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

UNCRITICAL CRITICISM
619
of division of labour. If Mr. Skvortsov thinks otherwise,
he should formulate and explain his opinion instead of
dealing out stern but wholly meaningless remarks.
“Division of labour is not in the least a characteristic
feature of manufacture, for division of labour exists in the
factory too.”
Very well, Mr. Skvortsov! But have I said that this is
the only feature that distingulshes manufacture from the
factory? Had the critic at all seriously wanted to discover
whether I correctly understand the “characteristic features
of manufacture” (a very interesting and by no means as simple
a problem as may appear at first sight), could he have kept
silent about the fact that in the very section concerned I
definitely say: “We have had occasion elsewhere to enumerate
the principal features of the concept of manufacture
according to Marx (Studies, 179*)” (385, footnote 1)? In the
Studies, division of labour figures as only one of a series of
features. The reader of Mr. Skvortsov’s article might,
therefore, get an absolutely distorted notion of my views, and
no notion whatever of the critic’s views.
To proceed. The attempt to present a whole number of
so-called “handicraft” industries as the manufactory stage of
Russian capitalism is made in my book, if I am not
mistaken, for the first time, and I, of course, am far from
imagining that this problem has been altogether settled
(particularly since I have examined it from a specific point of
view). I accordingly anticipated criticism of my views, and
did so with all the more reason, and all the more interest,
because certain Russian Marxists had expressed somewhat
different views (see The Development of Capitalism, p. 550,
footnote). But how has the problem been treated by Mr. P.
Skvortsov? His “criticism” amounts in its entirety to an
exhortation, magnificent for its laconic severity, not to
confine myself to a “mechanical enumeration of the number of
wage-workers, of aggregate output in such and such years in
this or that sphere of production” (2278). If this exhortation
does not refer to the section of my book which deals
with the question of factory statistics (Mr. Skvortsov
* See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95
in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.