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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
543
And so on and so forth. It would be interesting to see how,
in these and similar cases, the Narodnik economists would
determine where “artificial” capitalism begins and
“people’s” industry ends.
The three main forms of industry enumerated above differ
first of all in their systems of technique. Small commodityproduction
is characterised by its totally primitive, hand
technique that remained unchanged almost from time
immemorial. The small producer in industry remains a peasant
who follows tradition in his methods of processing raw material.
Manufacture introduces division of labour, which effects
a substantial change in technique and transforms the peasant
into a factory-hand, a “labourer performing one detailed
operation.” But production by hand remains, and, on its basis,
progress in methods of production is inevitably very slow.
Division of labour springs up spontaneously and is passed on
by tradition just as peasant labour is. Large-scale machine
industry alone introduces a radical change, throws manual
skill overboard, transforms production on new, rational
principles, and systematically applies science to production.
So long as capitalism in Russia did not organise large-scale
machine industry, and in those industries in which it has
not done so yet, we see almost complete stagnation in technique,
we see the employment of the same hand-loom and
the same watermill or windmill that were used in production
centuries ago. On the other hand, in industries subordinated
to the factory we observe a complete technical revolution
and extremely rapid progress in the methods of machine
production.
We see that the different stages of the development of
capitalism are connected with different systems of technique.
Small commodity-production and manufacture are
characterised by the prevalence of small establishments,
from among which only a few large ones emerge. Large-scale
machine industry completely eliminates the small
establishments. Capitalist relationships arise in the small
industries too (in the form of workshops employing wageworkers
and of merchant’s capital), but these are still poorly
developed and are not crystallised in sharp oppositions
between the groups participating in production. Neither
big capital nor extensive proletarian strata as yet exist.