C) 280. Factories in categories A and B in this section employ
110,588 workers, which is 16.2% of the total number of
workers in the COMMERCIAL
large factories (655,670). We would point out
that this section combines quite diverse trades, e.g., beetsugar
and tobacco, DISTRIBUTION
distilling and flour-milling, etc. For
the remaining sections the average number of working days
per factory is as follows: A) 259; B) 271; C) 272. Thus, the
larger the factories the greater the number of days they
operate in the course of the year. The general data for all the
biggest factories in European Russia, therefore, confirm
the conclusions of the Moscow sanitary statistical returns
* Statistical Summary of Russia’s Industrial Development.
A paper read by M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, member of the Free
Economic Society, and the debate on this paper at the sessions of
section III. St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 41.
** Let us recall that category A includes factories with 100 to
499 workers, B, with 500 to 999, and C, with 1,000 and more.