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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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is why industry at this stage is characterised by the greatest
stability, but this stability is tantamount to stagnation
in technique and the preservation of patriarchal social relationships
tangled up with all sorts of survivals of medieval
traditions. The manufactories work for a big market—sometimes
for the whole country—and, accordingly, production
acquires the instability characteristic of capitalism,
an instability which attains the greatest intensity under
factory production. Large-scale machine industry can only
develop in spurts, in alternating periods of prosperity and
of crisis. The ruin of small producers is tremendously accelerated
by this spasmodic growth of the factory; the workers
are drawn into the factory in masses during a boom period,
and are then thrown out. The formation of a vast reserve
army of unemployed, ready to undertake any kind of work,
becomes a condition for the existence and development of
large-scale machine industry. In Chapter II we showed from
which strata of the peasantry this army is recruited, and
in subsequent chapters we indicated the main types of
occupations for which capital keeps these reserves ready.
The “instability” of large-scale machine industry has always
evoked, and continues to evoke, reactionary complaints
from individuals who continue to look at things through the
eyes of the small producer and who forget that it is this
“instability” alone that replaced the former stagnation by
the rapid transformation of methods of production and of
all social relationships.
One of the manifestations of this transformation is the
separation of industry from agriculture, the liberation of
social relations in industry from the traditions of the
feudal and patriarchal system that weigh down on agriculture.
In small commodity-production the industrialist has
not yet emerged at all from his peasant shell; in the
majority of cases he remains a farmer, and this connection
between small industry and small agriculture is so profound
that we observe the interesting law of the parallel differentiation
of the small producers in industry and in agriculture.
The formation of a petty bourgeoisie and of wage-workers
proceeds simultaneously in both spheres of the national
economy, thereby preparing the way, at both poles of differentiation,
for the industrialist to break with agriculture.