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

544
V. I. LENIN
In manufacture we see the rise of both. The gulf between
the one who owns the means of production and the one
who works now becomes very wide. “Wealthy” industrial
settlements spring up, the bulk of whose inhabitants are
poor working people. A small number of merchants, who
do an enormous business buying raw materials and selling
finished goods, and a mass of detail workers living from
hand to mouth—such is the general picture of manufacture.
But the multitude of small establishments, the
retention of the tie with the land, the adherence to tradition
in production and in the whole manner of living—all
this creates a mass of intermediary elements between
the extremes of manufacture and retards the development
of these extremes. In large-scale machine industry all
these retarding factors disappear; the acuteness of social
contradictions reaches the highest point. All the dark sides
of capitalism become concentrated, as it were: the machine,
as we know, gives a tremendous impulse to the greatest
possible prolongation of the working day; women and children
are drawn into industry; a reserve army of unemployed
is formed (and must be formed by virtue of the conditions
of factory production), etc. However, the socialisation of
labour effected on a vast scale by the factory, and the transformation
of the sentiments and conceptions of the people
it employs (in particular, the destruction of patriarchal and
petty-bourgeois traditions) cause a reaction: large-scale
machine industry, unlike the preceding stages, imperatively
calls for the planned regulation of production and public
control over it (a manifestation of the latter tendency is
factory legislation).*
The very character of the development of production
changes at the various stages of capitalism. In the small
industries this development follows in the wake of the
development of peasant economy; the market is extremely
narrow, the distance between the producer and the consumer
is short, and the insignificant scale of production easily
adapts itself to the slightly fluctuating local demand. That
* On the connection between factory legislation and the conditions
and relationships brought into being by large-scale machine industry,
see Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky’s book, The Russian Factory, Chapter II,
Part 2, and especially the article in Novoye Slovo of July 1897.