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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
585
capitalist regime. It is a profound error to ignore this
diversity of forms, and that is the error of those who, like
Mr. V. V., argue that capitalism has “fenced off a corner
for itself with some one to one-and-a-half million workers
and never emerges from it.”* Here we have large-scale machine
industry instead of capitalism. But how arbitrarily and
how artificially are these million and a half workers fenced
off into a special “corner” that is supposedly in no way connected
with the remaining spheres of wage-labour! As a
matter of fact, the connection is a very close one, and it will
be sufficient, in order to characterise it, to mention two
basic features of the present economic system. Firstly, this
system is based on money economy. The “power of money”
manifests itself in full force in both industry and agriculture,
in both town and country, but it reaches its full
development, completely eliminates the remnants of patriarchal
economy, is concentrated in a few gigantic institutions
(banks) and is directly connected with large-scale social
production only in the sphere of large-scale machine industry.
Secondly, the economic system of today is based on
the purchase and sale of labour-power. If we take even the
smallest producers in agriculture or in industry, we will
find that the one who does not hire himself out, or himself
hire others, is the exception. But here again, these relationships
reach full development and become completely separated
from previous forms of economy only in largescale
machine industry. Hence, the “corner” which seems so
small to some Narodnik actually embodies the quintessence of
modern social relationships, and the population of this “corner,”
i.e., the proletariat, is, in the literal sense of the word,
the vanguard of the whole mass of toilers and exploited.**
* Novoye Slovo, 1896, No. 6, p. 21.
** Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said of the relation
between wage-workers in large-scale machine industry and the rest of
the wage-workers as the Webbs say of the relation between trade unionists
in Britain and non-unionists: “The trade unionists number about
4 per cent of the total population ... the trade unionists number about
20 per cent of the adult male manual working class.” But “Die Gewerkschaftler
... zählen ... in der Regel die Elite des Gewerbes in ihren
Reihen. Der moralische und geistige Einfluss, den sie auf die Masse
ihrer Berufsgenossen ausüben, steht deshalb ausser jedem Verhältniss zu
ihrer numerischen Stärke” (S. & B. Webb: Die Geschichte des britischen