Chapter VI. Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry (5)

In all the industries organised on the lines of manufacture that we have examined, the vast mass of the workers are not independent, are subordinated to capital, and receive only wages, owning neither raw material nor finished product. At bottom, the overwhelming majority of the workers in these “industries” are wage-workers, although this relationship never achieves in manufacture the completeness and purity characteristic of the factory. In manufacture, merchant’s capital is combined with industrial capital, is interwoven with it in the most diverse ways, and the dependence of the operative on the capitalist assumes a host of forms and shades, from work for hire in another person’s workshop, to work at home for a “master,” and finally to dependence in the purchase of raw material or in the sale of the product. Under manufacture, side by side with the mass of dependent workers, there always remains a more or less considerable number of quasi-independent producers. But all this diversity of forms of dependence merely covers up the main feature of manufacture, the fact that the split between the representatives of labour and of capital is already manifested in full force. By the time the emancipation of the peasants took place this split in the larger centres of Russian manufacture had already been sealed by a continuity of several generations. In all the “industries” above examined we see a mass of people whose only means of livelihood is to work in a condition of dependence upon members of the propertied class; on the other hand, we see a small minority of well-to-do industrialists who control (in one form or another) nearly the whole industry of the given district. It is this fundamental fact that imparts to our manufacture a pronounced capitalist character, as distinct from the preceding stage. Dependence on capital and work for hire existed then too, but it had not yet taken definite shape, had not yet embraced the mass of industrialists, the mass of the population, had not given rise to a split among the various groups of individuals participating in production. Moreover, production itself in the preceding stage still preserves its small dimensions – the difference between the master and the worker is relatively small – there are scarcely any big capitalists (who always head manufacture) – nor are there any workers tied to a single operation and thereby tied to capital, which combines these detailed operations into a single mechanism of production.

Here is an old writer’s evidence which strikingly confirms this characterisation of the data cited by us above: “In the village of Kimry, as in other so-called rich Russian villages, Pavlovo, for example, half the population are beggars who live entirely on alms. . . . If an operative falls sick, and moreover lives alone, he risks going the next week without a crust of bread.”

Thus, the main feature of the economy of Russian manufacture was already fully revealed by the 60s – the contrast between the “wealth” of a whole number of “celebrated” “villages” and the complete proletarisation of the overwhelming majority of “handicraftsmen.” Connected with this feature is the circumstance that the most typical workers in manufacture (namely, artisans who have entirely or virtually broken with the land) are already gravitating towards the next, and not the preceding, stage of capitalism, that they stand closer to the worker in large-scale machine industry than to the peasant. The above-quoted data on the cultural level of the handicraftsmen are striking proof of this. But that description cannot be extended to the whole mass of the working personnel in manufacture. The retention of a vast number of small establishments and small masters, the retention of connection with the land and the exceedingly extensive development of work in the home – all this leads to large numbers of “handicraftsmen” in manufacture gravitating still towards the peasantry, towards becoming small masters, towards the past and not the future, and clinging to all sorts of illusions about the possibility (by supreme exertion, by thrift and resource fullness) of becoming independent masters. Here is a remarkably fair appraisal of these petty-bourgeois illusions given by an investigator of the “handicraft industries” of Vladimir Gubernia: