WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

LENIN

COLLECTED WORKS

3

THE RUSSIAN EDITION WAS PRINTED
IN ACCORDANCE WITH A DECISION
OF THE NINTH CONGRESS OF THE R.C.P.(B.)
AND THE SECOND CONGRESS OF SOVIETS
OF THE U.S.S.R.

V. I. LENIN

COLLECTED WORKS

VOLUME

3

THE DEVELOPMENT
OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA

PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW

V. I. LENIN
1897

The typeset files we have used in these editions were created by David J. Romagnolo and are taken from www.marx2mao.com. They represent years of work, meticulously re-creating a stunningly high resolution, re-type-set digital archive of Lenin’s Collected Works and the PDFs are free to download. Verso gratefully acknowledges the invaluable work of Mr Romagnolo, who has kindly granted permission to reproduce his typesetting in the volumes of this series.

This English edition of V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works is a translation of the fourth, enlarged Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

Corrections have been made to some of the texts and notes in accordance with the fifth Russian edition, and some further editorial comments have been added.

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2019

First published in English by Progress Publishers 1960

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CONTENTS

I

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA. The Process of the Formation of the Home Market for Large-Scale Industry

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Chapter I.The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists

      I.The Social Division of Labour

The increase in the number of industries 37-38.—The creation of a home market as a result of the social division of labour 38.—The manifestation of this process in agriculture 38-39.—The views of the Narodnik economists 39.

    II.The Growth of the Industrial Population at the Expense of the Agricultural

The necessary connection between this phenomenon and the very nature of commodity and capitalist economy 40-41.

   III.The Ruin of the Small Producers

The mistaken view of the Narodniks 41.—The view of the author of Capital on this subject 42.

   IV.The Narodnik Theory of the Impossibility of Realising Surplus-Value

The substance of the theory of Messrs. V. V. and N.—on: its erroneous character 43-45.—The “foreign market” is wrongly dragged into the problem of realisation 46.—The superficial estimation of the contradictions of capitalism by the writers mentioned 47.

    V.The Views of Adam Smith on the Production and Circulation of the Aggregate Social Product in Capitalist Society and Marx’s Criticism of These Views

Adam Smith’s omission of constant capital 47-49.—The influence of this error on the theory of the national revenue 49-51.

  VI.Marx’s Theory of Realisation

The basic premises of Marx’s theory 51-52.—The realisation of the product under simple reproduction 52-53.—The main conclusion from Marx’s theory of realisation 54-55.—The significance of productive consumption 55-56.—The contradiction between the urge towards the unlimited growth of production and the limited character of consumption 56-58.

 VII.The Theory of the National Income

Proudhon 59-60.—Rodbertus 60-62.—Contemporary econmists 62.—Marx 63-64.

VIII.Why Does the Capitalist Nation Need a Foreign Market?

The causes of the need for a foreign market 64-66.—The foreign market and the progressive character of capitalism 66-67.

   IX.Conclusions from Chapter I

Résumé of the propositions examined above 67-68.—The essence of the problem of the home market 69.

Chapter II.The Differentiation of the Peasantry

      I.Zemstvo Statistics for Novorossia

Economic groups of the peasantry 70-71.—Commercial agriculture and the purchase and sale of labour-power 72.—The top group; the concentration of land 72-73, and of animals and implements 73, the higher productivity of labour 74-75.—Mr. V. V.’s argument of the decline in horse-ownership 75.—The hiring of farm workers and Mr. V. V.’s argument on this phenomenon 76-77.—The bottom group of the peasantry; the leasing of land 77-78.—The middle group, its instability 79-80.—Messrs. V. V. and Karyshev on peasant rentings 80-84.—The attitude of the Narodniks to Mr. Postnikov’s researches 84-85.

    II.Zemstvo Statistics for Samara Gubernia

Data concerning the farms of the different peasant groups in Novouzensk Uyezd 85-87.—The land held and the land in use by the different groups 87-88.—Mr. Karyshev on land renting and grain prices 88-90.—Wage-labour; the creation of a home market by the differentiation of the peasantry 90-92.—The rural proletariat in Samara Gubernia 92-93.

   III.Zemstvo Statistics for Saratov Gubernia

Data concerning the farms of the different groups 93-94.—The hiring of farm workers 94-95.—“Industries” in Zemstvo statistics 95-96.—Rentings 96-97.—The arguments on land renting advanced by Messrs. Karyshev, N.-on, and Maress 97-101.—A comparison of Kamyshin and other uyezds 101-102.—The significance of the classification of peasant households 102-105.

   IV.Zemstvo Statistics for Perm Gubernia

Data concerning the farms of the different groups 106-107.—The hiring of farm workers and day labourers and its significance 108-110.—The manuring of the soil 110.—Improved implements 110-111.—Commercial and industrial establishments 111-112.

    V.Zemstvo Statistics for Orel Gubernia

Data concerning the farms of the different groups 112-113.—Incompleteness of the picture of differentiation from the data for Orel Gubernia 113-115.

  VI.Zemstvo Statistics for Voronezh Gubernia

Methods of classification in Voronezh abstracts 115-116.—Data for Zadonsk Uyezd 116-117.—Industries 117-118.

 VII.Zemstvo Statistics for Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia

Data concerning groups of farms for three uyezds 119-122.

VIII.Review of Zemstvo Statistics for Other Gubernias

Novgorod Gubernia, Demyansk Uyezd 122-123.—Chernigov Gubernia, Kozeletsk Uyezd 123.—Yenisei Gubernia 124.—Poltava Gubernia, three uyezds 125.—Kaluga Gubernia 126.—Tver Gubernia 126-127.

   IX.Summary of the Above Zemstvo Statistics on the Differentiation of the Peasantry

Methods of marking the summary 127-129.—Combined table and chart 130-133 and 140-141.—Examination of the various columns of the chart 134-139.—Comparison between different localities as to the degree of differentiation 140-141.

    X.Summary of Zemstvo Statistics and Army-Horse Census Returns

Zemstvo Statistics for 112 uyezds of 21 gubernias 141-143.—Army-horse census returns for 49 gubernias of European Russia 143-144.—Significance of these data 144-145.

   XI.A Comparison of the Army-Horse Censuses of 1888-1891 and 1896-1900

Data for 48 gubernias of European Russia 146-147.—Statistical exercises of Messrs. Vikhlyayev and Chernenkov 147-148.

  XII.Zemstvo Statistics on Peasant Budgets

Character of the data and methods of treating them 148-150.—(A). General results of the budgets 150-157.—Magnitude of expenditures and incomes 150.—Components of expenditures 151.—Components of incomes 152-153—Cash portions of the budgets 154-155.—The significance of the taxes 155-156.—(B). A characterisation of peasant farming 157-162.—General data about the farms157-158.—Property and implements 159.—Farm expenditure 160-161.—Income from agriculture 161.—An apparent exception 161-162.—(C). A characterisation of the standard of living 162-172.—Expenditure on food in kind 162-163.—Expenditure on food in cash 163-164.—Remaining expenditures on personal consumption 165.—Cash expenditure on personal and productive consumption 165-166.—Mr. N.-on about the top “stratum” of the peasantry 166-167.—A comparison between the standard of living or rural workers and peasants 167-169.—Methods of Mr. Shcherbina 170-172.

 XIII.Conclusions from Chapter II

The significance of commodity economy 172.—1) Capitalist contradictions within the village community 172-173.—2) “Depeasantising” 173-174.—3) Characterisation of this process in Capital 173-176.—4) The peasant bourgeoisie 176-177.—5) The rural proletariat. The European type of allotment-holding rural worker 177-180—6) The middle peasantry 181.—7) The formation of a home market for capitalism 181.—8) Increasing differentiation; significance of migration 182-183.—9) Merchant’s and usurer’s capital. The presentation of the problem in theory. The connection between these forms of capital and industrial capital 183-186.—10) Labour-service and its influence on the differentiation of the peasantry 186-187.

Chapter III.The Landowners’ Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy

      I.The Main Features of Corvée Economy

The essence of the serf system of economy and the conditions for it 191-193.

    II.The Combination of the Corvée and the Capitalist Systems of Economy

The remnants of the old system after the Reform 193-194.—The labour-service and the capitalist systems 194-195; their relative incidence 195-197.—The transition from the labour-service system to the capitalist 197-198.

   III.Description of the Labour-Service System

Types of labour-service 198-199.—Rentings in kind and their significance 199-200.—The payment of labour under labour-service 201-203.—Personal dependence under labour-service 203-204.—General estimation of labour-service 204-205.

   IV.The Decline of the Labour-Service System

Two types of labour-service 205-206.—The significance of the differentiation of the peasantry 206-208.—View of Mr. Stebut 209.—Views in various publications 209-210.

    V.The Narodnik Attitude to the Problem

The idealisation of labour-service 210-211.—Mr. Kablukov’s argument 211-215.

  VI.The Story of Engelhardt’s Farm

The original condition of the farm and the nature of the gradual changes made in it 215-219.

 VII.The Employment of Machinery in Agriculture

Four periods in the development of agricultural machinery production 219-220.—Incompleteness of official statistics 220-223.—Data on the employment of various agricultural machines 223-228.

VIII.The Significance of Machinery in Agriculture

The capitalist character of the employment of machinery 228-230.—Results of the employment of machinery 230-235.—The inconsistency of the Narodniks 235-237.

   IX.Wage-Labour in Agriculture

“Agricultural outside employments” 237, their significance 237-238, their scale 239-240.—Number of agricultural workers in all European Russia 240-242.

    X.The Significance of Hired Labour in Agriculture

The conditions of agricultural workers 242-243.—Specific forms of hire 243-245.—The conditions of workers of small and big employers 245-246.—First elements of public control 246-248.—The appraisal of agricultural migration by the Narodniks 248-251.

Chapter IV.The Growth of Commercial Agriculture

      I.General Data on agricultural Production in Post-Reform Russia and on the Types of Commercial Agriculture

The production of cereals and potatoes in 1864-1865, 1870-1879, 1883-1887, 1885-1894, 252-253.—Potato sowing and its significance 253-254.—Areas of commercial agriculture 255.—Mr. Kablukov’s arguments 256.

    II.The Commercial Grain-Farming Area

The shifting of the principal centre of cereal production 257.—The significance of the outer regions as colonies 257-258.—The capitalist character of agriculture in this area 259-261.

   III.The Commercial Stock-Farming Area. General Data on the Development of Dairy Farming

The significance of stock farming in the different areas 261-262.—The calculations of Messrs. Kovalevsky and Levitsky 263.—The development of cheese-making 264-266.—The incompleteness of official data 266.—Technical progress 266-267.

   IV.Continuation. The Economy of Landlord Farming in the Area Described

The rationalisation of agriculture 267-268.—“Amalgamated dairies” and their significance 268-270.—The formation of a home market 270.—The migration of agricultural workers to the industrial gubernias 271.—The more-even distribution of jobs throughout the year 271-273.—The small cultivators’ dependence and its estimation by-Mr. V. V 273-275.

    V.Continuation. The Differentiation of the Peasantry on the Dairy-Farming Area

The distribution of cows among the peasants 275-276.—Details of St. Petersburg Uyezd 276-278.—“Progressive trends in peasant farming” 279-280.—The influence of this progress on the poor 280-282.

  VI.The Flax-Growing Area

The growth of commercial flax-growing 282-284.—Exchange between different types of commercial agriculture 284.—“Extremes” in the flax area 285.—Technical improvements 285-287.

 VII.The Technical Processing of Agricultural Produce

The significance of the factory or technical system of farming 287-288.

1) Distilling

The extent of agricultural distilling 288-289.—The development and the significance of potato distilling 289-292.

2) Beet-Sugar Production

The growth of sugar-beet production 291-292.—The progress of capitalist agriculture 292-294.

3) Potato-Starch Production

Its growth 294-295.—Two processes in the development of this branch of production 295.—The starch “industry” in Moscow Gubernia 295-297 and in Vladimir Gubernia 297-298.

4) Vegetable Oil Production

The dual processes of its development 298.—Oil pressing as a cottage industry 299-300.

5) Tobacco Growing

VIII.Industrial Vegetable and Fruit Growing; Suburban Farming

The growth of commercial fruit growing 304 and vegetable growing 304-305.—Peasant vegetable growers in the St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yaroslavl gubernias 305-307.—The hothouse industry 307.—Industrial melon growing 307-309.—Suburban farming and its characteristics 309-310.

   IX.Conclusions on the Significance of Capitalism in Russian Agriculture

1) On the transformation of agriculture into enterprise 310.—2) The specific features of capitalism in agriculture 311-312.—3) The formation of a home market for capitalism 312-313.—4) The progressive historical role of capitalism in Russian agriculure 313-318.

    X.Narodnik Theories on Capitalism in Agriculture. “The Freeing of Winter Time”

The narrow and stereotyped character of this theory 318.—Its omission of highly important aspects of the process 318-323.

   XI.Continuation.—The Village Community.—Marx’s View on Small-Scale Agriculture.—Engels’s Opinion of the Contemporary Agricultural Crisis

The Narodnik’s wrong presentation of the problem of the village community 323-325.—Their misunderstanding of a passage in Capital 325-326.—Marx’s estimation of peasant agriculture 326-327.—His estimation of agricultural capitalism 327.—Mr. N.—on’s inappropriate quotation 327-330.

Chapter V.The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry

      I.Domestic Industry and Handicrafts

The remants of domestic industry 331.—The extent of the prevalence of handicrafts 332-333, their basic features 333-334.

    II.Small Commodity-Producers in Industry. The Craft Spirit in the Small Industries

The transition from handicrafts to commodity production 334-335.—The fear of competition 335-337.

   III.The Growth of Small Industries after the Reform. Two Forms of This Process and Its Significance

Causes of the growth of small industries 338.—The settlement of industrialists in the outer regions 339.—The growth of small industries among the local population 339-341.—The shift of capital 342-343.—The connection between the growth of small industries and the differentiation of the peasantry 343.

   IV.The Differentiation of the Small Commodity-Producers. Data on House-to-House Censuses of Handicraftsmen in Moscow Gubernia

Presentation of the problem 344.—The method of processing the data 344-346.—Combined table and chart 347 and 349.—Conclusions: wage-labour 348, 351, productivity of labour 351-353, incomes 355.—The petty-bourgeois structure of handicraft industries 355.

    V.Capitalist Simple Co-operation

Its significance and influence on production 356-359.—Artels 359-360.

  VI.Merchant’s Capital in the Small Industries

The conditions that give rise to the buyer-up 360-361.—Tradeswomen in the lace industry 362-364.—Examples of marketing organisation 364-366.—Views of the Narodniks 366-367.—Forms of merchant’s capital 367-369.

 VII.“Industry and Agriculture”

Data of the table 369-370.—The agriculture of wage-workers 371.—“Land labourers” 371-372.—Other data concerning industry and agriculture 372-376.—Length of the working period 376.—Résumé 376-378.

VIII.“The Combination of Industry with Agriculture”

The Narodnik’s theory 378.—The forms in which industry is combined with agriculture and their diverse significance 378-380.

   IX.Some Remarks on the Pre-Capitalist Economy of Our Countryside

Chapter VI.Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry

      I.The Rise of Manufacture and Its Main Features

The concept of manufacture 384, its dual origin 384-385 and significance 385.

    II.Capitalist Manufacture in Russian Industry

  1)The Weaving Industries

  2)Other Branches of the Textile Industry. The Felt Trade

  3)The Hat-and-Cap and Hemp-and-Rope Trades

  4)The Wood-Working Trades

  5)The Processing of Livestock Produce. The Leather and Fur Trades

  6)The Remaining Livestock Processing Trades

  7)The Processing of Mineral Products

  8)The Metal Trades. The Pavlovo Industries

  9)Other Metal Trades

10)The Jewellery, Samovar and Accordian Trades

   III.Technique in Manufacture. Division of Labour and Its Significance

Hand production 427-428.—apprenticeship 427-28.—Division of labour as a stage preparatory to large-scale machine industry 428-429, its influence on the workers 429-431.

   IV.The Territorial Division of Labour and the Separation of Agriculture from Industry

Mr. Kharizomenov’s opinion 431-432.—Non-agricultural centres 432-434.—The transitional character of manufacture 434-435.—The raising of the cultural level of the population 434-435.

    V.The Economic Structure of Manufacture

The circumstances of production 435-436.—How Mr. Ovayannikov and Kharizomenov describe it 436-438.

  VI.Merchant’s and Industrial Capital in Manufacture. The “Buyer-up” and the “Factory Owner”

The connection between the big and the small establishments 438-440.—The error of the Narodniks 441.

 VII.Capitalist Domestic Industry as an Appendage of Manufacture

Its incidence 441-442, its characteristic features 442-445, the conditions making for its spread 445-446, its significance in the theory of the surplus-population 446-448.

VIII.What Is “Handicraft” Industry?

Some aggregate statistics on handicraftsmen 448-450.—The predominance of capitalistically employed workers 450-451.—The vagueness of the term “handicraft” and the abuse of it 451-453.

Chapter VII.The Development of Large – Scale Machine Industry

      I.The Scientific Conception of the Factory and the Significance of “Factory” Statisitics

    II.Our Factory Statistics

There sources 456.—Publications of the 60s 457-458.—The specific character of the Military Statistical Abstract 459-461.—Mr. Orlov’s Directory 461-462.—The Collections of the Department of Commerce and Manufactures 463-464.—The Returns for Russia for 1884-85; Mr. Karyshev’s errors 464-465.—Data of gubernia statistical committees 466.—The List 466.—Is the number of factories in Russia growing? 467-468.

    II.An Examination of Historical-Statistical Data on the Development of Large-Scale Industry

1)Textile Trades

2)Wood-Working Industries

3)Chemical, Livestock Product and Ceramic Industries

4)Metallurgical Industries

5)Food Industries

6)Excise-Paying and Other Trades

7)Conclusions

   IV.The Development of the Mining Industry

The Urals, their specific features 484-488.—The South 488-491.—The Causasus 491-492.—The big and small mines in the Donets Basin 492-494.—The significance of the data on the development of the mining industry 494-496.

    V.Is the Number of Workers in Large Capitalist Enterprises Growing?

Data for the years 1865, 1879, 1890 496-499.—Mistaken Method of the Narodniks 499-507.

  VI.Steam-Engine Statistics

Data for the years 1875-1878 and 1892 507-509.

 VII.The Growth of Large Factories

Data for the years 1866, 1879, 1890 and 1894-95 509-514.—The largest enterprises in factory industry and in the mining industry 514-515.—The errors of Mr. N.—on 515-517.

VIII.The Distribution of Large-Scale Industry

Data on the leading centres of factory industry in the years 1879 and 1890 518-519.—Three types of centres 519-521.—The classification of the centres 521-523.—The growth of rural factory centres and its significance 523-525.

   IX.The Development of the Lumber and Building Industries

The growth of the lumber industry 525-526; its organisation 526-530.—The growth of capitalism in the building industry 530-533.

    X.The Appendage to the Factory

   XI.The Complete Separation of Industry from Agriculture

The error of the Narodniks 536-537.—Moscow Zemstvo sanitary statistics 537-541.

  XII.Three Stages in the Development of Capitalism in Russian Industry

The connection between all the stages 541-543.—Specific technical features 543.—The growth of capitalist relationships 543-544.—The character of the development of industry 544-545.—The separation of industry from agriculture 545-548.—Differences in living conditions 548-550.—The growth of the home market 550-551.

Chapter VIII.The Formation of the Home Market

      I.The Growth of Commodity Circulation

The development of the railways 552-553, water transport 553-554, commerce and the banks 554-557.

    II.The Growth of the Commercial and Industrial Population

1)The Growth of Towns

2)The Significance of Home Colonisation

3)The Growth of Factory and of Commercial and Industrial Townships and Villages

4)Non-Agricultural Outside Employments

Non-agricultural outside employments 568-581, their size and growth 568-576, their progressive role 576-579, the appraisal of them by Narodnik writers 579-581.

   III.The Growth of the Employment of Wage-Labour

Approximate number of wage-workers 581-583.—Capitalist surplus-population 583.—The error of the Narodniks 583-586.

   IV.The Formation of a Home Market for Labour-Power

The main movements of wage-workers in connection with the size of wages 586-589.—The formation of a home market 589-590.—Mr. N.—on’s “theory” 590-591.

    V.The Significance of the Border Regions. Home or Foreign Market?

Capitalism’s urge for expansion 591-592.—The example of the Caucasus 593-594.—Two aspects of the process of the formation of a market 594-596.

  VI.The “Mission” of Capitalism

The increase in the productivity of social labour 596-598.—The socialisation of labour 598-600.—The cause of differences with the Narodniks 600-601.

Appendices:

      I.Combined Table of Statistics on Small Peasant Industries of Moscow Gubernia (to Chapter V, p. 345)

    II.Table of Statistics on the Factory Industry of European Russia (to Chapter VII, p. 456)

   III.The Chief Centres of Factory Industry in European Russia (to Chapter VII, p. 519)

II

UNCRITICAL CRITICISM. (Regarding Mr. P. Skvortsvo’s Article “Commodity Fetishism” in Nachnoye Obozreniye, No. 12, 1899)

      I. 

    II. 

   III. 

Notes

ILLUSTRATIONS

V. I. Lenin, 1897

Cover of the first edition of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899

Cover of the second edition of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1908, autographed by the author

Cover of the German edition (1894) of Marx’s Capital, Vol. III, Part 1, used by Lenin

Chart illustrating Tables A & B, §IX, Chapter II

Page 96 from the magazine Nachalo, No. 3 for 1899, in which the first six sectios of Chapter III of Lenin’s The Development Capitalism in Russia were published

Chart of summarised data given in the Table in §IV of Chaper V

Diagram illustrating the organisation of he felt industry

Page 405 of The Development Capitalism in Russia (1908 edition) with V. I. Lenin’s notes

V. I. Lenin’s grouping of towns in European Russia according to the population census of 1897

___________

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
IN RUSSIA

THE PROCESS OF THE FORMATION OF A HOME
MARKET FOR LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY¹

Written in 1896-99.
First printed in book
form at the end of
March 1899

Published according to the text
of the second edition, 1908   

Cover of the first edition of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

In the work here presented, the author has set himself the aim of examining the question of how a home market is being formed for Russian capitalism. As we know, this question was raised long ago by the principal exponents of Narodnik views (chief among them being Messrs. V. V. and N.—on²), and it will be our task to criticise these views. We have not considered it possible to limit ourselves in this criticism to examining the mistakes and misconceptions in our opponents’ views; in answering the question raised it seemed to us that it was not enough to adduce facts showing the formation and growth of a home market, for the objection might be raised that such facts had been selected arbitrarily and that facts showing the contrary had been omitted. It seemed to us that it was necessary to examine the whole process of the development of capitalism in Russia, to endeavour to depict it in its entirety. It goes without saying that such an extensive task would be beyond the powers of a single person, were a number of limitations not introduced. Firstly, as the title itself shows, we treat the problem of the development of capitalism in Russia exclusively from the standpoint of the home market, leaving aside the problem of the foreign market and data on foreign trade. Secondly, we limit ourselves purely to the post-Reform period. Thirdly, we deal mainly and almost exclusively with data concerning the interior, purely Russian, gubernias. Fourthly, we limit ourselves exclusively to the economic aspect of the process. But even with all the limitations indicated the topic that remains is an extremely broad one. The author does not close his eyes at all to the difficulty, and even the danger, of dealing with so broad a topic, but it seemed to him that to elucidate the problem of the home market for Russian capitalism it was absolutely necessary to show the connection between, and interdependence of, the various aspects of the process taking place in all spheres of the social economy. We therefore limit ourselves to an examination of the main features of the process, leaving a more specific study of it to further investigations.

The plan of our work is as follows: in Chapter I we shall examine, as briefly as possible, the basic theoretical propositions of abstract political economy on the subject of the home market for capitalism. This will serve as a sort of introduction to the rest of the work, the factual part of it, and will relieve us of the need to make repeated references to theory in our further exposition. In the three following chapters we shall endeavour to describe the capitalist evolution of agriculture in post-Reform Russia, namely, in Chapter II we shall examine Zemstvo statistical data on the differentiation of the peasantry; in Chapter III data on the transitional state of landlord economy, and on the replacement of the corvée system of this economy by the capitalist; and in Chapter IV data on the forms in which the formation of commercial and capitalist agriculture is proceeding. The next three chapters will be devoted to the forms and stages of the development of capitalism in our industry: in Chapter V we shall examine the first stages of capitalism in industry, namely, in small peasant (known as handicraft) industry; in Chapter VI data on capitalist manufacture and on capitalist domestic industry, and in Chapter VII data on the development of large-scale machine industry. In the last chapter (VIII), we shall make an attempt to indicate the connection between the various aspects of the process that have been described and to present a general picture of that process.

__________

P. S.³ To our extreme regret we have not been able to use for this work the excellent analysis of “the development of agriculture in capitalist society” made by K. Kautsky in his book Die Agrarfrage (Stuttgart, Dietz, 1899; I. Abschn. “Die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft in der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft”*).**

This book (which we received when the greater part of the present work had already been set up in type) is, after Vol. III of Capital, the most noteworthy contribution to recent economic literature. Kautsky investigates the “main tendencies” in the capitalist evolution of agriculture; his purpose is to examine the diverse phenomena in modern agriculture as “particular manifestations of one general process” (Vorrede,*** VI). It is interesting to note how far the main features of this general process in Western Europe and in Russia are identical, notwithstanding the tremendous peculiarities of the latter, in both the economic and non-economic spheres. For example, typical of modern capitalist agriculture in general is the progressive division of labour and the employment of machinery (Kautsky, IV, b, c), a phenomenon also noticeable in post-Reform Russia (see later, Chapter III, §§VII and VIII; Chapter IV, particularly §IX). The process of the “proletarisation of the peasantry” (the heading of Chapter VIII of Kautsky’s book) is manifested everywhere in the spread of wagelabour in every form among the small peasants (Kautsky, VIII, b); we see the parallel of this in Russia in the formation of a huge class of allotment-holding wage-workers (see later, Chapter II). The existence of a small peasantry in every capitalist society is due not to the technical superiority of small production in agriculture, but to the fact that the small peasants reduce the level of their requirements below that of the wage-workers and tax their energies far more than the latter do (Kautsky, VI, b; “the agricultural wageworker is better off than the small peasant,” says Kautsky repeatedly: S. 110, 317, 320); the same thing is also to be observed in Russia (see later, Chapter II, §XI, C⁴). It is natural, therefore, that West-European and Russian Marxists should agree in their appraisal of such phenomena as “agricultural outside employments,” to use the Russian term, or the “agricultural wage-labour of migratory peasants,” as the Germans say (Kautsky, S. 192; cf. later, Chapter III, §X); or of such a phenomenon as the migration of workers and peasants from the villages to the towns and factories (Kautsky, IX, especially S. 343; and many other places. Cf. later, Chapter VIII, §II); the transplantation of largescale capitalist industry to the rural districts (Kautsky, S. 187. Cf. later, VII, §VIII). This is quite apart from the same appraisal of the historical significance of agricultural capitalism (Kautsky, passim, especially S. 289, 292, 298. Cf. later, Chapter IV, §IX), from the same recognition of the progressive nature of capitalist relations in agriculture as compared with pre-capitalist relations [Kautsky, S. 382: “The ousting des Gesindes (of personally dependent farm labourers, servants) and der Instleute (“midway between the farm labourer and the tenant cultivator”: the peasant who rents land, making payment by labour-service) by day labourers who outside of working hours are free men, would mark great social progress.” Cf. later, Chapter IV, §IX, 4]. Kautsky categorically declares that the adoption by the village community of largescale modern agriculture conducted communally “is out of the question” (S. 338); that the agronomists in Western Europe who demand the consolidation and development of the village community are not socialists at all, but people representing the interests of the big landowners, who want to tie down the workers by granting them patches of land (S. 334); that in all European countries those who represent the landowners’ interests want to tie down the agricultural workers by allotting them land and are already trying to give legislative effect to the appropriate measures (S. 162); that all attempts to help the small peasantry by introducing handicraft industry (Hausindustrie)—that worst form of capitalist exploitation—“should be most resolutely combated” (S. 181). We consider it necessary to emphasise the complete unanimity of opinion between the West-European and the Russian Marxists, in view of the latest attempts of the spokesmen of Narodism to draw a sharp distinction between the two (see the statement made by Mr. V. Vorontsov on February 17, 1899, at the Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Trade, Novoye Vremya [New Times], No. 8255, February 19, 1899).⁵

Cover of the second edition of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1908, autographed by the author

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION⁶

This book was written in the period preceding the Russian Revolution, during the slight lull that set in after the outbreak of the big strikes of 1895-1896. At that time the working-class movement withdrew, as it were, into itself, spreading in breadth and depth and paving the way for the beginning in 1901 of the demonstration movement.

The analysis of the social-economic system and, consequently, of the class structure of Russia given in this work on the basis of an economic investigation and critical analysis of statistics, has now been confirmed by the open political action of all classes in the course of the revolution. The leading role of the proletariat has been fully revealed. It has also been revealed that the strength of the proletariat in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total Population. The economic basis of the one phenomenon and the other is demonstrated in the present work.

Further, the revolution is now increasingly revealing the dual position and dual role of the peasantry. On the one hand, the tremendous survivals of corvée economy and all kinds of survivals of serfdom, with the unprecedented impoverishment and ruin of the peasant poor, fully explain the deep sources of the revolutionary peasant movement, the deep roots of the revolutionary character of the peasantry as a mass. On the other hand, in the course of the revolution, the character of the various political parties, and the numerous ideological-political trends reveal the inherently contradictory class structure of this mass, its petty-bourgeois character, the antagonism between the proprietor and the proletarian trends within it. The vacillation of the impoverished small master between the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat is as inevitable as the phenomenon existent in every capitalist society that an insignificant minority of small producers wax rich, “get on in the world,” turn into bourgeois, while the overwhelming majority are either utterly ruined and become wage-workers or paupers, or eternally eke out an almost proletarian existence. The economic basis of both these trends among the peasantry is demonstrated in the present essay.

With this economic basis the revolution in Russia is, of course, inevitably a bourgeois revolution. This Marxist proposition is absolutely irrefutable. It must never be forgotten. It must always be applied to all the economic and political problems of the Russian Revolution.

But one must know how to apply it. A concrete analysis of the status and the interests of the different classes must serve as a means of defining the precise significance of this truth when applied to this or that problem. The opposite mode of reasoning frequently met with among the Rightwing Social-Democrats headed by Plekhanov, i.e., the endeavour to look for answers to concrete questions in the simple logical development of the general truth about the basic character of our revolution, is a vulgarisation of Marxism and downright mockery of dialectical materialism. Of such people, who from the general truth of the character of this revolution deduce, for example, the leading role of the “bourgeoisie” in the revolution, or the need for socialists to support the liberals, Marx would very likely have repeated the words once quoted by him from Heine: “I have sown dragon’s teeth and harvested fleas.”⁷

With the present economic basis of the Russian Revolution, two main lines of its development and outcome are objectively possible:

Either the old landlord economy, bound as it is by thousands of threads to serfdom, is retained and turns slowly into purely capitalist, “Junker” economy. The basis of the final transition from labour-service to capitalism is the internal metamorphosis of feudalist landlord economy. The entire agrarian system of the state becomes capitalist and for a long time retains feudalist features. Or the old landlord economy is broken up by revolution, which destroys all the relics of serfdom, and large landownership in the first place. The basis of the final transition from labour-service to capitalism is the free development of small peasant farming, which has received a tremendous impetus as a result of the expropriation of the landlords’ estates in the interests of the peasantry. The entire agrarian system becomes capitalist, for the more completely the vestiges of serfdom are destroyed the more rapidly does the differentiation of the peasantry proceed. In other words: either—the retention, in the main, of landed proprietorship and of the chief supports of the old “superstructure”; hence, the predominant role of the liberal-monarchist bourgeois and landlord, the rapid transition of the well-to-do peasantry to their side, the degradation of the peasant masses, not only expropriated on a vast scale but enslaved, in addition, by one or other kind of Cadet⁸-proposed land-redemption payments, and downtrodden and dulled by the dominance of reaction; the executors of such a bourgeois revolution will be politicians of a type approximating to the Octobrists.⁹ Or—the destruction of landlordism and of all the chief supports of the corresponding old “superstructure”; the predominant role of the proletariat and the peasant masses, with the neutralising of the unstable or counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie; the speediest and freest development of the productive forces on a capitalist basis, under the best circumstances for the worker and peasant masses at all conceivable under commodity production;—hence, the establishment of the most favourable conditions for the further accomplishment by the working class of its real and fundamental task of socialist reorganisation. Of course, infinitely diverse combinations of elements of this or that type of capitalist evolution are possible, and only hopeless pedants could set about solving the peculiar and complex problems arising merely by quoting this or that opinion of Marx about a different historical epoch.

The essay here presented to the reader is devoted to an analysis of the pre-revolutionary economy of Russia. In a revolutionary epoch, life in a country proceeds with such speed and impetuosity that it is impossible to define the major results of economic evolution in the heat of political struggle. Messrs. the Stolypins¹⁰, on the one hand, and the liberals on the other (and not only Cadets à la Struve, but all the Cadets in general), are working systematically, doggedly and consistently to accomplish the revolution according to the first pattern. The coup d’etat of June 3, 1907, that we have recently witnessed, marks a victory for the counter-revolution,¹¹ which is striving to ensure the complete predominance of the landlords in the so-called representative body of the Russian people. But how far this “victory” is a lasting one is another matter; the struggle for the second outcome of the revolution goes on. Not only the proletariat, but also the broad masses of the peasantry are striving, more or less resolutely, more or less consistently, and more or less consciously, for this outcome. However much the counter-revolution tries to strangle the direct mass struggle by outright violence, however much the Cadets try to strangle it by means of their despicable and hypocritical counterrevolutionary ideas, that struggle, in spite of all, is breaking out, now here and now there, and laying its impress upon the policy of the “labour,” Narodnik parties, although the top circles of petty-bourgeois politicians are undoubtedly contaminated (especially the “Popular Socialists” and Trudoviks¹²) with the Cadet spirit of treachery, Molchalinism¹³ and smugness characteristic of moderate and punctilious philistines or bureaucrats.

How this struggle will end, what the final result of the first onset of the Russian Revolution will be—it is at present impossible to say. Hence, the time has not yet come (moreover, the immediate Party duties of a participant in the working-class movement leave no leisure) for a thorough revision of this essay.* The second edition cannot overstep the bounds of a characterisation of Russian economy before the revolution. The author had to confine himself to going over and correcting the text and also to making the most essential additions from the latest statistical material. These are recent horse-census data, harvest statistics, returns of the 1897 census of the population of Russia, new data from factory statistics, etc.

July 1907

The Author

Cover of the German edition (1894) of K. Marx’s Capital, Vol. III, Part 1, used by Lenin

CHAPTER I

THE THEORETICAL MISTAKES OF THE NARODNIK ECONOMISTS¹⁴

The market is a category of commodity economy, which in the course of its development is transformed into capitalist economy and only under the latter gains complete sway and universal prevalence. Therefore, in order to examine basic theoretical propositions concerning the home market we must proceed from simple commodity economy and trace its gradual transformation into capitalist economy.

I. THE SOCIAL DIVISION OF LABOUR

The basis of commodity economy is the social division of labour. Manufacturing industry separates from the raw materials industry, and each of these subdivides into small varieties and subvarieties which produce specific products as commodities, and exchange them for the products of all the others. Thus, the development of commodity economy leads to an increase in the number of separate and independent branches of industry; the tendency of this development is to transform into a special branch of industry the making not only of each separate product, but even of each separate part of a product—and not only the making of a product, but even the separate operations of preparing the product for consumption. Under natural economy society consisted of a mass of homogeneous economic units (patriarchal peasant families, primitive village communities, feudal manors), and each such unit engaged in all forms of economic activity, from the acquisition of various kinds of raw material to their final preparation for consumption. Under commodity economy heterogeneous economic units come into being, the number of separate branches of economy increases, and the number of economic units performing one and the same economic function diminishes. It is this progressive growth in the social division of labour that is the chief factor in the process of creating a home market for capitalism. “…Where the basis is commodity production and its absolute form, capitalist production,” says Marx, “…products are commodities, or use-values, which have an exchange-value that is to be realised, to be converted into money, only in so far as other commodities form an equivalent for them, that is, other products confront them as commodities and values; thus, in so far as they are not produced as immediate means of subsistence for the producers themselves, but as commodities, as products which become use-values only by their transformation into exchange-values (money), by their alienation. The market for these commodities develops through the social division of labour; the division of productive labours mutually transforms their respective products into commodities, into equivalents for each other, making them mutually serve as markets” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 177-178. Russ. trans., 526.¹⁵ Our italics, as in all quotations, unless otherwise stated).

It goes without saying that the above-mentioned separation of the manufacturing from the raw materials industry, of manufacture from agriculture, transforms agriculture itself into an industry, into a commodity-producing branch of economy. The process of specialisation that separates from each other the diverse varieties of the manufacture of products, creating an ever-growing number of branches of industry, also manifests itself in agriculture, creating specialised agricultural districts (and systems of farming)* and giving rise to exchange not only between the products of agriculture and industry but also between the various products of agriculture. This specialisation of commercial (and capitalist) agriculture manifests itself in all capitalist countries, in the international division of labour; this is true of post-Reform Russia as well, as we shall show in detail below.

Thus, the social division of labour is the basis of the entire process of the development of commodity economy and of capitalism. It is quite natural, therefore, that our Narodnik theoreticians, who declare this process to be the result of artificial measures, the result of a “deviation from the path,” and so on and so forth, have tried to gloss over the fact of the social division of labour in Russia or to belittle its significance. Mr. V. V., in his article “Division of Agricultural and Industrial Labour in Russia” (Vestnik Yevropy [European Messenger], 1884, No. 7), “denied” “the dominance in Russia of the principle of the social division of labour” (p. 347), and declared that in this country the social division of labour “has not sprung from the depths of the people’s life, but has attempted to thrust itself into it from outside” (p. 338). Mr. N.—on, in his Sketches, argued as follows about the increase in the quantity of grain offered for sale: “This phenomenon might imply that the grain produced is more evenly distributed over the country, that the Archangel fisherman now consumes Samara grain, and that the Samara farmer supplements his dinner with Archangel fish. Actually, however, nothing of the kind is happening” (Sketches on Our Post-Reform Social Economy, St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 37). Without any data and contrary to generally known facts, the categorical assertion is bluntly made here that there is no social division of labour in Russia! The Narodnik theory of the “artificial character” of capitalism in Russia could only have been evolved by rejecting, or proclaiming as “artificial,” the very foundation of all commodity economy, namely, the social division of labour.

II. THE GROWTH OF THE INDUSTRIAL POPULATION AT THE EXPENSE OF THE AGRICULTURAL

In view of the fact that in the epoch preceding commodity economy, manufacturing is combined with the raw materials industry, and the latter is headed by agriculture, the development of commodity economy takes the shape of the separation from agriculture of one branch of industry after another. The population of a country in which commodity economy is poorly developed (or not developed at all) is almost exclusively agricultural. This, however, must not be understood as meaning that the population is engaged solely in agriculture: it only means that the population engaged in agriculture, also process the products of agriculture, and that exchange and the division of labour are almost non-existent. Consequently, the development of commodity economy eo ipso means the divorcement of an ever-growing part of the population from agriculture, i.e., the growth of the industrial population at the expense of the agricultural population. “It is in the nature of capitalist production to continually reduce the agricultural population as compared with the non-agricultural, because in industry (in the strict sense) the increase of constant capital at the expense of variable capital goes hand in hand with an absolute increase in variable capital despite its relative decrease; on the other hand, in agriculture the variable capital required for the exploitation of a certain plot of land decreases absolutely; it can thus only increase to the extent that new land is taken into cultivation, but this again requires as a prerequisite a still greater growth of the non-agricultural population” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 177. Russ. trans., p. 526).¹⁶ Thus one cannot conceive of capitalism without an increase in the commercial and industrial population at the expense of the agricultural population, and everybody knows that this phenomenon is revealed in the most clear-cut fashion in all capitalist countries. It need hardly be proved that the significance of this circumstance as regards the problem of the home market is enormous, for it is bound up inseparably both with the evolution of industry and with the evolution of agriculture; the formation of industrial centres, their numerical growth, and the attraction of the population by them cannot but exert a most profound influence on the whole rural system, and cannot but give rise to a growth of commercial and capitalist agriculture. All the more noteworthy is the fact that the exponents of Narodnik economics completely ignore this law both in their purely theoretical arguments and in their arguments about capitalism in Russia (we shall deal at length with the specific manifestations of this law in Russia later on, in Chapter VIII). The theories of Messrs. V. V. and N.—on regarding the home market for capitalism overlook a mere trifle—the diversion of the population from agriculture to industry, and the influence exerted by this fact on agriculture.*

III. THE RUIN OF THE SMALL PRODUCERS

So far we have dealt with simple commodity production. Now we pass to capitalist production, that is, we presume that instead of simple commodity producers we have, on the one hand, the owner of means of production and, on the other, the wage-worker, the seller of labour-power. The conversion of the small producer into a wage-worker presumes that he has lost the means of production—land, tools, workshop, etc.—i.e., that he is “impoverished,” “ruined.” The view is advanced that this ruin “diminishes the purchasing power of the population,” “diminishes the home market” for capitalism (Mr. N.—on, loc. cit., p. 185. Also pp. 203, 275, 287, 339-340, etc. The same view is held by Mr. V. V. in the majority of his writings). We do not deal here with the factual data relating to this process in Russia—they will be examined in detail in later chapters. At the moment the question is posed purely theoretically, i.e., it relates to commodity production in general where it is transformed into capitalist production. The writers mentioned also pose this question theoretically, i.e., from the mere fact of the ruin of the small producers they deduce a shrinkage of the home market. This view is absolutely incorrect, and its persistent survival in our economic literature can only be explained by the romantic prejudices of Narodism (see the article referred to in the footnote). It is forgotten that the “freeing” of one section of the producers from the means of production necessarily presumes the passage of the latter into other hands, their conversion into capital; presumes, consequently, that the new owners of these means of production produce as commodities the products formerly consumed by the producer himself, i.e., expand the home market; that in expanding production the new owners of the means of production present a demand to the market for new implements, raw materials, means of transport, etc., and also for articles of consumption (the enrichment of these new owners naturally presumes an increase in their consumption). It is forgotten that it is by no means the well-being of the producer that is important for the market but his possession of money; the decline in the well-being of the patriarchal peasant, who formerly conducted a mainly natural economy, is quite compatible with an increase in the amount of money in his possession, for the more such a peasant is ruined, the more he is compelled to resort to the sale of his labour-power, and the greater is the share of his (albeit scantier) means of subsistence that he must acquire in the market. “With the setting free (from the land) of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into material elements of variable capital” (capital spent on the purchase of labour-power) (Das Kapital, I, 776). “The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home market” (ibid. 778).¹⁷ Thus, from the standpoint of abstract theory, the ruin of the small producers in a society of developing commodity economy and capitalism means the very opposite to what Messrs. N.—on and V. V. want to deduce therefrom; it means the creation and not the shrinkage of the home market. If the very same Mr. N.—on, who declares a priori that the ruin of the Russian small producers means the shrinkage of the home market, nevertheless cites the just-quoted contrary assertions of Marx (Sketches, pp. 71 and 114), it only proves the remarkable ability of that writer to belabour himself with quotations from Capital.

IV. THE NARODNIK THEORY OF THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF REALISING SURPLUS-VALUE

The next question in the theory of the home market is the following. We know that the value of a product in capitalist production resolves into three parts: 1) the first part replaces the constant capital, i.e., the value that existed previously in the shape of raw and auxiliary materials, machines and instruments of production, etc., and that is merely reproduced in a certain part of the finished product; 2) the second part replaces the variable capital, i.e., covers the maintenance of the worker; and, lastly, 3) the third part constitutes the surplus-value, which belongs to the capitalist. It is usually granted (we state the question in the spirit of Messrs. N.—on and V. V.) that the realisation (i.e., the finding of a corresponding equivalent, sale in the market) of the first two parts presents no difficulty, because the first part goes into production, and the second into consumption by the working class. But how is the third part—surplus-value—realised? It cannot, surely, be consumed in its entirety by the capitalists! So our economists come to the conclusion that “the way out of the difficulty” of realising surplus-value is “the acquisition of a foreign market” (N.—on, Sketches, Part II, §XV in general, and p. 205 in particular; V. V., “The Excess in the Market Supply of Commodities” in Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Fatherland Notes], 1883, and Essays on Theoretical Economics, St. Petersburg, 1895, p. 179 and foll.). The writers mentioned explain the need for a capitalist nation to have a foreign market by the suggestion that the capitalists cannot realise their products in any other way. The home market in Russia, they say, is shrinking because of the ruin of the peasantry and because of the impossibility of realising surplus-value without a foreign market, while the foreign market is closed to a young country that enters the path of capitalist development too late—and so, it is declared as proven that Russian capitalism has no basis, is still-born, a claim founded on mere a priori (and, moreover, theoretically incorrect) assumptions!

When expressing his views on realisation, Mr. N.—on evidently had in mind Marx’s theory on this subject (although he said not a single word about Marx in this part of his Sketches), but he absolutely failed to understand it and distorted it beyond recognition, as we shall see in a moment. This explains the curious fact that his views coincided in all essentials with those of Mr. V. V., who cannot possibly be accused of “not understanding” theory, for it would be the height of injustice to suspect him of even the slightest acquaintance with it. Both authors expound their theories as though they are the first to have dealt with the subject, and have reached certain solutions “all by themselves”; both of them most sublimely ignore the arguments of the old economists on the subject, and both repeat old errors that have been most thoroughly refuted in Volume II of Capital.* Both authors reduce the whole problem of the realisation of the product to the realisation of surplus-value, evidently imagining that the realisation of constant capital presents no difficulties. This naïve opinion contains a most profound error, one that is the source of all further errors in the Narodnik theory of realisation. As a matter of fact, the difficulty of explaining realisation is precisely one of explaining the realisation of constant capital. In order to be realised, constant capital must be put back again into production, and that is directly practicable only in the case of that capital whose product consists of means of production. If, however, the product which makes good the constant part of capital consists of articles of consumption, it cannot be directly put back into production; what is required is exchange between the department of social production that makes means of production and that which makes articles of consumption. It is this point that constitutes the whole difficulty of the problem, a difficulty unnoticed by our economists. Mr. V. V. presents the matter, generally speaking, as if the aim of capitalist production is not accumulation but consumption, advancing the profound argument that “into the hands of a minority flows a mass of material objects in excess of the consuming power of the organism” (sic!) “at the given stage of their development” (loc. cit., 149) and that “it is not the moderation and abstemiousness of the manufacturers which are the cause of the superfluity of products, but the limitations and insufficient elasticity of the human organism (!!), which fails to increase its consuming power at the rate at which surplus-value grows” (ibid., 161). Mr. N.—on tries to present the matter as though he does not regard consumption as the aim of capitalist production, as though he takes account of the role and significance of means of production in regard to the problem of realisation; as a matter of fact, however, he has no clear idea whatsoever about the process of the circulation and reproduction of the aggregate social capital, and has become entangled in a host of contradictions. We shall not stop to examine all these contradictions in detail (pp. 203-205 of Mr. N.—on’s Sketches); that would be too thankless a task (and one already performed in part by Mr. Bulgakov* in his book Markets Under Capitalist Production, Moscow, 1897, pp. 237-245), and furthermore, to prove the justice of the appraisal given here of Mr. N.—on’s arguments, it will suffice to examine his final conclusion, namely, that the foreign market is the way out of the difficulty of realising surplus-value. This conclusion of Mr. N.—on’s (essentially a mere repetition of the one drawn by Mr. V. V.) shows in most striking fashion that he did not in any way understand either the realisation of the product in capitalist society (i.e., the theory of the home market) or the role of the foreign market. Indeed, is there even a grain of common sense in this dragging of the foreign market into the problem of “realisation”? The problem of realisation is how to find for each part of the capitalist product, in terms of value (constant capital, variable capital and surplus-value) and in its material form (means of production, and articles of consumption, specifically necessities and luxuries), that other part of the product which replaces it on the market. Clearly, foreign trade must here be excluded, -for dragging it in does not advance the solution of the problem one iota, but merely retracts it by extending the problem from one country to several. The very same Mr. N.—on who discovered in foreign trade “the way out of the difficulty” of realising surplus-value, argues about wages, for example, as follows: with the part of the annual product which the direct producers, the workers, receive in the shape of wages “only that part of the means of subsistence can be drawn from circulation which is equal in value to the sum-total of wages” (203). How, the question arises, does our economist know that the capitalists of a given country will produce means of subsistence in just the quantity and of just the quality requisite for their realisation by wages? How does he know that in this connection the foreign market can be dispensed with? Obviously, he cannot know this, and has simply brushed aside the problem of the foreign market, for in discussing the realisation of variable capital the important thing is the replacement of one part of the product by another, and not at all whether this replacement takes place in one country or in two. With respect to surplus-value, however, he departs from this necessary premise, and instead of solving the problem, simply evades it by talking of the foreign market. The sale of the product in the foreign market itself needs explanation, i.e., the finding of an equivalent for that part of the product which is being sold, the finding of another part of the capitalist product that can replace the first. That is why Marx says that in examining the problem of realisation, the foreign market, foreign trade “must be entirely discarded,” for “the involvement of foreign commerce in analysing the annually reproduced value of products can … only confuse without contributing any new element of the problem, or of its solution” (Das Kapital, II, 469).¹⁹ Messrs. V. V. and N.—on imagined that they were giving a profound appraisal of the contradictions of capitalism by pointing to the difficulties of realising surplus-value. Actually, however, they were giving an extremely superficial appraisal of the contradictions of capitalism, for if one speaks of the “difficulties” of realisation, of the crises, etc., arising therefrom, one must admit that these “difficulties” are not only possible but are necessary as regards all parts of the capitalist product, and not as regards surplus-value alone. Difficulties of this kind, due to disproportion in the distribution of the various branches of production, constantly arise, not only in realising surplus-value, but also in realising variable and constant capital; in realising not only the product consisting of articles of consumption, but also that consisting of means of production. Without “difficulties” of this kind and crises, there cannot, in general, be any capitalist production, production by isolated producers for a world market unknown to them.

V. THE VIEWS OF ADAM SMITH ON THE PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION OF THE AGGREGATE SOCIAL PRODUCT IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY AND MARX’S CRITICISM OF THESE VIEWS

In order properly to understand the theory of realisation we must start with Adam Smith, who laid the foundation of the erroneous theory on this subject that held undivided sway in political economy until Marx. Adam Smith divided the price of a commodity into only two parts: variable capital (wages, in his terminology) and surplus-value (he does not combine “profit” and “rent,” so that actually he counted three parts in all.)* Similarly, he divided the sum-total of commodities, the total annual social product, into the same parts and allocated them directly to the “revenue” of the two classes of society: the workmen and the capitalists (undertakers and landlords, as Smith calls them).*

On what did he base his omission of the third component of value, constant capital? Adam Smith could not fail to observe this part, but he assumed that it also is made up of wages and surplus-value. Here is how he argued on this subject: “In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages or maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer. These three parts seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. A fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle, and other instruments of husbandry. But it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts” (namely, rent, profit and wages). “Though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, labour and profit.”** Marx calls this theory of Smith’s “astonishing.” “His proof consists simply in the repetition of the same assertion” (II, S. 366).²⁰ Smith sends us “from pillar to post” (I. B., 2. Aufl., S. 612***).²¹ In saying that the price of farming instruments itself resolves into the same three parts, Smith forgets to add: and also into the price of the means of production employed in the making of these instruments. The erroneous exclusion by Adam Smith (and also by subsequent economists) of the constant part of capital from the price of the product is due to an erroneous conception of accumulation in capitalist economy, i.e., of the expansion of production, the transformation of surplus-value into capital. Here too Adam Smith omitted constant capital, assuming that the accumulated part of surplus-value, the part converted into capital, is entirely consumed by the productive workers, i.e., goes entirely in wages, whereas actually the accumulated part of surplus-value is expended on constant capital (instruments of production, raw and auxiliary materials) plus wages. Criticising this view of Smith (and also of Ricardo, Mill and others) in Capital, Volume I (Part VII, “The Accumulation of Capital,” Chapter 22, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital,” §2, “Erroneous Conception, by Political Economy, of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale”), Marx there states that in Volume II “it will be shown that Adam Smith’s dogma, inherited by all his successors, prevented political economy from understanding even the most elementary mechanism of the process of social reproduction” (I, 612).²² Adam Smith committed this error because he confused the value of the product with the newly created value: the latter does indeed resolve itself into variable capital and surplus-value, whereas the former includes constant capital in addition. This error had been earlier exposed by Marx in his analysis of value, when he drew a distinction between abstract labour, which creates new value, and concrete, useful labour, which reproduces the previously existing value in the new form of a useful product.²³

An explanation of the process of the reproduction and circulation of the total social capital is particularly necessary to settle the problem of the national revenue in capitalist society. It is extremely interesting to note that, when dealing with the latter problem, Adam Smith could no longer cling to his erroneous theory, which excludes constant capital from the country’s total product. “The gross revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labor; the neat revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining; first, their fixed; and, secondly, their circulating capital; or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniencies, and amusements” (A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book II. “Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock,” Chapter II, Vol. II, p. 18. Russ. trans., II, p. 21). Thus, from the country’s total product Adam Smith excluded capital, asserting that it resolves itself into wages, profit and rent, i.e., into (net) revenue; but in the gross revenue of society he includes capital, separating it from articles of consumption (= net revenue). This is the contradiction in which Marx catches Adam Smith: how can there be capital in the revenue if there was no capital in the product? (Cf. Das Kapital, II, S. 355.)²⁴ Without noticing it himself, Adam Smith here recognises three component parts in the value of the total product: not only variable capital and surplus-value, but also constant capital. Further on, Adam Smith comes up against another very important difference, one of enormous significance in the theory of realisation. “The whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital,” he says, “must evidently be excluded from the neat revenue of the society. Neither the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade, their profitable buildings, etc., nor the produce of the labor necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever make any part of it. The price of that labor may indeed make a part of it; as the workmen so employed may place the whole value of their wages in their stock reserved for immediate consumption.” But in other kinds of labour, both the “price” (of labour) “and the produce” (of labour) “go to this stock, the price to that of the workmen, the produce to that of other people” (A. Smith, ibid.). Here we find a gleam of recognition of the need to distinguish two kinds of labour: one that produces articles of consumption which may enter into the “neat revenue,” and another which produces “useful machines and instruments of trade … buildings, etc.,” i.e., articles that can never be used for personal consumption. From this it is only one step to the admission that an explanation of realisation absolutely requires that two forms of consumption be distinguished: personal and productive (= putting back into production). It was the rectification of these two mistakes made by Smith (the omission of constant capital from the value of the product, and the confusing of personal with productive consumption) that enabled Marx to build up his brilliant theory of the realisation of the social product in capitalist society.

As for the other economists, those between Adam Smith and Marx, they all repeated Adam Smith’s error* and for that reason did not advance one step. Of the confusion that consequently reigns in the theories of revenue we shall speak later. In the controversy as to the possibility of a general overproduction of commodities that was waged by Ricardo, Say, Mill and others, on the one hand, and by Malthus, Sismondi, Chalmers, Kirchmann and others, on the other, both sides adhered to Smith’s erroneous theory, and consequently, as Mr. S. Bulgakov justly remarks, “in view of the false premises and the wrong formulation of the problem itself, these controversies could only lead to empty and scholastic wordspinning” (loc. cit., p. 21. See an account of this wordspinning in Tugan-Baranovsky’s Industrial Crises, etc., St. Petersburg, 1894, pp. 377-404).

VI. MARX’S THEORY OF REALISATION

It follows automatically from what has been said that the fundamental premises on which Marx’s theory is based are the following two propositions. The first is that the total product of a capitalist country, like the individual product, consists of the following three parts: 1) constant capital, 2) variable capital, and 3) surplus-value. To those who are familiar with the analysis of the process of production of capital given in Vol. I of Marx’s Capital this proposition is self-evident. The second proposition is that two major departments of capitalist production must be distinguished, namely (Department I), the production of means of production—of articles which serve for productive consumption, i.e., are to be put back into production, articles which are consumed, not by people, but by capital; and (Department II) the production of articles of consumption, i.e., of articles used for personal consumption. “There is more theoretical meaning in this division alone than in all the preceding controversies over the theory of markets” (Bulgakov, loc. cit., p. 27). The question arises as to why such a division of products according to their natural form is now necessary to analyse the reproduction of social capital, when the analysis of the production and reproduction of individual capital dispensed with such a division and left the question of the natural form of the product entirely on one side. On what grounds can we introduce the question of the natural form of the product into a theoretical investigation of capitalist economy, which is based entirely on the exchange-value of the product? The fact is that when the production of individual capital was analysed, the question of where and how the product would be sold, and of where and how articles of consumption would be bought by the workers and means of production by the capitalists, was set aside as making no contribution to this analysis and as having no relation to it. All that had to be examined then was the problem of the value of the separate elements of production and of the results of production. Now, however, the question is: where will the workers and the capitalists obtain their articles of consumption, where will the capitalists obtain their means of production, how will the finished product meet all these demands and enable production to expand? Here, consequently, we have not only “a replacement of value, but also a replacement in material” (Stoffersatz.—Das Kapital, II, 389),²⁵ and hence it is absolutely essential to distinguish between products that play entirely different parts in the process of social economy.

Once these basic propositions are taken into account, the problem of the realisation of the social product in capitalist society no longer presents any difficulty. Let us first assume simple reproduction, i.e., the repetition of the process of production on its previous scale, the absence of accumulation. Obviously, the variable capital and the surplus-value in Department II (which exist in the form of articles of consumption) are realised by the personal consumption of the workers and capitalists of this department (for simple reproduction presumes that the whole of the surplus-value is consumed, and that no portion of it is converted into capital). Further, the variable capital and the surplus-value which exist in the form of means of production (Department I) must, in order to be realised, be exchanged for articles of consumption for the capitalists and workers engaged in the making of means of production. On the other hand, neither can the constant capital existing in the form of articles of consumption (Department II) be realised except by an exchange for means of production, in order to be put back again into production the following year. Thus we get variable capital and surplus-value in means of production exchanged for constant capital in articles of consumption: the workers and the capitalists (in the means of production department) in this way obtain means of subsistence, while the capitalists (in the articles of consumption department) dispose of their product and obtain constant capital for further production. Under simple reproduction, the parts exchanged must be equal: the sum of variable capital and surplus-value in means of production must be equal to the constant capital in articles of consumption. On the other hand, if we assume reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, i.e., accumulation, the first magnitude must be greater than the second, because there must be available a surplus of means of production with which to begin further production. Let us revert, however, to simple reproduction. There has been left unrealised one more part of the social product, namely, constant capital in means of production. This is realised partly by exchange among the capitalists of this same department (coal, for example, is exchanged for iron, because each of these products serves as a necessary material or instrument in the production of the other), and partly by being put directly into production (for example, coal extracted in order to be used in the same enterprise again for the extraction of coal; grain in agriculture, etc.). As for accumulation, its starting-point, as we have seen, is a surplus of means of production (taken from the surplus-value of the capitalists in this department), a surplus that also calls for the conversion into capital of part of the surplus-value in articles of consumption. A detailed examination of how this additional production will be combined with simple reproduction we consider to be superfluous. It is no part of our task to undertake a special examination of the theory of realisation, and the foregoing is enough to elucidate the error of the Narodnik economists and to enable us to draw certain theoretical conclusions regarding the home market.*

On the problem of interest to us, that of the home market, the main conclusion from Marx’s theory of realisation is the following: capitalist production, and, consequently, the home market, grow not so much on account of articles of consumption as on account of means of production. In other words, the increase in means of production outstrips the increase in articles of consumption. Indeed, we have seen that constant capital in articles of consumption (Department II) is exchanged for variable capital + surplus-value in means of production (Department I). According, however, to the general law of capitalist production, constant capital grows faster than variable capital. Hence, constant capital in articles of consumption has to increase faster than variable capital and surplus-value in articles of consumption, while constant capital in means of production has to increase fastest of all, outstripping both the increase of variable capital (+ surplus-value) in means of production and the increase of constant capital in articles of consumption. The department of social production which produces means of production has, consequently, to grow faster than that producing articles of consumption. For capitalism, therefore, the growth of the home market is to a certain extent “independent” of the growth of personal consumption, and takes place mostly on account of productive consumption. But it would be a mistake to understand this “independence” as meaning that productive consumption is entirely divorced from personal consumption: the former can and must increase faster than the latter (and there its “independence” ends), but it goes without saying that, in the last analysis, productive consumption is always bound up with personal consumption. Marx says in this connection: “…We have seen (Book II, Part III) that continuous circulation takes place between constant capital and constant capital…” (Marx has in mind constant capital in means of production, which is realised by exchange among capitalists in the same department). “It is at first independent of individual consumption because it never enters the latter. But this consumption definitely limits it nevertheless, since constant capital is never produced for its own sake but solely because more of it is needed in spheres of production whose products go into individual consumption” (Das Kapital, III, 1, 289. Russ. trans., p. 242).²⁷

This larger consumption of constant capital is nothing but a higher level of the development of the productive forces, one expressed in terms of exchange-value, because the rapidly developing “means of production” consist, in the main, of materials, machines, instruments, buildings and all sorts of other accessories for large-scale, especially machine, production. It is quite natural, therefore, that capitalist production, which develops the productive forces of society and creates large-scale production and machine industry, is also distinguished by a particular expansion of that department of social wealth which consists of means of production…. “In this case” (namely, the production of means of production), “what distinguishes capitalist society from the savage is not, as Senior thinks, the privilege and peculiarity of the savage to expend his labour at times in a way that does not procure him any products resolvable (exchangeable) into revenue, i.e., into articles of consumption. No, the distinction consists in the following:

“a) Capitalist society employs more of its available annual labour in the production of means of production (ergo, of constant capital) which are not resolvable into revenue in the form of wages or surplus-value, but can function only as capital.

“b) When a savage makes bows, arrows, stone hammers, axes, baskets, etc., he knows very well that he did not spend the time so employed in the production of articles of consumption, but that he has thus stocked up the means of production he needs, and nothing else” (Das Kapital, II, 436. Russ. trans., 333).²⁸ This “very good knowledge” of one’s relation to production has disappeared in capitalist society owing to the latter’s inherent fetishism, which presents the social relations of men as relations of products—owing to the conversion of every product into a commodity produced for an unknown consumer and to be realised in an unknown market. And as it is a matter of the utmost indifference to the individual entrepreneur what kind of article he produces—every product yields a “revenue,”—this same superficial, individual point of view was adopted by the economist-theoreticians in relation to the whole of society and prevented the process of the reproduction of the total social product in capitalist economy from being understood.

The development of production (and, consequently, of the home market) chiefly on account of means of production seems paradoxical and undoubtedly constitutes a contradiction. It is real “production as an end in itself”—the expansion of production without a corresponding expansion of consumption. But it is a contradiction not of doctrine, but of actual life; it is the sort of contradiction that corresponds to the very nature of capitalism and to the other contradictions of this system of social economy. It is this expansion of production without a corresponding expansion of consumption that corresponds to the historical mission of capitalism and to its specific social structure: the former consists in the development of the productive forces of society; the latter rules out the utilisation of these technical achievements by the mass of the population. There is an undoubted contradiction between the drive towards the unlimited extension of production inherent in capitalism, and the limited consumption of the masses of the people (limited because of their proletarian status). It is this contradiction that Marx records in the propositions so readily quoted by the Narodniks and which are supposed to corroborate their views on the shrinkage of the home market, the non-progressive character of capitalism, etc., etc. Here are some of these propositions: “Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production: the labourers as buyers of commodities are important for the market. But as sellers of their own commodity—labour-power—capitalist society tends to keep them down to the minimum price” (Das Kapital, II, 303).²⁹

“…The conditions of realisation are limited by the proportional relation of the various branches of production and the consumer power of society…. But the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest” (ibid., III, 1, 225-226).³⁰ “The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move—these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour…. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world market, and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.” (III, 1, 232. Russ. trans., p. 194).³¹ “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their outer limit”* (III, 2, 21. Russ. trans., p. 395).³³ These propositions all speak of the contradiction we have mentioned, namely, the contradiction between the unrestricted drive to expand production and limited consumption—and of nothing else.* Nothing could be more senseless than to conclude from these passages in Capital that Marx did not admit the possibility of surplus-value being realised in capitalist society, that he attributed crises to under-consumption, and so forth. Marx’s analysis of realisation showed that the circulation between constant capital and constant capital is definitely limited by personal consumption; but this same analysis showed the true character of this “limitedness,”³⁴ it showed that, compared with means of production, articles of consumption play a minor role in the formation of the home market. And, furthermore, there is nothing more absurd than to conclude from the contradictions of capitalism that the latter is impossible, non-progressive, and so on—to do that is to take refuge from unpleasant, but undoubted realities in the transcendental heights of romantic dreams. The contradiction between the drive towards the unlimited expansion of production and limited consumption is not the only contradiction of capitalism, which cannot exist and develop at all without contradictions. The contradictions of capitalism testify to its historically transient character, and make clear the conditions and causes of its collapse and transformation into a higher form; but they by no means rule out either the possibility of capitalism, or its progressive character as compared with preceding systems of social economy.**

VII. THE THEORY OF THE NATIONAL INCOME

Having outlined the main propositions of Marx’s theory of realisation, we still have briefly to point to its enormous importance in the theory of national “consumption,” “distribution,” and “income”. All these problems, particularly the last, have hitherto been a veritable stumbling-block for economists. The more they have spoken and written about it, the greater has been the confusion caused by Adam Smith’s fundamental error. We shall cite here some examples of this confusion.

It is interesting to note, for example, that Proudhon repeated essentially the same error, except that he formulated the old theory somewhat differently. He said:

“A (which stands for all property owners, entrepreneurs and capitalists) starts an enterprise with 10,000 francs, and with them makes advance payment to the workers, who must produce goods in return; after A has thus converted his money into commodities he must, at the end of the production process, at the end, say, of a year, convert the commodities again into money. To whom does he sell his commodities? To the workers, of course, for there are only two classes in society—the entrepreneurs on the one hand, and the workers on the other. These workers, having for the product of their labour received 10,000 francs as pay, which covers their essential requirements of life, must now, however, pay more than 10,000 francs, that is, they must pay for the addition that A receives in the shape of the interest and other profits he counted on at the beginning of the year. The worker can cover these 10,000 francs only by borrowing, and, as a consequence, he sinks deeper and deeper into debt and poverty. One of two things must necessarily take place: either the worker may consume 9, although he produced 10, or he pays the entrepreneur only the amount of his wages, in which case the entrepreneur himself suffers bankruptcy and disaster, for he does not receive interest on capital, which he on his part, however, must pay.” (Diehl, Proudhon, II, 200, quoted from the compilation “Industry.” Articles from Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften,* Moscow, 1896, p. 101.)

As the reader sees, this is the same difficulty—how surplus-value is to be realised—that Messrs. V. V. and N.—on are fussing over. Proudhon only expressed it in a somewhat specific form. And this specific character of his formulation brings our Narodniks still closer to him: they too, like Proudhon, consider the “difficulty” to lie in the realisation of surplus-value (interest or profit, in Proudhon’s terminology) and do not understand that the confusion they have acquired from the old economists prevents them from explaining the realisation not only of surplus-value, but also of constant capital, i.e., that their “difficulty” is in their not understanding the whole process of the realisation of the product in capitalist society.

Regarding this “theory” of Proudhon’s, Marx sarcastically observes:

“Proudhon exposes his inability to grasp this” (namely, the realisation of the product in capitalist society) “in the ignorant formulation: l’ouvrier ne peut pas racheter son propre produit (the labourer cannot buy back his own product), because the interest which is added to the prix-de-revient (cost-price) is contained in the product” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 379. Russ. trans., 698, in which there are mistakes).³⁵

And Marx quotes the remark directed against Proudhon by a certain vulgar economist named Forcade, who “quite correctly generalises the difficulty put forward in so narrow a form by Proudhon.” Forcade said that the price of commodities contains not only something over and above the wages—the profit—but also the part that replaces constant capital. Hence, concludes Forcade in opposition to Proudhon, the capitalist is also unable to buy back commodities with his profit (not only did Forcade not solve the problem, he did not even understand it).

Neither did Rodbertus make any contribution to the solution of the problem. While laying particular stress on the thesis that “ground-rent, profit on capital and wages are income,”* he proved quite unable to arrive at a clear understanding of the concept “income.” Stating his view as to what the tasks of political economy would have been had it pursued “a correct method” (loc. cit., S. 26), he also speaks about the distribution of the national product. “It” (i.e., the true “science of the national economy”—Rodbertus’s italics) “should have shown how out of the total national product one part always goes to replace the capital consumed in production or worn out, while the other, as national income, goes to satisfy the direct requirements of society and of its members” (ibid., S. 27). But although true science should have shown this, Rodbertus’s “science” did nothing of the kind. The reader will see that he merely repeated Adam Smith word for word, evidently not even seeing that this is only the beginning of the problem. Which workers “replace” the national capital? How is their product realised? Not a word did he say about this. Summing up his theory (diese neue Theorie, die ich der bisherigen gegenüberstelle,* S. 32) in the shape of separate theses, Rodbertus first speaks of the distribution of the national product as follows: “Rent” (by this, as we know, Rodbertus meant what is usually termed surplus-value) “and wages are, consequently, the parts into which the product resolves itself, in so far as it is income” (S. 33). This extremely important reservation should have suggested a very vital question to him: he had only just said that by income he meant articles which serve “to satisfy direct requirements”; hence, there are products that do not serve for personal consumption. How are they realised? But Rodbertus sees no unclarity here and soon forgets this reservation, speaking outright of the “division of the product into three parts” (wages, profit and rent) (S. 49-50 and others). Thus Rodbertus virtually repeated Adam Smith’s theory together with his fundamental mistake and explained nothing at all regarding the question of income. The promise of a new, full and better theory of the distribution of the national product** proved to be just empty talk. As a matter of fact, Rodbertus did not advance the theory of this subject a single step. How confused were his conceptions of “income” is shown by his lengthy speculations in his Fourth Social Letter to von Kirchmann (Das Kapital, Berlin, 1884) about whether money should be included in the national income, and whether wages are taken from capital or from income—speculations of which Engels said that they “belong to the domain of scholasticism” (Vorwort to Vol. II, Capital, S. XXI).*³⁶

Utter confusion on the problem of the national income reigns supreme among economists to this day. For example, in his article on “Crises” in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (the afore-mentioned compilation, p. 81), Herkner, speaking of the realisation of the product in capitalist society (§5, “distribution”), expresses the opinion that the speculations of K. H. Rau are “sound,” although he merely repeats Adam Smith’s mistake by dividing the whole product of society into incomes. R. Meyer, in his article on “income” (ibid., p. 283 and foll.), quotes the confused definitions of A. Wagner (who also repeats Adam Smith’s error) and frankly admits that “it is difficult to distinguish income from capital,” and that “the most difficult thing is to distinguish between returns (Ertrag) and income (Einkommen).”

We thus see that the economists who have discoursed at length on the inadequate attention paid by the classical economists (and Marx) to “distribution” and “consumption” have not been able to give the slightest explanation of the most fundamental problems of “distribution” and “consumption.” That is understandable, for one cannot even discuss “consumption” unless one understands the process of the reproduction of the total social capital and of the replacement of the various component parts of the social product. This example once again proved how absurd it is to single out “distribution” and “consumption” as though they were independent branches of science corresponding to certain independent processes and phenomena of economic life. It is not with “production” that political economy deals, but with the social relations of men in production, with the social system of production. Once these social relations have been ascertained and thoroughly analysed, the place in production of every class, and, consequently, the share they get of the national consumption, are thereby defined. And the solution of the problem which brought classical political economy to a halt, and which has not been advanced a hair’s breadth by all sorts of experts on “distribution” and “consumption,” is provided by the theory which comes directly after those of the classical economists and which completes the analysis of the production of capital, individual and social.

The problem of “national income” and of “national consumption,” which is absolutely insoluble when examined independently, and has engendered nothing but scholastic speculations, definitions and classifications, proves to be solved in its entirety when the process of the production of the total social capital has been analysed. Furthermore, it ceases to exist as a separate problem when the relation of national consumption to the national product and the realisation of each separate part of this product have been ascertained. All that remains is to give names to these separate parts.

“In order to avoid unnecessary difficulty, one should distinguish gross output (Rohertrag) and net output from gross income and net income.

“The gross output, or gross product, is the total reproduced product….

“The gross income is that portion of value and that portion of the gross product” (Bruttoprodukts oder Rohprodukts) measured by it which remains after deducting that portion of value and that portion of the product of total production measured by it which replaces the constant capital advanced and consumed in production. The gross income, then, is equal to wages (or the portion of the product destined to again become the income of the labourer)+profit+rent. The net income, on the other hand, is the surplus-value, and thus the surplus-product, which remains after deducting wages, and which, in fact, thus represents the surplus-value realised by capital and to be divided with the landlord, and the surplus-product measured by it.

“…Viewing the income of the whole society, national income consists of wages plus profit plus rent, thus, of the gross income. But even this is an abstraction to the extent that the entire society, on the basis of capitalist production, bases itself on the capitalist standpoint and thereby considers only the income resolved into profit and rent as net income” (III, 2, 375-376. Russ. trans., pp. 695-696).³⁷

Thus, the explanation of the process of realisation also made clear the question of income and removed the main difficulty that had prevented the achievement of clarity on this question, namely: how does “income for one become capital for another”?, how can the product which consists of articles of personal consumption and resolves itself totally into wages, profit and rent, also include the constant part of capital, which can never be income? The analysis of realisation given in Capital, Volume II, Part III, gave a full answer to these questions, and in the concluding part of Volume III of Capital, which deals with “revenues,” Marx had only to give names to the separate parts of the social product and refer the reader to the analysis given in Volume II.*

VIII. WHY DOES THE CAPITALIST NATION NEED A FOREIGN MARKET?

Regarding the above-stated theory of the realisation of the product in capitalist society, the question may arise: Does not this theory contradict the proposition that the capitalist nation cannot dispense with foreign markets?

It must be remembered that the analysis given of the realisation of the product in capitalist society proceeded from the assumption that there is no foreign trade: this assumption has already been mentioned above and it has been shown to be essential in such an analysis. Obviously, imports and exports would only have confused the issue, without in the least helping to clear up the problem. The mistake made by Messrs. V. V. and N.—on is that they bring in the foreign market to explain the realisation of surplus-value: while explaining absolutely nothing, this reference to the foreign market merely conceals their theoretical mistakes; that is one point. Another point is that it enables them, with the aid of these mistaken “theories,” to avoid the need to explain the fact of the development of a home market for Russian capitalism.* The “foreign market” merely serves them as a pretext for obscuring the development of capitalism (and, consequently, of the market) inside the country—a pretext all the more convenient in that it also relieves them of the need to examine the facts which show that Russian capitalism is winning foreign markets.**

The need for a capitalist country to have a foreign market is not determined at all by the laws of the realisation of the social product (and of surplus-value in particular), but, firstly, by the fact that capitalism makes its appearance only as a result of widely developed commodity circulation, which transcends the limits of the state. It is therefore impossible to conceive a capitalist nation without foreign trade, nor is there any such nation.

As the reader sees, this reason is of a historical order. And the Narodniks could not escape it with a couple of threadbare phrases about “the impossibility of the capitalists consuming surplus-value.” Had they really wanted to raise the question of the foreign market, they would have had to examine the history of the development of foreign trade, the history of the development of commodity circulation. And having examined this history, they could not have, of course, depicted capitalism as a casual deviation from the path.

Secondly, the conformity between the separate parts of social production (in terms of value and in their natural form) which was necessarily assumed by the theory of the reproduction of social capital, and which is actually established only as the average magnitude of a number of continual fluctuations—this conformity is constantly disturbed in capitalist society owing to the separate existence of different producers working for an unknown market. The various branches of industry, which serve as “markets” for one another, do not develop evenly, but outstrip one another, and the more developed industry seeks a foreign market. This does not mean at all “the impossibility of the capitalist nation realising surplus-value,”—the profound conclusion so readily drawn by the Narodnik. It merely indicates the lack of proportion in the development of the different industries. If the national capital were distributed differently, the same quantity of products could be realised within the country. But for capital to abandon one sphere of industry and pass into another there must be a crisis in that sphere; and what can restrain the capitalists threatened by such a crisis from seeking a foreign market, from seeking subsidies and bonuses to facilitate exports, etc.?

Thirdly, the law of pre-capitalist modes of production is the repetition of the process of production on the previous scale, on the previous technical basis: such are the corvée economy of the landlords, the natural economy of the peasants, the artisan production of the industrialists. The law of capitalist production, on the contrary, is constant transformation of the modes of production, and the unrestricted growth of the scale of production. Under the old modes of production, economic units could exist for centuries without undergoing any change either in character or in size, and without extending beyond the landlord’s manor, the peasant village or the small neighbouring market for the rural artisans and small industrialists (the so-called handicraftsmen). The capitalist enterprise, on the contrary, inevitably outgrows the bounds of the village community, the local market, the region, and then the state. Since the isolation and seclusion of the states have already been broken down by commodity circulation, the natural trend of every capitalist industry brings it to the necessity of “seeking a foreign market.”

Thus, the necessity of seeking a foreign market by no means proves that capitalism is unsound, as the Narodnik economists like to picture matters. Quite the contrary. This necessity demonstrates the progressive historical work of capitalism, which destroys the age-old isolation and seclusion of systems of economy (and, consequently, the narrowness of intellectual and political life), and which links all countries of the world into a single economic whole.

From this we see that the two latter causes of the need for a foreign market are again causes of a historical character. In order to understand them one must examine each separate industry, its development within the country, its transformation into a capitalist industry—in short, one must take the facts about the development of capitalism in the country; and it is not surprising that the Narodniks take the opportunity to evade these facts under cover of worthless (and meaningless) phrases about the “impossibility” of both the home and the foreign markets.

IX. CONCLUSIONS FROM CHAPTER I

Let us now sum up the theoretical propositions examined above, which have a direct bearing on the problem of the home market.

1) The basic process of the formation of a home market (i.e., of the development of commodity production and of capitalism) is the social division of labour. This consists of various forms of processing raw materials (and various operations in this processing) separating from agriculture one after another and becoming independent branches of industry, which exchange their products (now commodities) for the products of agriculture. Thus, agriculture itself becomes industry (i.e., produces commodities), and the same process of specialisation takes place in it.

2) A direct conclusion from the preceding proposition is the law governing all developing commodity economy, and the more so capitalist economy—the industrial (i.e., non-agricultural) population grows faster than the agricultural and diverts an ever-growing part of the population from agriculture to manufacturing industry.

3) The separation of the direct producer from the means of production, i.e., his expropriation, signifying the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist production (and constituting the necessary condition for this transition), creates the home market. The process of this creation of the home market proceeds in two directions: on the one hand, the means of production from which the small producer is “freed” are converted into capital in the hands of their new owner, serve to produce commodities and, consequently, are themselves converted into commodities. Thus, even the simple reproduction of these means of production now requires that they be purchased (previously, these means of production were reproduced in greater part in the natural form and partly were made at home), i.e., provides a market for means of production, and then the product now produced with the aid of these means of production is also converted into a commodity. On the other hand, the means of subsistence of the small producer become the material elements of the variable capital, i.e., of the sum of money expended by the employer (whether a landowner, contractor, lumber-dealer, factory owner, etc., makes no difference) on hiring workers. Thus, these means of subsistence are now also converted into commodities, i.e., create a home market for articles of consumption.

4) The realisation of the product in capitalist society (and, consequently, the realisation of surplus-value) cannot be explained without clearing up the point—1) that the social product, like the individual product, resolves itself in terms of value into three parts and not two (constant capital+variable capital+surplus-value, and not only into variable capital+surplus-value, as taught by Adam Smith and the entire school of political economy that came after him and before Marx), and 2) that in its natural form it must be divided into two big departments: means of production (consumed productively) and articles of consumption (consumed personally). By establishing these main theoretical propositions, Marx fully explained the process of realisation of the product in general and of surplus-value in particular in capitalist production, and revealed that it is utterly wrong to drag the foreign market into the problem of realisation.

5) Marx’s theory of realisation also threw light on the problem of national consumption and income.

From what has been said above, it follows automatically that the problem of the home market as a separate, self-sufficient problem not depending on that of the degree of capitalist development does not exist at all. That is why Marx’s theory does not anywhere or ever raise this problem separately. The home market appears when commodity economy appears; it is created by the development of this commodity economy, and the degree to which the social division of labour is ramified determines the level of its development; it spreads with the extension of commodity production from products to labour-power, and only in proportion as the latter is transformed into a commodity does capitalism embrace the entire production of the country, developing mainly on account of means of production, which occupy an increasingly important place in capitalist society. The “home market” for capitalism is created by developing capitalism itself, which deepens the social division of labour and resolves the direct producers into capitalists and workers. The degree of the development of the home market is the degree of development of capitalism in the country. To raise the question of the limits of the home market separately from that of the degree of the development of capitalism (as the Narodnik economists do) is wrong.

That is why the question of how a home market is being formed for Russian capitalism reduces itself to the following: How and in what direction are the diverse aspects of the Russian national economy developing? What constitutes the connection between and interdependence of these diverse aspects?

The next chapters will be devoted to an examination of data containing the answers to these questions.

CHAPTER II

THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PEASANTRY

We have seen that in capitalist production the basis for the formation of a home market is the process of the disintegration of the small cultivators into agricultural entrepreneurs and workers. Almost every work on the economic position of the Russian peasantry in the post-Reform period refers to the so-called “differentiation” of the peasantry. It must consequently be our task to study the principal features of this phenomenon and to determine its significance. In the following exposition we employ the statistical data of Zemstvo house-to-house censuses.⁴⁰

I. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR NOVOROSSIA⁴¹

Mr. V. Postnikov, in his book Peasant Farming in South Russia (Moscow, 1891),⁴² has collected and processed the Zemstvo statistics for the Taurida and partly the Kherson and the Ekaterinoslav gubernias. This book should be given first place in the literature on the differentiation of the peasantry, and we consider it necessary to arrange according to the system we have adopted the data gathered by Mr. Postnikov, supplementing them occasionally with data from Zemstvo publications. The Zemstvo statisticians of Taurida have grouped the peasant households according to area under crops—a very sound method, one that renders it possible to form a precise judgement of the economy of each group due to the predominance in that locality of grain cultivation with extensive farming. Here are the general data for the economic groups of the Taurida peasantry.*

____________

** Dessiatine = 2.70 acres.—Ed.

The unevenness in the distribution of the area under crops is very considerable: ⅖ of the total households (comprising about of the population, for the size of these families is below the average) possess about ⅛ of the total area under crops; they belong to the poor group, cultivating little land, who cannot cover their needs with their income from farming. Further, there are the middle peasants, also constituting about ⅖ of the total households, who cover their average expenditure by income from the land (Mr. Postnikov considers that a family requires from 16 to 18 dessiatines under crops to cover its average expenditure). Lastly, there are the well-to-do peasants (about ⅕ of the households and of the population), who concentrate in their hands over half the area cultivated, the crop area per household clearly indicating the “commercial” character of the farming done by this group. In order exactly to estimate the extent of this commercial agriculture in the various groups, Mr. Postnikov employs the following method. From the total crop area of the farm, he separates the following: the food area (which provides sustenance for the family and the farm labourers), the fodder area (which provides fodder for the cattle) and the farm-service area (seed-plot, land occupied by buildings, etc.), and thus arrives at the size of the market or commercial area, the produce of which goes for sale. It is shown that in the group with 5 to 10 dess. under crops, only 11.8% of the cultivated area yields produce for the market, whereas this percentage grows with the increase in the area under crops (by groups) as follows: 36.5%—52%—61%. Consequently, the well-to-do peasants (the top two groups) engage in what is commercial cultivation, and secure a gross money income ranging from 574 to 1,500 rubles per annum. This commercial cultivation then becomes capitalist farming, for the areas cultivated by the well-to-do peasants exceed the family labour norm (i.e., the amount of land that a family can cultivate by its own labour), and compel them to resort to the hiring of workers: in the three northern uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, the author estimates, the well-to-do peasants hire over 14,000 rural workers. The poor peasants, on the contrary, “provide workers” (over 5,000), that is, resort to the sale of their labour-power, since the income from cultivating the land amounts, in the 5 to 10 dess. group, for example, to only about 30 rubles in cash per household.* We observe here, consequently, the very process of the creation of a home market that is dealt with by the theory of capitalist production—the “home market” grows as a result of the conversion into a commodity of the product of commercial, entrepreneur farming, on the one hand, and of the conversion into a commodity of the labour-power sold by the badly-off peasants, on the other.

In order to acquaint ourselves more closely with this phenomenon, let us examine the position of each separate group of the peasantry. Let us start with the top group. Here are the data for the amount of land it owns and uses:

Dnieper Uyezd, Taurida Gubernia

Area cultivated per household (dessiatines)

Groups of households

Allotment

Purchased

Rented

Total

  I.

Cultivating no land

  6.4

  0.9

  0.1

  7.4

  II.

”

up to 5

dess.

  5.5

  0.04

  0.6

  6.1

III.

”

5 to 10

”

  8.7

  0.05

  1.6

10.3

IV.

”

10 to 25

”

12.5

  0.6

  5.8

18.9

 V.

”

25 to 50

”

16.6

  2.3

17.4

36.3

VI.

”

over 50

”

17.4

30.0

44.4

91.4

IV.

”

10 to 25

”

12.5

  0.6

  5.8

18.9

Average

11.2

  1.7

  7.0

19.9

We see, accordingly, that the well-to-do peasants, notwithstanding the fact that they are best provided with allotment land,⁴³ concentrate in their hands the bulk of the purchased and the rented land and turn into small landowners and capitalist farmers.* On the renting of 17 to 44 dess. of land there is an annual expenditure, at local prices, of about 70 to 160 rubles. Obviously we are dealing here with a commercial transaction: the land becomes a commodity, “a money-making machine.”

Let us take the data for livestock and implements:

Three uyezds, Taurida Gubernia In Dnieper

Animals per household

% households with no draught

There are per household

Carting

Ploughing

Groups of households

Draught

Other

Total

animals

implements**

  I.

Cultivating no land

  0.3

  0.8

  1.1

80.5

—

—

  II.

”

up to 5

dess.

  1.0

  1.4

  2.4

48.3

—

—

III.

”

5 to 10

”

  1.9

  2.3

  4.2

12.5

  0.8

  0.5

IV.

”

10 to 25

”

  3.2

  4.1

  7.3

  1.4

  1.0

  1.0

 V.

”

25 to 50

”

  5.8

  8.1

13.9

  0.1

  1.7

  1.5

VI.

”

over 50

”

10.5

19.5

30.0

  0.03

  2.7

  2.4

Average

  3.1

  4.5

  7.6

15.0

Thus the well-to-do peasantry are far better supplied with implements than the poor and even the middle peasantry. It is sufficient to glance at this table to see how totally fictitious are the “average” figures which people are so fond of bringing into play when they talk of the “peasantry”. The commercial cultivation of the peasant bourgeoisie is accompanied here by commercial livestock farming, namely, the breeding of coarse-wool sheep. Regarding implements, we shall quote in addition figures for improved implements, which we have taken from Zemstvo statistical returns.* Out of the total reaping and mowing machines (3,061), 2,841, or 92.8%, belong to the peasant bourgeoisie (⅕ of the total households).

It is quite natural that the well-to-do peasantry also employ a farming technique much above the average (larger size of farm, more plentiful supply of implements, available financial resources, etc.); that is to say, the well-to-do peasants “do their sowing faster, make better use of favourable weather, sow the seed in more humid soil,” and reap their harvest in proper time; they thresh their grain as it is carted in from the field, etc. It is also natural that the expenditure on the production of agricultural produce diminishes (per unit of product) as the size of the farm increases. Mr. Postnikov proves this proposition in particular detail, using the following system of calculation: he determines the number of people working (including hired labourers), the number of draught animals, implements, etc., per 100 dessiatines of crop area in the various groups of the peasantry. It is proved that these numbers diminish as the size of the farm increases. For example, those cultivating under 5 dessiatines have per 100 dessiatines of allotment land 28 people working, 28 draught animals, 4.7 ploughs and scarifiers, and 10 carts, whereas those cultivating over 50 dessiatines have 7 people working, 14 draught animals, 3.8 ploughs and scarifiers, and 4.3 carts. (We omit more detailed data for all groups, referring those interested in the details to Mr. Postnikov’s book.) The author’s general conclusion is: “With the increase in the size of the farm and in the area cultivated by the peasant, the expenditure on the maintenance of labour-power, human and animal, that prime item of expenditure in agriculture, progressively decreases, and, among the groups that cultivate large areas, drops to nearly one half per dessiatine under crops of the expenditure among the groups with small cultivated areas” (op. cit., p. 117). To this law of the greater productivity and, hence, of the greater stability of the big peasant farms Mr. Postnikov quite rightly attaches great importance, proving it with very detailed data not only for Novorossia alone, but also for the central gubernias of Russia.* The further the penetration of commodity production into crop cultivation, and, consequently, the keener the competition among the agriculturists, the struggle for land and for economic independence, the more vigorously must this law be manifested, a law which leads to the ousting of the middle and poor peasants by the peasant bourgeoisie. It must, however, be noted that technical progress in agriculture expresses itself in different ways, depending on the system of agriculture, on the system of field cultivation. Whereas in the case of grain growing and extensive cultivation this progress may find expression in a mere expansion of the crop area and reduction of the number of workers, animals, etc., per unit of crop area, in the case of livestock or industrial-crop farming, with the adoption of intensive agriculture, this same progress may find expression, for example, in the cultivation of root crops, which require more workers per unit of crop area, or in the acquisition of dairy cattle, the cultivation of fodder grasses, etc., etc.

The description of the top group of the peasantry must be supplemented by indicating the considerable employment of wage-labour. Here are the data for the three uyezds of Taurida Gubernia:

Mr. V. V., in the above-mentioned article, argued about this question as follows: he took the farms employing workers as a percentage of the total number of peasant farms and arrived at the conclusion that “the number of peasants resorting to hired labour for the cultivation of the land, as compared to the aggregate mass of the people, is quite insignificant: 2 to 3, a maximum of 5 peasant farmers out of 100 are all that represent peasant capitalism … it” (peasant farming in Russia employing labourers) “is not a system firmly rooted in contemporary economic life, but something fortuitous, such as occurred 100 and 200 years ago” (Vestnik Yevropy, 1884, No. 7, p. 332). What sense is there in comparing the number of farms employing workers with the total number of “peasant” farms, when the latter figure also includes the plots of farm labourers? Why, by this method one could also get rid of capitalism in Russian industry: one would only need to take the families engaging in industries who employ wage-workers (i.e., the families of manufacturers, large and small) as a percentage of the total number of families engaging in industries in Russia; the result would be a “quite insignificant” percentage of the “mass of the people.” It is far more correct to compare the number of farms employing labourers with the number of actually independent farms, i.e., of those living on agriculture alone and not resorting to the sale of their labour-power. Furthermore, Mr. V. V. lost sight of a trifle, namely, that the peasant farms employing labourers are among the biggest: the percentage of farms employing labourers, “insignificant” when taken “in general and on the average,” turns out to be very imposing (34-64%) among the well-to-do peasantry, who account for more than half of the total production and produce large quantities of grain for sale. One can therefore judge how absurd is the opinion that farming based on the employment of labourers is “fortuitous,” something that occurred 100 to 200 years ago! Thirdly, only by disregarding the real specific features of cultivation can one take as the criterion of “peasant capitalism” only farm labourers, i.e., regular workers, and ignore the day labourers. It is commonly known that the hiring of day labourers plays a particularly important role in agriculture.*

Let us take the bottom group. It consists of peasants who cultivate no land or who cultivate little; they “do not differ much in economic status … both groups serve as farm labourers for their fellow villagers, or engage in outside, mainly agricultural employments” (p. 134, op. cit.), i.e., belong to the rural proletariat. Let us note, for example, that in Dnieper Uyezd the bottom group constitutes 40% of the households, and those having no ploughing implements 39% of the total households. In addition to selling their labour-power, the rural proletariat obtain an income from leasing their allotment land:

Dnieper Uyezd

Percentages

Groups of households

of householders leasing their allotment land

of leased allotment land

  I.

Cultivating no land

80

97.1

  II.

”

up to 5

dess.

30

38.4

III.

”

5 to 10

”

23

17.2

IV.

”

10 to 25

”

16

  8.1

 V.

”

25 to 50

”

7

  2.9

VI.

”

over 50

”

7

13.8

For uyezd

25.7

14.9

In the three uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, the land leased (in 1884-86) amounted to 25% of the total peasant arable; this does not include land leased, not to peasants, but to middle-class intellectuals. In all, nearly ⅓ of the population in these three uyezds lease land; the allotments of the rural proletariat are rented mainly by the peasant bourgeoisie. Here are data in this regard:

In three uyezds of Taurida Gubernia

allotment land rented from neighbors (dessiatines)

as %

by

peasants

cultivating

up

to

10 dess. per

household

  16,594

  6

”

”

”

”

”

10 to 25 dess.

”

  89,526

35

”

”

”

”

”

25 and more

”

150,596

59

Total

256,716

100

Allotment land is now an object of extensive speculation among the South-Russian peasants. Land is used as security for loans on promissory notes…. Land is leased, or sold, for one or two years and for longer periods—8, 9 or 11 years” (p. 139, op. cit.). Thus, the peasant bourgeoisie is also a representative of merchant’s and usurer’s capital.* Here we have a striking refutation of the Narodnik prejudice that the “kulak” and the “usurer” have nothing in common with the “enterprising muzhik.” On the contrary, the threads both of merchant’s capital (the loaning of money on the security of land, the buying-up of various products, etc.) and of industrial capital (commercial agriculture with the aid of wage-workers, etc,.) merge in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. It depends on surrounding circumstances, on the greater or lesser degree to which the Asiatic way of life is eliminated and culture is widespread in our countryside as to which of these forms of capital will develop at the expense of the other.

Let us examine, finally, the position of the middle group (cultivating from 10 to 25 dess. per household, with an average of 16.4 dess.). Its position is a transitional one: its money income from agriculture (191 rubles) is somewhat lower than the sum annually spent by the average Tauridian (200 to 250 rubles). Here draught animals work out at 3.2 head per household, whereas for a full team 4 are required. Hence the position of the middle peasant’s farm is an unstable one, and to till his land he has to resort to “yoking.”*⁴⁵

The cultivation of the land on a “yoking” basis is, it goes without saying, less productive (time lost in moving from place to place, shortage of horses, etc.), so that in one village, for example, Mr. Postnikov was informed that “yokers often scarify no more than one dessiatine per day, which is half the normal rate.”** If to this we add that in the middle group about ⅕ of the households have no ploughing implements, that this group provides more workers than it hires (according to Mr. Postnikov’s calculations), its unstable character and its transitional position between the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat will be clear. We shall quote somewhat more detailed data about the ousting of the middle group (see Table on p. 81).

Thus, the distribution of allotment land is the most “equalised,” although here, too, the ousting of the bottom group by the top ones is marked. But the situation radically changes when we pass from this compulsorily-held land to the free, i.e., to the purchased and the rented land. The concentration of this land is enormous, and as a result, the distribution of the total land in use by the peasants is quite unlike the distribution of the allotment land: the middle group is pushed into second place (46% of allotment land—41% of land in use), the well-to-do group very considerably enlarges its holdings (28% of allotment land—46% of land in use), while the poor group is being pushed out of the ranks of the cultivators (25% of allotment land—12% of land in use).

The table reveals an interesting phenomenon, one that we shall meet again, namely, the decline in the role of allotment land in peasant farming. In the bottom group this is due to the leasing out of land; in the top group to the fact that in the total farming area purchased and rented land is overwhelmingly predominant. The remnants of the pre-Reform system (the tying of the peasants to the land, and equalised, tax-assessed land tenure) are being utterly destroyed by the penetration of capitalism into agriculture.

As for land renting in particular, the figures given enable us to clear up a very common mistake in the arguments of the Narodnik economists on this subject. Take the arguments of Mr. V. V. In the article quoted above he bluntly raised the issue of the relation of the renting of land to the break-up of the peasantry. “Does the renting of land help to differentiate the peasant farms into big and small and to destroy the average, typical group?” (Vestnik Yevropy, loc. cit., pp. 339-340.) Mr. V. V. answered this question in the negative. Here are his arguments: 1) “The large percentage of persons who resort to the renting of land.” Examples: 38 to 68%; 40 to 70%; 30 to 66%; 50 to 60% respectively in different uyezds of different gubernias.—2) The small size of the rented plots per household: 3 to 5 dess., according to Tambov statistical returns. — 3) The peasants with small allotments rent more land than those with big ones.

____________

* Data taken from the Zemstvo Statistical Returns. They cover the whole uyezd, including settlements not embraced by volosts.⁴⁶ The figures in the column “Total land used by group” have been calculated by myself, by adding together the allotment, rented and purchased land, and subtracting the leased land.

To enable the reader clearly to judge the appropriateness of such arguments, let alone their soundness, we quote the corresponding figures for Dnieper Uyezd.*

% of renting households household (dess.)

Arable per renting

Price per dessiatines (rubles)

Cultivating

up to 5

dess.

25

  2.4

15.25

”

5 to 10

”

42

  3.9

12.00

”

10 to 25

”

69

  8.5

  4.75

”

25 to 50

”

88

20.0

  3.75

”

over 50

”

91

48.6

  3.55

For uyezd

56.2

12.4

  4.23

The question arises, of what importance can “average” figures be here? Does the fact that those who rent land are “many”—56%—really do away with the concentration of the rented land in the hands of the rich? Is it not ridiculous to take the “average” area of rented land [12 dess. per renting household. Very often it is not even per renting household, but per existing household that is taken. That is what Mr. Karyshev, for example, does in his work “Peasant Rentings of Non-Allotment Land” (Dorpat, 1892; Vol. II of Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigations)] by putting together peasants of whom one takes 2 dessiatines at a fabulous price (15 rubles), evidently out of dire need, on ruinous terms, while another takes 48 dessiatines, over and above his own adequate amount of land, “buying” the land wholesale at the incomparably lower price of 3.55 rubles per dessiatine? No less hollow is the third argument: Mr. V. V. himself took care to refute it by admitting that figures relating “to entire village communities” (in classifying the peasants according to allotment) “do not present a true picture of what is taking place in the community itself” (p. 342, op. cit.).**

It would be a great mistake to imagine that the concentration of rented land in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie is limited to individual renting and does not apply to renting by the village community. Nothing of the kind. The rented land is always distributed “according to where the money lies,” and the relation between the groups of the peasantry does not change in the least where land is rented by the community. Hence, the argument of Mr. Karyshev, for example, that the relation between community renting and individual renting expresses a “conflict between two principles (!?), the communal and the individual” (p. 159, loc. cit.), that community renting “is characterised by the labour principle and the principle of even distribution of rented land among the community members” (ibid., 230)—this argument belongs entirely to the sphere of Narodnik prejudices. Notwithstanding the task he set himself of summing up the “results of Zemstvo statistical investigation,” Mr. Karyshev carefully avoided all the abundant Zemstvo statistical material about the concentration of rented land in the hands of small groups of well-to-do peasants. Let us quote an example. In the three indicated uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, state lands rented by peasant communities are distributed among the groups as follows:

A little illustration of the “labour principle” and of the “principle of even distribution”!

Such are the Zemstvo statistical data on peasant farming in South Russia. No room is left by these data for doubting the complete differentiation of the peasantry, the complete domination in the countryside of the peasant bourgeoisie.* Highly interesting, therefore, is the attitude of Messrs. V. V. and N. — on towards these data, the more so that formerly both these writers admitted the need of raising the problem of the differentiation of the peasantry (Mr. V. V. in the above-mentioned article of 1884, and Mr. N. — on in Slovo [The Word] in 1880, when he remarked on the interesting phenomenon in the village community itself that the “unenterprising” muzhiks neglect their land, while the “enterprising” ones take the best land for themselves; cf. Sketches, p. 71). It should be noted that Mr. Postnikov’s work is of a dual character: on the one hand the author skilfully gathered and carefully processed extremely valuable Zemstvo statistics and managed, in doing so, to escape the “tendency to regard the peasant community as something integral and homogeneous, as it is still held to be by our urban intelligentsia” (p. 351, op. cit.). On the other hand, the author, not being guided by theory, failed totally to appraise the data he had processed, and regarded them from the extremely narrow point of view of “measures,” proceeding to concoct projects about “agricultural-handicraft-factory communities” and about the necessity of “restricting,” “enjoining,” “observing,” etc., etc. Well then, our Narodniks did their best to ignore the first, the positive part of Mr. Postnikov’s work and concentrated their attention on the second part. Both Mr. V. V. and Mr. N. — on began with highly serious air to “refute” Mr. Postnikov’s absolutely unserious “projects” (Mr. V. V. in Russkaya Mysl [Russian Thought], 1894, No. 2; Mr. N. — on in his Sketches, p. 233, footnote), accusing him of the evil intention of introducing capitalism into Russia, and carefully avoiding the data which revealed the prevalence of capitalist relations in the countryside of South Russia today.*

II. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR SAMARA GUBERNIA

From the country’s southern outer area let us pass to the eastern region, to Samara Gubernia. Let us take Novouzensk Uyezd, the last one investigated; in the statistical report for this uyezd we find the most detailed classification of the peasants according to economic status.** Here are the general data on the groups of the peasantry (the data that follow cover 28,276 allotment-holding households, numbering 164,146 persons of both sexes, i.e., only the Russian population of the uyezd, without Germans or farmsteaders—householders who farm both on community land and on separate non-community farmsteads. The inclusion of the Germans and the farmsteaders would considerably heighten the picture of differentiation).

The concentration of agricultural production turns out to be very considerable: the “community” capitalists ( of the total households, namely, households with 10 and more draught animals) possess 36.5% of the area under crops—as much as do 75.3%, the poor and middle peasantry put together! Here, too, as always, the “average” figure (15.9 dess. under crops per household) is absolutely fictitious and creates the illusion of universal prosperity. Let us examine other data on the economy of the various groups.

Thus, in the bottom group there are very few independent peasant farmers; the poor peasants have no improved implements at all, while the middle peasantry have them in insignificant numbers. The concentration of animals is still greater than the concentration of area under crops; the well-to-do peasants evidently combine capitalist livestock raising with their large-scale capitalist cropping. At the opposite pole we have “peasants” who ought to be classed as allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers, for their main source of livelihood is the sale of their labour-power (as we shall see in a moment), and the landowners sometimes give one or two animals to their labourers to tie them down to their farms and to reduce wages.

It goes without saying that the peasant groups differ not only as to the size of their farms, but also in their methods of farming: firstly, in the top group a very large proportion of the peasant farmers (40 to 60%) are supplied with improved implements (mainly iron ploughs, and also horse and steam threshers, winnowing machines, reapers, etc.). In the hands of 24.7% of the households, the top group, are concentrated 82.9% of the total improved implements; 38.2% of the households, the middle group, possess 17% of the improved implements; 37.1%, the poor, possess 0.1% (7 implements out of 5,724).* Secondly, the peasants with few horses are compelled by necessity to carry on “a different system of farming, a system of economic activity” entirely different from that of the peasants with many horses, as the compiler of Returns for Novouzensk Uyezd says (pp. 44-46). The well-to-do peasants “let their land rest … plough in the autumn … plough it again in the spring and sow after harrowing … roll the ploughed land when the soil has aired … plough twice for rye,” whereas the badly-off peasants “do not let their land rest but sow Russian wheat year after year … for wheat they plough in the spring once … for rye they provide neither fallow nor ploughed land, but merely break the surface before sowing … for wheat they plough in the late spring, and as a result the corn often does not come up … for rye they plough once, or merely break the surface and not at the proper time … they plough the same plot of land unwisely year after year, without allowing it to rest.” “And so on and so forth without end,” the compiler concludes this list. “The facts enumerated concerning the radical difference between the farming systems of the better- and the badly-off peasants result in grain of poor quality and bad harvests for the latter and comparatively better harvests for the former” (ibid.).

But how could such a big bourgeoisie arise under the agricultural community system? The answer is supplied by the figures for land possessed and in use according to groups. The peasants in the section taken by us (76 households) have a total of 57,128 dess. of purchased land and 304,514 dess. of rented land, of which 177,789 dess. are non-allotment land rented by 5,602 households; 47,494 dess. of the allotment land rented from other village communities are held by 3,129 households, and 79,231 dess. of the allotment land rented in their own village communities are held by 7,092 households. The distribution of this enormous area of land, constituting more than ⅔ of the peasants’ total area under crops, is as follows (see Table on p. 89).

We see here an enormous concentration of purchased and rented land. More than of the total purchased land is in the hands of 1.8% of the households, the very richest. Of all the rented land, 69.7% is concentrated in the hands of peasant capitalists, and 86.6% is in the hands of the top group of the peasantry. A comparison of the figures on the renting and the leasing-out of allotment land clearly reveals the passage of the land into the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Here, too, the conversion of the land into a commodity leads to the cheapening of the wholesale purchase price of land (and, consequently, to profiteering in land). If we determine the price of one dessiatine of rented non-allotment land we get the following figures, counting from the bottom group to the top: 3.94; 3.20; 2.90; 2.75; 2.57; 2.08; 1.78 rubles. To show what mistakes the Narodniks fall into by thus ignoring the concentration of rented ]and, let us quote by way of example the arguments of Mr. Karyshev in the well-known symposium The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Certain Aspects of the Russian National Economy (St. Petersburg, 1897). When grain prices fall, with an improvement of the harvest, and renting prices rise, the entrepreneur renters, concludes Mr. Karyshev, have to reduce demand and hence the renting prices had been raised by the representatives of consumers’ economy (I, 288). The conclusion is absolutely arbitrary: it is quite possible that the peasant bourgeoisie raise renting prices in spite of a drop in grain prices, for an improvement in the harvest may compensate for the drop in prices. It is quite possible that the well-to-do peasants raise renting prices even when there is no such compensation, reducing the cost of production of grain by introducing machinery. We know that the employment of machines in agriculture is growing and that these machines are concentrated in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Instead of studying the differentiation of the peasantry, Mr. Karyshev introduces arbitrary and incorrect premises about an average peasantry. That is why all the conclusions and deductions similarly arrived at by him in the publication quoted are of no value whatever.

Having ascertained that diverse elements exist among the peasantry, we can now easily get clarity on the question of the home market. If the well-to-do peasants control about ⅔ of the total agricultural production, it is obvious that they must account for an incomparably larger share of the grain on sale. They produce grain for sale, whereas the badly-off peasants have to buy additional grain and sell their labour-power. Here are the data:*

We suggest that the reader compare the arguments of our Narodniks with these data regarding the process of the formation of the home market…. “If the muzhik is prosperous, the factory flourishes, and vice versa” (V. V., Progressive Trends, p. 9). Mr. V. V. is evidently not in the least interested in the social form of the wealth which the “factory” needs and which is created only by the conversion of the product and the means of production, on the one hand, and of labour-power, on the other, into a commodity. Mr. N. — on, when speaking of the sale of grain, consoles himself with the thought that this grain is produced by the “muzhikfarmer” (Sketches, p. 24), that by transporting this grain “the railways live at the expense of the muzhik” (p. 16). Really, are not these “community-member” capitalists “muzhiks”? “Some day we shall have occasion to point out,” wrote Mr. N. — on in 1880, and reprinted it in 1893, “that in the localities where communal land tenure prevails, agriculture based on capitalist principles is almost completely absent (sic!!) and that it is possible only where communal ties have either been entirely broken or are breaking down” (p. 59). Mr. N. —on has never had this “occasion,” nor could he have had, for the facts point precisely to the development of capitalist agriculture among “community members”* and to the complete adaptation of the notorious “communal ties” to the farms of big crop growers that employ labourers.

The relationship between the peasant groups proves to be absolutely analogous in Nikolayevsk Uyezd (cited statistical returns, p. 826 and foll.; we leave out those living away from home and the landless). For example, 7.4%, the rich households (having 10 and more draught animals), comprising 13.7% of the population, concentrate in their hands 27.6% of the total livestock and 42.6% of the rented land, whereas 29%, the poor households (horseless and one-horse), comprising 19.7% of the population, have only 7.2% of the livestock and 3% of the rented land. Unfortunately, the tables for Nikolayevsk Uyezd, we repeat, are too scanty. To finish with Samara Gubernia, let us quote the following highly instructive description of the position of the peasantry from the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia.

“… The natural increase in the population, augmented by the Immigration of land-poor peasants from the western gubernias, in connection with the appearance in the sphere of agricultural production of money-grubbing speculators in land, has with every passing year complicated the forms of the renting of land, raised its worth and converted the land into a commodity which has so quickly and immensely enriched some and ruined many others. To illustrate the latter point, let us indicate the area cultivated by some of the southern merchant- and peasant-owned farms, where the tillage of 3,000 to 6,000 dessiatines is no rarity, while some practise the cultivation of 8-10-15 thousand dessiatines of land, renting several tens of thousands of state-owned land.

“The existence and the growth of the agricultural (rural) proletariat in Samara Gubernia are to a considerable extent the product of recent times, with their increasing production of grain for sale, rise in renting prices, ploughing up of virgin and pasture land, clearing of forests, and so forth. The landless households throughout the gubernia number 21,624 in all, whereas the non-farming ones number 33,772 (of those households that have allotments), while the horseless and one-horse households together number 110,604 families, with a total of 600,000 persons of both sexes, counting five and a fraction persons per family. We take the liberty of counting these, too, as proletarians, although legally they have a share of communal land; actually, these are day labourers, ploughmen, shepherds, reapers and similar workers on big farms who cultivate ½ to 1 dessiatine of their own allotments so as to feed their families who remain at home” (pp. 57-58).

Thus, the investigators regard as proletarians not only the horseless peasants, but also those who have one horse. We note this important conclusion, which fully coincides with that of Mr. Postnikov (and with the data in the classified tables) and points to the real social-economic significance of the bottom group of the peasantry.

III. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR SARATOV GUBERNIA

We now pass to the central black-earth belt, to Saratov Gubernia. We take Kamyshin Uyezd, the only one for which a fairly complete classification of the peasants according to draught animals held is available.*

Here are the data for the whole uyezd (40,157 households, 263,135 persons of both sexes. Area under crops, 435,945 dessiatines, i.e., 10.8 dessiatines per “average” household):

Thus, here again we see the concentration of land under crops in the hands of the big crop growers: the well-to-do peasantry, constituting only a fifth of the households (and about a third of the population),* hold more than half the total area under crops (53.3%), the size of this area clearly indicating the commercial character of the farming: an average of 27.6 dess. per household. The well-to-do peasantry have also a considerable number of animals per household: 14.6 head (in terms of cattle, i.e., counting 10 head of small domestic animals for one of cattle), and of the total number of peasants’ cattle in the uyezd, nearly ⅗ (56%) is concentrated in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. At the opposite pole in the countryside, we find the opposite state of affairs; the complete dispossession of the bottom group, the rural proletariat, who in our example comprise a little less than ½ of the households (nearly ⅓ of the population), but who have only ⅛ of the total area under crops, and even less (11.8%) of the total number of animals. These are mainly allotment-holding farm labourers, day labourers and industrial workers.

Side by side with the concentration of crop areas and with the enhancement of the commercial character of agriculture there takes place its transformation into capitalist agriculture. We see the already familiar phenomenon: the sale of labour-power in the bottom groups and its purchase in the top ones.

Here an important explanation is needed. P. N. Skvortsov has quite rightly noted in one of his articles that Zemstvo statistics attach far too “wide” a meaning to the term “industry” (or “employments”). In fact, all sorts of occupations engaged in by the peasants outside their allotments are assigned to the category of “industries”; factory owners and workers, owners of flour mills and of melon fields, day labourers, regular farm labourers; buyers-up, traders and unskilled labourers; lumber-dealers and lumbermen; building contractors and building workers; members of the liberal professions, clerks, beggars, etc., all these are “industrialists”! This barbarous misuse of words is a survival of the traditional—and we have the right even to say: official—view that the “allotment” is the “real,” “natural” occupation of the muzhik, while all other occupations are assigned indiscriminately to “outside” industries. Under serfdom this use of the word had its raison d’être, but now it is a glaring anachronism. Such terminology is retained partly because it harmonises wonderfully with the fiction about an “average” peasantry and rules right out the possibility of studying the differentiation of the peasantry (particularly in those places where peasant “outside” occupations are numerous and varied. Let us remind the reader that Kamyshin Uyezd is a noted centre of the sarpinka industry⁴⁷). The processing* of household returns on peasant farming will be unsatisfactory so long as peasant “industries” are not classified according to their economic types, so long as among the “industrialists” employers are not separated from wage-workers. This is the minimum number of economic types without discriminating between which economic statistics cannot be regarded as satisfactory. A more detailed classification is, of course, desirable; for example; proprietors employing wage-workers—proprietors not employing wage-workers—traders, buyers-up, shopkeepers, etc., artisans, meaning industrialists who work for customers, etc.

Coming back to our table, let us observe that after all we had some right to consider “industries” as being the sale of labour-power, for it is usually wage-workers who predominate among peasant “industrialists.” If it were possible to single the wage-workers out of the latter, we would, of course, obtain an incomparably smaller percentage of “industrialists” in the top groups.

As to the data regarding wage-workers, we must note here the absolutely mistaken character of Mr. Kharizomenov’s opinion that the “short-term hire [of workers] for reaping, mowing and day labouring, which is too widespread a phenomenon, cannot serve as a characteristic criterion of the strength or weakness of a farm” (p. 46 of “Introduction” to the Combined Returns). Theoretical considerations, the example of Western Europe, and the facts of Russia (dealt with below) compel us, on the contrary, to regard the hiring of day labourers as a very characteristic feature of the rural bourgeoisie.

Lastly, as regards rented land, the data show, here too, the same concentration of it in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Let us note that the combined tables of the Saratov statisticians do not show the number of peasants who rent land and lease it out, but only the total land rented and leased out*; we have, therefore, to determine the amount of land rented and leased per existing, and not per renting household.

Thus we see, here too, that the wealthier the peasants the more they rent land, despite the fact that they are better provided with allotment land. Here too we see that the well-to-do are ousting the middle peasantry, and that the role of allotment land in peasant farming tends to diminish at both poles of the countryside.

Let us examine in greater detail these data on land renting. With them are connected the very interesting and important investigations and arguments of Mr. Karyshev (quoted Results) and Mr. N. — on’s “corrections” to them.

Mr. Karyshev devotes a special chapter (III) to “the dependence of land renting on the prosperity of the lessees.” The general conclusion he arrives at is that, “other things being equal, the struggle for rentable land tends to go in favour of the better-off” (p. 156). “The relatively more prosperous households … push the less prosperous ones into the background” (p. 154). We see, consequently, that the conclusion drawn from a general review of Zemstvo statistical data is the same as that to which we are led by the data we are studying. Moreover, a study of the dependence of the amount of rented land on the size of the allotment led Mr. Karyshev to the conclusion that classification according to allotment “obscures the meaning of the phenomenon that interests us” (p. 139): “land renting … is more resorted to by a) the categories that are worse provided with land, but by b) the groups within them that are better provided. Evidently, we have here two diametrically opposed influences, the confusion of which prevents the understanding of either” (ibid.). This conclusion follows naturally if we consistently adhere to the viewpoint that distinguishes the peasant groups according to economic strength; we have seen everywhere in our data that the well-to-do peasants grab rentable land, despite the fact that they are better provided with allotment land. It is clear that the degree of prosperity of the household is the determining factor in the renting of land, and that this factor merely undergoes a change but does not cease to be determining, with the change in the conditions of land allotment and renting. But, although Mr. Karyshev investigated the influence of “prosperity,” he did not adhere consistently to the viewpoint mentioned, and therefore characterised the phenomenon inaccurately, speaking of the direct connection between the degree to which the lessee is supplied with land and the renting of land. This is one point. Another point is that the one-sidedness of Mr. Karyshev’s investigation prevented him from appraising the full significance of the way rentable land is grabbed by the rich peasants. In his study of “non-allotment renting”, he limits himself to summarising the Zemstvo statistics on land renting, without taking account of the lessees’ own farms. Naturally, with such a method of study, a more formal one, the problem of the relation between land renting and the “prosperity,” of the commercial character of land renting could not be solved. Mr. Karyshev, for example, was in possession of the same data on Kamyshin Uyezd as we are, but he limited himself to reproducing absolute figures only of land renting (see Appendix No. 8, p. XXXVI) and to calculating the average amount of rented land per allotment-holding household (text, p. 143). The concentration of land renting in the hands of the well-to-do peasants, its industrial character, its connection with land leasing by the bottom group of the peasantry, were all overlooked. Thus, Mr. Karyshev could not but see that the Zemstvo statistics refute the Narodnik notion of land renting and show that the poor are ousted by the well-to-do peasants; but he gave an inaccurate description of this phenomenon, did not study it from all sides and came into conflict with the data, repeating the old song about the “labour principle,” etc. But even the mere statement of the fact of economic discord and conflict among the peasantry seemed heresy to the Narodniks, and they proceeded to “correct” Mr. Karyshev in their own way. Here is how Mr. N. — on does it, “using,” as he says (p. 153, note), Mr. N. Kablukov’s arguments against Mr. Karyshev. In §IX of his Sketches, Mr. N. — on discusses land renting and the various forms it assumes. “When a peasant,” he says, “has sufficient land to enable him to obtain his livelihood by tilling his own, he does not rent any land” (152). Thus, Mr. N. — on flatly denies the existence of entrepreneur activity in peasant land renting and the grabbing of rentable land by rich peasants engaged in commercial crop growing. His proof? Absolutely none: the theory of “people’s production” is not proved, but laid down as law. In answer to Mr. Karyshev, Mr. N. — on quotes a table from the Zemstvo abstract for Khvalynsk Uyezd showing that “the number of draught animals being equal, the smaller the allotment the more must this deficiency be compensated by renting” (153),* and again, “if the peasants are placed in absolutely identical conditions as regards the possession of animals, and if they have sufficient workers in their households, then the smaller the allotment they have, the more the land they rent” (154). The reader will see that such “conclusions” are merely a quibble at Mr. Karyshev’s inaccurate formulation, that Mr. N. — on’s empty trifles simply obscure the issue of the connection between land renting and prosperity. Is it not self-evident that where an equal number of draught animals is possessed, the less land a household has, the more it rents? That goes without saying, for it is the very prosperity whose differences are under discussion that is taken as equal. Mr. N. — on’s assertion that peasants with sufficient land do not rent land is not in any way proved by this, and his tables merely show that he does not understand the figures he quotes: by comparing the peasants as to amount of allotment land held, he brings out the more strikingly the role of “prosperity” and the grabbing of rentable land in connection with the leasing of land by the poor (leasing it to these same well-to-do peasants, of course.)** Let the reader recall the data we have quoted on the distribution of rented land in Kamyshin Uyezd; imagine that we have singled out the peasants with “an equal number of draught animals” and, dividing them into categories according to allotment and into subdivisions according to the number of persons working, we declare that the less land a peasant has, the more he rents, etc. Does such a method result in the disappearance of the group of well-to-do peasants? Yet Mr. N. — on, with his empty phrases, has succeeded in bringing about its disappearance and has been enabled to repeat the old prejudices of Narodism.

Mr. N. — on’s absolutely useless method of computing the land rented by peasants per household according to groups with 0, 1, 2, etc., persons working is repeated by Mr. L. Maress in the book The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, etc. (I, 34). Here is a little example of the “averages” boldly employed by Mr. Maress (as by the other contributors to this book, written from a biassed Narodnik point of view). In Melitopol Uyezd, he argues, the amount of rented land per renting household is 1.6 dess. in households having no working males, 4.4 dess. in households having one working male, 8.3 in households having two, and 14.0 in households having three (p. 34). And the conclusion is that there is an “approximately equal per-capita distribution of rented land”!! Mr. Maress did not think it necessary to examine the actual distribution of rented land according to groups of households of different economic strength, although he was in a position to learn this both from Mr. V. Postnikov’s book and from the Zemstvo abstracts. The “average” figure of 4.4 dess. of rented land per renting household in the group of households having one working male was obtained by adding together such figures as 4 dess. in the group of households cultivating 5 to 10 dess. and with 2 to 3 draught animals, and 38 dess. in the group of households cultivating over 50 dess. of land and with 4 and more draught animals. (See Returns for Melitopol Uyezd, p. D. 10-11.) It is not surprising that by adding together the rich and the poor and dividing the total by the number of items added, one can obtain “equal distribution” wherever desired!

Actually, however, in Melitopol Uyezd 21% of the households, the rich ones (those with 25 dess. and more under crops), comprising 29.5% of the peasant population, account—despite the fact that they are best provided with allotment and purchased land—for 66.3% of the total rented arable (Returns for Melitopol Uyezd, p. B. 190-194). On the other hand, 40% of the households, the poor ones (those with up to 10 dess. under crops), comprising 30.1 % of the peasant population, account—despite the fact that they are worst provided with allotment and purchased land—for 5.6% of the total rented arable. As can be seen, this closely resembles “equal per-capita distribution”!

Mr. Maress bases all his calculations of peasant land-renting on the “assumption” that “the renting households are mainly in the two groups worst provided” (provided with allotment land; that “among the renting population there is equal per-capita (sic!) distribution of rented land”; and that “the renting of land enables the peasants to pass from the groups worst provided to those best provided” (34-35). We have already shown that all these “assumptions” of Mr. Maress directly contradict the facts. Actually, the very contrary is the case, as Mr. Maress could not but have noted, had he—in dealing with inequalities in economic life (p. 35)—taken the data for the classification of households according to economic indices (instead of according to allotment tenure), and not limited himself to the unfounded “assumption” of Narodnik prejudices.

Let us now compare Kamyshin Uyezd with other uyezds in Saratov Gubernia. The ratios between the peasant groups are everywhere the same, as is shown by the following data for the four uyezds (Volsk, Kuznetsk, Balashov and Serdobsk) in which, as we have said, the middle and the well-to-do peasants are combined:

Hence, we see everywhere the ousting of the poor by the prosperous peasants. But in Kamyshin Uyezd the well-to-do peasantry are more numerous and richer than in the other uyezds. Thus, in five uyezds of the gubernia (including the Kamyshin Uyezd) the households are distributed according to draught animals held as follows: with no draught animals—25.3%; with 1 animal—25.5%; with 2—20%; with 3—10.8%; and with 4 and more—18.4%, whereas in Kamyshin Uyezd, as we have seen, the well-to-do group is larger, and the badly-off group somewhat smaller. Further, if we combine the middle and well-to-do peasantry, i.e., if we take the households with 2 draught animals and more, we get the following data for the respective uyezds:

Per household with 2 and more draught animals

This means that in Kamyshin Uyezd the prosperous peasants are richer. This uyezd is one of those with the greatest abundance of land: 7.1 dess. of allotment land per registered person,⁴⁸ male, as against 5.4 dess. for the gubernia. Hence, the land-abundance of the “peasantry” merely means the greater numbers and greater wealth of the peasant bourgeoisie.

In concluding this review of the data for Saratov Gubernia, we consider it necessary to deal with the classification of the peasant households. As the reader has probably observed, we reject a limine* any classification according to allotment and exclusively employ classification according to economic strength (draught animals, area under crops). The reasons for adopting this system must be given. Classification according to allotment is far more widespread in our Zemstvo statistics, and in its defence the two following, at first sight very convincing, arguments are usually advanced.* It is said, firstly, that to study the life of the agricultural peasants it is natural and necessary to classify them according to land. This argument ignores a fundamental feature of Russian life, namely, the unfree character of allotment-land tenure, in that by force of law it bears an equalitarian character, and that the purchase and sale of allotment land is hindered in the extreme. The whole process of the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry is one of real life evading these legal bounds. In classifying the peasants according to allotment, we lump together the poor peasant who leases out land and the rich peasant who rents or buys land; the poor peasant who abandons the land and the rich peasant who “gathers” land; the poor peasant who runs his most wretched farm with an insignificant number of animals and the rich peasant who owns many animals, fertilises his soil, introduces improvements., etc., etc. In other words, we lump together the rural proletarian and the members of the rural bourgeoisie. The “averages” thus obtained obscure the differentiation, and are therefore purely fictitious.** The combined tables of the Saratov statisticians described above enable us to demonstrate clearly the uselessness of classification according to allotment. Take, for example, the category of non-allotment peasants in Kamyshin Uyezd (see Combined Returns, p. 450 and foll., the Returns for Kamyshin Uyezd, Vol. XI, p. 174 and foll.). The compiler of the Combined Returns, in describing this category, says that the area under crops is “very negligible” (“Introduction”, p. 45), i.e., he assigns it to the category of the poor. Let us take the tables. The “average” area under crops in this category is 2.9 dess. per household. But see how this “average” was reached: by adding together the big crop growers (18 dess. per household in the group with 5 and more draught animals; the households in this group constitute about ⅛ of the whole category, but they possess about half of this category’s area under crops) and the poor, the horseless peasants, with 0.2 dess. per household! Take the households employing farm labourers. There are very few of them in this category—77 in all, or 2.5%. But of these 77 there are 60 in the top group, in which the area cultivated is 18 dess. per household; and in this group the households employing farm labourers constitute 24.5%. Clearly, we obscure the differentiation of the peasantry, depict the propertyless peasants in a better light than they actually are (by adding the rich to them and striking averages), while, on the contrary, we depict the well-to-do peasants as being of lesser strength, because the category of peasants with large allotments includes, in addition to the majority, the well-off, also the badly-off (it is a known fact that even the large-allotment village communities always include indigent peasants). We are now clear, too, as to the incorrectness of the second argument in defence of classification according to allotment. It is argued that by such classification the indices of economic strength (number of animals, area under crops, etc.) always show a regular increase according to the increase in the size of the allotment. That is an undoubted fact, for the allotment is one of the major factors of well-being. Where, consequently, the peasants are large-allotment holders there are always more members of the peasant bourgeoisie and, as a result, the “average” allotment figures for the whole category are raised. All this, however, gives no grounds whatever for inferring that a method combining the rural bourgeoisie with the rural proletariat is correct.

We conclude: in systematising peasant household statistics one should not limit oneself to classification according to allotment. Economic statistics must necessarily take the scale and type of farm as the basis of classification. The indices for distinguishing these types should be taken in conformity with local conditions and forms of agriculture, while in dealing with extensive grain farming, one can limit oneself to classifying according to area under crops (or to the number of draught animals); under other conditions one must take account of the area under industrial crops, the technical processing of agricultural produce, the cultivation of root crops or of fodder grasses, dairy farming, vegetable growing, etc. When the peasantry combine agricultural and industrial occupations on a large scale, a combination of the two systems of classification is necessary, i.e., of classification according to the scale and type of agriculture, and of classification according to the scale and type of “industries.” The methods of summarising peasant household returns are not such a narrowly specific and second-rate problem as one might imagine at first sight. On the contrary, it will be no exaggeration to say that at the present time it is the basic problem of Zemstvo statistics. The completeness of household returns and the technique of collecting them* have reached a high degree of perfection, but owing to unsatisfactory summarising, a vast amount of most valuable information is simply lost, and the investigator has at his disposal merely “average” figures (for village communities, volosts, categories of peasants, size of allotment, etc.). But these “averages,” as we have seen already, and shall see later, are often absolutely fictitious.

IV. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR PERM GUBERNIA

In our review of Zemstvo statistics let us now turn to a gubernia where conditions are totally different: Perm Gubernia. Let us take Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, for which we have a household classification made according to scale of farming.* Here are the general data regarding the agricultural part of the uyezd (23,574 households, 129,439 persons of both sexes).

Hence, here too, notwithstanding the considerably smaller areas under crops, we find the same ratios between the groups, the same concentration of crop areas and animals in the hands of a small group of well-to-do peasants. The ratio between the land held and the land in actual economic use is the same as in the gubernias with which we are already familiar.**

The same grabbing of rentable land by the well-to-do peasants, those already best provided; the same transfer of allotment land (by leasing) from the poor to the affluent peasantry; the same diminution of the role of allotment land, proceeding in two different directions, at both poles of the countryside. To enable the reader to get a more concrete picture of these processes, we give the data on land renting in greater detail:

In the top groups of peasants (who, as we know, concentrate in their hands most of the rented land), land renting is consequently of an obviously industrial, entrepreneur character, despite the widespread view to the contrary of the Narodnik economists.

Let us pass to the data on hired labour, which are particularly valuable as regards this uyezd owing to their completeness (specifically, data have been added on the hiring of day labourers):

We see here a clear refutation of the view of the Saratov statisticians that the hiring of day labourers is not a characteristic index of a farm’s strength or weakness. On the contrary, it is a supremely characteristic index of the peasant bourgeoisie. In all forms of hiring by the day we observe that the percentage of peasants who hire labourers increases together with the increase in economic strength, despite the fact that the most affluent peasants are best provided with workers in their families. Here, too, family co-operation is the basis of capitalist co-operation. Further, we see that the number of farms hiring day labourers is 2½ times (average for the uyezd) the number hiring seasonal workers—we take the hiring of day labourers for reaping; unfortunately, the statisticians did not give the total number of farms hiring day labourers, although this information was available. In the three top groups, of 7,679 households 2,190 employ farm labourers, while 4,017 households, i.e., the majority of the peasants in the well-to-do group, hire day labourers for reaping. Of course, the hiring of day labourers is by no means specific to Perm Gubernia, and if we have seen above that in the well-to-do peasant groups from 2 to 6 and 9 tenths of the total number of proprietors employ farm labourers, the direct conclusion is the following. The majority of the well-to-do peasant households employ hired labour in one form or another. The formation of a body of regular farm labourers and day labourers is an essential condition for the existence of the well-to-do peasantry. Lastly, it is extremely interesting to note that the ratio between the number of farms hiring day labourers and the number employing regular farm labourers diminishes from the bottom peasant groups to the top. In the bottom groups the number of farms hiring day labourers always exceeds, many times over, the number employing regular farm labourers. In the top groups, on the contrary, the number of farms employing regular farm labourers is sometimes even larger than the number hiring day labourers. This fact clearly points to the formation in the top groups of the peasantry of farms employing labourers, farms based on the regular employment of wage-labour; wage-labour is more evenly distributed over the seasons of the year, and it becomes possible to dispense with the more costly and more troublesome hiring of day labourers. Let us quote, incidentally, the returns on hired labour for Elabuga Uyezd, Vyatka Gubernia (the well-to-do peasants are here merged with the middle peasants).

Assuming that every day labourer works one month (28 days), the number of day labourers will be three times the number of seasonal workers. Let us note in passing that in Vyatka Gubernia, too, we find the already familiar ratios between the groups as regards both the hiring of workers and the renting and leasing of land.

Very interesting are the household data on the use of manure, cited by the Perm statisticians. Here is the result of an analysis of these data:

Groups of householders

% of farms using manure

Cart-loads of manure used per (manureusing) household

Cultivating

up to

5

dess.

33.9

80

”

5 to

10

”

66.2

116

”

10 to

20

”

70.3

197

”

20 to

50

”

76.9

358

”

over

50

”

84.3

732

Total

51.7

176

Thus, here too, we see a profound difference in the systems and methods of farming employed by the poor and the affluent peasants. And this difference must exist everywhere, since the well-to-do peasants everywhere concentrate in their hands the greater part of the peasant-owned animals, and have more opportunities for expending-their labour on farm improvements. Therefore, if we learn, for example, that the post-Reform “peasantry” have at one and the same time created a group of horseless and cattleless households and “raised agricultural efficiency” by adopting the practice of manuring the soil (described in detail by Mr. V. V. in his Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming, pp. 123-160 and foll.), this quite clearly shows us that the “progressive trends” simply indicate the progress of the rural bourgeoisie. This is seen even more distinctly in the distribution of improved agricultural implements, data regarding which are also available in the Perm statistics. These data, however, have been collected not for the whole of the agricultural part of the uyezd, but only for its 3rd, 5th and 4th districts, comprising 15,076 households out of 23,574. The following improved implements are registered: winnowers 1,049, seed-sorters 225, threshers 354, totalling 1,628. They are distributed among the groups as follows:

Groups of householders

Number of improved implements per 100 farms

Total improved implements

% of total improved implements

Cultivating no land

  0.1

   2

  0.1

”

up to

 5

dess.

  0.2

  10

  0.6

”

5 to

10

”

  1.8

  60

  3.7

”

10 to

20

”

  9.2

 299

  18.4

”

20 to

50

”

  50.4

 948

  58.3

77.2

”

over

50

”

180.2

 309

  18.9

Total

  10.8

1,628 

100  

One more illustration of Mr. V. V.’s “Narodnik” thesis that improved implements are used by “all” peasants!

The data on “industries” enable us this time to single out two main types of “industries,” indicating 1) the transformation of the peasantry into a rural bourgeoisie (ownership of commercial and industrial establishment), and 2) the transformation of the peasantry into a rural proletariat (sale of labour-power, the so-called “agricultural industries”). The following table shows the distribution by groups of these diametrically opposite types of “industrialists”*:

Groups of householders

Commercial & industrial establishments per 100 peasants

Distribution of commercial and industrial establishments by groups as % of total

% of farms engaging in agricultural industries

Cultivating no land

  0.5

  1.7

52.3

”

up to

  5

dess.

  1.4

14.3

26.4

”

5 to

10

”

  2.4

22.1

  5.0

”

10 to

20

”

  4.5

34.3

  1.4

”

20 to

50

”

  7.2

23.1

61.9

  0.3

”

over

50

”

18.0

  4.5

—

Total

  2.9

100  

16.2

A comparison of these data with those showing the distribution of the area under crops and the hiring of workers once again shows that the differentiation of the peasantry creates a home market for capitalism.

We see also how profoundly the facts are distorted when the most varied types of occupations are lumped together under the heading of “industries” or “employments,” when the “combination of agriculture with industries” is depicted (as, for example, by Messrs. V. V. and N. — on) as something uniform, identical in nature and precluding capitalism.

Let us point in conclusion to the similarity of the data for Ekaterinburg Uyezd. If from the 59,709 households in the uyezd we subtract the landless (14,601 households), those having only meadow land (15,679 households), and those neglecting their allotments entirely (1,612 households), we get for the remaining 27,817 households the following data: the 20,000 households that cultivate no land or cultivate little (up to 5 dess.) have an aggregate area under crops of 41,000 dess. out of 124,000 dess., i.e., less than ⅓. On the other hand, 2,859 well-to-do households (with over 10 dess. under crops) have 49,751 dess. under crops, and 53,000 dess. of rented land out of a total of 67,000 dess. (including 47,000 dess. out of 55,000 dess. of rented peasant land). The distribution of the two opposite types of “industries” and also of the households employing farm labourers in Ekaterinburg Uyezd is shown to be quite similar to the distribution of these indices of differentiation for Krasnoufimsk Uyezd.

V. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR OREL GUBERNIA

We have at our disposal two volumes of statistics, for the Yelets and Trubchevsk uyezds of this gubernia, which classify the peasant households according to the number of draught horses owned.*

Combining the two uyezds, we give the following joint data by groups.

From this we see that the general relations between the groups are the same as those we have seen earlier (the concentration of purchased and rented land in the hands of the well-to-do, the transfer of the land to them from the poor peasants, etc.). Quite similar, too, are the relations between the groups as regards hired labour, “industries,” and “progressive trends” in farming.

And so, in Orel Gubernia also we see the differentiation of the peasantry into two directly opposite types: on the one hand, into a rural proletariat (abandonment of land and sale of labour-power), and, on the other, into a peasant bourgeoisie (purchase of land, renting on a considerable scale, especially of allotment land, improved methods of farming, hiring of regular farm labourers and day labourers, here omitted, and the combining of commercial and industrial enterprises with agriculture. The scale of farming by the peasants here, however, is generally much smaller than in the above-quoted cases; there are far fewer big crop growers, and the differentiation of the peasantry, to judge by these two uyezds, therefore seems weaker. We say “seems” on the following grounds: firstly, though we observe here that the “peasantry” turn more rapidly into a rural proletariat and produce hardly perceptible groups of rural bourgeois, we have, on the other hand, already seen examples of the reverse, where this latter pole of the countryside becomes particularly perceptible. Secondly, here the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry (we confine ourselves in this chapter to the agricultural peasantry) is obscured by the “industries,” the development of which is particularly extensive (40% of the families). And the “industrialists” here too include, besides a majority of wage-workers, a minority of merchants, buyers-up, entrepreneurs, proprietors, etc. Thirdly, here the differentiation of the peasantry is obscured because of the absence of data regarding the aspects of local agriculture that are most closely connected with the market. Commercial, market cultivation is not developed here to expand the crop areas to produce grain for sale but for the production of hemp. The largest number of commercial operations are bound up with this crop but the data of the tables given in the volume do not single out this particular aspect of agriculture among the various groups. “Hemp growing is the main source of the peasants’ income” (that is, money income. Returns for Trubchevsk Uyezd, p. 5 of descriptions of villages, and many others), “the peasants devote their attention mainly to the cultivation of hemp…. All the manure … is used on the hemp fields” (ibid., 87), everywhere loans are contracted “on security of hemp,” and debts are paid with hemp (ibid., passim). For the manuring of their hemp fields the well-to-do peasants buy manure from the poor (Returns for Orel Uyezd, Vol. VIII, Orel, 1895, pp. 91-105), hemp fields are leased out and rented in home and outside village communities (ibid., 260), and the processing of the hemp is done by part of the “industrial establishments” of whose concentration we have spoken. It is clear how incomplete is that picture of differentiation which gives no information about the main commercial product of local agriculture.*

VI. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR VORONEZH GUBERNIA

The returns for Voronezh Gubernia are distinguished for their exceptionally complete information and abundance of classifications. In addition to the usual classification according to allotment, we have for several uyezds a classification according to draught animals, to persons working (working strength of family), to industries (not engaged in industries; engaged in industries: a—agricultural, b—mixed and c—commercial and industrial), to farm labourers (farms with members employed as farm labourers;—with no farm labourers and with no members employed as such;—households employing farm labourers). The last classification is given for the largest number of uyezds, and at first glance one might think that it is the most suitable for studying the differentiation of the peasantry. Actually, however, this is not the case: the group of farms providing farm labourers does not by any means embrace the whole of the rural proletariat, for it does not include farms providing day labourers, unskilled labourers, factory workers, builders’ labourers, navvies, domestic servants, etc. Farm labourers constitute only a part of the wage-workers provided by the “peasantry.” The group of farms that employ farm labourers is also very incomplete, for it does not include farms that hire day labourers. The neutral group (which neither provides nor employs farm labourers) lumps together in each uyezd tens of thousands of families, combining thousands of peasants who own no horses with thousands who own many, peasants who rent land and peasants who lease land, cultivators and non-cultivators, thousands of wage-workers and a minority of employers, etc. General “averages” for the entire neutral group are obtained, for example, by adding together landless households or those possessing 3 to 4 dess. per household (of allotment and purchased land in all) and households possessing 25, 50 and more dessiatines of allotment land and purchasing additionally tens and hundreds of dessiatines of land (Returns for Bobrov Uyezd, p. 336, Col. No. 148; for Novokhopersk Uyezd, p. 222)—by adding together households with 0.8 to 2.7 animals per family and those with 12 to 21 animals (ibid.). Naturally, one cannot depict the differentiation of the peasantry with the aid of such “averages,” and so we have to take the classification according to draught animals as the one most closely approximating classification according to scale of farming. We have at our disposal four volumes of returns with this classification (for Zemlyansk, Zadonsk, Nizhnedevitsk and Korotoyak uyezds), and from these we must choose Zadonsk Uyezd, because no separate returns are given for the others on the purchase and leasing of land according to groups. Below we shall give combined data for all these four uyezds and the reader will see that the conclusions they yield are the same. Here are general data for the groups in Zadonsk Uyezd (15,704 households, 106,288 persons of both sexes, 135,656 dess. of allotment land, 2,882 dess. of purchased land, 24,046 dess. of rented, and 6,482 dess. of land leased out).

The relations between the groups are similar here to those in the gubernias and uyezds already mentioned (concentration of purchased and of rented land, the transfer of allotment land from the poor peasants, who lease out land, to the renting and affluent peasants, etc.); but here the significance of the affluent peasants is very much smaller. The extremely negligible scale of peasant farming even raises the question, nd naturally so, of whether the local peasants do not belong to the “industrialists” rather than to the tillers of the soil. Here are data on the “industries,” first of all on their distribution according to groups:

The distribution of improved implements and of the two opposite types of “industries” (the sale of labour-power and commercial and industrial enterprise) is the same as in the data examined above. The enormous percentage of households engaging in “industries,” the preponderance of grain-purchasing over grain-selling farms, the preponderance of money income from “industries” over money income from agriculture*—all this gives us grounds for regarding this uyezd as “industrial” rather than agricultural. Let us, however, see what sort of industries these are. The Evaluation Returns on Peasant Landownership in Zemlyansk, Zadonsk, Korotoyak and Nizhnedevitsk Uyezds (Voronezh, 1889) contains a list of all the trades of the “industrialists,” working locally and away from home (222 trades in all), classified in groups according to allotment, and indicating the size of earnings in each trade. This list shows that the overwhelming majority of the peasant “industries” consist of work for hire. Of 24,134 “industrialists” in Zadonsk Uyezd, 14,135 are farm labourers, carters, shepherds and unskilled labourers, 1,813 are builders’ labourers, 298 are town, factory and other workers, 446 are engaged in private service, 301 are beggars, etc. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the “industrialists” are members of the rural proletariat, allotment-holding wage-workers, who sell their labour-power to rural and industrial employers.* Thus, if we take the ratio between the different groups of the peasantry in a given gubernia or a given uyezd, we find everywhere the typical features of differentiation, both in the land-abundant steppe gubernias with their relatively huge peasant crop areas, and in the most land-poor localities with their miniature peasant “farms”; despite the most pro-found difference in agrarian and agricultural conditions, the ratio between the top group of the peasantry and the bottom is everywhere the same. If, however, we compare the different localities, in some we see with particular clarity the formation of rural entrepreneurs from among the peasants and in others we see the formation of a rural proletariat. It goes without saying that in Russia, as in every other capitalist country, the latter aspect of the process of differentiation embraces an incomparably larger number of small cultivators (and very likely a larger number of localities) than the former.

VII. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR NIZHNI-NOVGOROD GUBERNIA

For three uyezds of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia—the Knyaginin, Makaryev and Vasil uyezds—the Zemstvo house-to-house census returns have been reduced to one table, which divides the peasant farms (only allotment-holding and only of peasants living in their own villages) into five groups according to draught animals held (Material for the Evaluation of the Lands of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia. Economic Section. Vols. IV, IX and XII, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1888, 1889, 1890).

Combining these three uyezds, we get the following data on the groups of households (in the three uyezds mentioned the data cover 52,260 households and 294,798 persons of both sexes. Allotment land—433,593 dess., purchased—51,960 dess., rented—86,007 dess., counting all kinds of rented land, allotment and non-allotment, arable and meadow land; land leased out—19,274 dess.):

Here too, consequently, we see that the well-to-do peasants, despite their better provision with allotment land (the percentage of allotment land in the top groups is larger than the percentage these groups constitute in the population), concentrate in their hands the purchased land (the well-to-do households, 9.6% of the total, have 46.2% of the purchased land, whereas the poor peasants, ⅔ of the households, have less than a quarter), as well as concentrate the rented land, and “gather” the allotment land leased by the poor. As a result of all this the actual distribution of the land in use by the “peasantry” is quite unlike the distribution of the allotment land. The horseless peasants have actually less land at their disposal than the allotment guaranteed them by law. The one-horse and two-horse peasants increase their holdings by only 10 to 30% (from 8.1 dess. to 9.4 dess., and from 10.5 dess. to 13.8 dess.), whereas the well-to-do peasants increase their holdings one and a half times to double. While the differences in the allotment land of the groups are negligible, the differences in the actual scale of cultivation are enormous, as can be seen from the above-quoted data on animals and from the following data on area under crops:

____________

* For Knyaginin Uyezd only.

When assessed by the area under crops the differences between the groups are seen to be even greater than when assessed by the amount of land actually held and in use, to say nothing of the differences in the size of the allotments.* This shows again and again the utter uselessness of classification by allotment holding, the “equality” of which has now become a legal fiction. The other columns of the table show how the “combination of agriculture with industry” is taking place among the peasantry: the well-to-do peasants combine commercial and capitalist agriculture (the high percentage of households employing farm labourers) with commercial and industrial undertakings, whereas the poor combine the sale of their labour-power (“outside employments”) with crop growing on an insignificant scale, that is, are converted into allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers. Let us observe that the absence of a proportionate diminution in the percentage of the households with outside employments is explained by the extreme variety of these “employments” and “industries” of the Nizhni-Novgorod peasantry: besides agricultural workers, unskilled labourers, building and shipbuilding workers, etc., the industrialists here include a relatively very large number of “handicraftsmen,” owners of industrial workshops, merchants, buyers-up, etc. Obviously, the lumping together of “industrialists” of such diverse types distorts the data on “households with outside earnings.”**

On the question of the differences in cultivation by the various groups of peasants, let us observe that in the Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, “manuring the land … is one of the chief conditions determining the degree of productivity” of the ploughlands (p. 79 of the Returns for Knyaginin Uyezd). The average rye yield grows in proportion to the increase in the amount of manure used: with 300 to 500 cart-loads of manure per 100 dess. of allotment land, the rye crop amounts to 47.1 meras* per dess.; with 1,500 cart-loads and more, to 62.7 meras (ibid., p. 84). Clearly, therefore, the difference between the groups in the scale of their agricultural production should be still greater than the difference in area under crops, and the Nizhni-Novgorod statisticians made a big mistake in studying the produce of the peasant fields in general, and not of the fields of the poor and the well-to-do peasantry separately.

VIII. REVIEW OF ZEMSTVO STATISTICS FOR OTHER GUBERNIAS

As the reader will have observed, in studying the process of the differentiation of the peasantry we use exclusively Zemstvo house-to-house census statistics, if they cover more or less extensive areas, if they give sufficiently detailed information on the most important indices of differentiation, and if (which is particularly important) they have been processed in such a way as to make it possible to single out the various groups of peasants according to their economic strength. The data given above, relating to seven gubernias, exhaust the Zemstvo statistical material that answers these conditions and that we have been able to use. For the sake of completeness, let us now point briefly to the remaining, less complete, data of a similar kind (i.e., based on house-to-house censuses).

For Demyansk Uyezd of Novgorod Gubernia we have a table on peasant farms grouped according to the number of horses (Material for Evaluating the Farmlands of Novgorod Gubernia, Demyansk Uyezd, Novgorod, 1888). There is no information here on land renting and leasing (in dessiatines), but the data given reveal the complete similarity of the relations between the well-to-do and the indigent peasants in this gubernia, as compared with the other gubernias. Here too, for example, as we proceed from the bottom group to the top (from the horseless households to those with 3 and more horses), there is an increase in the percentage of farms with purchased and rented land, despite the fact that those with many horses have an amount of allotment land above the average. Households with 3 or more horses, 10.7% of the total number of households and 16.1 % of the population, possess 18.3% of all allotment land, 43.4% of the purchased land, 26.2% of the rented land (to judge from the area under rye and oats on rented land), and 29.4% of the total “industrial buildings.” On the other hand 51.3 %, the horseless and one-horse households, constituting 40.1% of the population, have only 33.2% of the allotment land, 13.8% of the purchased land, 20.8% of the rented land (in the sense indicated above), and 28.8% of the “industrial buildings.” In other words, here too the well-to-do peasants “gather” the land and combine commercial and industrial “trades” with agriculture, while the poor abandon the land and turn into wage-workers (the percentage of “persons engaged in industries” diminishes as we pass from the bottom group to the top—from 26.6 % among the horseless peasants to 7.8% among those having 3 and more horses). The incompleteness of these data compels us to omit them from the following summary of the material on the differentiation of the peasantry.

For the same reason we omit the data on part of Kozelets Uyezd, Chernigov Gubernia (Material for Evaluating Farmlands, Compiled by the Chernigov Statistical Department of the Gubernia Zemstvo Board, Vol. V, Chernigov, 1882; the data on the number of draught animals are classified for 8,717 households of the black-earth district of the uyezd). The relationships between the groups are the same here too: 36.8% of the households, with no draught animals and constituting 28.8% of the population, have 21% of their own and allotment land and 7% of the rented land, but account for 63% of the total land let out on lease by these 8,717 households. On the other hand, 14.3% of the households, with 4 and more draught animals and constituting 17.3 % of the population, have 33.4% of their own and allotment land and 32.1% of the rented land, and account for only 7% of the land let out on lease. Unfortunately, the other households (owning 1 to 3 draught animals) are not subdivided into smaller groups.

In Material for an Investigation of the Land-Usage and Domestic Life of the Rural Population of Irkutsk and Yenisei Gubernias there is a very interesting table (classification according to number of draught horses) of peasant and settler farms in four regions of Yenisei Gubernia (Vol. III, Irkutsk, 1893, p. 730 and foll.). It is very interesting to observe that the relationship between the well-to-do Siberian and the settler (and in this relationship the most ardent Narodnik would hardly dare to seek the famous community principle!) is essentially the same as that between our well-to-do village community members and their horseless and one-horse “brethren.” By combining the settlers and the peasant old-timers (such a combination is necessary because the former serve as labour-power for the latter), we get the familiar features of the top and bottom groups. Of the households, 39.4%, the bottom groups (those with no horses, and with 1 or 2), constituting 24% of the population, have only 6.2% of the total arable and 7.1% of the total animals, whereas 36.4% of the households, those with 5 and more horses, constituting 51.2% of the population, have 73% of the arable and 74.5% of the total cattle. The latter groups (5 to 9, 10 and more horses), cultivating 15 to 36 dess. per household, resort extensively to wage-labour (30 to 70% of the farms employ wage-workers), whereas the bottom three groups, cultivating 0—0.2—3—5 dess. per household provide workers (20—35—59% of the farms). The data on the renting and leasing out of land are the only exception we have met to the rule (of the concentration of rented land in the hands of the well-to-do), and this is the sort of exception that proves the rule. The point is that in Siberia there are none of the conditions that created this rule, there is no compulsory and “equalitarian” allotment of land, there is no established private property in land. The well-to-do peasant neither purchases nor rents land, but appropriates it (at least that has been the case till now); the leasing out and the renting of land are rather of the character of neighbourly exchange, and that is why the group data on the renting and the leasing of land display no consistency.*

For three uyezds of Poltava Gubernia we can determine approximately the way the area under crops is distributed (knowing the number of farms with different areas under crops — indicated in the statistical reports as “from—to” so many dessiatines—and multiplying the number of households in each division by the average area under crops within the limits indicated). We get the following data for 76,032 households (villagers, excluding non-peasants) with 362,298 dess. under crops: 31,001 households (40.8%) cultivate no land or only up to 3 dess. per household, to a total of 36,040 dess. under crops (9.9%); 19,017 households (25%) cultivate over 6 dess. per household and have 209,195 dess. under crops (57.8%). (See Economic Statistical Returns for Poltava Gubernia, Konstantinograd, Khorol and Piryatin uyezds.)⁵⁰ The distribution of area under crops is very much the same as what we have seen in the case of Taurida Gubernia, despite the basically smaller areas under crops. Naturally, such an uneven distribution is possible only where the purchased and rented land is concentrated in the hands of a minority. We have no complete data on this, since the statistics do not classify households according to economic strength and must therefore confine ourselves to the following data on Konstantinograd Uyezd. In the chapter of farming by the rural social-estates (Chapter II, §5, “Agriculture”) the compiler of the abstract states: “In general, if rented plots are divided into three categories: area per lessee of 1) up to 10 dess., 2) from 10 to 30 dess. and 3) over 30 dess., the data for each will be as follows*:

Ratio of

Rented land

leasees %

rented land %

per leasee (dess.)

sub-leased in %

Small rented plots (up to 10 dess.)

86.0

35.5

  3.7

  6.6

Medium rented plots (10 to 30 dess.)

  8.3

16.6

17.5

  3.9

Big rented plots (over 30 dess.)

  5.7

47.9

74.8

12.9

Total

100

100

  8.6

  9.3

Comment is superfluous.

For Kaluga Gubernia we have only the following very fragmentary and incomplete data on grain-sowing by 8,626 households (about of the total number of peasant households in the gubernia*).

That is to say, 21.6% of the households, constituting 30.6% of the population, possess 36.6% of the draught horses, 45.1% of the area under crops and 43.1% of the gross income from crops. Clearly, these figures also point to the concentration of purchased and rented land in the hands of the well-to-do peasantry.

For Tver Gubernia, despite the wealth of information in the statistical returns the house-to-house censuses have been very inadequately processed; there is no classification of households according to economic strength. This defect is used by Mr. Vikhlyayev in the Statistical Returns for Tver Gubernia (Vol. XIII, Part 2, Peasant Farming, Tver, 1897) to deny “differentiation” among the peasantry, to detect a drive towards “greater equality,” and to sing hymns in praise of “people’s production” (p. 312) and “natural economy.” Mr. Vikhlyayev enters into the most hazardous and unfounded arguments on stratification,” not only without citing any precise data on the peasant groups, but without even having made clear for himself the elementary truth that differentiation is taking place within the village community, and that therefore to talk about “stratification” and to classify exclusively according to village communities or to volosts is simply ridiculous.*

IX. SUMMARY OF THE ABOVE ZEMSTVO STATISTICS ON THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PEASANTRY

In order to compare and combine the above-quoted data on the differentiation of the peasantry, we obviously cannot take absolute figures and put them into groups: for that we should require complete data for the whole group of districts and identical methods of classification. We can only compare and juxtapose the relation of the top to the bottom groups (as regards possession of land, animals, implements, etc.). The relationship expressed, for example, in the fact that 10% of the households have 30% of the area under crops, does away with the difference in the absolute figures and is therefore suitable for comparison with every similar relationship in any locality. But to make such a comparison we must single out in the other locality 10% of the households, too, neither more nor less. But the sizes of the groups in the different uyezds and gubernias are not equal. And so, we have to split up these groups so as to take in each locality an equal percentage of households. Let us agree to take 20% of the households for the well-to-do peasants and 50% for the poor, i.e., let us form out of the top groups one of 20% of the households, and out of the bottom groups one of 50%. Let us illustrate this method by an example. Suppose we have five groups of the following proportions, from the bottom to the top: 30%, 25%, 20%, 15% and 10% of the households (S = 100%). To form a bottom group, we take the first group and ⅘ of the second group , and to form a top group we take the last group and ⅔ of the penultimate group , the percentages for area under crops, animals, implements, etc., being determined, of course, in the same way. That is to say, if the percentages for area under crops corresponding to the above-stated percentages of the households are as follows: 15%, 20%, 20%, 21% and 24% (S = 100%), then our top group, 20% of the households, will account for of the area under crops, while our bottom group, 50% of the households, will account for of the area under crops. Obviously, in splitting up the groups in this manner, we do not change by one iota the actual relationship between the bottom and top strata of the peasantry.* This splitting up is necessary, firstly, because in this way, instead of 4—5—6—7 different groups, we get three large groups with clearly defined indices**; secondly, because only in this way are data on the differentiation of the peasantry in the most varied localities under the most varied conditions comparable.

To judge the interrelation between the groups we take the following data, the most important on the question of differentiation: 1) number of households; 2) number of persons of both sexes of the peasant population; 3) amount of allotment land; 4) purchased land; 5) rented land; 6) land leased out; 7) total land owned or in use by the group (allotment + purchased + rented — land leased out); 8) area under crops; 9) number of draught animals; 10) total number of animals; 11) number of households employing farm labourers; 12) number of households with employments (singling out as far as possible those forms of “employment” among which work for hire, sale of labour-power predominates); 13) commercial and industrial establishments and 14) improved agricultural implements. The items given in italics (“leasing of land” and “employments”) are of negative significance, since they indicate the decline of the farm, the ruin of the peasant and his conversion into a worker. All the other data are of positive significance, since they indicate the expansion of the farm and the conversion of the peasant into a rural entrepreneur.

On all these points we compute for each group of farms the percentages of the total for the uyezd or for several uyezds of one gubernia, and then ascertain (by the method we have described) what percentage of the land, area under crops, animals, etc., falls to the 20% of the households of the top groups and to the 50% of the households of the bottom groups.*

We give a table drawn up in this manner covering the data for 21 uyezds in 7 gubernias, with a total of 558,570 peasant farms and a population of 3,523,418 persons of both sexes.

Table A.* Of the top groups a group has been formed of 20% of the households

Table B.* Of the bottom groups a group has been formed of 50% of the households

Notes to tables A and B

1. For Taurida Gubernia the returns for land leased out concern only two uyezds: Berdyansk and Dnieper.

2. For the same gubernia the category of improved implements includes mowers and reapers.

3. For the two uyezds of Samara Gubernia instead of the percentage of land leased out the percentage of allotment-leasing non-farming households has been taken.

4. For Orel Gubernia the amount of land leased out (and consequently of the total land in use) has been determined approximately. The same applies to the four uyezds of Voronezh Gubernia.

5. For Orel Gubernia the returns for improved implements exist for only Yelets Uyezd.

6. For Voronezh Gubernia, instead of the number of households with employments we have taken (for three uyezds: Zadonsk, Korotoyak and Nizhnedevitsk) the number of households providing farm labourers.

7. For Voronezh Gubernia returns for improved implements exist for only two uyezds: Zemlyansk and Zadonsk.

8. For Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, instead of households engaged in “industries” in general, we have taken the households engaging in outside employments.

9. For some of the uyezds, instead of the number of commercial and industrial establishments, we have had to take the number of households with commercial and industrial establishments.

10. Where the statistical returns give several columns of “employments” we have tried to single out those “employments” which most exactly indicate work for hire, the sale of labour-power.

11. All rented land, as far as possible, has been taken—allotment and non-allotment, arable and meadow land.

12. We would remind the reader that for Novouzensk Uyezd farmstead peasants and Germans are excluded, for Krasnoufimsk Uyezd only the agricultural part of the uyezd has been taken for Ekaterinburg Uyezd landless peasants and those possessing a share in meadow land alone are excluded, for Trubchevsk Uyezd suburban village communities are excluded, for Knyaginin Uyezd the industrial village of Bolshoye Murashkino is excluded, etc. These exclusions are partly ours, and are partly due to the nature of the material. Obviously, therefore, the differentiation of the peasantry must actually be more pronounced than appears in our table and chart.

To illustrate this combined table and to show clearly the complete similarity, of the relationship of the top to the bottom peasant groups in the most varied localities, we have drawn the following chart on which are plotted the percentages in the table. To the right of the column indicating the percentages of total households, runs a curve showing the positive indices of economic strength (enlargement of holding, increase in the number of animals, etc.), while to the left runs a curve showing the negative indices of economic strength (leasing out of land, sale of labour-power; these columns are shaded). The distance from the top horizontal line of the chart to each continuous curve shows the share of the well-to-do groups in the sum-total of peasant farming, while the distance from the bottom horizontal line to each broken curve shows the share of the poor groups in that sum-total. Lastly, to give a clear picture of the general character of the combined data, we have plotted an “average” curve (arrived at by calculating arithmetical averages from the percentages indicated in the chart. To distinguish it from the others, this “average” curve is in red). This “average” curve indicates, so to speak, the typical differentiation of the Russian peasantry today.

Now, in order to sum up the data on differentiation given above (§§I-VII), let us examine this chart column by column.

The first column to the right of the one indicating the percentages of households shows the proportion of the population belonging to the top and the bottom groups. We see that everywhere the size of the families of the well-to-do peasantry is above the average and that of the poor below the average. We have already spoken of the significance of this fact. Let us add that it would be wrong to take as the unit for all comparisons the individual (as the Narodniks are fond of doing) and not the household, the family. While the expenditure of the well-to-do family grows because of the larger size of the family, the mass of expenditure, on the other hand, in the large-family household diminishes (on buildings, domestic effects, household needs, etc., etc. The economic advantages of large families are particularly stressed by Engelhardt in his Letters From the Countryside,⁵¹ and by Trirogov in his book, The Village Community and the Poll Tax, St. Petersburg, 1882). Therefore, to take the individual as the unit for comparisons, and to take no account of this diminution, means artificially and falsely to identify the condition of the “individual” in the large and in the small families. Incidentally, the chart clearly shows that the well-to-do group of peasants concentrate in their hands a far larger share of agricultural production than would follow from a calculation per head of population.

The next column refers to allotment land. In its distribution we see the greatest degree of equality, as should be the case by virtue of the legal status of allotment land. But even here the process of the poor being ousted by the well-to-do peasants is beginning: everywhere we find that the top groups hold a somewhat larger share of the allotment land than the share they represent in the population, while the bottom groups hold a somewhat smaller one. The “village community” tends to serve the interests of the peasant bourgeoisie. Compared, however, with the actual land tenure the inequality in the distribution of allotment land is still quite insignificant. The distribution of allotment land does not (as is clearly evident from the chart) give any idea of the actual distribution of land and farm property.*

Then comes the column for purchased land. In all cases this land is concentrated in the hands of the well-to-do: one-fifth of the households have about 6 or 7 tenths of all peasant-owned purchased land, whereas the poor peasants, constituting half the households, account for a maximum of 15%! One can judge, therefore, the significance of the “Narodnik” fuss about enabling the “peasantry” to buy as much land as possible and as cheaply as possible.

The next column is that for rented land. Here too we see everywhere the concentration of the land in the hands of the well-to-do (one-fifth of the households account for 5 to 8 tenths of the total rented land) who, moreover, rent land at cheaper rates, as we have seen above. This grabbing of rentable land by the peasant bourgeoisie clearly demonstrates that “peasant renting” carries an industrial character (the purchase of land for the purpose of selling the product.)** In saying this, however, we do not at all deny the fact of land renting being due to want. On the contrary, the chart shows the entirely different character of renting by the poor, who cling to the land (half the households account for 1 to 2 tenths of the total rented land). There are peasants and peasants.

The contradictory significance of land renting in “peasant farming” stands out particularly vividly when we compare the column on land renting with that on the leasing out of land (first column to the left, i.e., among the negative indices). Here we see the very opposite: the principal lessors of land are the bottom groups (half the households account for 7 to 8 tenths of the land leased), who strive to get rid of their allotments, which pass (despite legal prohibitions and restrictions) into the hands of employer farmers. Thus, when we are told that the “peasantry” rent land and that the “peasantry” lease out their land, we know that the first applies mainly to the peasant bourgeoisie and the second to the peasant proletariat.

The relation of purchased, rented and leased land to the allotment determines also the actual land held by the groups (5th column to the right). In all cases we see that the actual distribution of the total land at the disposal of the peasants has nothing in common with the “equality” of the allotments. Of the households 20% account for 35% to 50% of the total land, while 50% account for 20% to 30%. In the distribution of area under crops (next column) the ousting of the bottom group by the top stands out in still greater relief, probably because the poor peasantry are often unable to make economic use of their land and abandon it. Both columns (total land held and area under crops) show that the purchase and the renting of land lead to a diminution of the share of the bottom groups in the general system of economy, i.e., to their being ousted by the well-to-do minority. The latter now play a dominant role in the peasant economy, concentrating in their hands almost as much of the area under crops as do all the rest of the peasants put together.

The next two columns show the distribution of draught and other animals among the peasantry. The percentages of animals differ very slightly from those of area under crops; nor could it be otherwise, for the number of draught animals (and also of other animals) determines the area under crops, and in its turn is determined by it.

The next column shows the share of the various groups of the peasantry in the total number of commercial and industrial establishments. One-fifth of the households (the well-to-do group) concentrate in their hands about half of these establishments, while half the households, the poor, account for about ⅕,* that is to say, the “industries” that express the conversion of the peasantry into a bourgeoisie are concentrated mainly in the hands of the most affluent cultivators. The well-to-do peasants, consequently, invest capital in agriculture (purchase and renting of land, hire of workers, improvement of implements, etc.), industrial establishments, commerce, and usury: merchant’s and entrepreneur capital are closely connected, and surrounding conditions determine which of these forms of capital becomes predominant.

The data on households with “employments” (the first column to the left, among the negative indices) also characterise the “industries,” which are, however, of opposite significance, and mark the conversion of the peasant into a proletarian. These “industries” are concentrated in the hands of the poor (they constitute 50% of the households and account for 60% to 90% of the total households with employments), whereas the part played in them by the well-to-do groups is insignificant (it must not be forgotten that we have not been able to draw an exact line of demarcation between masters and workers in this category of “industrialists” either). One has only to compare the data on “employments” with the data on “commercial and industrial establishments” to see how utterly opposite are these two types of “industries,” and to realise what incredible confusion is created by the customary lumping together of these types.

Households employing farm labourers are in all cases concentrated in the group of well-to-do peasants (20% of the households account for 5 to 7 tenths of the total number of farms employing labourers), who (despite their having larger families) cannot exist without a class of agricultural labourers to “supplement” them. Here we have a striking confirmation of the proposition expressed above: that to compare the number of farms employing labourers with the total number of peasant “farms” (including the “farms” of the agricultural labourers) is absurd. It is much more correct to compare the number of farms employing labourers with one-fifth of the peasant households, for the well-to-do minority account for about ⅗, or even ⅔, of the total of such farms. The entrepreneur hiring of labourers from among the peasantry far exceeds hiring from necessity, that is, because of a shortage of workers in the family: the poor and small-family peasants, constituting 50% of the households, account for only about of the total number of farms employing labourers (here too, incidentally, shopkeepers, industrialists, etc., who do not hire workers on account of necessity, are included among the poor).

The last column, showing the distribution of improved implements, we could have headed “progressive trends in peasant farming,” following the example of Mr. V. V. The “fairest” distribution of these implements is that in Novouzensk Uyezd, Samara Gubernia, where the well-to-do households, constituting one-fifth of the total, have only 73 out of 100 implements, whereas the poor, constituting half the households, have as many as three out of a hundred.

Let us now compare the degree of peasant differentiation in the different localities. In the chart two types of localities stand out very clearly in this regard: in Taurida, Samara, Saratov and Perm gubernias the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry is markedly more intense than in Orel, Voronezh and Nizhni-Novgorod gubernias. The curves of the first four gubernias in the run below the red average line, while those of the last three gubernias run above the average, i.e., show a smaller concentration of farming in the hands of the well-to-do minority. The localities of the first type are the most land-abundant and strictly agricultural (in Perm Gubernia the agricultural parts of the uyezds have been singled out), with extensive farming. With farming of this character the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry is easily noted and therefore clearly visible. Conversely, in the localities of the second type we see, on the one hand, a development of commercial agriculture such as is not noted in our data; for example, the sowing of hemp in Orel Gubernia. On the other hand, we see the tremendous significance of “industries,” both in the sense of work for hire (Zadonsk Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia) and in the sense of non-agricultural occupations (Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia). The significance of both these circumstances for the question of the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry is enormous. Of the former (the different forms of commercial agriculture and agricultural progress in the different localities) we have already spoken. The significance of the latter (the role of the “industries”) is no less obvious. If in a given locality the bulk of the peasants are allotment-holding farm labourers, day labourers or wage-workers in industries, the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry will, of course, be marked very feebly.* But to get a proper idea of the matter, these typical representatives of the rural proletariat must be compared with typical representatives of the peasant bourgeoisie. The allotment-holding Voronezh day labourer who goes south in search of odd jobs must be compared with the Taurida peasant who cultivates huge tracts of land. The Kaluga, Nizhni-Novgorod and Yaroslavl carpenter must be compared with the Yaroslavl or Moscow vegetable grower or peasant who keeps cows to sell the milk, etc. Similarly, if the bulk of the peasants in a locality are engaged in the manufacturing industries, their allotments providing them with only a small part of their means of livelihood, the data on the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry must be supplemented with data on the differentiation of those who engage in industries. In Chapter V we shall deal with this latter question; at the moment we are concerned only with the differentiation of the typically agricultural peasantry.

X. SUMMARY OF ZEMSTVO STATISTICS AND ARMY-HORSE CENSUS RETURNS⁵²

We have shown that the relation of the top to the bottom group of the peasantry bears the very features that characterise the relation of the rural bourgeoisie to the rural proletariat; that these relationships are remarkably similar in the most varied localities with the most varied conditions; that even their numerical expression (i.e., percentages of the groups in the total area under crops, number of animals, etc.) fluctuates within limits that, comparatively speaking, are very small. The question naturally arises: how far can these data on the relationships between the groups in the different localities be utilised for forming an idea of the groups into which the entire Russian peasantry is divided? In other words, what returns can enable us to judge the composition of, and the interrelation between, the top and the bottom groups of the entire Russian peasantry?

There are very few of these returns, for no agricultural censuses are taken in Russia that register all the crop-raising farms in the country. The only material by which we can judge into which economic groups our peasantry is divided is the combined Zemstvo statistics and the army-horse census returns showing the distribution of draught animals (or horses) among the peasant households. Meagre as this material is, one can nevertheless draw from it conclusions (certainly very general, approximate, aggregate) that are not without interest, particularly since the ratio of peasants with many horses to those with few has already been analysed and found to be remarkably similar in the most varied localities.

According to the data in Mr. Blagoveshchensky’s Combined Zemstvo House-to-House Census Economic Returns (Vol. I, Peasant Farming, Moscow, 1893),⁵³ the Zemstvo censuses covered 123 uyezds in 22 gubernias, having 2,983,733 peasant households and a population of 17,996,317 persons of both sexes. But the data on the distribution of households according to draught animals are not everywhere of the same kind. Thus, in three gubernias we have to omit 11 uyezds* where the households are classified not in four, but in only three groups. For the remaining 112 uyezds in 21 gubernias we get the following combined figures covering nearly 2½ million households with a population of 15 million:

____________

** To horses are added oxen, calculated at a pair for one horse.

These data cover slightly less than one-fourth of the total peasant households in European Russia (the Combined Statistical Material on the Economic Position of the Rural Population in European Russia, published by the Chancellery of the Committee of Ministers, St. Petersburg, 1894, considers that in the 50 gubernias of European Russia there are 11,223,962 households in the volosts, including 10,589,967 peasant households). For the whole of Russia we have data on the distribution of horses among the peasants in Statistics of the Russian Empire. XX. Army-Horse Census of 1888 (St. Petersburg, 1891), and Statistics of the Russian Empire. XXXI. Army-Horse Census of 1891 (St. Petersburg, 1894). The first publication contains an analysis of the data collected in 1888 for 41 gubernias (including the 10 gubernias in the Kingdom of Poland), and the second for 18 gubernias in European Russia, plus the Caucasus, the Kalmyk Steppe and the Don Military Region.

Singling out 49 gubernias in European Russia (the returns for Don Region are not complete) and combining the data for 1888 and 1891, we get the following picture of the distribution of the total number of horses belonging to the peasants in village communities.

Thus, all over Russia the distribution of draught horses among the peasantry is very close to the “average” degree of differentiation we have depicted in our chart. Actually, the disintegration is even somewhat deeper: in the hands of 22 per cent of the households (2.2 million out of 10.2 million) are concentrated 9½ million horses out of 7 million, i.e., 56.3% of the total number. A vast mass of 2.8 million households has none at all, while 2.9 million one-horse households have only 17.2% of the total number of horses.*

Taking as our basis the above-established regularities in the relationship between the groups, we can now ascertain the real significance of these data. If a fifth of the households possesses a half of the total number of horses, one may unerringly conclude that no less (and probably more) than half the total peasant agricultural production is in their hands. Such a concentration of production is possible only where this well-to-do peasantry concentrates in its hands the major part of the purchased lands and of peasant-rented land, both non-allotment and allotment. It is this well-to-do minority who mainly do the buying and renting of land, despite the fact that in all probability they are best supplied with allotment land. While the “average” Russian peasant in the very best of times barely makes ends meet (and it is doubtful whether he does), the well-to-do minority, whose circumstances are considerably above the average, not only cover all their expenditure by independent farming, but also obtain a surplus. And this means that they are commodity producers, that they grow agricultural produce for sale. More, they turn into a rural bourgeoisie, combining with relatively large-scale crop farms commercial and industrial enterprises,—we have seen that it is precisely “industries” of this kind that are most typical of the Russian “enterprising” muzhik. Despite the fact that their families are the largest, that they have the largest number of family workers (these features have always been characteristic of the well-to-do peasantry, and the ⅕ of the households should account for a large share of the population, approximately images), the well-to-do minority employ permanent farm labourers and day labourers on the biggest scale. Of the total number of Russian peasant farms that resort to the hiring of labourers, a considerable majority should be those of this well-to-do minority. We are justified in drawing this conclusion both on the basis of the preceding analysis and from a comparison between the proportion of the population represented by this group and the share it has of the total number of draught animals, and hence of the cultivated area, of farming in general. Lastly, only this well-to-do minority can take a steady part in the “progressive trends in peasant farming.”⁵⁴ Such should be the relation between this minority and the rest of the peasantry; but it goes without saying that this relation assumes different forms and manifests itself in other ways depending on differences in agrarian conditions, systems of farming and forms of commercial agriculture.* The main trends of peasant differentiation are one thing; the forms it assumes, depending on the different local conditions, are another.

CHART ILLUSTRATING TABLES A & B

The position of the horseless and one-horse peasants is the very opposite. We have seen above that the Zemstvo statisticians put even the latter (to say nothing of the former) in the category of the rural proletariat. Thus, we hardly exaggerate in our approximate calculation, which places in the category of the rural proletariat all the horseless and up to ¾ of the one-horse peasants (about half the total households). These peasants, who are worst provided with allotment land, often lease out their allotments because of lack of implements, seed, etc. Of the total peasant-rented and purchased land theirs are but miserable scraps. Their farms will never yield enough for subsistence, and their main source of livelihood is “industries” or “employments,” i.e., the sale of their labour-power. These are a class of wage-workers with allotments, permanent farm labourers, day labourers, unskilled labourers, building workers, etc., etc.

XI. A COMPARISON OF THE ARMY-HORSE CENSUSES OF 1888-1891 AND 1896-1900

The army-horse censuses of 1896 and 1899-1900 enable us now to compare the latest data with those quoted above.

By combining the 5 southern gubernias (1896) with 43 of the rest (1899-1900), we get the following data for 48 gubernias of European Russia:

For 1888-1891 we cited data for 49 gubernias. Of these, the latest data are lacking only for one, namely, Archangel Gubernia. Subtracting the figures for this gubernia from those given above, we get for the same 48 gubernias in 1888-1891 the following picture:

A comparison of 1888-1891 and 1896-1900 reveals the growing expropriation of the peasantry. The number of households increased by nearly 1 million. The number of horses diminished, although very slightly. The number of horseless households increased with particular rapidity, and their percentage rose from 27.3 to 29.2. Instead of 5.6 million poor peasants (horseless and one-horse), we now have 6.6 million. The entire increase in the number of households has gone to enlarging the number of poor ones. The percentage of households rich in horses diminished. Instead of 2.2 million households with many horses, we have only 2 million. The number of middle and well-to-do households combined (with 2 and more horses) remained almost stationary (4,465,000 in 1888-1891 and 4,508,000 in 1896-1900).

Thus the conclusions to be drawn from these data are as follows.

The increasing poverty and expropriation of the peasantry is beyond doubt.

As for the relation of the top group of the peasantry to the bottom one, this remained almost unchanged. If, in the manner described above, we constitute the bottom groups of 50% of the households and the top groups of 20% of the households, we shall get the following: in 1888-1891 the poor, 50% of the households, had 13.7% of the horses. The rich, 20% of the households, had 52.6%. In 1896-1900 the poor, 50% of the households, also had 13.7% of the total peasant-owned horses, while the rich, 20% of the households, had 53.2% of the total number of horses. Consequently, the relationship between the groups remained almost unchanged.

Lastly, the peasantry as a whole became poorer in horses. Both the number and the percentage of the many-horse households decreased. On the one hand, this evidently marks the decline of peasant farming generally in European Russia. On the other hand, one must not forget that the number of horses employed in agriculture in Russia is abnormally high for the area cultivated. It could not be otherwise in a small-peasant country. The drop in the number of horses consequently represents to a certain degree “the restoration of the normal proportion between the number of draught animals and the amount of arable” among the peasant bourgeoisie (see Mr. V. V.’s arguments on this point above, in Chapter II, §1).

It will be appropriate here to touch on the arguments on this question in the latest works of Mr. Vikhlyayev (“Sketches of Russian Agricultural Reality,” St. Petersburg, published by the magazine Khozyain [Farmer]) and of Mr. Chernenkov (A Characterisation of Peasant Farming, Part I, Moscow, 1905). They were so carried away by the diversity of the figures on the distribution of horses among the peasantry that they turned economic analysis into a statistical exercise. Instead of studying the types of peasant farm (day labourer, middle peasant, entrepreneur), they make a study, like amateurs, of endless columns of figures, just as though they have set out to astonish the world by their arithmetical zeal.

Only thanks to such play with figures was Mr. Chernenkov able to fling the objection at me that I am “prejudiced” in interpreting “differentiation” as a new (and not old) and for some reason completely capitalist phenomenon. Mr. Chernenkov was, of course, free to think that I was drawing conclusions from statistics and forgetting economics! — that I was proving something from a mere change in the number and the distribution of horses! To view intelligently the differentiation of the peasantry, one must take the picture as a whole: the renting of land, the purchase of land, machines, outside employments, the growth of commercial agriculture, and wage-labour. Or maybe Mr. Chernenkov considers these also are neither “new” nor “capitalist” phenomena?

XII. ZEMSTVO STATISTICS ON PEASANT BUDGETS

To finish with the problem of the differentiation of the peasantry, let us examine it from yet another aspect—that of the highly specific data of peasant budgets. We shall thus see clearly how profound is the difference between the types of peasantry under discussion.

In the appendix to Evaluation Returns on Peasant Land-ownership in Zemlyansk, Zadonsk, Korotoyak and Nizhnedevitsk Uyezds (Voronezh, 1889) there are “statistics on the composition and budgets of typical farms,” which are distinguished for their extraordinary completeness.* Of the 67 budgets we leave out one, as being quite incomplete (budget No. 14 for Korotoyak Uyezd), and divide the rest into six groups according to draught animals, as follows: a—with no hoses; b—with 1 horse; c—with 2 horses; d—with 3 horses; e—with 4 horses and f—with 5 horses and more (we shall designate the groups only by these letters a to f). True, classification along these lines is not quite suitable for this locality (in view of the enormous significance of “industries” in the economy of both the bottom groups and the top), but we have to take it for the sake of comparing the budget data with the above-examined house-to-house census data. Such a comparison can only be made by dividing the “peasantry” into groups, whereas general and all-round “averages” are purely fictitious, as we have seen and shall see further on.* Let us note here, incidentally, the interesting phenomenon that “average” budget figures nearly always characterise the farm of above-average type, i.e., they picture the facts in a better light than they actually are.** This happens, probably, because the very term “budget” presupposes a farm that is balanced to at least a minimum degree, a kind that is not easily found among the poor. To illustrate this let us compare the budget and other data of the households, classified according to draught animals held.

This makes it clear that the budget figures can only be used by striking the average for each separate group of peasants. This is what we have done with the data mentioned. We give them under three headings: (A) general budget results; (B) characterisation of crop farming; and (C) characterisation of the standard of living.

(A) The general data regarding the magnitude of expenditure and income are as follows:

Thus, the sizes of the budgets of the different groups vary enormously; even if we leave aside the extreme groups, the budget in e is over five times that in b, whereas the size of the family in e is less than three times that in b.

Let us examine the distribution of expenditures*:

Average expenditure per farm

On food

On remaining personal consumption

On farm

Taxes and dues

Total

Rbs.

%

Rbs.

%

Rbs.

%

Rbs.

%

Rbs.

%

a)

60.98

55.89

17.51

16.05

15.12

13.87

15.47

14.19

109.08

100

b)

80.98

46.47

17.19

  9.87

58.32

33.46

17.77

10.20

174.26

100

c)

181.11

47.77

44.62

11.77

121.42

32.02

32.02

  8.44

379.17

100

d)

283.65

44.86

76.77

12.14

222.39

35.17

49.55

  7.83

632.36

100

e)

373.81

39.88

147.83

15.77

347.76

37.12

67.90

  7.23

937.30

100

f)

447.83

28.10

82.76

  5.19

976.84

61.29

86.34

  5.42

1,593.77

100

180.75

40.80

47.30

10.68

180.60

40.77

34.35

  7.75

443.00

100

It is sufficient to glance at the farm expenditure as compared with the total expenditure for each group to see that here we have both proletarians and proprietors: in group a the farm expenditure is only 14% of the total expenditure, whereas in group f it is 61%. The differences in the absolute figures of farm expenditure go without saying. Such expenditure is negligible in the case not only of the horseless but also of the one-horse peasant, and the one-horse “peasant” is much closer to the ordinary type (in capitalist countries) of allotment-holding farm labourer and day labourer. Let us also note the very considerable differences in the percentage of expenditure on food (a’s nearly double f’s); as we know, a big percentage is evidence of a low standard of living and is what most sharply differentiates the budget of the proprietor from that of the worker.

Now let us take the items of income*:

Thus, income from “industries” exceeds the gross income from agriculture in the two extreme groups: the proletarian-horseless peasant, and the rural entrepreneur. The “personal industries” of the bottom peasant groups consist, of course, mainly of work for hire, while income from the leasing of land is an important item in the “miscellaneous incomes.” The group of “independent farmers” even includes those whose income from the leasing of land is slightly less, and sometimes even more, than the gross income from agriculture. For example, in the case of one horseless peasant, the gross income from agriculture is 61.9 rubles, and from the leasing of land 40 rubles; in the case of another, the income from agriculture is 31.9 rubles and from the leasing of land 40 rubles. It must not be forgotten, furthermore, that the income from the leasing of land and from farm labouring goes entirely to cover the personal needs of the “peasant,” while from the gross agricultural income we must deduct expenditure on the conduct of the farm. After making this deduction, we shall find that the net income of the horseless peasant from agriculture is 41.99 rubles, and from “industries” 59.04 rubles, and in the case of the one-horse peasant, 69.37 and 49.22 rubles. The mere juxtaposition of these figures shows that we have before us types of agricultural labourers with allotments which cover part of the subsistence expenditure (and because of this reduce wages). To confuse such types of peasants with proprietors (agriculturists and industrialists) means blatantly to disregard all the requirements of scientific research.

At the other pole of the countryside we see just such proprietors as combine with independent crop farming commercial and industrial operations which yield an income that is considerable (under the given standard of living) and amounts to several hundred rubles. The utter indefiniteness of the heading “personal industries” conceals the differences between the bottom and the top groups in this respect, but the very size of the incomes from these “personal industries” reveals the extent of this difference (let us remind the reader that in the Voronezh statistics the category “personal industries” may include begging, agricultural labouring, service as steward, manager, etc., etc.).

As regards the size of net income, the horseless and one-horse peasants again stand out very sharply, with their most miserable “balances” (1 to 2 rubles) and even deficits on the money side. The resources of these peasants are no larger, if not smaller, than those of wage-workers. Only beginning with the 2-horse peasants do we see at least some net incomes and balances of a few dozen rubles (without which there cannot be the slightest question of proper farming). Among the well-to-do peasantry net incomes reach sums (120 to 170 rubles) that raise them well above the general level of the Russian working class.*

Naturally, the combining of workers and employers in one category and the striking of an “average” budget provide a picture of “moderate sufficiency” and of a “moderate” net income: income 491 rubles, expenditure 443 rubles, balance 48 rubles, including 18 rubles in cash. But that sort of average is absolutely fictitious. It simply conceals the utter poverty of the mass of peasants in the bottom groups (a and b, i.e., 30 budgets out of 66), who with their trivial incomes (120 to 180 rubles per family gross income) are unable to make ends meet and live mainly by regular farm labouring and day labouring.

An exact calculation of income and expenditure in cash and kind enables us to determine the relation of the differentiation of the peasantry to the market, for which only cash income and expenditure are important. The proportion of the cash part of the budget to the total budget in the various groups is as follows:

Percentage of cash part

of expenditure to gross expenditure

of income to gross income

a)

57.10

54.6

b)

46.47

41.4

c)

43.57

45.7

d)

41.47

42.3

e)

46.93

40.8

f)

60.18

59.2

49.14

47.9

We see, consequently, that the percentage of the cash income and expenditure increases (expenditure with particular regularity) from the middle groups to the extreme ones. The farming is of the most sharply expressed commercial character in the case of the peasant with no horses and of the one with many. This means that both live mainly by selling commodities, except that in the one instance the commodity is labour-power, while in the other it is goods produced for sale, with (as we shall see) a considerable employment of wage-labour, i.e., a product that assumes the form of capital. In other words, these budgets also show that the differentiation of the peasantry creates a home market for capitalism by converting the peasant into a farm labourer, on the one hand, and into a small-commodity producer, a petty bourgeois, on the other.

Another, and no less important, deduction from these data, is that in all the peasant groups farming has to a very large extent become commercial, has become dependent upon the market: in no case does the cash part of income or expenditure fall below 40%. And this percentage must be regarded as a high one, for we are discussing the gross incomes of small agriculturists, in which even the maintenance of cattle is included, i.e., straw, bran, etc.* Evidently, even the peasantry in the central black-earth belt (where money economy is, on the whole, more feebly developed than in the industrial belt, or in the outlying steppe regions) cannot exist at all without buying and selling and are already completely dependent on the market, on the power of money. It is needless to say how tremendously important this fact is, and how grave the error our Narodniks commit when they try to hush it up,** being carried away by their sympathies for the natural economy which has passed out of existence never to return. In modern society it is impossible to exist without selling, and anything that retards the development of commodity production merely results in a worsening of the conditions of the producers. “The disadvantages of the capitalist mode of production,” says Marx, speaking of the peasant, “… coincide here therefore with the disadvantages occasioned by the imperfect development of the capitalist mode of production. The peasant turns merchant and industrialist without the conditions enabling him to produce his products as commodities” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 346. Russ. trans., p. 671).⁵⁸

Let us observe that the budget data utterly refute the view, still fairly widespread, that taxes play an important part in the development of commodity production. Undoubtedly, quit-rents and taxes were at one time an important factor in the development of exchange, but at the present time commodity economy has become firmly established, and the indicated importance of taxes is becoming altogether secondary. A comparison of the expenditure on taxes and duties with the peasants’ total cash expenditure shows a ratio of 15.8% (for the respective groups it is: a—24.8%; b—21.9%; c—19.3%; d—18.8%; e—15.4% and f—9.0%). Hence, the maximum expenditure on taxes is one-third of the remaining cash expenditure unavoidably incurred by the peasant under the present conditions of social economy. If, however, we do not take the role of taxes in the development of exchange, but take them relative to the income, we shall see that it is an excessively high one. How heavily the traditions of the pre-Reform epoch weigh down upon the peasant of today is seen most strikingly in the existence of taxes which absorb one-seventh of the gross expenditure of the small farmer, or even of the allotment-holding farm labourer. Moreover, the distribution of taxes within the village community is astonishingly uneven: the better off the peasant, the smaller the part of his total expenditure that goes in taxes. The horseless peasant pays in proportion to his income nearly three times as much as the peasant owning many horses (see above, table on distribution of expenditure). We speak of the distribution of taxes within the village community, because if we calculate the amount of taxes and duties per dessiatine of allotment land, it will be found to be nearly uniform. After all that has been stated, this unevenness should not astonish us; it is inevitable in our village community, so long as the village community retains its compulsory, feudal character. As we know, the peasants share all taxes according to land held: share of taxes and share of land merge in their minds in the one concept “soul,” or person.* As we have seen, however, the differentiation of the peasantry leads to a diminution of the role of allotment land at both poles of the contemporary countryside. Naturally, under such conditions the distribution of taxes according to allotment land held (which is inseparably connected with the compulsory nature of the village community) leads to the shifting of the tax burden from the well-to-do peasants to the poor. The village community (i.e., collective responsibility⁵⁹ with no right to refuse land) becomes more and more harmful to the peasant poor.*

(B) Passing to the characterisation of peasant farming, let us start by citing general data on the farms:

From this table it is evident that the relationship existing between the groups in regard to the leasing out and the renting of land, size of families and area under crops, hiring of farm labourers, etc., is identical with that shown by the budget data and the above-examined mass data. But that is not all: the absolute figures on the economy of each group also prove to be very close to the data for whole uyezds. Here is a comparison of the budget and above-examined data:

____________

* Area under crops not for 4 uyezds, but only for Zadonsk Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia.

Thus, the position of the horseless and one-horse peasants in all the localities indicated is almost identical, so that the budget data may be regarded as sufficiently typical.

We cite data on the property and implements of the peasant farms in the different groups.

This table graphically illustrates the difference in the extent to which the various groups are provided with implements and livestock, a point we mentioned above on the basis of the mass data. We see here the completely different degree to which the various groups hold property, this difference being such that even the horses of the poor peasant are very different from those of the affluent peasant.* The horse of the one-horse peasant is a veritable “living fraction”—not a “quarter of a horse,” to be sure, but fully “twenty-seven fifty-seconds” of a horse!**⁶¹

Let us take further the data regarding the items of farm expenditure.*

These data are very eloquent. They strikingly reveal to us how utterly wretched is the “farm” not only of the horseless but also of the one-horse peasant; and how utterly wrong is the customary method of lumping such peasants with the few but powerful peasants who spend hundreds of rubles on their farms, are in a position to improve their implements, hire “working folk,” and “buy in” land on a large scale, renting to the amount of 50, 100 and 200 rubles a year.** Let us note, by the way, that the relatively high expenditure of the horseless peasant on “labourers and job-work” is very likely to be explained by the fact that the statisticians have placed under this heading two entirely different things: the hiring of a worker who has to work with his employer’s implements, i.e., the hiring of a farm labourer or day labourer; and the hiring of a neighbouring peasant who has with his own implements to cultivate the hirer’s land. These types of “hire,” diametrically opposite in significance, must be strictly distinguished from one another, as is done, for example, by V. Orlov (see Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. 1).

Let us now examine the data on income from agriculture. Unfortunately, in the Returns these data are far too inadequately analysed (partly, maybe, because of their paucity). For example, the question of yield is not examined: there is no information on the sale of each particular kind of produce and on the conditions of sale. Let us therefore confine ourselves to the following brief table:

Income from agriculture (rubles)

Total

Cash income

Groups

Per farm

Per head, both sexes

Per farm

% of total income from agriculture

Income from industries per farm

a)

57.11

13.98

   5.53

  9.68

  59.04

b)

127.69

25.82

  23.69

18.55

  49.22

c)

287.40

34.88

  54.40

18.93

108.21

d)

496.52

38.19

  91.63

18.45

146.67

e)

698.06

49.16

133.88

19.17

247.60

f)

698.39

43.65

  42.06

  6.02

975.20

292.74

35.38

  47.31

16.16

164.67

What immediately strikes one in this table is the glaring exception: the huge drop in the percentage of cash income from agriculture in the top group, despite the fact that it cultivates the biggest area. Farming on the biggest scale is thus apparently in the greatest degree natural economy. It will be extremely interesting to make a closer examination of this seeming exception, which throws light on the highly important question of the connection between agriculture and “industries” of an entrepreneur character. As we have already seen, the significance of industries of this type is particularly great in the budgets of the peasants owning many horses. Judging from the data under examination, especially typical of the peasant bourgeoisie in this locality is the tendency to combine agriculture with commercial and industrial enterprises.* It is not difficult to see, firstly, that it is wrong to compare farmers of this type with cultivators pure and simple, and, secondly, that agriculture under such circumstances very often only seems to be natural economy. When agriculture is combined with the technical processing of agricultural produce (flour-milling, oil-pressing, potato-starch manufacture, distilling, etc.), the money income from such farming may be assigned to income from the industrial establishments and not from agriculture. Actually, indeed, the agriculture in this case will be commercial, not natural, economy. The same thing has to be said of the farm in which a mass of agricultural produce is consumed in kind on the maintenance of farm labourers and of horses employed on some industrial enterprise (for example, mail-carrying). And it is precisely this type of farm that we have among the top group (budget No. 1 in Korotoyak Uyezd. Family of 18 persons, 4 working members, 5 farm labourers, 20 horses; income from agriculture—1,294 rubles, nearly all in kind, and from industrial enterprises—2,675 rubles. And such a “natural-economy peasant farm” is combined with the horseless and one-horse farms for the purpose of striking a general “average”). This example shows us once again how important it is to combine classification according to scale and type of agricultural activity with classification according to scale and type of “industrial” activity.

(C) Let us now examine the data on the peasants’ standard of living. Expenditure on food in kind is given incompletely in the Returns. We single out the most important items: agricultural produce and meat.**

This table shows that we were right in combining the horseless and one-horse peasants and contrasting them to the rest. The distinguishing feature of the groups of peasants mentioned is insufficiency of food and its inferior quality (potatoes). The food of the one-horse peasant is in some respects even worse than that of the horseless peasant. The general “average” even on this question is entirely fictitious, the insufficient nourishment of the mass of the peasants being obscured by the satisfactory nourishment of the well-off peasantry, who consume almost one and a half times as much agricultural produce and three times as much meat* as do the poor peasants.

For the purpose of comparing the remaining data on the peasants’ food, all produce must be taken at its value—in rubles:

____________

* Beef, pork, lard, mutton, butter, dairy produce, poultry and eggs.

** Salt, salted and fresh fish, herrings, vodka, beer, tea and sugar.

Thus, the general data on the peasants’ food confirm what has been said above. Three groups stand out clearly: the bottom group (horseless and one-horse), the middle group (two-and three-horse), and the top group, whose food is nearly twice as good as that of the bottom one. The general “average” wipes out both extreme groups. Cash expenditure on food is highest, both absolutely and relatively, in the two extreme groups—among the rural proletarians and the rural bourgeoisie. The former buy more, although they consume less, than the middle peasants; they buy the most essential agricultural produce, that of which they suffer a shortage. The latter buy more because they consume more, increasing particularly their consumption of non-agricultural produce. A comparison of these two extreme groups shows us clearly how a home market is created in a capitalist country for articles of personal consumption.***

The remaining items of expenditure on personal consumption are as follows:

It is not always correct to calculate this expenditure per head of both sexes, because the cost of fuel, lighting, household effects, etc., for example, is not proportionate to the number of members of the family.

These data also show the division of the peasantry (according to standard of living) into three different groups. Moreover, the following interesting peculiarity comes to light: the cash part of the expenditure on all personal consumption is highest in the bottom groups (in group a about half the expenditure is in money), whereas in the top groups the cash expenditure does not increase, amounting to only about a third. How can this be reconciled with the above-noted fact that, in general, the percentage of money expenditure increases in both extreme groups? Obviously in the top groups the cash expenditure is incurred mainly on productive consumption (expenditure on the farm), whereas in the bottom groups it is on personal consumption. Here are the exact data on this:

Consequently, the transformation of the peasantry into a rural proletariat creates a market mainly for articles of consumption, whereas its transformation into a rural bourgeoisie creates a market mainly for means of production. In other words, among the bottom groups of the “peasantry” we observe the transformation of labour-power into a commodity, and in the top ones the transformation of means of production into capital. Both these transformations result in precisely that process of the creation of a home market which theory has established for capitalist countries in general. That is why F. Engels, writing on the famine of 1891, said that it signified the creation of a home market for capitalism⁶³—a proposition that is unintelligible to the Narodniks, who regard the ruin of the peasantry merely as the decay of “people’s production,” and not as the transformation of patriarchal into capitalist economy.

Mr. N. — on has written a whole book on the home market, without noticing the process of the creation of a home market by the differentiation of the peasantry. In his article “How Are We to Explain the Increase in Our State Revenues?” (Novoye Slovo [New Word], 1896, No. 5, February) he deals with this question in the following argument: the tables of the income of the American worker show that the lower the income, the larger is the relative expenditure on food. Consequently, with a decline in food consumption there is a still greater decline in the consumption of other products. And in Russia there is a decline in the consumption of bread and vodka; hence there is also a decline in the consumption of other products, from which it follows that the greater consumption of the well-to-do “stratum” (p. 70) of the peasantry is more than balanced by the diminution of the consumption of the masses.—This argument contains three errors: firstly, by substituting the worker for the peasant, Mr. N. — on skips over the question; the point at issue is the process of the creation of workers and employers. Secondly, by substituting the worker for the peasant, Mr. N. — on reduces all consumption to personal consumption and forgets about productive consumption, about the market for means of production. Thirdly, Mr. N. — on forgets that the process of the differentiation of the peasantry is at the same time one of the displacement of natural by commodity economy, that, consequently, the market cannot be created by increasing consumption, but by transforming consumption in kind (even if more abundant) into cash or paying consumption (even if less abundant). We have just seen that the horseless peasants consume less, but buy more articles of personal consumption than the middle peasantry. They become poorer, but at the same time receive and spend more money,—and both these sides of the process are necessary for capitalism.*

In conclusion, let us make use of the budget figures to compare the standard of living of the peasants and the rural workers. Calculating the extent of personal consumption, not per head, but per adult working person (according to the rates of the Nizhni-Novgorod statisticians in the above-mentioned compilation), we get the following table:

To compare the data on the standard of living of rural workers with this, we may take, firstly, average prices of labour. For 10 years (1881-1891) the average pay of a farm labourer hired by the year in Voronezh Gubernia was 57 rubles, and including keep, 99 rubles,* so that keep cost 42 rubles. The amount of personal consumption by allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers (horseless and one-horse peasants) is below this level. The total cost of a family’s keep amounts to only 78 rubles in the case of the horseless “peasant” (in a family of 4) and 98 rubles in the case of the one-horse “peasant” (in a family of 5), i.e., less than the cost of a farm labourer’s keep. (We have omitted from the budgets of the horseless and one-horse peasants farm expenditure and also taxes and duties, for in this locality the allotment is leased at not less than the amount of the taxes.) As was to be expected, the position of the labourer who is tied to his allotment is worse than that of the labourer who is free from such tie (we say nothing of the tremendous degree to which the tying of people down to allotments develops relations of bondage and personal dependence). The cash expenditure of the farm labourer is far higher than the cash expenditure on personal consumption of the one-horse and horseless peasant. Consequently, the tying of people down to allotments retards the growth of the home market.

Secondly, we can make use of Zemstvo statistics on consumption by farm labourers. Let us take from the Statistical Returns for Orel Gubernia the data on Karachev Uyezd (Vol. V, Pt. 2, 1892), which are based on information concerning 158 cases of agricultural wage-labour.* Converting the monthly ration into one for a year, we get the following:

____________

** Computed in the manner stated above.

Consequently, the standard of living of the one-horse and horseless peasants is not higher than that of farm labourers, and if anything rather approximates to the minimum standard of living of the latter.

The general conclusion from our review of the data on the bottom group of the peasantry is, accordingly, the following: both in its relation to the other groups, which are ousting the bottom section of the peasantry from agriculture, in its scale of farming, which covers only part of the expenditure on maintaining the family, in its source of livelihood (sale of labour-power), and, lastly, in its standard of living, this group should be assigned to the allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers.*

In thus concluding our exposition of the Zemstvo statistics on peasant budgets, we cannot but stop to examine the methods of treating the budget data employed by Mr. Shcherbina, the compiler of Evaluation Returns and author of the article on peasant budgets in the well-known book The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, etc. (Vol. II).⁶⁴ Mr. Shcherbina states on some point in the Returns that he is using the theory “of the well-known political economist K. Marx” (p. 111); as a matter of fact, he positively distorts this theory, confusing the difference between constant and variable capital with the difference between fixed and circulating capital (ibid.), and quite senselessly applying these terms and categories of developed capitalism to peasant farming (passim), etc. The whole of Mr. Shcherbina’s treatment of the budget figures is nothing but a gross and incredible abuse of “average magnitudes.” All the evaluation returns concern the “average” peasant. The income from the land computed for the 4 uyezds is divided by the number of farms (recall that for the horseless peasant this income is about 60 rubles per family, and for the rich peasant about 700 rubles). The “magnitude of constant capital” (sic!!?) “per farm” (p. 114), i.e., the value of the whole property, is determined; the “average” value of implements, the average value of commercial and industrial establishments (sic!) is determined as 15 rubles per farm. Mr. Shcherbina ignores the detail that these establishments are the private property of the well-to-do minority, and divides them among all “equally”! The “average” expenditure on the renting of land (p. 118) is determined; as we have seen, it amounts to 6 rubles in the case of the one-horse peasant and to 100 to 200 rubles in the case of the rich peasant. All this is added together and divided by the number of farms. Even the “average” expenditure on “repair of capitals” is determined (ibid.). The Lord alone knows what that means! If it means replenishment and repair of implements and livestock, here are the figures we have already cited: with the horseless peasant this expenditure equals 8 (eight) kopeks per farm, and with the rich peasant 75 rubles. Is it not evident that if we add such “peasant farms” together and divide by the number of items added, we shall get the “law of average requirements” discovered by Mr. Shcherbina in the returns for Ostrogozhsk Uyezd (Vol. II, Pt. 2, 1887) and so brilliantly applied subsequently? And from such a “law” it will not be difficult to draw the conclusion that “the peasant satisfies not his minimum requirements, but their average level” (p. 123 and many others), that peasant farming is a special “type of development” (p. 100), etc., etc. This ingenuous device of “equalising” the rural proletariat and the peasant bourgeoisie is reinforced by the already familiar classification according to allotment. Had we applied it, for example, to the budget data, we would have combined in one group such peasants, for example (in the category of those having large allotments, with 15 to 25 dess. per family), as: one who leases half his allotment (of 23.5 dess.) sows 1.3 dess., lives mainly by means of “personal industries” (how surprisingly well this sounds!) and secures an income of 190 rubles for 10 persons of both sexes (budget No. 10 in Korotoyak Uyezd); and another who rents an additional 14.7 dess., sows 23.7 dess., employs farm labourers and has an income of 1,400 rubles for 10 persons of both sexes (budget No. 2 in Zadonsk Uyezd). Is it not clear that we shall get a special “type of development” if we add the farms of farm labourers and day labourers to those of peasants employing workers, and divide the total by the number of items added? One has only to make regular and exclusive use of “average” data on peasant farming, and all “false ideas” about the differentiation of the peasantry will be eliminated once and for all. That is exactly what Mr. Shcherbina does by adopting this method en grand* in his article in the book The Influence of Harvests, etc. Here a huge effort is made to calculate the budgets of the whole of the Russian peasantry—and all by means of the very same, tried and tested, “averages.” The future historian of Russian economic literature will note with astonishment that the prejudices of Narodism caused the most elementary requirements of economic statistics to be forgotten, namely, that a strict distinction be drawn between employers and wage-workers, regardless of the form of land tenure that unites them, and regardless of the multiplicity and variety of the intermediary types between them.

XIII. CONCLUSIONS FROM CHAPTER II

Let us sum up the main points that follow from the data examined above:

1) The social-economic situation in which the contemporary Russian peasantry find themselves is that of commodity economy. Even in the central agricultural belt (which is most backward in this respect as compared with the southeastern border regions or the industrial gubernias), the peasant is completely subordinated to the market, on which he is dependent as regards both his personal consumption and his farming, not to mention the payment of taxes.

2) The system of social-economic relations existing among the peasantry (agricultural and village-community) shows us the presence of all those contradictions which are inherent in every commodity economy and every order of capitalism: competition, the struggle for economic independence, the grabbing of land (purchasable and rentable), the concentration of production in the hands of a minority, the forcing of the majority into the ranks of the proletariat, their exploitation by a minority through the medium of merchant’s capital and the hiring of farm labourers. There is not a single economic phenomenon among the peasantry that does not bear this contradictory form, one specifically peculiar to the capitalist system, i.e., that does not express a struggle and antagonism of interests, that does not imply advantage for some and disadvantage for others. It is the case with the renting of land, the purchase of land, and with “industries” in their diametrically opposite types; it is also the case with the technical progress of farming.

We attach cardinal importance to this conclusion not only as regards capitalism in Russia, but also as regards the significance of the Narodnik doctrine in general. It is these contradictions that show us clearly and irrefutably that the system of economic relations in the “community” village does not at all constitute a special economic form (“people’s production,” etc.), but is an ordinary petty-bourgeois one. Despite the theories that have prevailed here during the past half-century, the Russian community peasantry are not antagonists of capitalism, but, on the contrary, are its deepest and most durable foundation. The deepest—because it is here, remote from all “artificial” influences, and in spite of the institutions which restrict the development of capitalism, that we see the constant formation of the elements of capitalism within the “community” itself. The most durable—because agriculture in general, and the peasantry in particular, are weighed down most heavily by the traditions of the distant past, the traditions of patriarchal life, as a consequence of which the transformative effects of capitalism (the development of the productive forces, the changing of all social relations, etc.) manifest themselves here most slowly and gradually.*

3) The sum-total of all the economic contradictions among the peasantry constitutes what we call the differentiation of the peasantry. The peasants themselves very aptly and strikingly characterise this process with the term “depeasantising.”** This process signifies the utter dissolution of the old, patriarchal peasantry and the creation of new types of rural inhabitants.

Before we proceed to describe these types, let us note the following. Reference to this process was made in our literature long ago and has been repeated very often. For example, in his day Mr. Vasilchikov, who made use of the works of the Valuyev Commission,⁶⁶ noted the formation of a “rural proletariat” in Russia and the “differentiation of the peasant social estate” (Landownership and Agriculture, 1st ed., Vol. I, Chapter IX). This fact was also mentioned by V. Orlov (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. IV, Pt. 1, p. 14) and by many others. But all these references were very fragmentary. No attempt was ever made to study this phenomenon systematically, and that is why we lack, to this day, adequate information about this phenomenon notwithstanding the wealth of data provided by the Zemstvo house-to-house censuses. Connected with this is the fact that the majority of the writers who have dealt with this problem regard the break-up of the peasantry simply as the emergence of property inequality, as simple “differentiation,” to use the favourite term of the Narodniks in general and of Mr. Karyshev in particular (see his book on Rentings and his articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo). Undoubtedly, the emergence of property inequality is the starting-point of the whole process, but the process is not at all confined to property “differentiation.” The old peasantry is not only “differentiating,” it is being completely dissolved, it is ceasing to exist, it is being ousted by absolutely new types of rural inhabitants—types that are the basis of a society in which commodity economy and capitalist production prevail. These types are the rural bourgeoisie (chiefly petty bourgeoisie) and the rural prole-tariat—a class of commodity producers in agriculture and a class of agricultural wage-workers.

It is extremely instructive that the purely theoretical analysis of the process of the formation of agricultural capitalism points to the differentiation of the small producers as an important factor in this process. We have in mind one of the most interesting chapters in Vol. III of Capital, namely Chapter 47, “Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent.” As the starting-point of this genesis Marx takes labour-rent (Arbeitsrente)*—“…where the direct producer, using instruments of labour (plough, cattle, etc.) which actually or legally belong to him, cultivates soil actually owned by him during part of the week, and works during the remaining days upon the estate of the feudal lord without any compensation from the feudal lord…” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 323. Russ. trans., 651). The next form of rent is rent in kind (Produktenrente), when the direct producer produces the entire product on land which he himself exploits, and gives up to the landowner the whole of the surplus product in kind. The producer here becomes more independent and is enabled to acquire by his labour a certain surplus over and above the amount of produce that satisfies his indispensable needs. “Similarly, this form” of rent “will give rise to greater differences in the economic position of the individual direct producers. At least the possibility for such a differentiation exists, and the possibility for the direct producer to have in turn acquired the means to exploit other labourers directly” (S. 329. Russ. trans., 657.)⁶⁸ And so, while natural economy still prevails, at the very first expansion of the independence of the dependent peasants, there already appear the germs of their differentiation. But these germs can develop only under the next form of rent, money rent, which represents a mere change in the form of rent in kind. The direct producer gives up to the landowner not produce, but the price of this produce.* The basis of this type of rent remains the same: the direct producer is as hitherto the traditional possessor of the land, but “the basis of this type of rent … is approaching its dissolution” (330). Money rent “presupposes a considerable development of commerce, of urban industry, of commodity production in general, and thereby of money circulation” (331).⁶⁹ The traditional, common-law relationship between the dependent peasant and the landowner is transformed here into a purely cash, contract-based relationship. This leads, on the one hand, to the expropriation of the old peasantry, and, on the other, to the peasant buying out his land and his liberty. The transformation of rent in kind into money rent is furthermore not only inevitably accompanied, but even anticipated, by the formation of a class of propertyless day labourers, who hire themselves out for money. During their genesis, when this new class appears but sporadically, the custom necessarily develops among the more prosperous peasants subject to rent payments (rentepflichtigen) of exploiting agricultural wage-labourers for their own account…. In this way, they gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating a certain amount of wealth and themselves becoming transformed into future capitalists. The old self-employed possessors of land themselves thus give rise to a nursery school for capitalist tenants, whose development is conditioned by the general development of capitalist production beyond the bounds of the countryside” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 332. Russ. trans., 659-660).⁷⁰

4) The differentiation of the peasantry, which develops the latter’s extreme groups at the expense of the middle “peasantry,” creates two new types of rural inhabitants. The feature common to both types is the commodity, money character of their economy. The first new type is the rural bourgeoisie or the well-to-do peasantry. These include the independent farmers who carry on commercial agriculture in all its varied forms (the principal ones of which we shall describe in Chapter IV), then come the owners of commercial and industrial establishments, the proprietors of commercial enterprises, etc. The combining of commercial agriculture with commercial and industrial enterprises is the type of “combination of agriculture with industries” that is specifically peculiar to this peasantry. From among these well-to-do peasants a class of capitalist farmers is created, since the renting of land for the sale of grain plays (in the agricultural belt) an enormous part in their farms, often a more important part than the allotment. The size of the farm, in the majority of cases, requires a labour force larger than that available in the family, for which reason the formation of a body of farm labourers, and still more of day labourers, is a necessary condition for the existence of the well-to-do peasantry.* The spare cash obtained by these peasants in the shape of net income is either directed towards commercial operations and usury, which are so excessively developed in our rural districts, or, under favourable conditions, is invested in the purchase of land, farm improvements, etc. In a word, these are small agrarians. Numerically, the peasant bourgeoisie constitute a small minority of the peasantry, probably not more than one-fifth of the total number of households (which is approximately three-tenths of the population), although, of course, the proportion fluctuates considerably according to district. But as to their weight in the sum-total of peasant farming, in the total, quantity of means of production belonging to the peasantry, in the total amount of produce raised by the peasantry, the peasant bourgeoisie are undoubtedly predominant. They are the masters of the contemporary countryside.

5) The other new type is the rural proletariat, the class of allotment-holding wage-workers. This covers the poor peasants, including those that are completely landless; but the most typical representative of the Russian rural proletariat is the allotment-holding farm labourer, day labourer, unskilled labourer, building worker or other allotment-holding worker. Insignificant farming on a patch of land, with the farm in a state of utter ruin (particularly evidenced by the leasing out of land), inability to exist without the sale of labour-power (=“industries” of the indigent peasants), an extremely low standard of living (probably lower even than that of the worker without an allotment)—such are the distinguishing features of this type.** One must assign not less than half the total peasant households (which is approximately of the population) to membership of the rural proletariat, i.e., all the horseless and a large part of the one-horse peasants (this, of course, is only a wholesale, approximate calculation, one subject to more or less considerable modifications in the different areas, according to local conditions). The grounds which compel us to believe that such a considerable proportion of the peasantry already belong to the rural proletariat have been advanced above.* It should be added that our literature frequently contains too stereotyped an understanding of the theoretical proposition that capitalism requires the free, landless worker. This proposition is quite correct as indicating the main trend, but capitalism penetrates into agriculture particularly slowly and in extremely varied forms. The allotment of land to the rural worker is very often to the interests of the rural employers themselves, and that is why the allotment-holding rural worker is a type to be found in all capitalist countries. The type assumes different forms in different countries: the English cottager is not the same as the small-holding peasant of France or the Rhine provinces, and the latter again is not the same as the Knecht in Prussia. Each of these bears traces of a specific agrarian system, of a specific history of agrarian relations—but this does not prevent the economist from classing them all as one type of agricultural proletarian. The juridical basis of his right to his plot of land is absolutely immaterial to such a classification. Whether the land is his full property (as a small-holding peasant), or whether he is only allowed the use of it by the landlord or the Rittergutsbesitzer,* or, finally, whether he possesses it as a member of a Great-Russian peasant community—makes no difference at all.** In assigning the indigent peasants to the rural proletariat we are saying nothing new. This term has already been used repeatedly by many writers, and only the Narodnik economists persist in speaking of the peasantry in general, as of something anti-capitalist, and close their eyes to the fact that the mass of the “peasantry” have already taken a quite definite place in the general system of capitalist production, namely, as agricultural and industrial wage-workers. In our country, people are very fond of singing the praises of our agrarian system, which retains the village community and the peasantry, etc., and of contrasting this to the Ostsee system, with its capitalist organisation of agriculture. It will not be without interest, therefore, to see what types of the agricultural population in the Ostsee region⁷² are sometimes assigned to the class of farm labourers and day labourers. The peasants in the Ostsee gubernias are divided into those with large plots (25 to 50 dess. in separate lots), cottagers (with plots of 3 to 10 dess.) and landless peasants. As Mr. S. Korolenko quite rightly remarks, the cottager “most closely approximates to the general type of Russian peasant of the central gubernias” (Hired Labour, p. 495); he is everlastingly compelled to divide his time between seeking employment and cultivating his plot of land. But what is particularly interesting to us is the economic position of the farm labourers. The fact is that the landlords themselves find it advantageous to allot them land on account of wages. Here are some examples of the holdings of Ostsee farm labourers: 1) 2 dess. of land (we have converted Loftstelle into dessiatines: 1 Loftstelle = ⅓ dess.); the husband works 275 days and the wife 50 days a year at a wage of 25 kopeks per day; 2) 2 ⅔ dess. of land; “the farm labourer keeps 1 horse, 3 cows, 3 sheep and 2 pigs” (pp. 508, 518); the farm labourer works alternate weeks and the wife works 50 days; 3) 6 dess. of land (Bauska Uyezd, Courland Gubernia), “the farm labourer keeps 1 horse, 3 cows, 3 sheep and several pigs” (p. 518), he works 3 days a week and his wife 35 days a year; 4) in Hasenpoth Uyezd, Courland Gubernia—8 dess. of land, “in all cases the farm labourers get their flour milled gratis and free medical aid and medicine, and their children attend school” (p. 519), etc. We draw the reader’s attention to the size of the holdings and the scale of the farming of these farm labourers, i.e., to the very conditions that, in the opinion of the Narodniks, set our peasants apart from the general European agrarian system, which corresponds to capitalist production. We combine all the examples given in the publication quoted: 10 farm labourers own 31.5 dess. of land, that is, an average of 3.15 dess. per labourer. The farm labourers here include peasants who work the lesser part of the year for the landlord (the husband half the year, and the wife 35 to 50 days) and also one-horse peasants who own 2 and even 3 cows each. The question arises: what constitutes the notorious difference between our “community peasant” and the Ostsee farm labourer of this type? In the Ostsee region they call things by their proper names, whereas in Russia one-horse farm labourers are combined with wealthy peasants, “averages” are struck, and sentimental talk is indulged in about the “community spirit,” the “labour principle,” “people’s production” and the “combination of agriculture with industries”….

6) The intermediary link between these post-Reform types of “peasantry” is the middle peasantry. It is distinguished by the least development of commodity production. The independent agricultural labour of this category of peasant covers his maintenance in perhaps only the best years and under particularly favourable conditions, and that is why his position is an extremely precarious one. In the majority of cases the middle peasant cannot make ends meet without resorting to loans, to be repaid by labour-service, etc., without seeking “subsidiary” employment on the side, which also consists partly in the sale of labour-power, etc. Every crop failure flings masses of the middle peasants into the ranks of the proletariat. In its social relations this group fluctuates between the top group, towards which it gravitates but which only a small minority of lucky ones succeed in entering, and the bottom group, into which it is pushed by the whole course of social evolution. We have seen that the peasant bourgeoisie oust not only the bottom group, but also the middle group, of the peasantry. Thus a process specifically characteristic of capitalist economy takes place, the middle members are swept away and the extremes are reinforced—the process of “depeasantising.”

7) The differentiation of the peasantry creates a home market for capitalism. In the bottom group, this formation of a market takes place on account of articles of consumption (the market of personal consumption). The rural proletarian, by comparison with the middle peasantry, consumes less, and, moreover, consumes food of worse quality (potatoes instead of bread, etc.), but buys more. The formation and development of a peasant bourgeoisie creates a market in twofold fashion: firstly and mainly on account of means of production (the market of productive consumption), since the well-to-do peasant strives to convert into capital those means of production which he “gathers” from both landlords “in straitened circumstances” and peasants in the grip of ruin. Secondly, a market is also created here on account of personal consumption, due to the expansion of the requirements of the more affluent peasants.*

8) On the question of whether the differentiation of the peasantry is progressing, and if so at what rate, we have no precise statistics that can be compared with the data in the combined tables (§§I-VI). This is not surprising, for till now (as we have already remarked) no attempt whatever has been made to study even the statics of the differentiation of the peasantry systematically and to indicate the forms in which this process is taking place.* But all the general data on the economy of our rural districts indicate an uninterrupted and rapidly increasing differentiation: on the one hand, the “peasants” are abandoning and leasing out their land, the number of horseless peasants is growing, the “peasants” are fleeing to the towns, etc.; on the other hand, the “progressive trends in peasant farming” are also taking their course, the “peasants” are buying land, improving their farms, introducing iron ploughs, developing grass cultivation, dairy farming, etc. We now know which “peasants” are taking part in these two diametrically opposite sides of the process.

Furthermore, the development of the migration movement is giving a tremendous impetus to the differentiation of the peasantry, and especially of the agricultural peasantry. It is well known that the migration of peasants is mainly from the agricultural gubernias (migration from the industrial gubernias is quite negligible), and precisely from the densely populated central gubernias, where there is the greatest development of labour-service (which retards the differentiation of the peasantry). That is the first point. The second point is that it is mainly the peasants in medium circumstances who are leaving the areas of emigration and mainly the extreme groups who are remaining at home. Thus, migration is accelerating the differentiation of the peasantry in the areas of emigration and is carrying the elements of differentiation to the new places (the agricultural wage-labour of settlers in Siberia in the first period of their new life.* This connection between migration and the differentiation of the peasantry is fully proved by I. Hourwich in his superb research work, Peasant Migration to Siberia (Moscow, 1888). We strongly recommend to the reader this book which our Narodnik press has strenuously tried to hush up.**

9) A tremendous part, as is known, is played in our rural districts by merchant’s and usurer’s capital. We consider it superfluous to cite numerous facts and indicate sources relating to this phenomenon: the facts are well known and do not directly concern our theme. The only question of interest to us is the following: What relation has merchant’s and usurer’s capital in our countryside to the differentiation of the peasantry? Is there any connection between the relations among the various groups of peasants described above and the relations between peasant creditors and peasant debtors? Is usury a factor and a motive force of differentiation, or does it retard this differentiation?

Let us first indicate how theory presents this question. In the analysis of capitalist production given by the author of Capital very great significance was attached, as we know, to merchant’s and usurer’s capital. The main points of Marx’s views on this subject are the following: 1) merchant’s and usurer’s capital, on the one hand, and industrial capital [i.e., capital invested in production, whether agricultural or industrial], on the other, represent a single type of economic phenomenon, which is covered by the general formula: the buying of commodities in order to sell at a profit (Das Kapital, I, 2. Abschnitt, Chapter IV, especially pp. 148-149 of the second German edition⁷³). 2) Merchant’s and usurer’s capital always historically precede the formation of industrial capital and are logically the necessary premise of its formation (Das Kapital, III, 1, S. 312-316; Russ. trans., pp. 262-265; III, 2, 132-137, 149; Russ. trans., pp. 488-492, 502)⁷⁴; but in themselves neither merchant’s capital nor usurer’s capital represents a sufficient premise for the rise of industrial capital (i.e., capitalist production); they do not always break up the old mode of production and replace it by the capitalist mode of production; the formation of the latter “depends entirely upon the stage of historical development and the attendant circumstances” (ibid., 2, 133; Russ. trans., p. 489).⁷⁵ “To what extent they” (commercial and merchant’s capital) “bring about a dissolution of the old mode of production depends on their solidity and internal structure. And whither this process of dissolution will lead, in other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself” (ibid., III, 1, 316; Russ. trans., 265).⁷⁶ 3) The independent development of merchant’s capital is inversely proportional to the degree of development of capitalist production (ibid., S. 312; Russ. trans., 262)⁷⁷; the greater the development of merchant’s and usurer’s capital, the smaller the development of industrial capital (= capitalist production), and vice versa.

Consequently, as applied to Russia, the question to be answered is: Is merchant’s and usurer’s capital being linked up with industrial capital? Are commerce and usury, in disintegrating the old mode of production, leading to its replacement by the capitalist mode of production, or by some other system?* These are questions of fact, questions that must be answered in regard to all aspects of the national economy of Russia. As regards peasant cultivation the data reviewed above contain the reply, and an affirmative reply, to this question. The ordinary Narodnik view that the “kulak” and the “enterprising muzhik” are not two forms of one and the same economic phenomenon, but totally unconnected and opposite types of phenomena, is absolutely without foundation. It is one of those Narodnik prejudices which no one has ever even attempted to prove by an analysis of precise economic data. The data indicate the contrary. Whether the peasant hires workers for the purpose of expanding production, whether he trades in land (recall the data quoted above on the large scale of land renting among the rich) or in groceries, or whether he trades in hemp, hay, cattle, etc., or money (usurer), he represents a single economic type, and his operations amount, at bottom, to one and the same economic relation. Furthermore, that in the Russian community village the role of capital is not confined to bondage and usury, that capital is also invested in production, is apparent from the fact that the well-to-do peasant puts his money into the improvement of his farm, into the purchase and renting of land, the acquisition of improved implements, the hiring of workers, etc., and not only into trading establishments and undertakings (see above). If capital in our countryside were incapable of creating anything but bondage and usury, we could not, from the data on production, establish the differentiation of the peasantry, the formation of a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat; the whole of the peasantry would represent a fairly even type of poverty-stricken cultivators, among whom only usurers would stand out, and they only to the extent of money owned and not to the extent and organisation of agricultural production. Finally, from the above-examined data follows the important proposition that the independent development of merchant’s and usurer’s capital in our countryside retards the differentiation of the peasantry. The further the development of commerce proceeds, bringing the country closer to the town, eliminating the primitive village markets and undermining the monopoly of the village shopkeeper, and the more there develop forms of credit that accord with European standards, displacing the village usurer, the further and deeper must the differentiation of the peasantry proceed. The capital of the well-to-do peasants, forced out of petty trade and usury, will flow more abundantly into production, whither it is already beginning to flow.

10) Another important phenomenon in the economy of our countryside that retards the differentiation of the peasantry is the survivals of corvée economy, i.e., labour-service. Labour-service is based on the payment of labour in kind, hence, on a poor development of commodity economy. Labour-service presupposes and requires the middle peasant, one who is not very affluent (otherwise he would not agree to the bondage of labour-service) but is also not a proletarian (to undertake labour-service one must have one’s own implements, one must be at least in some measure a “sound” peasant).

When we said above that the peasant bourgeoisie are the masters of the contemporary countryside, we disregarded the factors retarding differentiation: bondage, usury, labour-service, etc. Actually, the real masters of the contemporary countryside are often enough not the representatives of the peasant bourgeoisie, but the village usurers and the neighbouring landowners. It is, however, quite legitimate to disregard them, for otherwise it is impossible to study the internal system of economic relationships among the peasantry. It is interesting to note that the Narodnik also employs this procedure, only he stops half-way and does not carry his reasoning to its logical conclusion. Speaking of the burden of taxes, etc., in The Destiny of Capitalism, Mr. V. V. observes that due to these reasons “the conditions for a natural (sic!) life no longer exist” (287) for the village community, for the “mir”. Excellent! But the whole question is precisely: what are these “natural conditions” that do not yet exist in our countryside? To obtain a reply to this question one must study the system of economic relationships within the village community, lifting away, if one may so express it, the survivals of pre-Reform times which obscure these “natural conditions” of life in our countryside. Had Mr. V. V. done this, he would have seen that this system of village relationships reveals the absolute differentiation of the peasantry, that the more completely bondage, usury, labour-service, etc., are forced out, the more profoundly will the differentiation of the peasantry proceed.* Above we have shown, on the basis of Zemstvo statistics, that this differentiation is already an accomplished fact, that the peasantry have completely split up into opposite groups.

Page 96 from the magazine Nachalo, No. 3 for 1899, in which the first six sections of Chapter III of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia were published.

CHAPTER III⁷⁹

THE LANDOWNERS’ TRANSITION FROM CORVÉE TO CAPITALIST ECONOMY

From peasant economy we must now pass to landlord economy. Our task is to examine, in its main features, the present social-economic system of landlord economy and to describe the nature of the evolution of this system in the post-Reform epoch.

I. THE MAIN FEATURES OF CORVÉE ECONOMY

As our starting-point in examining the present system of landlord economy we must take the system of that economy which prevailed in the epoch of serfdom. The essence of the economic system of those days was that the entire land of a given unit of agrarian economy, i.e., of a given estate, was divided into the lord’s and the peasants’ land; the latter was distributed in allotments among the peasants, who (receiving other means of production in addition, as for example, timber, sometimes cattle, etc.) cultivated it with their own labour and their own implements, and obtained their livelihood from it. The product of this peasants’ labour constituted the necessary product, to employ the terminology of theoretical political economy; necessary—for the peasants in providing them with means of subsistence, and for the landlord in providing him with hands; in exactly the same way as the product which replaces the variable part of the value of capital is a necessary product in capitalist society. The peasants’ surplus labour, on the other hand, consisted in their cultivation, with the same implements, of the landlord’s land; the product of that labour went to the landlord. Hence, the surplus labour was separated then in space from the necessary labour: for the landlord they cultivated his land, for themselves their allotments; for the landlord they worked some days of the week and for themselves others. The peasant’s allotment in this economy served, as it were, as wages in kind (to express oneself in modern terms), or as a means of providing the landlord with hands. The peasants’ “own” farming of their allotments was a condition of the landlord economy, and its purpose was to “provide” not the peasant with means of livelihood but the landlord with hands.*

It is this system of economy which we call corvée [Russ.: barshchina] economy. Its prevalence obviously presumes the following necessary conditions: firstly, the predominance of natural economy. The feudal estate had to constitute a self-sufficing, self-contained entity, in very slight contact with the outside world. The production of grain by the landlords for sale, which developed particularly in the latter period of the existence of serfdom, was already a harbinger of the collapse of the old regime. Secondly, such an economy required that the direct producer be allotted the means of production in general, and land in particular; moreover, that he be tied to the land, since otherwise the landlord was not assured of hands. Hence, the methods of obtaining the surplus product under corvée and under capitalist economy are diametrically opposite: the former is based on the producer being provided with land, the latter on the producer being dispossessed of the land.** Thirdly, a condition for such a system of economy was the personal dependence of the peasant on the landlord. If the landlord had not possessed direct power over the person of the peasant, he could not have compelled a man who had a plot of land and ran his own farm to work for him. Hence, “other than economic pressure,” as Marx says in describing this economic regime, was necessary (and, as has already been indicated above, Marx assigned it to the category of labour-rent; Das Kapital, III, 2, 324).⁸¹ The form and degree of this coercion may be the most varied, ranging from the peasant’s serf status to his lack of rights in the social estates. Fourthly, and finally, a condition and a consequence of the system of economy described was the extremely low and stagnant condition of technique, for farming was in the hands of small peasants, crushed by poverty and degraded by personal dependence and by ignorance.

II. THE COMBINATION OF THE CORVÉE AND THE CAPITALIST SYSTEMS OF ECONOMY

The corvée system of economy was undermined by the abolition of serfdom. All the main foundations of this system were undermined: natural economy, the self-contained and the self-sufficient character of the landed estate, the close connection between its various constituents, and the landlord’s power over the peasants. The peasant’s farm was separated from that of the landlord; the peasant was to buy back his land and become the full owner of it; the landlord, to adopt the capitalist system of farming, which, as has just been observed, has a diametrically opposite basis. But such a transition to a totally different system could not, of course, take place at once, and for two different reasons. First, the conditions required for capitalist production did not yet exist. A class of people was required who were accustomed to work for hire; the peasants’ implements had to be replaced by those of the landlord; agriculture had to be organised on the same lines as any other commercial and industrial enterprise and not as the business of the lord. All these conditions could only take shape gradually, and the attempts of some landlords, immediately after the Reform, to import machinery and even workers from abroad could not but end in a fiasco. The other reason why the transition to the capitalist conduct of affairs was not possible at once was that the old corvée system of economy had been undermined, but not yet completely destroyed. The peasants’ farms were not entirely separated from those of the landlords, for the latter retained possession of very essential parts of the peasants’ allotments: the “cut-off lands,”⁸² the woods, meadows, watering places, pastures, etc. Without these lands (or easement rights) the peasants were absolutely unable to carry on independent farming, so that the landlords were able to continue the old system of economy in the form of labour-service. The possibility of exercising “other than economic pressure” also remained in the shape of the peasants’ temporarily-bound status,⁸³ collective responsibility, corporal punishment, forced labour on public works, etc.

Thus, capitalist economy could not emerge at once, and corvée economy could not disappear at once. The only possible system of economy was, accordingly, a transitional one, a system combining the features of both the corvée and the capitalist systems. And indeed, the post-Reform system of farming practised by the landlords bears precisely these features. With all the endless variety of forms characteristic of a transitional epoch, the economic organisation of contemporary landlord farming amounts to two main systems, in the most varied combinations—the labour-service* system and the capitalist system. The first consists in the landlord’s land being cultivated with the implements of the neighbouring peasants, the form of payment not altering the essential nature of this system (whether payment is in money, as in the case of job-hire, or in produce, as in the case of half-cropping, or in land or grounds, as in the case of labour-service in the narrow sense of the term). This is a direct survival of corvée economy,** and the economic characterisation of the latter, given above, is applicable almost entirely to the labour-service system (the only exception being that in one of the forms of the labour-service system one of the conditions of corvée economy disappears, namely, under job-hire, where labour instead of being paid in kind is paid in money). The capitalist farming system consists of the hire of workers (annual, seasonal, day, etc.) who till the land with the owner’s implements. The systems mentioned are actually interwoven in the most varied and fantastic fashion: on a mass of landlord estates there is a combination of the two systems, which are applied to different farming operations.* It is quite natural that the combination of such dissimilar and even opposite systems of economy leads in practice to a whole number of most profound and complicated conflicts and contradictions, and that the pressure of these contradictions results in a number of the farmers going bankrupt, etc. All these are phenomena characteristic of every transitional period.

If we raise the question as to the relative incidence of the two systems, we shall have to say, first of all, that no precise statistics are available on the matter, and it is not likely that they could be collected: that would require a registration not only of all estates, but of all economic operations performed on all the estates. Only approximate data are available, in the shape of general descriptions of individual localities as to the predominance of one or another system. Data of this kind are given in a summarised form for the whole of Russia in the above-mentioned publication of the Department of Agriculture, Hired Labour, etc. On the basis of these data, Mr. Annensky has drawn up a very striking chart showing the incidence of these systems (The Influence of Harvests, etc.,⁸⁴ I, 170). Let us summarise these data in a table, and supplement them with figures on the cultivated area on private owners’ lands in 1883-1887 (according to Statistics of the Russian Empire, IV. The average harvest in European Russia in the five years 1883-1887. St. Petersburg, 1888).*

Number of gubernias

Gubernia groups according to system of economy predominant on landowners’ estates

in black-earth belt

in non-black-earth belt

Total

Area under all cereals and potatoes on private owners’ estates
(thous. dess.)

  I.

Gubernias where the capitalist system predominates

  9

10

19

7,407

 II.

Gubernias where a mixed system predominates

  3

  4

  7

2,222

III.

Gubernias where the labour-service system predominates

12

5

17

6,281

Total

24

19

43

15,910

Thus, although the labour-service system predominates in the purely Russian gubernias, the capitalist system of landlord farming must be considered the predominant one at present in European Russia as a whole. Moreover, our table gives a far from complete picture of this predominance, for Group I of the gubernias includes some in which the labour-service system is not applied at all (the Baltic gubernias, for example), whereas Group III includes not a single gubernia, and in all probability not a single farmed estate in which the capitalist system is not applied at least in part. Here is an illustration of this based on Zemstvo statistics (Raspopin; “Private-Landowner Farming in Russia According to Zemstvo Statistics,” in Yuridichesky Vestnik [Legal Messenger], 1887, Nos. 11-12. No. 12, p. 634):

Uyezds in Kursk Gubernia

% of estates hiring labourers

% of estates employing farm labourers

medium

large

medium

large

Dmitrovsk

53.3

84.3

68.5

85.0

Fetezh

77.1

88.2

86.0

94.1

Lgov

58.7

78.8

73.1

96.9

Sudzha

53.0

81.1

66.9

90.5

Lastly, it must be observed that sometimes the labour-service system passes into the capitalist system and merges with it to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. For example, a peasant rents a plot of land, undertaking in return to perform a definite number of days’ work (a practice which, as we know, is most widespread; see examples in the next section). How are we to draw a line of demarcation between such a “peasant” and the West-European or Ostsee “farm labourer” who receives a plot of land on undertaking to work a definite number of days? Life creates forms that unite in themselves with remarkable gradualness systems of economy whose basic features constitute opposites. It becomes impossible to say where “labour-service” ends and where “capitalism” begins.

Having established the fundamental fact that the whole variety of forms of contemporary landlord farming amounts to two systems—the labour-service and the capitalist systems, in various combinations, we shall now proceed to give an economic description of the two systems and determine which of them is eliminating the other under the influence of the whole course of economic evolution.

III. DESCRIPTION OF THE LABOUR-SERVICE SYSTEM

Labour-service, as has already been observed above, is of exceedingly varied types. Sometimes peasants undertake for a money payment to cultivate with their own implements the fields of the landowner—so-called “job-hire,” “dessiatine employments,”* cultivation of “cycles”**⁸⁵ (i.e., one dessiatine of spring crop and one of winter crop), etc. Sometimes the peasant borrows grain or money, undertaking to work off either the entire loan or the interest on it.*** Under this form a feature peculiar to the labour-service system in general stands out with great clarity—the bondage, the usurious character of this sort of hire of labour. In some cases the peasants work “for trespass” (i.e., undertake to work off the legally established fine for cattle trespass), or work simply “out of respect” (cf. Engelhardt, loc. cit., 56), i.e., gratis, or just for a drink, so as not to lose other “employments” by the landowner. Lastly, labour-service in return for land is very widespread in the shape either of half-cropping or directly of work for land rented, for grounds used, etc.

Very often the payment for rented land assumes the most diverse forms, which sometimes are even combined, so that side by side with money rent we find rent in kind and “labour-service.” Here are a couple of examples: for every dessiatine, 1½ dess. to be cultivated+10 eggs+ 1 chicken + 1 day’s female labour; for 43 dess. of spring-crop land 12 rubles per dess., and 51 dess. of winter-crop land 16 rubles per dess. in cash+threshing of so many stacks of oats, 7 stacks of buckwheat and 20 stacks of rye+manuring of not less than 5 dessiatines of rented land with manure from own animals, at the rate of 300 cart-loads per dessiatine (Karyshev, Rentings, p. 348). In this case even the peasant’s manure is converted into a constituent part of the private landowner’s farm! The widespread and varied character of labour-service is indicated by the abundance of terms used for it: otrabotki, otbuchi, otbutki, barshchina, basarinka, posobka, panshchina, postupok, viyemka, etc. (ibid., 342). Sometimes the peasant pledges himself to perform “whatever work the owner orders” (ibid., 346), or in general to “pay heed,” “give ear” to him, to “help out.” Labour-service embraces the “whole cycle of jobs in rural life. It is as labour-service that all operations relating to field-cultivation and grain and hay harvesting get done, firewood is stocked and loads are carted” (346-347), roofs and chimneys are repaired (354, 348), and the delivery of poultry and eggs is undertaken (ibid.). An investigator of Gdov Uyezd, St. Petersburg Gubernia, quite justly remarks that the types of labour-service to be met with are of the “former, pre-Reform, corvée character” (349).*

Particularly interesting is the form of labour-service for land, so-called labour-service renting and rent payment in kind.** In the preceding chapter we have seen how capitalist relations are manifested in peasant renting of land; here we see “renting” which is simply a survival of corvée economy,* and which sometimes passes imperceptibly into the capitalist system of providing the estate with agricultural workers by alloting patches of land to them. Zemstvo statistics establish beyond doubt this connection between such “renting” and the lessors’ own farming. “With the development of their own farming on the private landowners’ estates, the owners had to guarantee themselves a supply of workers at the required time. Hence, there develops in many places the tendency among them to distribute land to the peasants on the labour-service basis, or for a part of the crop together with labour-service….” This system of farming “… is fairly widespread. The more frequently the lessors do their own farming, the smaller the amount of land available for leasing and the greater the demand for such land, the more widely does this form of land renting develop” (ibid., p. 266, cf. also 367). Thus, we have here renting of a very special kind, under which the landowner does not abandon his own farm, but which expresses the development of private-landowner cultivation, expresses not the consolidation of the peasant farm by the enlargement of area held, but the conversion of the peasant into an agricultural labourer. In the preceding chapter we have seen that on the peasant’s farm the renting of land is of contradictory significance: for some it is a profitable expansion of their farms; for others it is a deal made out of dire need. Now we see that on the landlord’s farm, too, the leasing of land is of contradictory significance: in some cases it is the transfer of the farm to another person for a payment of rent; in others it is a method of conducting one’s own farm, a method of providing one’s estate with manpower.

Let us pass to the question of the payment of labour under labour-service. The data from various sources are at one in testifying to the fact that the payment of labour where it is hired on a labour-service and bonded basis is always lower than under capitalist “free” hire. Firstly, this is proved by the fact that rent in kind, i.e., on the basis of labour-service and half-cropping (which, as we have just seen, is merely labour-service and bonded hire), is everywhere, as a general rule, more costly than money rent, very much more costly (ibid., p. 350), sometimes twice as much (ibid., 356, Rzhev Uyezd, Tver Gubernia). Secondly, rent in kind is developed to the greatest degree among the poorest groups of peasants (ibid., 261 and foll.). This is renting from dire need, “renting” by the peasant who is no longer able to resist his conversion, in this way, into an agricultural wage-worker. The well-to-do peasants do what they can to rent land for money. “The tenant takes advantage of every opportunity to pay his rent in money, and thus to reduce the cost of using other people’s land” (ibid., 265)—and we would add, not only to reduce the cost of renting the land, but also to escape bonded hire. In Rostovon-Don Uyezd the remarkable fact was even observed of money rent being abandoned in favour of skopshchina,⁸⁶ as rents went up, despite a drop in the peasants’ share of the harvest (ibid., p. 266). The significance of rent in kind, which utterly ruins the peasant and turns him into a farm labourer, is quite clearly illustrated by this fact.* Thirdly, a direct comparison between the price of labour in the case of labour-service hire and of capitalist “free” hire shows the latter to be greater. In the above-quoted publication of the Department of Agriculture, Hired Labour, etc., it is calculated that the average pay for the complete cultivation, with the peasant’s own implements, of a dessiatine of land under winter grain is 6 rubles (data for the central black-earth belt for the 8 years, 1883-1891). If, however, we calculate the cost of the same amount of work on a hired labour basis, we get 6 rubles 19 kopeks for the work of the labourer alone, not counting the work of the horse (the pay for the horse’s work cannot be put at less than 4 rubles 50 kopeks, loc. cit., 45). The compiler rightly considers this to be “absolutely abnormal” (ibid.). We would merely observe that the fact that payment for labour under purely capitalist hire is greater than under all forms of bondage and under other pre-capitalist relations has been established not only in agriculture, but also in industry, and not only in Russia, but also in other countries. Here are more precise and more detailed Zemstvo statistics on this question (Statistical Returns for Saratov Uyezd, Vol. I, Pt. III, pp. 18-19. Quoted from Mr. Karyshev’s Rentings, p. 353). (See Table on p. 203.)

Thus, under labour-service (just as under bonded hire combined with usury) the prices paid for labour are usually less than half those under capitalist hire.* Since labour service can only be undertaken by a local peasant, and one who must be “provided with an allotment,” the fact of the tremendous drop in pay clearly indicates the importance of the allotment as wages in kind. The allotment, in such cases, continues to this day to serve as a means of “guaranteeing” the landowner a supply of cheap labour. But the difference between free and “semi-free”* labour is far from exhausted by the difference in pay. Of enormous importance also is the circumstance that the latter form of labour always presupposes the personal dependence of the one hired upon the one who hires him, it always presupposes the greater or lesser retention of “other than economic pressure.” Engelhardt very aptly says that the lending of money for repayment by labour-service is explained by the greater security of such debts: to extract payment from the peasant on a distraint order is a difficult matter, “but the authorities will compel the peasant to perform the work he has undertaken to do, even if his own grain remains ungathered” (loc. cit., 216). “Only long years of slavery, of serf labour for the lord, have been able to produce the indifference” (only apparent) with which the cultivator leaves his own grain in the rain to go carting somebody else’s sheaves (ibid., 429). Without one or other form of binding the population to their domiciles, to the “community,” without a certain lack of civic rights, labour-service as a system would be impossible. It stands to reason that an inevitable consequence of the above-described features of the labour-service system is low productivity of labour: methods of farming based on labour-service can only be the most stereotyped; the labour of the bonded peasant cannot but approximate, in quality, to the labour of the serf.

Saratov Uyezd

Average prices (in rubles) paid for cultivating one dessiatine

Category of work

Under winter contract, 80 to 100% of wages being advanced

Under labour-service for the rent of arable

Hired labour, according to statements of:

according to written terms

according to statements of tenants

hirers

hired

Complete cultivation and harvesting, with carting and threshing

  9.6

—

  9.4

20.5

17.5

Ditto, without threshing (spring crops)

  6.6

—

  6.4

15.3

13.5

Ditto, without threshing (winter crops)

  7.0

—

  7.5

15.2

14.3

Tilling

  2.8

  2.8

—

  4.3

  3.7

Harvesting (reaping and carting)

  3.6

  3.7

  3.8

10.1

  8.5

Reaping (without carting)

  3.2

  2.6

  3.3

  8.0

  8.1

Mowing (without carting)

  2.1

  2.0

  1.8

  3.5

  4.0

The combination of the labour-service and the capitalist systems makes the present system of landlord farming extremely similar in its economic organisation to the system that prevailed in our textile industry before the development of large-scale machine industry. There, part of the operations was done by the merchant with his own implements and with wage-workers (fixing the yarn, dyeing and finishing the fabric, etc.), and part with the implements of peasant handicraftsmen who worked for him, using his material. Here, part of the operations is performed by wage-workers, using the employer’s implements, and another part by the labour and the implements of peasants working on the land of others. There, combined with industrial capital was merchant’s capital, and the handicraftsman, besides being weighed down by capital, was burdened with bondage, the operations of the subcontractor, the truck-system, etc. Here, likewise, combined with industrial capital is merchant’s and usurer’s capital accompanied by all forms of pay reduction and intensification of the producer’s personal dependence. There, the transitional system lasted for centuries, being based on a primitive hand-labour technique, and was smashed in some three decades by large-scale machine industry; here, labour-service has continued almost since the rise of Rus (the landowners forced the villeins into bondage as far back as the time of Russkaya Pravda⁸⁷), perpetuating routine technique, and has begun rapidly to give way to capitalism only in the post-Reform epoch. In both cases, the old system merely implies stagnation in the forms of production (and, consequently, in all social relations), and the domination of the Asiatic way of life. In both cases, the new, capitalist forms of economy constitute enormous progress, despite all the contradictions inherent in them.

IV. THE DECLINE OF THE LABOUR-SERVICE SYSTEM

The question now arises: in what relation does the labour-service system stand to the post-Reform economy of Russia?

First of all, the growth of commodity economy conflicts with the labour-service system, since the latter is based on natural economy, on unchanging technique, on inseparable ties between the landlord and the peasant. That is why this system is totally impracticable in its complete form, and every advance in the development of commodity economy and commercial agriculture undermines the conditions of its practicability.

Next we must take account of the following circumstance. From the foregoing it follows that labour-service, as practised in present-day landlord farming, should be divided into two types: 1) labour-service that can only be performed by a peasant farmer who owns draught animals and implements (e.g., cultivation of “cycle dessiatine,” ploughing, etc.), and 2) labour-service that can be performed by a rural proletarian who has no implements (for example, reaping, mowing, threshing, etc.). It is obvious that for both peasant and landlord farming, the first and the second type of labour-service are of opposite significance, and that the latter type constitutes a direct transition to capitalism, merging with it by a number of quite imperceptible transitions. In our literature labour-service is usually referred to in general, without this distinction being made. Yet in the process of the elimination of labour-service by capitalism the shifting of the centre of gravity from the first type of labour-service to the second is of enormous importance. Here is an example from Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia: “On the majority of the estates … the cultivation of the fields and the crops, i.e., the jobs on the careful fulfilment of which the harvest depends, are done by regular workers, whereas the harvesting, i.e., the job in the performance of which promptness and speed are the prime consideration, is given to neighbouring peasants to be done in return for money lent, or for the use of pasture and other grounds” (Vol. V, Pt. 2, p. 140). On such farms most of the hands are hired on the labour-service basis, but the capitalist system undoubtedly predominates, and the “neighbouring peasants” are at bottom turned into rural workers, similar to the “contract day labourers” in Germany, who also have land and also hire themselves out for a definite part of the year (see above, p. 179, footnote). The enormous drop in the number of horses owned by peasants and the increase in the number of horseless households as a result of the crop failures of the 90s* could not but exert great influence in accelerating this process of the elimination of labour-service by the capitalist system.**

Finally, one of the most important reasons for the decline of the labour-service system should be sought in the differentiation of the peasantry. The connection between labour-service (of the first type) and the middle group of the peasantry is clear and a priori—as we have already observed above—and can be proved by Zemstvo statistics. For example, the abstract for Zadonsk Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia, gives returns of the number of farms doing job-work, in the various groups of peasantry. Here are the data in percentages:

Group of householders

% of peasants taking job-work to total peasants in group

% of total

number of households

households taking job-work

Horseless

  9.9

24.5

10.5

1-horse

27.4

40.5

47.6

With 2-3 horses

29.0

31.8

39.6

   ” 4 ”

16.5

  3.2

  2.3

In uyezd

23.3

100

100

From the above it is clear that participation in job-work is less prevalent in the two extreme groups. The largest percentage of households taking job-work is to be found in the middle group of the peasantry. Since job-work is also frequently assigned in Zemstvo statistical abstracts to the category of “employments” in general, we see here, consequently, an example of the typical “employments” of the middle peasantry—exactly as in the preceding chapter we acquainted ourselves with the typical “employments” of the bottom and top groups of the peasantry. The types of “employments” examined there express the development of capitalism (commercial and industrial establishments and the sale of labour-power), whereas the type of “employments” mentioned here, on the contrary, expresses the backwardness of capitalism and the predominance of labour-service (if we assume that in the sum-total of “job-work” the predominant jobs are such as we have assigned to labour-service of the first type).

The greater the decline of natural economy and of the middle peasantry, the more vigorously is labour-service bound to be eliminated by capitalism. The well-to-do peasants cannot, naturally, serve as a basis for the labour-service system, for it is only dire need that compels the peasant to undertake the worst-paid jobs, jobs that are ruinous for his own farm. But the rural proletariat are equally unsuitable for the labour-service system, though for another reason: having no farm of his own, or possessing a miserable patch of land, the rural proletarian is not tied down to it to the extent that the “middle” peasant is, and, as a consequence, it is far easier for him to go elsewhere and hire himself out on “free” terms, i.e., for higher pay and without bondage at all. Hence the universal dissatisfaction of our agrarians at the peasants leaving for the towns or for “outside employments” generally, hence their complaints that the peasants have “little attachment” (see below, p. 250). The development of purely capitalist wage-labour saps the very roots of the labour-service system.*

It is supremely important to note that this inseparable connection between the differentiation of the peasantry and the elimination of labour-service by capitalism—a connection so obvious in theory—has long been noted by agricultural writers who have observed the various methods of farming on the landlord estates. In the preface to his collection of articles on Russian agriculture written between 1857 and 1882, Prof. Stebut points out that … “In community peasant agriculture the farmer-industrialists are becoming differentiated from the farm labourers. The former, who are becoming cultivators on a big scale, are beginning to employ farm labourers and usually cease to take job-work, unless they find it absolutely necessary to enlarge their crop area somewhat, or to obtain the use of pasture land, which in most cases cannot be done except by taking job-work; the latter, on the other hand, cannot take any job-work for lack of horses. Hence the obvious necessity for a transition, and a speedy transition, to farming based on wage-labour, since the peasants who still take job-work by the dessiatine are, due to the feeble state of their horses and to the multitude of jobs they undertake, beginning to turn out work that is bad from the viewpoint both of quality and of promptness of fulfilment” (p. 20).

References to the fact that the ruin of the peasantry is leading to the elimination of labour-service by capitalism are also made in current Zemstvo statistical material. In Orel Gubernia, for example, it has been observed that the drop in grain prices ruined many tenants and that the landowners were compelled to increase the area cultivated on capitalist lines. “Simultaneously with the expansion of the area cultivated by the landlords, we observe everywhere a tendency to replace job-work by the labour of regular farmhands and to do away with the use of peasants’ implements … a tendency to improve the cultivation of the soil by the introduction of up-to-date implements … to change the system of farming, to introduce grass crops, to expand and improve livestock farming and to make it profitable” (Agricultural Survey of Orel Gubernia for 1887-88, pp. 124-126. Quoted from P. Struve’s Critical Remarks, pp. 242-244). In Poltava Gubernia, in 1890, when grain prices were low, there was observed “a diminution in peasant renting of land … throughout the gubernia…. Correspondingly, in many places, despite the severe drop in grain prices, there was an increase in the area cultivated by landowners employing regular labour” (The Influence of Harvests, etc., I, 304). In Tambov Gubernia, a considerable increase has been observed in the prices paid for work done by horses: for the three years 1892-1894, these prices were 25 to 30% higher than for the three years 1889-1891 (Novoye Slovo, 1895, No. 3, p. 187). This rise in the cost of work done by horses, a natural result of the decline in the number of peasant horses, cannot but entail the ousting of labour-service by the capitalist system.

It is by no means our intention, of course, to use these separate references in order to prove that labour-service is being eliminated by capitalism: no complete statistics on this subject are available. We are merely using them to illustrate the point that there is a connection between the differentiation of the peasantry and the elimination of labour-service by capitalism. General and mass-scale data, which prove irrefutably that this elimination is going on, relate to the employment of machinery in agriculture and to the employment of labour freely hired. But before passing to these data, we must first deal with the views of the Narodnik economists on contemporary farming by private landowners in Russia.

V. THE NARODNIK ATTITUDE TO THE PROBLEM

The point that the labour-service system is simply a survival of corvée economy is not denied even by the Narodniks. On the contrary, it is admitted—although in an insufficiently general form—by Mr. N. —on (Sketches, §IX) and by Mr. V. V. (particularly explicitly in his article “Our Peasant Farming and Agronomy,” in Otechestvenniye Zapiski, 1882, No. 8-9). The more astonishing is it that the Narodniks do their utmost to avoid admitting the clear and simple fact that the present system of private-landowner farming is a combination of the labour-service and the capitalist systems, and that, consequently, the more developed the former, the weaker the latter, and vice versa. They avoid analysing the relation of each of these systems to the productivity of labour, to the payment of the worker’s labour, to the basic features of the post-Reform economy of Russia, etc. To put the question on this basis, on the basis of recognising the “change” actually taking place, meant to admit the inevitability of the progressive elimination of labour-service by capitalism. To avoid drawing that conclusion, the Narodniks did not stop even at idealising the labour-service system. This monstrous idealisation is the basic feature of the Narodnik views on the evolution of landlord economy. Mr. V. V. even went so far as to write that “the people … are the victors in the struggle for the form of agricultural technique, although their victory has resulted in their greater ruin” (The Destiny of Capitalism, p. 288). To admit such a “victory” is more eloquent than to admit defeat! Mr. N. —on discerned in the allotment of land to the peasants under corvée and under labour-service economy the “principle” “of linking the producer and the means of production,” but he forgot the tiny circumstance that this allotting of land served as a means of guaranteeing a supply of labour for the landlords. As we have indicated, Marx, in describing pre-capitalist systems of agriculture, analysed all the forms of economic relations that, in general, exist in Russia, and clearly emphasised the necessity of small-scale production and of a tie between the peasant and the land in the case of both labour-rent, rent in kind and money rent. But could it ever have entered his head to elevate this allotting of land to the dependent peasant into a “principle” of an eternal tie between the producer and the means of production? Did he forget even for a moment that this tie between the producer and the means of production was the source of, and condition for, medieval exploitation, constituted the basis for technical and social stagnation and necessarily required all sorts of “other than economic, pressure”?

An exactly similar idealisation of labour-service and of bondage is displayed by Messrs. Orlov and Kablukov in Moscow Zemstvo Returns when they quote as a model the farm of a certain Mme. Kostinskaya in Podolsk Uyezd (see Vol. V, Pt. I, pp. 175-176, and Vol. II, pp. 59-62, Sect. II). In Mr. Kablukov’s opinion, this farm proves “that it is possible to arrange matters in such a way as to preclude (sic!!) such an antagonism” (i.e., antagonism of interests between landlord and peasant farming) “and assist in achieving a flourishing (sic!) condition of both peasant and private farming” (Vol. V, Pt. I, pp. 175-176). It seems, then, that the flourishing condition of the peasants consists in … labour-service and bondage. They have no pastures or cattleruns (Vol. II, pp. 60-61),—which does not prevent Messrs. the Narodniks from regarding them as “sound” peasants—and rent these grounds, for which they pay the proprietress in work, performing “all the jobs on her estate … thoroughly, punctually and promptly.”*

That is the limit in idealising an economic system which is a direct survival of corvée service!

The methods employed in all such Narodnik reasoning are very simple; we have only to forget that the allotment of land to the peasant is one of the conditions of corvée or labour-service economy, we have only to omit the circumstance that this allegedly “independent” cultivator must render labour-rent, rent in kind or money rent,—and we get the “pure” idea of “the tie between the producer and the means of production.” But the actual relation between capitalism and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation does not change in the least from the fact of simply omitting these forms.**

Let us deal somewhat with another, very curious, argument of Mr. Kablukov. We have seen that he idealises labour-service; but it is remarkable that when he, as a statistician, describes real types of purely capitalist farms in Moscow Gubernia, his description, in spite of himself, and in a distorted way, is a reflection of the very facts that prove the progressive nature of capitalism in Russian agriculture. We beg the reader’s attention, and apologise in advance for our rather lengthy quotations.

Besides the old types of farms employing hired labour, there is to be found in Moscow Gubernia

“a new, recent, emergent type of farm that has totally broken with all tradition and regards things simply, in the way people regard every industry that is to serve as a source of income. Agriculture in this case is not regarded as … a lord’s hobby, as an occupation anybody may engage in…. No, here the necessity is recognised of having … special knowledge…. The basis of calculation” (as to the organisation of production) “is the same as in all other forms of production” (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. V, Pt. I, pp. 185-186).

Mr. Kablukov does not notice that this description of the new type of farm which has only “recently emerged,” in the 70s, proves precisely the progressive nature of capitalism in agriculture. It was capitalism that first turned agriculture from a “lord’s hobby” into ordinary industry, it was capitalism that first compelled people “to regard things simply,” “to break with tradition” and to equip themselves with “special knowledge.” Before capitalism this was both unnecessary and impossible, because the farms of the different manors, village communities and peasant families were “self-sufficing,” were not dependent on other farms, and no power on earth could drag them out of their age-long stagnation. Capitalism was the force which created (through the medium of the market) the social accounting of the output of the individual producers, and compelled them to reckon with the demands of social development. It is this that constitutes the progressive role of capitalism in agriculture in all European countries.

Listen now to the way Mr. Kablukov describes our purely capitalist farms:

“Only then is account taken of labour-power as a necessary factor in acting upon nature; without this factor all organisation of the landlord’s estate will be fruitless. Thus, with all appreciation of its significance, this element, at the same time, is not regarded as an independent source of income, as was the case under serfdom, or as is the case now in those instances when what is made the basis of the estate’s profitability is not the product of labour, the obtaining of which is the direct purpose of its application, not the striving to apply this labour to the production of its more valuable products and thereby to enjoy its results, but the striving to reduce the share of the product which the worker gets for himself, the desire to reduce the cost of labour to the master as near as possible to zero” (p. 186). Reference is made to farming based on labour in return for the use of cut-off lands. “Under these circumstances, for a farm to be profitable the owner requires neither knowledge nor special qualities. All that is obtained from this labour represents clear income for the owner, or at all events such income as is obtained almost without any expenditure of circulating capital. But such farming cannot, of course, be well conducted and cannot be called farming in the strict sense of the term, any more than the leasing of all pasture and other grounds can be called such; there is no economic organisation here” (186). And quoting examples of the leasing of cut-off lands in return for labour-service, the author concludes: “The main emphasis in the farm economy, the manner of extracting an income from the soil, is rooted in the exertion of influence upon the worker rather than upon matter and its forces” (189).

This argument is an extremely interesting example of how distorted is the picture of actual facts when viewed from the angle of a wrong theory. Mr. Kablukov confuses production with the social system of production. Under every social system production consists in “the exertion of influence” upon matter and its forces. Under every social system only the surplus product can be the landowner’s source of “income.” In both respects the labour-service system of economy is fully identical with the capitalist system, Mr. Kablukov’s opinion notwithstanding. The real difference between them is that labour-service necessarily presupposes the lowest productivity of labour; hence, no possibility exists for increasing income by increasing the surplus product; that can only be done by one means, namely, by employing all sorts of bonded forms of hire. Under purely capitalist economy, on the contrary, bonded forms of hire must go by the board, for the proletarian, not being tied to the land, is useless as an object of bondage;—to raise the productivity of labour becomes not only possible, but also necessary as the sole means of increasing income and withstanding severe competition. Thus, the description of our purely capitalist farms, given by the very Mr. Kablukov who so zealously tried to idealise labour-service, fully confirms the fact that Russian capitalism is creating the social conditions which necessarily demand the rationalisation of agriculture and the abolition of bondage, whereas labour-service, on the contrary, precludes the possibility of rationalising agriculture and perpetuates technical stagnation and the producer’s condition of bondage. Nothing could be more frivolous than the customary Narodnik exultation over the fact that capitalism in our agriculture is weak. So much the worse if it is weak, for it only indicates the strength of pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, which are incomparably more burdensome to the producer.

VI. THE STORY OF ENGELHARDT’S FARM

Quite a special place among the Narodniks is held by Engelhardt. To criticise his appraisal of labour-service and capitalism would mean to repeat what has already been said in the preceding section. We think it far more expedient to set against Engelhardt’s Narodnik views the story of Engelhardt’s own farm. Such a critique will also be of positive value, because the evolution of this farm reflects in miniature, as it were, the main features of the evolution of all private-landowner farming in post-Reform Russia.

When Engelhardt settled down on the farm it was based on the traditional labour-service and bondage, which preclude “proper farming” (Letters from the Countryside, 559). Labour-service was the cause of the poor condition of cattle-raising, of the poor cultivation of the soil and of the monotonous persistence of obsolete systems of field cultivation (118). “I saw that it was impossible … to go on farming in the old way” (118). The competition of grain from the steppe regions was bringing down prices and making farming unprofitable (p. 83).* We would observe that from the very outset, along with the labour-service system a certain part was played on the farm by the capitalist system: wage-workers, although very few in number, were also employed on the farm when it was run in the old way (the cowman and others), and Engelhardt asserts that the wages of his farm labourer (drawn from among allotment-holding peasants) were “fabulously low” (11), low because “it was impossible to give more” considering that cattle-raising was in a bad way. The low productivity of labour made it impossible to raise wages. Thus, the starting-point on Engelhardt’s farm was the features, familiar to us, of all Russian farms: labour-service, bondage, the very lowest productivity of labour, “incredibly low” payment of labour, routine farming.

What changes did Engelhardt introduce into this state of things? He began to sow flax—a commercial and industrial crop requiring the employment of labour on a big scale. The commercial and capitalist character of the cultivation was accordingly enhanced. But how was he to obtain labour? Engelhardt tried at first to employ in the new (commercial) cultivation the old system, that of labour-service. Nothing came of that; the work was badly done, the “dessiatine” proved to be beyond the strength of the peasants, who resisted with all their might “gang work” and bonded terms of labour. “The system had to be changed. Meanwhile I got on my feet. I acquired my own horses, harness, carts, ploughs and harrows and was already in a position to run the farm with regular workers. I began to produce flax, partly with my regular workers and partly on a job basis, hiring labourers for definite jobs” (218). Thus, the transition to the new system of farming and to commercial cultivation demanded the replacement of labour-service by the capitalist system. To increase productivity of labour, Engelhardt resorted to the well-tried method of capitalist production: piece work. Women were engaged to work by the stack, or the pood, and Engelhardt (not without some naïve triumph) tells of the success of this system; the cost of cultivation increased (from 25 rubles per dess. to 35 rubles), but profit also increased by 10 to 20 rubles; the women’s productivity of labour increased following the change from bonded to hired labour (from half a pood per night to a whole pood) and the earnings of the women increased to 30-50 kopeks per day (“unprecedented in our parts”). The local textile merchant was full of praise for Engelhardt: “Your flax has given a great fillip to trade” (219).

Applied at first to the cultivation of the commercial crop, hired labour gradually began to embrace other agricultural operations. One of the first operations to be withdrawn by capital from the labour-service system was threshing. It is well known that on all farms run by private landowners this work is mostly performed on capitalist lines. “Part of the land,” wrote Engelhardt, “I lease to peasants for cultivation in cycles, for otherwise I would find it hard to cope with the reaping of the rye” (211). Thus, labour-service functions as a direct transition to capitalism, by ensuring the farmer a supply of day labourers in the busiest season. At first cycle-cultivation included threshing, but here, too, the poor quality of the work done compelled the farmer to resort to hired labour. Land began to be leased for cycle-cultivation without threshing, which latter was done partly by farm labourers and partly, through the medium of a contractor, by a team of wage-workers, at piece rates. Here, too, the results of replacing labour-service by the capitalist system were: 1) an increase in the productivity of labour: formerly 16 people threshed 900 sheaves per day, now 8 did 1,100 sheaves; 2) an increase in the yield; 3) a reduction in threshing time; 4) an increase in the worker’s earnings; 5) an increase in the farmer’s profits (212).

Further, the capitalist system also embraced tillage operations. Iron ploughs were introduced in place of the old wooden ones, and the work passed from the bound peasant to the farm labourer. Engelhardt triumphantly reports the success of his innovation, the diligence of the labourers, and quite justly shows that the customary accusations flung at the labourer of being lazy and dishonest are due to the “brand of serfdom” and to bonded labour “for the lord,” and that the new organisation of farming also demands something of the farmer: a display of enterprise, a knowledge of people and ability to handle them, a knowledge of the job and its scope, acquaintance with the technical and commercial aspects of agriculture—i.e., qualities that were not and could not be possessed by the Oblomovs⁸⁹ of the feudal or bondage-suffering countryside. The various changes in the technique of agriculture are inseparably connected with one another and inevitably lead to the transformation of its economy. For example, let us suppose you introduce the cultivation of flax and clover—that will immediately necessitate numerous other changes, and if these are not made, the business will not run smoothly. The ploughing implements will have to be changed and iron ploughs substituted for wooden ones, iron harrows for wooden ones, and this in turn will require a different type of horse, a different type of labourer, a different system of farming as regards the hire of labourers, etc.” (154-155).

The change in the technique of agriculture thus proved to be inseparably bound up with the elimination of labour-service by capitalism. Particularly interesting in this regard is the gradualness with which this elimination takes place: the system of farming, as hitherto, combines labour-service and capitalism, but the main weight gradually shifts from the former to the latter. Here is a description of how Engelhardt’s reorganised farm operated:

Nowadays I have much work to do, because I have changed the whole system of farming. A considerable part of the work is done by regular labourers and day labourers. The work is extremely varied. I clear brushwood for wheat growing, uproot birches for flax growing. I have rented meadow land by the Dnieper, and have sown clover, lots of rye and much flax. I need an enormous number of hands. To secure them, you have to make arrangements in good time, for when the busy season starts everybody will be occupied either at home or on other farms. This recruitment of labour is done by advancing money or grain for work to be done” (pp. 116-117).

Labour-service and bondage remained, consequently, even on a “properly” conducted farm; but, firstly, they now occupied a subordinate position as compared with free hire, and, secondly, the very labour-service underwent a change; it was mainly the second type of labour-service which remained, that implying the labour not of peasant farmers, but of regular labourers and agricultural day labourers.

Thus, Engelhardt’s own farm is better than all arguments in refuting Engelhardt’s Narodnik theories. He set out to farm on rational lines, but was unable to do so, under the given social and economic conditions, except by organising the farm on the basis of employing farm labourers. The raising of the technical level of agriculture and the supplanting of labour-service by capitalism proceeded hand in hand on this farm, as it does on all private-landowner farms in general in Russia. This process is most clearly reflected in the employment of machinery in Russian agriculture.

VII. THE EMPLOYMENT OF MACHINERY IN AGRICULTURE

The post-Reform epoch is divided into four periods as regards the development of agricultural machinery production and the employment of machinery in agriculture.* The first period covers the years immediately preceding the peasant Reform and the years immediately following it. The landlords at first rushed to purchase foreign machinery so as to get along without the “unpaid” labour of the serfs and to avoid the difficulties connected with the hiring of free workers. This attempt ended, of course, in failure; the fever soon died down, and beginning with 1863-1864 the demand for foreign machinery dropped. The end of the 70s saw the beginning of the second period, which continued until 1885. It was marked by an extremely steady and extremely rapid increase in machinery imports from abroad; home production also grew steadily, but more slowly than imports. From 1881 to 1884 there was a particularly rapid increase in imports of agricultural machinery, due partly to the abolition, in 1881, of the duty-free import of pig-iron and cast-iron for the needs of factories producing agricultural machinery. The third period extended from 1885 to the beginning of the 90s. Agricultural machinery, hitherto imported duty-free, now had an import duty imposed (of 50 kopeks gold per pood). The high duty caused an enormous drop in machinery imports, while home production developed slowly owing to the agricultural crisis which set in at that time. Finally, the beginning of the 90s evidently saw the opening of a fourth period, marked by a fresh rise in the import of agricultural machinery, and by a particularly rapid increase of its home production.

Let us cite statistics to illustrate these points. Average annual imports of agricultural machinery at various periods were as follows:

Periods

Thousand poods

Thousand rubles

1869-1872

259.4

  787.9

1873-1876

566.3

2,283.9

1877-1880

629.5

3,593.7

1881-1884

961.8

6,318   

1885-1888

399.5

2,032   

1889-1892

509.2

2,596   

1893-1896

864.8

4,868   

There are, unfortunately, no such complete and precise data on the production of agricultural machinery and implements in Russia. The unsatisfactory state of our factory-and-works statistics, the confusing of the production of machinery in general with the production of specifically agricultural machinery, and the absence of any firmly established rules for distinguishing between “factory” and “handicraft” production of agricultural machinery—all this prevents a complete picture of the development of agricultural machinery production in Russia being obtained. Combining all the data available from the above-mentioned sources, we get the following picture of the development of agricultural machinery production in Russia:

Production, imports and employment of agricultural machinery and implements

These data show the vigorousness of the process in which primitive agricultural implements are giving way to improved ones (and, consequently, primitive forms of farming to capitalism). In 18 years the employment of agricultural machinery increased more than 3.5-fold, and this was mainly because of the expansion of home production, which more than quadrupled. Noteworthy, too, was the shifting of the main centre of such production from the Vistula and Baltic gubernias to the south-Russian steppe gubernias. Whereas in the 70s the main centre of agricultural capitalism in Russia was the western outer gubernias, in the 1890s still more outstanding areas of agricultural capitalism were created in the purely Russian gubernias.*

It is necessary to add, regarding the data just cited, that although they are based on official (and, as far as we know, the only) information on the subject under examination, they are far from complete and are not fully comparable for the different years. For the years 1876-1879 returns are available that were specially compiled for the 1882 exhibition; they are the most comprehensive, covering not only “factory” but also “handicraft” production of agricultural implements; it was estimated that in 1876-1879 there were, on the average, 340 establishments in European Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, whereas according to “factory” statistical data there were in 1879 not more than 66 factories in European Russia producing agricultural machinery and implements (computed from Orlov’s Directory of Factories and Works for 1879). The enormous difference in these figures is explained by the fact that of the 340 establishments less than one-third (100) were counted as possessing steam power, and more than half (196) as being operated by hand labour; 236 establishments of the 340 had no foundries of their own and had their castings made outside (Historico-Statistical Survey, loc. cit.). The data for 1890 and 1894, on the other hand, are from Collections of Data on Factory Industry in Russia (published by Department of Commerce and Industry).* These data do not fully cover even the “factory” production of agricultural machinery and implements; for example, in 1890, according to the Collection, there were in European Russia 149 works engaged in this industry, whereas Orlov’s Directory mentions more than 163 works producing agricultural machinery and implements; in 1894, according to the first-mentioned returns, there were in European Russia 164 works of this kind (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 21, p. 544), but according to the List of Factories and Works there were in 1894-95 over 173 factories producing agricultural machinery and implements. As for the small-scale, “handicraft” production of agricultural machinery and implements, this is not included in these data at all.** That is why there can be no doubt that the data for 1890 and 1894 greatly understate the actual facts; this is confirmed by the opinion of experts, who considered that in the beginning of the 1890s agricultural machinery and implements were manufactured in Russia to a sum of about 10 million rubles (Agriculture and Forestry, 359), and in 1895 to a sum of nearly 20 million rubles (Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 51).

Let us quote somewhat more detailed data on the types and quantity of agricultural machinery and implements manufactured in Russia. It is considered that in 1876 there were produced 25,835 implements; in 1877—29,590; in 1878—35,226; in 1879—47,892 agricultural machines and implements. How far these figures are exceeded at the present time may be seen from the following: in 1879 about 14,500 iron ploughs were manufactured, and in 1894—75,500 (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 21). “Whereas five years ago the problem of the measures to be taken to bring about the wider use of iron ploughs on peasant farms was one awaiting solution, today it has solved itself. It is no longer a rarity for a peasant to buy an iron plough; it has become a common thing, and the number of iron ploughs now acquired by peasants every year runs into thousands.”* The mass of primitive agricultural implements employed in Russia still leaves a wide field for the production and sale of iron ploughs.** The progress made in the use of ploughs has even raised the issue of the employment of electricity. According to a report in the Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta [Commercial and Industrial News] (1902, No. 6), at the Second Congress of Electrical Engineers “considerable interest was aroused by a paper read by V. A. Rzhevsky on ‘Electricity in Agriculture.’ ” The lecturer illustrated by means of some excellent drawings the tillage of fields in Germany with the aid of electric ploughs, and, from the plan and estimates he had drawn up at a landowner’s request for his estate in one of 3 the southern gubernias, cited figures showing the economies to be effected by this method of tilling the land. According to this plan, it was proposed to plough 540 dess. annually, and a part of this twice a year. The depth of furrow was to be from 4½ to 5 vershoks.* The soil was pure black earth. In addition to ploughs, the plan provided for machinery for other field-work, and also for a threshing machine and a mill, the latter of 25 h.p., calculated to operate 2,000 hours per annum. The cost of completely equipping the estate, including six versts of overhead cable of 50-mm. thickness, was estimated at 41,000 rubles. The cost of ploughing one dessiatine would be 7 rubles 40 kopeks if the mill were put up, and 8 rubles 70 kopeks with no mill. It was shown that at the local costs of labour, draught animals, etc., the use of electrical equipment would in the first case effect a saving of 1,013 rubles, while in the second case, less power being used without a mill, the saving would be 966 rubles.

No such sharp change is to be noted in the output of threshing and winnowing machines, because their production was relatively well established long ago.** In fact, a special centre for the “handicraft” production of these machines was established in the town of Sapozhok, Ryazan Gubernia, and the surrounding villages, and the local members of the peasant bourgeoisie made plenty of money at this “industry” (cf. Reports and Investigations, I, pp. 208-210). A particularly rapid expansion is observed in the production of reaping machines. In 1879, about 780 of these machines were produced; in 1893 it was estimated that 7,000 to 8,000 were sold a year, and in 1894-95 about 27,000. In 1895, for example, the works belonging to J. Greaves in the town of Berdyansk, Taurida Gubernia, “the largest works in Europe in this line of production” (Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 51) i.e., in the production of reaping machines, turned out 4,464 reapers. Among the peasants in Taurida Gubernia reaping machines have become so widespread that a special occupation has arisen, namely, the mechanical reaping of other people’s grain.*

Similar data are available for other, less widespread, agricultural implements. Broadcast seeders, for example, are now being turned out at dozens of works, and the more perfect row drills, which were produced at only two works in 1893 (Agriculture and Forestry, 360), are now turned out at seven works (Productive Forces, I, 51), whose output has again a particularly wide sale in the south of Russia. Machinery is employed in all branches of agriculture and in all operations connected with the production of some kinds of produce: in special reviews reference is made to the extended use of winnowing machines, seed-sorters, seed-cleaners (trieurs), seed-driers, hay presses, flax-scutchers, etc. In the Addendum to the Report on Agriculture for 1898, published by the Pskov Gubernia Zemstvo Administration (Severny Kurier [Northern Courier], 1899, No. 32), the increasing use of machinery is noted, particularly of flax-scutchers, in connection with the transition from flax production for home use to that for commercial purposes. There is an increase in the number of iron ploughs. Reference is made to the influence of migration in augmenting the number of agricultural machines and in raising wages. In Stavropol Gubernia (ibid., No. 33), agricultural machinery is being employed on an increasing scale in connection with the growing immigration into this gubernia. In 1882, there were 908 machines: in 1891-1893, an average of 29,275; in 1894-1896, an average of 54,874; and in 1895, as many as 64,000 agricultural implements and machines.

The growing employment of machines naturally gives rise to a demand for engines: along with steam-engines, “oil engines have latterly begun to spread rapidly on our farms” (Productive Forces, I, 56), and although the first engine of this type appeared abroad only seven years ago, there are already 7 factories in Russia manufacturing them. In Kherson Gubernia in the 70s only 134 steam-engines were registered in agriculture (Material for the Statistics of Steam-Engines in the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, 1882), and in 1881 about 500 (Historico-Statistical Survey, Vol. II, section on agricultural implements). In 1884-1886, in three uyezds of the gubernia (out of six), 435 steam threshing machines were registered. “At the present time (1895) there must be at least twice as many” (Tezyakov, Agricultural Workers and the Organisation of Sanitary Supervision over Them, in Kherson Gubernia, Kherson, 1896, p. 71). The Vestnik Finansov (1897, No. 21) states that in Kherson Gubernia, “there are about 1,150 steam-threshers, and in the Kuban Region the number is about the same, etc…. Latterly the acquisition of steam-threshers has assumed an industrial character…. There have been cases of a five-thousand-ruble threshing machine with steam-engine fully covering its cost in two or three good harvest years, and of the owner immediately getting another on the same terms. Thus, 5 and even 10 such machines are often to be met with on small farms in the Kuban Region. There they have become an essential accessory of every farm that is at all well organised.” “Generally speaking, in the south of Russia today, more than ten thousand steam-engines are in use for agricultural purposes” (Productive Forces, IX, 151).*

If we remember that the number of steam-engines in use in agriculture throughout European Russia in 1875-1878 was only 1,351 and that in 1901, according to incomplete returns (Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports for 1903), the number was 12,091, in 1902—14,609, in 1903—16,021 and in 1904—17,287, the gigantic revolution brought about by capitalism in agriculture in this country during the last two or three decades will be clear to us. Great service in accelerating this process has been rendered by the Zemstvos. By the beginning of 1897, Zemstvo agricultural machinery and implement depots “existed under the auspices of 11 gubernia and 203 uyezd Zemstvo boards, with a total working capital of about a million rubles” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 21). In Poltava Gubernia, the turnover of the Zemstvo depots increased from 22,600 rubles in 1890 to 94,900 rubles in 1892 and 210,100 rubles in 1895. In the six years, 12,600 iron ploughs, 500 winnowing machines and seed-sorters, 300 reaping machines, and 200 horse-threshers were sold. “The principal buyers of implements at the Zemstvo depots are Cossacks and peasants; they account for 70% of the total number of iron ploughs and horse-threshers sold. The purchasers of seeding and reaping machines were mainly landowners, and large ones at that, possessing over 100 dessiatines” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 4).

According to the report of the Ekaterinoslav Gubernia Zemstvo Board for 1895, “the use of improved agricultural implements in the gubernia is spreading very rapidly.” For example, in the Verkhne-Dnieper Uyezd there were:

 1894

   1895

Ploughs,

scarifiers

and

cultivators:

 ”

”

”

”

private landowners’

 5,220

  6,752

 ”

”

”

”

peasants’

27,271

30,112

Horse-threshers:

 ”

”

private landowners’

   131

   290

 ”

”

peasants’

   671

   838

(Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 6)

According to the data of the Moscow Gubernia Zemstvo Board, peasants in Moscow Gubernia in 1895 owned 41,210 iron ploughs; 20.2% of all householders owned such ploughs (Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 31). In Tver Gubernia, according to a special record made in 1896, there were 51,266 iron ploughs, owned by 16.5% of the total number of householders. In Tver Uyezd there were only 290 iron ploughs in 1890, and 5,581 in 1896 (Statistical Returns for Tver Gubernia, Vol. XIII, Pt. 2, pp. 91, 94). One can judge, therefore, how rapid is the consolidation and improvement of the farms of the peasant bourgeoisie.

VIII. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MACHINERY IN AGRICULTURE

Having established the fact of the extremely rapid development of the production of agricultural machinery and of the employment of machines in Russia’s post-Reform agriculture, we must now examine the social and economic significance of this phenomenon. From what has been said above regarding the economics of peasant and landlord farming, the following conclusions may be drawn: on the one hand, capitalism is the factor giving rise to, and extending the use of, machines in agriculture; on the other, the application of machinery to agriculture is of a capitalist character, i.e., it leads to the establishment of capitalist relations and their further development.

Let us dwell on the first of these conclusions. We have seen that the labour-service system of economy and the patriarchal peasant economy inseparably connected with it are by their very nature based on routine technique, on the preservation of antiquated methods of production. There is nothing in the internal structure of that economic regime to stimulate the transformation of technique; on the contrary, the secluded and isolated character of that system of economy, and the poverty and downtrodden condition of the dependent peasant preclude the possibility of improvements. In particular, we would point to the fact that the payment of labour under the labour-service system is much lower (as we have seen) than where hired labour is employed; and it is well known that low wages are one of the most important obstacles to the introduction of machines. And the facts do indeed show us that an extensive movement for the transformation of agricultural technique only commenced in the post-Reform period of the development of commodity economy and capitalism. The competition that is the product of capitalism, and the dependence of the cultivator on the world market made the transformation of technique a necessity, while the drop in grain prices made this necessity particularly urgent.*

To explain the second conclusion, we must examine landlord and peasant farming separately. When a landlord introduces a machine or an improved implement, he replaces the implements of the peasant (who has worked for him) with his own; he goes over, consequently, from labour-service to the capitalist system of farming. The spread of agricultural machines means the elimination of labour-service by capitalism. It is possible, of course, that a condition laid down, for example, for the leasing of land is the performance of labour-service in the shape of day-work at a reaping machine, thresher, etc., but this will be labour-service of the second type, labour-service which converts the peasant into a day labourer. Such “exceptions,” consequently, merely go to prove the general rule that the introduction of improved implements on the farms of private landowners means converting the bonded (“independent” according to Narodnik terminology) peasant into a wage-worker—in exactly the same way as the acquisition of his own instruments of production by the buyer-up, who gives out work to be done in the home, means converting the bonded “handicraftsman” into a wage-worker. The acquisition by the landlord farm of its own implements leads inevitably to the undermining of the middle peasantry, who get means of subsistence by engaging in labour-service: We have already seen that labour-service is the specific “industry” of the middle peasant, whose implements, consequently, are a component part not only of peasant, but also of landlord, farming.* Hence, the spread of agricultural machinery and improved implements and the expropriation of the peasantry are inseparably connected. That the spread of improved implements among the peasantry is of the same significance hardly requires explanation after what has been said in the preceding chapter. The systematic employment of machinery in agriculture ousts the patriarchal “middle” peasant as inexorably as the steam-power loom ousts the handicraft weaver.

The results of the employment of machinery in agriculture confirm what has been said, and reveal all the typical features of capitalist progress with all its inherent contradictions. Machines enormously increase the productivity of labour in agriculture, which, before the present epoch, was almost entirely untouched by social development. That is why the mere fact of the growing employment of machines in Russian agriculture is sufficient to enable one to see how utterly unsound is Mr. N. —on’s assertion that there is “absolute stagnation” (Sketches, p. 32) in grain production in Russia, and that there is even a “decline in the productivity” of agricultural labour. We shall return to this assertion, which contradicts generally established facts and which Mr. N. —on needed for his idealisation of the pre-capitalist order.

Further, machines lead to the concentration of production and to the practice of capitalist co-operation in agriculture. The introduction of machinery, on the one hand, calls for capital on a big scale, and consequently is only within the capacity of the big farmers; on the other hand, machines pay only when there is a huge amount of products to be dealt with; the expansion of production becomes a necessity with the introduction of machines. The wide use of reaping machines, steam-threshers, etc., is therefore indicative of the concentration of agricultural production—and we shall indeed see later that the Russian agricultural region where the employment of machines is particularly widespread (Novorossia) is also distinguished by the quite considerable size of its farms. Let us merely observe that it would be a mistake to conceive the concentration of agriculture in just the one form of extensive enlargement of the crop area (as Mr. N. —on does); as a matter of fact, the concentration of agricultural production manifests itself in the most diverse forms, depending on the forms of commercial agriculture (see next chapter on this point). The concentration of production is inseparably connected with the extensive co-operation of workers on the farm. Above we saw an example of a large estate on which the grain was harvested by setting hundreds of reaping machines into operation simultaneously. “Threshers drawn by 4 to 8 horses require from 14 to 23 and even more workers, half of whom are women and boys, i.e., semi-workers…. The 8 to 10 h. p. steam-threshers to be found on all large farms” (of Kherson Gubernia), “require simultaneously from 50 to 70 workers, of whom more than half are semi-workers, boys and girls of 12 to 17 years of age” (Tezyakov, loc. cit., 93). “Large farms, on each of which from 500 to 1,000 workers are gathered together simultaneously, may safely be likened to industrial establishments,” the same author justly observes (p. 151).* Thus, while our Narodniks were arguing that the “village community” “could easily” introduce co-operation in agriculture, life went on in its own way, and capitalism, splitting up the village community into economic groups with opposite interests, created large farms based on the extensive co-operation of wage-workers.

From the foregoing it is clear that machines create a home market for capitalism: first, a market for means of production (for the products of the machine-building industry, mining industry, etc., etc.), and second, a market for labour-power. The introduction of machines, as we have seen, leads to the replacement of labour-service by hired labour and to the creation of peasant farms employing labourers. The mass-scale employment of agricultural machinery presupposes the existence of a mass of agricultural wage-workers. In the localities where agricultural capitalism is most highly developed, this process of the introduction of wage-labour along with the introduction of machines is intersected by another process, namely, the ousting of wage-workers by the machine. On the one hand, the formation of a peasant bourgeoisie and the transition of the landowners from labour-service to capitalism create a demand for wage-workers; on the other hand, in places where farming has long been based on wage-labour, machines oust wage-workers. No precise and extensive statistics are available to show what is the general effect of both these processes for the whole of Russia, i.e., whether the number of agricultural wage-workers is increasing or decreasing. There can be no doubt that hitherto the number has been increasing (see next section). We imagine that now too it is continuing to increase**: firstly, data on the ousting of wage-workers in agriculture by machines are available only for Novorossia, while in other areas of capitalist agriculture (the Baltic and western region, the outer regions in the East, some of the industrial gubernias) this process has not yet been noted on a large scale. There still remains an enormous area where labour-service predominates, and in that area the introduction of machinery is giving rise to a demand for wage-workers. Secondly, the growth of intensive farming (introduction of root crops, for example) enormously increases the demand for wage-labour (see Chapter IV). A decline in the absolute number of agricultural (as against industrial) wage-workers must, of course, take place at a certain stage in the development of capitalism, namely, when agriculture throughout the country is fully organised on capitalist lines and when the employment of machinery for the most diverse agricultural operations is general.

As regards Novorossia, local investigators note here the usual consequences of highly developed capitalism. Machines are ousting wage-workers and creating a capitalist reserve army in agriculture. “The days of fabulous prices for hands have passed in Kherson Gubernia too. Thanks to … the increased spread of agricultural implements …” (and other causes) “the prices of hands are steadily falling” (author’s italics)…. “The distribution of agricultural implements, which makes the large farms independent of workers* and at the same time reduces the demand for hands, places the workers in a difficult position” (Tezyakov, loc. cit., 66-71). The same thing is noted by another Zemstvo Medical Officer, Mr. Kudryavtsev, in his work Migrant Agricultural Workers at the Nikolayev Fair in the Township of Kakhovka, Taurida Gubernia, and Their Sanitary Supervision in 1895 (Kherson, 1896). “The prices of hands … continue to fall, and a considerable number of migrant workers find themselves without employment and are unable to earn anything; i.e., there is created what in the language of economic science is called a reserve army of labour—artificial surplus-population” (61). The drop in the prices of labour caused by this reserve army is sometimes so great that “many farmers possessing machines preferred” (in 1895) “to harvest with hand labour rather than with machines” (ibid., 66, from Sbornik Khersonskogo Zemstva [Kherson Zemstvo Symposium], August 1895)! More strikingly and convincingly than any argument this fact reveals how profound are the contradictions inherent in the capitalist employment of machinery!

Another consequence of the use of machinery is the growing employment of female and child labour. The existing system of capitalist agriculture has, generally speaking, given rise to a certain hierarchy of workers, very much reminiscent of the hierarchy among factory workers. For example, on the estates in South Russia there are the following categories: a) full workers, adult males capable of doing all jobs b) semi-workers, women and males up to the age of 20; semi-workers are divided again into two categories: aa) 12, 13 to 15, 16 years of age—these are semi-workers in the stricter sense of the term—and bb) semi-workers of great strength; “in the language used on the estates, ‘three-quarter’ workers,”* from 16 to 20 years of age, capable of doing all the jobs done by the full worker, except mowing. Lastly, c) semi-workers rendering little help, children not under 8 and not over 14 years of age; these act as swine-herds, calf-herds, weeders and plough-boys. Often they work merely for their food and clothing. The introduction of agricultural implements “lowers the price of the full worker’s labour” and renders possible its replacement by the cheaper labour of women and juveniles. Statistics on migrant labour confirm the fact of the displacement of male by female labour: in 1890, of the total number of workers registered in the township of Kakhovka and in the city of Kherson, 12.7% were women; in 1894, for the whole gubernia women constituted 18.2% (10,239 out of 56,464); in 1895, 25.6% (13,474 out of 48,753). Children in 1893 constituted 0.7% (from 10 to 14 years of age), and in 1895, 1.69% (from 7 to 14 years of age). Among local workers on estates in Elisavetgrad Uyezd, Kherson Gubernia, children constituted 10.6% (ibid.).

Machines increase the intensity of the workers’ labour. For example, the most widespread type of reaping machine (with hand delivery) has acquired the characteristic name of “lobogreyka” or “chubogreyka,”* since working with it calls for extraordinary exertion on the part of the worker: he takes the place of the delivery apparatus (cf. Productive Forces, I, 52). Similarly, intensity of labour increases with the use of the threshing machine. The capitalist mode of employing machinery creates here (as everywhere) a powerful stimulus to the lengthening of the working day. Night work, something previously unknown, makes its appearance in agriculture too. “In good harvest years … work on some estates and on many peasant farms is carried on even at night” (Tezyakov, loc. cit., 126), by artificial illumination—torchlight (92). Finally, the systematic employment of machines results in traumatism among agricultural workers; the employment of young women and children at machines naturally results in a particularly large toll of injuries. The Zemstvo hospitals and dispensaries in Kherson Gubernia, for example, are filled, during the agricultural season, “almost exclusively with traumatic patients” and serve as “field hospitals, as it were, for the treatment of the enormous army of agricultural workers who are constantly being disabled as a result of the ruthless destructive work of agricultural machines and implements” (ibid., 126). A special medical literature is appearing that deals with injuries caused by agricultural machines. Proposals are being made to introduce compulsory regulations governing the use of agricultural machines (ibid.). The large-scale manufacture of machinery imperatively calls for public control and regulation of production in agriculture, as in industry. Of the attempts to introduce such control we shall speak below.

Let us note, in conclusion, the extremely inconsistent attitude of the Narodniks towards the employment of machinery in agriculture. To admit the benefit and progressive nature of the employment of machinery, to defend all measures that develop and facilitate it, and at the same time to ignore the fact that machinery in Russian agriculture is employed in the capitalist manner, means to sink to the viewpoint of the small and big agrarians. Yet what our Narodniks do is precisely to ignore the capitalist character of the employment of agricultural machinery and improved implements, without even attempting to analyse what types of peasant and landlord farms introduce machinery. Mr. V. V. angrily calls Mr. V. Chernyayev “a representative of capitalist technique” (Progressive Trends, 11). Presumably it is Mr. V. Chernyayev, or some other official in the Ministry of Agriculture, who is to blame for the fact that the employment of machinery in Russia is capitalist in character! Mr. N. —on, despite his grandiloquent promise “not to depart from the facts” (Sketches, XIV), has preferred to ignore the fact that it is capitalism that has developed the employment of machinery in our agriculture, and he has even invented the amusing theory that exchange reduces the productivity of labour in agriculture (p. 74)! To criticise this theory, which is proclaimed without any analysis of the facts, is neither possible nor necessary. Let us confine ourselves to citing a small sample of Mr. N. —on’s reasoning. “If,” says he, “the productivity of labour in this country were to double, we should have to pay for a chetvert (about six bushels) of wheat not 12 rubles, but six, that is all” (234). Not all, by far, most worthy economist. “In this country” (as indeed in any society where there is commodity economy), the improvement of technique is undertaken by individual farmers, the rest only gradually following suit. “In this country,” only the rural entrepreneurs are in a position to improve their technique. “In this country,” this progress of the rural entrepreneurs, small and big, is inseparably connected with the ruin of the peasantry and the creation of a rural proletariat. Hence, if the improved technique used on the farms of rural entrepreneurs were to become socially necessary (only on that condition would the price be reduced by half), it would mean the passing of almost the whole of agriculture into the hands of capitalists, it would mean the complete proletarisation of millions of peasants, it would mean an enormous increase in the non-agricultural population and an increase in the number of factories (for the productivity of labour in our agriculture to double, there must be an enormous development of the machine-building industry, the mining industry, steam transport, the construction of a mass of new types of farm buildings, shops, warehouses, canals, etc., etc.). Mr. N. —on here repeats the little error of reasoning that is customary with him: he skips over the consecutive steps that are necessary with the development of capitalism, he skips over the intricate complex of social-economic changes which necessarily accompany the development of capitalism, and then weeps and wails over the danger of “destruction” by capitalism.

IX. WAGE-LABOUR IN AGRICULTURE

We now pass to the principal manifestation of agricultural capitalism—to the employment of hired labour. This feature of post-Reform economy was marked most strongly in the outer regions of south and east European Russia, in that mass shift of agricultural wage-workers known as the “agricultural migration.” For this reason we shall first cite data concerning this main region of agricultural capitalism in Russia and then examine the data relating to the whole of Russia.

The tremendous movements of our peasants in search of work for hire have long ago been noted in our literature. Reference to them was made by Flerovsky (Condition of the Working Class in Russia, St. Petersburg, 1869), who tried to determine their relative incidence in the various gubernias. In 1875, Mr. Chaslavsky gave a general review of “agricultural outside employments” (Compendium of Political Knowledge, Vol. II) and noted their real significance (“there was formed … something in the nature of a semi-vagrant population … something in the nature of future farm labourers”). In 1887, Mr. Raspopin gathered together Zemstvo statistics on this phenomenon and regarded them not as “employments” of the peasants in general, but as a process of the formation of a class of wage-workers in agriculture. In the 90s, the works of Messrs. S. Korolenko, Rudnev, Tezyakov, Kudryavtsev and Shakhovskoi appeared, thanks to which a much fuller study of this phenomenon was made.

The principal area to which agricultural wage-workers migrate embraces Bessarabia, Kherson, Taurida, Ekaterinoslav, Don, Samara, Saratov (southern part) and Orenburg gubernias. We confine ourselves to European Russia, but it must be observed that the movement spreads, ever further afield (especially in the recent period), and covers the North Caucasus and the Ural region, etc. Data concerning capitalist agriculture in this area (the area of commercial grain farming) will be given in the next chapter; there, too, we shall point to other localities to which agricultural labourers migrate. The principal area from which agricultural labourers migrate is the central black-earth gubernias: Kazan, Simbirsk, Penza, Tambov, Ryazan, Tula, Orel, Kursk, Voronezh, Kharkov, Poltava, Chernigov, Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia.* Thus the movement of workers proceeds from the most thickly-populated to the most thinly-populated localities, the ones being colonised; from the localities where serfdom was most developed to those where it was least developed**; from localities where labour-service is most developed to localities where it is little developed and capitalism is highly developed. Hence, the workers flee from “semi-free” to free labour. It would be a mistake to think that this flight amounts exclusively to a movement from thickly-populated to thinly-populated areas. A study of the movement of workers (Mr. S. Korolenko, loc. cit.) has revealed the singular and important fact that workers migrate from many areas in such great numbers as to create a shortage of hands in these places, one that is compensated by the arrival of workers from other places. Hence, the departure of workers expresses not only the tendency of the population to spread more evenly over the given territory, but also the tendency of the workers to go to areas where conditions are better. This tendency will become quite clear to us if we recall that in the area of departure, the area of labour-service, agricultural workers’ wages are particularly low, while in the area of attraction, the area of capitalism, wages are far higher.*

As to the extent of “agricultural migration,” general data exist only in the above-mentioned book by Mr. S. Korolenko, who calculates the surplus of workers (relative to the local demand for them) at 6,360,000 for the whole of European Russia, including 2,137,000 in the above-enumerated 15 gubernias of agricultural emigration, whereas in the 8 gubernias of immigration the shortage of workers is estimated at 2,173,000 persons. Despite the fact that Mr. S. Korolenko’s methods of calculation are by no means always satisfactory, his general conclusions (as we shall see repeatedly below) must be regarded as approximately correct, and the number of migratory workers not only not an exaggeration, but if anything an understatement of the facts. There can be no doubt that part of these two million workers who come to the South are non-agricultural workers. But Mr. Shakhovskoi (loc. cit.) estimates quite arbitrarily, approximately, that industrial workers account for half this number. Firstly, we know from all sources that the workers who migrate to this region are mainly agricultural, and secondly, agricultural workers come there not only from the gubernias mentioned above. Mr. Shakhovskoi himself quotes a figure which confirms Mr. S. Korolenko’s calculations. He states that in 11 black-earth gubernias (which are included in the above-described area from which agricultural workers emigrate) there were issued in 1891 a total of 2,000,703 passports and identity cards (loc. cit., p. 24), whereas according to Mr. S. Korolenko’s calculations the number of workers who left these gubernias was only 1,745,913. Consequently, Mr. S. Korolenko’s figures are not in the least exaggerated, and the total number of migratory rural workers in Russia must obviously be over 2 million.** The existence of such a mass of “peasants” who abandon their homes and allotments (where they have homes and allotments) vividly testifies to the tremendous process of the conversion of small cultivators into rural proletarians, of the enormous demand by growing agricultural capitalism for wage-labour.

The question now arises, what is the total number of rural wage-workers in European Russia, both migratory and resident? The only attempt to answer this question that we know is the one made in Mr. Rudnev’s work Peasant Industries in European Russia (Sbornik Saratovskogo Zemstva [Symposium of the Saratov Zemstvo], 1894, Nos. 6 and 11). This work, an extremely valuable one, gives a summary of the Zemstvo statistics for 148 uyezds in 19 gubernias of European Russia. The total number of “industrialists” is put at 2,798,122, out of 5,129,863 working males (18 to 60 years of age), i.e., 55% of the total number of working peasants.* Under “agricultural industries” the author includes only work as hired agricultural labourers (farm labourers, day labourers, herdsmen, stockyard workers). An estimate of the percentage of agricultural workers to the total number of males of working age in various gubernias and districts of Russia, leads the author to the conclusion that in the black-earth belt about 25% of all working males are engaged in hired agricultural labour, and in the non-black-earth area about 10%. This gives us the number of agricultural workers in European Russia as 3,395,000, or, in round numbers, 3½ million (Rudnev, loc. cit., p. 448. This number is about 20% of the total number of males of working age). It must be observed in this connection that, according to Mr. Rudnev, “day labour and agricultural job-work were placed in the category of industries by the statisticians only when they were the chief occupation of the given person or family” (loc. cit., 446).*

Mr. Rudnev’s figure should be regarded as the minimum, because, firstly, the Zemstvo census returns are more or less out-of-date, relating to the 80s and at times even to the 70s, and because, secondly, in determining the percentage of agricultural workers, no account whatever was taken of the Baltic and Western gubernias, where agricultural capitalism is highly developed. For want of other data, however, we are obliged to take this figure of 3½ million.

It appears, consequently, that about one-fifth of the peasants have already reached a position where their “chief occupation” is that of wage-labour for rich peasants and landlords. We see here the first group of the entrepreneurs who present a demand for the labour-power of the rural proletariat. These are the rural entrepreneurs, who employ about half of the bottom group of the peasantry. Thus, there is to be observed a complete interdependence between the formation of a class of rural entrepreneurs and the expansion of the bottom group of the “peasantry,” i.e., the increase in the number of rural proletarians. Among these rural entrepreneurs a prominent part is played by the peasant bourgeoisie: for example, in 9 uyezds of Voronezh Gubernia, 43.4% of the farm labourers are employed by peasants (Rudnev, 434). Were we to take this percentage as the standard for all rural workers and for the whole of Russia, it would be seen that the peasant bourgeoisie present a demand for some one and a half million agricultural workers. One and the same “peasantry” throws on to the market millions of workers in search of employers—and presents an impressive demand for wage-workers.

X. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIRED LABOUR IN AGRICULTURE

Let us now attempt to depict the principal features of the new social relations that take shape in agriculture with the employment of hired labour, and to define their significance.

The agricultural workers who come to the South in such masses belong to the poorest strata of the peasantry. Of the workers who come to Kherson Gubernia, make the journey on foot, since they lack the money for railway fare; “they tramp for hundreds and thousands of versts along the railway track and the banks of navigable rivers, admiring the splendid pictures of rapidly-moving trains and smoothly-gliding ships” (Tezyakov, 35). On the average, the worker takes with him about 2 rubles*; often enough he even lacks the money to pay for a passport, and gets a monthly identity card for ten kopeks. The journey takes from 10 to 12 days, and after such a long tramp (sometimes undertaken barefoot in the cold spring mud), the traveller’s feet swell and become calloused and bruised. About of the workers travel on dubi (large boats made out of rough boards, holding from 50 to 80 persons and usually packed to the limit). The reports of an official commission (the Zvegintsev Commission)⁹¹ note the grave danger of this form of travel: “not a year passes but that one, two or even more of these overcrowded dubi go to the bottom with their passengers” (ibid., 34). The overwhelming majority of the workers have allotments, but of absolutely insignificant dimensions. “As a matter of fact,” Mr. Tezyakov quite justly observes, “all these thousands of agricultural workers are landless village proletarians, for whom outside employments are now the sole means of livelihood…. Landlessness is growing rapidly, and at the same time is swelling the ranks of the rural proletariat” (77). Striking confirmation of the rapidity of this growth is the number of worker novices, i.e., of those seeking employment for the first time. These novices constitute as many as 30%. Incidentally, this figure enables us to judge how rapid is the process that creates bodies of permanent agricultural workers.

The mass migration of workers has given rise to special forms of hire peculiar to highly-developed capitalism. In the South and South-East, numerous labour markets have arisen where thousands of workers gather and employers assemble. These markets are usually held in towns, industrial centres, trading villages and at fairs. The industrial character of the centres is of particular attraction to the workers, who readily accept employment on non-agricultural jobs, too. Thus, in Kiev Gubernia, labour markets are held in Shpola and Smela (large centres of the beet-sugar industry), and in the town of Belaya Tserkov. In Kherson Gubernia, they are held in the commercial villages (Novoukrainka, Birzula and Mostovoye, where on Sundays over 9,000 workers gather, and many other villages), at railway stations (Znamenka, Dolinskaya, etc.), and in towns (Elisavetgrad, Bobrinets, Voznesensk, Odessa, and others). In the summer, townspeople, labourers and “cadets” (the local name for tramps) from Odessa also come to hire themselves out for agricultural work. In Odessa rural workers hire themselves out in what is called Seredinskaya Square (or the “Mowers’ Market”). “The workers make for Odessa, avoiding other markets, in the hope of getting better earnings here” (Tezyakov, 58). The township of Krivoi Rog is an important centre where workers are hired for agriculture and mining. In Taurida Gubernia, the township of Kakhovka is particularly noted for its labour market, where formerly as many as 40,000 workers gathered; in the nineties from 20,000 to 30,000 gathered there, and now, judging from certain data, the number is still smaller. In Bessarabia Gubernia, mention should be made of the town of Akkerman; in Ekaterinoslav Gubernia, of the town of Ekaterinoslav, and Lozovaya Station; in Don Gubernia, of Rostov-on-Don, frequented every year by as many as 150,000 workers. In North Caucasus, of the towns of Ekaterinodar and Novorossiisk, Tikhoretskaya Station, and other places. In Samara Gubernia, of the village of Pokrovskaya (opposite Saratov), the village of Balakovo and other places. In Saratov Gubernia, of the towns of Khvalynsk and Volsk. In Simbirsk Gubernia, of the town of Syzran. Thus, capitalism has created in the outer regions a new form of the “combination of agriculture with industries,” namely, the combination of agricultural and non-agricultural hired labour. Such a combination is possible on a wide scale only in the period of the final and highest stage of capitalism, that of large-scale machine industry, which attenuates the importance of skill, of “hand labour,” facilitates the transition from one occupation to another, and levels the forms of hire.*

Indeed, the forms of hire in this locality are very peculiar and very characteristic of capitalist agriculture. All the semi-patriarchal, semi-bonded forms of hired labour which one so frequently meets in the central black-earth belt disappear here. The only relationships left are those between hirers and hired, a commercial transaction for the purchase and sale of labour-power. As always under developed capitalist relations, the workers prefer hire by the day, or by the week, which enables them to make the pay correspond more exactly to the demand for labour. “Prices are fixed for the area of each market (within a radius of about 40 versts) with mathematical precision, and it is very hard for the employers to beat down the price, because the muzhik who has come to the market prefers to lie around or go on to another place rather than work for lower pay” (Shakhovskoi, 104). It goes without saying that violent fluctuations in prices paid for labour cause innumerable breaches of contract—only not on one side, as the employers usually claim, but on both sides: “concerted action is taken by both sides”: the labourers agree among themselves to demand more, and the employers—to offer less (ibid., 107).* How openly “callous cash payment” reigns here in the relations between the classes may be seen, for example, from the following fact: “experienced employers know very well” that the workers will “give in” only when they have eaten up their food stock. “A farmer related that when he came to the market to hire workers … he walked among them, poking with his stick at their knapsacks (sic !): if they had bread left, he would not talk to them; he would leave the market” and wait “until the knapsacks in the market were empty” (from the Selsky Vestnik [Rural Herald], 1890, No. 15, ibid., 107-108).

As under developed capitalism anywhere, so here, we see that the worker is particularly oppressed by small capital. The big employer is forced by sheer commercial considerations** to abstain from petty oppression, which is of little advantage and is fraught with considerable loss should disputes arise. That is why the big employers, for example (those employing from 300 to 800 workers), try to keep their workers from leaving at the end of the week, and themselves fix prices according to the demand for labour; some even adopt a system of wage increases if the price of labour in the area goes up—and all evidence goes to show that these increases are more than compensated by better work and the absence of disputes (ibid., 130-132; 104). A small employer, on the contrary, sticks at nothing. “The farmsteaders and German colonists carefully ‘choose’ their workers and pay them 15 or 20% more; but the amount of work they ‘squeeze’ out of them is 50 per cent more” (ibid., 116). The “wenches” who work for such an employer “don’t know day from night,” as they themselves say. The colonists who hire mowers get their sons to follow on their heels (i.e., to speed up the workers!) in shifts, so that the speeders-up, replacing one another three times a day, come with renewed energy to drive the workers on: “that is why it is so easy to recognise those who have worked for the German colonists by their haggard appearance. Generally speaking, the farmsteaders and the Germans avoid hiring those who have formerly worked on landowners’ estates. ‘You’ll not stand the pace with us,’ they say quite frankly” (ibid.).*

Large-scale machine industry, by concentrating large masses of workers, transforming the methods of production, and destroying all the traditional, patriarchal cloaks and screens that have obscured the relations between classes, always leads to the directing of public attention towards these relations, to attempts at public control and regulation. This phenomenon, which has found particularly striking expression in factory inspection, is also beginning to be observed in Russian capitalist agriculture, precisely in the region where it is most developed. The question of the workers’ sanitary conditions was raised in Kherson Gubernia as early as 1875 at the Second Gubernia Congress of Doctors of the Kherson Zemstvo, and was dealt with again in 1888; in 1889 there was drawn up a programme for the study of the workers’ conditions. The investigation of sanitary conditions that was carried out (on a far from adequate scale) in 1889-1890 slightly lifted the veil concealing the conditions of labour in the remote villages. It was seen, for instance, that in the majority of cases the workers have no living quarters; where barracks are provided, they are usually very badly built from a hygienic point of view, and “not infrequently” dug-outs are met with—they are inhabited, for example, by shepherds, who suffer severely from dampness, overcrowding, cold, darkness and the stifling atmosphere. The food provided is very often unsatisfactory. The working day, as a rule, is from 12½ to 15 hours, which is much longer than the usual working day in large-scale industry (11 to 12 hours). An interval during the hottest part of the day is met with only “as an exception”—and cases of brain diseases are no rarity. Work at machines gives rise to occupational division of labour and occupational diseases. For example, working at threshing machines are “drummers” (they put the sheaves into the drum; the work is very dangerous and most laborious: thick corn-dust beats into their faces), and “pitchers” (they pitch up the sheaves; the work is so heavy that the shifts have to be changed every hour or two). Women sweep up the straw, which boys carry aside, while from 3 to 5 labourers stack it in ricks. The number employed on threshing in the whole gubernia must exceed 200,000 (Tezyakov, 94).* Mr. Tezyakov’s conclusions regarding the sanitary conditions of agricultural work, are as follows: “Generally speaking, the opinion of the ancients that the labour of the husbandman is “the pleasantest and healthiest of occupations’ is hardly sound at the present time, when the capitalist spirit reigns in agriculture. With the introduction of machinery into agriculture, the sanitary conditions of agricultural labour have not improved, but have changed for the worse. Machinery has brought into the field of agriculture a specialisation of labour so little known here before that it has had the effect of developing among the rural population occupational diseases and a host of serious injuries” (94).

A result of the investigations into sanitary conditions (after the famine year and the cholera) was the attempt to organise medical and food depots, at which the labourers were to be registered, placed under sanitary supervision and provided with cheap dinners. However modest the scale and the results of this organisation may be and however precarious its existence,* it remains an important historical fact, revealing the trends of capitalism in agriculture. At the Congress of Doctors of Kherson Gubernia it was proposed, on the basis of data gathered by practitioners: to recognise the importance of medical and food depots and the need for improving their sanitary condition and extending their activities to give them the character of labour exchanges providing information on the prices of labour and their fluctuations; to extend sanitary inspection to all more or less big farms employing considerable numbers of labourers, “as is done in industrial establishments” (p. 155); to issue strict regulations governing the employment of agricultural machines and the registration of accidents; to raise the question of the workers’ right to compensation and of providing better and cheaper steam transport. The Fifth Congress of Russian Doctors passed a resolution calling the attention of the Zemstvos concerned to the activities of the Kherson Zemstvo in the organisation of medical and sanitary inspection.

__________

In conclusion, let us return to the Narodnik economists. Above we have seen that they idealise labour-service and close their eyes to the progressive nature of capitalism as compared with that system. Now we must add that they are unfavourably disposed to the “migration” of workers, and favour local “employments.” Here, for example, is how this usual Narodnik view is expressed by Mr. N. —on: “The peasants … set off in quest of work…. How far, one may ask, is it advantageous from the economic point of view? Not personally for each individual peasant, but how far is it advantageous for the peasantry as a whole, from the national-economic point of view? … What we want is to point to the purely economic disadvantage of the annual peregrination, God knows where to, for the entire summer, when it would seem that one could find plenty of occupations at hand…” (23-24).

We assert, the Narodnik theory notwithstanding, that the “peregrination” of the workers not only yields “purely economic” advantages to the workers themselves, but in general should be regarded as progressive; that public attention should not be directed towards replacing outside employments by local “occupations close at hand,” but, on the contrary, towards removing all the obstacles in the way of migration, towards facilitating it in every way, towards improving and reducing the costs of all conditions of the workers’ travel, etc. The grounds for our assertion are as follows:

1) “Purely economic” advantage accrues to the workers from “peregrination” in that they go to places where wages are higher, where their position as seekers of employment is a more advantageous one. Simple as this argument is, it is too often forgotten by those who love to rise to a higher, allegedly “national-economic” point of view.

2) “Peregrination” destroys bonded forms of hire and labour-service.

Let us recall, for example, that formerly, when migration was little developed, the southern landowners (and other employers) readily resorted to the following system of hiring labourers: they sent their agents to the northern gubernias and (through the medium of rural officials) hired tax-defaulters on terms extremely disadvantageous to the latter.* Those offering employment consequently enjoyed the advantage of free competition, but those seeking it did not. We have quoted instances of the peasant’s readiness to flee from labour-service and bondage even to the mines.

It is not surprising, therefore, that on the question of “peregrination” our agrarians go hand in hand with the Narodniks. Take Mr. S. Korolenko, for example. In his book he quotes numerous opinions of landlords in opposition to the “migration” of workers, and adduces a host of “arguments” against “outside employments”: “dissipation,” “rowdy habits,” “drunkenness,” “dishonesty,” “the striving to leave the family in order to get rid of it and escape parental supervision,” “the craving for amusement and a brighter life,” etc. But here is a particularly interesting argument: “Finally, as the proverb says, ‘if it stay at one spot, a stone will gather moss,’ and a man who stays at one spot will certainly amass property and cherish it” (loc. cit., p. 84). The proverb does indeed very strikingly indicate what happens to a man who is tied to one spot. Mr. S. Korolenko is particularly displeased with the phenomenon we referred to above, namely, that “too” many workers leave certain gubernias and that the shortage thus created is made good by the arrival of workers from other gubernias. In noting this fact as regards, for example, Voronezh Gubernia, Mr. S. Korolenko points to one of the reasons for this, namely, the large number of peasants possessing gift-land allotments. “Evidently such peasants, who are relatively worse off materially and are not worried about their all too meagre property, more frequently fail to carry out the obligations they undertake and in general more readily leave for other gubernias, even when they could find plenty of employment at home.” “Such peasants, having little attachment (sic!) to their own inadequate allotments, and sometimes not even possessing implements, more readily abandon their homes and go to seek their fortunes far from their native villages, without troubling about employment locally, and sometimes even about obligations undertaken, since they have nothing on which distraint can be made” (ibid.).

“Little attachment!” That’s just the term.

It should give food for thought to those who talk about the disadvantages of “peregrination” and the preferableness of local “occupations close at hand”!*

3) “Peregrinations” mean creating mobility of the population. Peregrinations are one of the most important factors preventing the peasants from “gathering moss,” of which more than enough has been fastened on them by history. Unless the population becomes mobile, it cannot develop, and it would be naïve to imagine that a village school can teach people what they can learn from an independent acquaintance with the different relations and orders of things in the South and in the North, in agriculture and in industry, in the capital and in the backwoods.

CHAPTER IV

THE GROWTH OF COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE

Having examined the internal economic structure of peasant and landlord economy, we must now take up the question of the changes in agricultural production and ask: do these changes express a growth of capitalism and of the home market?

I. GENERAL DATA ON AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN POST-REFORM RUSSIA AND ON THE TYPES OF COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE

Let us glance first of all at the general statistics on grain production in European Russia. The considerable harvest fluctuations render the data for individual periods or for individual years quite useless.* It is necessary to take different periods and the data for a whole number of years. We have at our disposal the following data: for the period of the 60s, the data for 1864-1866 (Military Statistical Abstract, IV, St. Petersburg, 1871, data of gubernatorial reports). For the 70s, the returns of the Department of Agriculture for the entire decade (Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1883). And lastly, for the 1880s, we have data for the five years of 1883-1887 (Statistics of the Russian Empire, IV); this five-year period can represent the whole of the eighties, since the average harvest for the ten years, 1880-1889, is even somewhat higher than for the five years 1883-1887 (see Agriculture and Forestry in Russia, published for the Chicago Exhibition, pp. 132 and 142). Further, in order to judge of the trend of evolution in the 90s we take the data for the decade 1885-1894 (Productive Forces, I, 4). Lastly, the data for 1905 (Yearbook of Russia, 1906) are quite adequate for a judgement of the present time. The 1905 harvest was only a little lower than the average for the five years 1900-1904.

Let us compare all these data.*

Fifty gubernias of European Russia⁹³

We see from this that until the 1890s the post-Reform era is characterised by an undoubted increase in the production both of cereals and potatoes. The productivity of agricultural labour rises: firstly, the size of the net yield grows faster than that of the sown area (with occasional exceptions); secondly, we must bear in mind that the proportion of the population engaged in agricultural production steadily diminished during this period owing to the diversion of the population from agriculture to commerce and industry, and also owing to the migration of peasants beyond the bounds of European Russia.** What is particularly noteworthy is the fact that it is commercial agriculture that is growing: there is an increase in the amount of grain gathered (after subtracting seed) per head of the population, while among this population there is an ever-growing division of social labour; there is an increase in the commercial and industrial population; the agricultural population splits up into rural entrepreneurs and a rural proletariat; there is an extension of specialisation in agriculture itself, so that the amount of grain produced for sale grows far more rapidly than the total amount of grain produced in the country. The capitalist character of the process is strikingly illustrated by the increased share of potatoes in the total agricultural production.* The increase in the area under potatoes signifies, on the one hand, an improvement in agricultural technique (the introduction of root-crops) and increased technical processing of agricultural produce (distilling and the manufacture of potato starch). On the other hand, it is, from the viewpoint of the rural entrepreneur class, the production of relative surplus-value (cheapening of the cost of maintaining labour-power, deterioration of the people’s nourishment). The data for the decade 1885-1894 show further that the crisis of 1891-1892, which tremendously intensified the expropriation of the peasantry, led to a considerable reduction in the output of cereals and to a reduction in the yield of all crops; but the process of the displacement of cereals by potatoes continued with such force that the per-capita output of potatoes increased, notwithstanding the reduced yield. Finally, the last five years (1900-1904) also show an increase in agricultural production, an increase in the productivity of agricultural labour and a worsening of the conditions of the working-class (increase in the part played by potatoes).

As we have noted above, the growth of commercial agriculture manifests itself in the specialisation of agriculture. Mass-scale and gross data on the production of all crops can give (and then not always) only the most general indications of this process, since the specific features of the different areas thereby disappear. Yet it is precisely the segregation of the different agricultural areas that is one of the most characteristic features of post-Reform agriculture in Russia. Thus, the Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry (Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1883), quoted by us, enumerates the following agricultural areas: the flax area, “the region where stock farming predominates,” and where, in particular, “dairy farming is considerably developed”; the region where grain crops predominate, particularly the three-field area and the area with the improved fallow or multi-field grass system (part of the steppe belt, which “is characterised by the production of the most valuable, so-called élite grains, mainly intended for the foreign market”); the beet area, and the area in which potatoes are cultivated for distilling purposes. “The economic areas indicated have arisen in European Russia comparatively recently, and with every passing year continue increasingly to develop and become more segregated” (loc. cit., p. 15).* Our task should now be, consequently, to study this process of the specialisation of agriculture, and we should ascertain whether a growth of commercial agriculture is to be observed in its various forms, whether capitalist agriculture comes into existence in the process, and whether agricultural capitalism bears the features we indicated above in analysing the general data on peasant and landlord farming. It goes without saying that for our purposes it will be sufficient if we confine ourselves to describing the principal areas of commercial agriculture.

But before examining the data for the separate areas, let us note the following: the Narodnik economists, as we have seen, do all they can to evade the fact that the characteristic feature of the post-Reform period is the growth of commercial agriculture. Naturally, in doing so they also ignore the circumstance that the drop in grain prices is bound to stimulate the specialisation of agriculture and the drawing of agricultural produce into the sphere of exchange. Here is an instance. The authors of the well-known book The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices all proceed from the postulate that the price of grain is of no importance to natural economy, and they repeat this “truism” endlessly. One of them, Mr. Kablukov, has observed, however, that under the general conditions of commodity production this postulate is substantially wrong. “It is possible, of course,” he writes, “that the grain placed on the market has cost less to produce than that grown on the consumer’s farm, in which case it would appear to be in the interest also of the consuming farm to change from cultivating cereals to other crops” (or to other occupations, we would add), “and, consequently, for it too the market price of grain assumes importance as soon as it fails to coincide with its cost of production” (I, 98, note, author’s italics). “But we cannot take that into account,” he says peremptorily. Why is that? Because, it seems: 1) a change-over to other crops is possible “only where certain conditions exist.” By means of this empty truism (everything on earth is possible only under certain conditions!) Mr. Kablukov calmly evades the fact that the post-Reform period in Russia has created, and continues to create, the very conditions that call for the specialisation of agriculture and the diversion of the population from agriculture…. 2) Because “in our climate it is impossible to find a crop equal to cereals in food value”. The argument is highly original, expressing a mere evasion of the issue. What has the food value of other crops to do with the matter, if we are dealing with the sale of these other crops and the purchase of cheap grain? … 3) Because “grain farms of the consuming type always have a rational basis for their existence.” In other words, because Mr. Kablukov “and colleagues” regard natural economy as “rational.” The argument, as you see, is irrefutable….

II. THE COMMERCIAL GRAIN-FARMING AREA

This area covers the outer region in the south and the east of European Russia, the steppe gubernias of Novorossia and the Transvolga. Agriculture is distinguished here for its extensive character and the enormous scale of the production of grain for sale. If we take the eight gubernias of Kherson, Bessarabia, Taurida, Don, Ekaterinoslav, Saratov, Samara and Orenburg, we shall find that in 1883-1887 the net crop of cereals (not including oats) for a population of 13,877,000 amounted to 41.3 million chetverts, i.e., more than one-fourth of the total net yield of the 50 gubernias of European Russia. The crop most commonly sown here is wheat—the principal export grain.* Agriculture develops here fastest of all (by comparison with the other areas of Russia), and these gubernias relegate the central black-earth gubernias, formerly in the lead, to the background:

Net per capita cereal crop in the periods**

Areas of gubernias

1864-1866

1870-1879

1883-1887

Southern-steppe

  2.09

  2.14

  3.42

Lower Volga and Transvolga

  2.12

  2.96

  3.35

Central black-earth

  3.32

  3.88

  3.28

Thus there is a shifting of the principal centre of grain production: in the 1860s and 1870s the central black-earth gubernias were ahead of all the rest, but in the 1880s they yielded priority to the steppe and Lower Volga gubernias: their production of grain began to diminish.

This interesting fact of the enormous growth of agricultural production in the area described is to be explained by the circumstance that in the post-Reform period the outer steppe regions have been colonies of the central, long-settled part of European Russia. The abundance of free land has attracted an enormous stream of settlers, who have quickly increased the area under crops.* The extensive development of commercial crops was possible only because of the close economic ties of these colonies with central Russia, on the one hand, and the European grain-importing countries, on the other. The development of industry in central Russia and the development of commercial farming in the outer regions are inseparably connected and create a market for each other. The industrial gubernias received grain from the South, selling there the products of their factories and supplying the colonies with labour, artisans (see Chapter V, §III on the migration of small industrialists to the outer regions), and means of production (timber, building materials, tools, etc.). Only because of this social division of labour could the settlers in the steppe localities engage exclusively in agriculture and sell huge quantities of grain in the home and particularly in the foreign market. Only because of their close connection with the home and foreign markets could the economic development of these localities proceed so rapidly; and it was precisely capitalist development, for along with the growth of commercial farming there was an equally rapid process of the diversion of the population into industry, the process of the growth of towns and of the formation of new centres of large-scale industry (see below, Chapters VII and VIII).**

As to the question of whether the growth of commercial farming in this area is bound up with technical progress in agriculture and with the creation of capitalist relations, that has been dealt with above. In Chapter II we saw how large the areas cultivated by peasants in these localities are and how sharply capitalist relations manifest themselves there even within the village community. In the preceding chapter we saw that in this area there has been a particularly rapid development in the use of machinery, that the capitalist farms in the outer regions attract hundreds of thousands and millions of wage-workers, with huge farms created on a scale unprecedented in agriculture, on which there is extensive co-operation of wage-workers, etc. We have little left now to add in completion of this picture.

In the outer steppe regions the privately-owned estates are not only distinguished occasionally for their enormous size, but are also the scene of farming on a very big scale. Above we made reference to crop areas of 8, 10 and 15 thousand dessiatines in Samara Gubernia. In Taurida Gubernia, Falz-Fein owns 200,000 dess., Mordvinov 80,000 dess.; two individuals own 60,000 dess. each, “and many proprietors have from 10,000 to 25,000 dessiatines” (Shakhovskoi, 42). An idea of the scale of farming can be obtained, for example, from the fact that in 1893 there were 1,100 machines (of which 1,000 belonged to the peasantry) haymaking for Falz-Fein. In Kherson Gubernia there were 3.3 million dessiatines under cultivation in 1893, of which 1.3 million dess. belonged to private owners; in five uyezds of the gubernia (without Odessa Uyezd) there were 1,237 medium-sized farms (250 to 1,000 dess. of land), 405 big farms (1,000 to 2,500 dess.) and 226 farms each of over 2,500 dess. According to data gathered in 1890 on 526 farms, they employed 35,514 workers, i.e., an average of 67 workers per farm, of whom from 16 to 30 were annual labourers. In 1893, 100 more or less big farms in Elisavetgrad Uyezd employed 11,197 workers (an average of 112 per farm!), of whom 17.4% were annual, 39.5% seasonal, and 43.1% day labourers.* Here are data on the distribution of crop area among all the agricultural undertakings in the uyezd, both of private landowners and of peasants.**

Thus, a little over 3 per cent of the peasants (and if we count only those who cultivated, 4 per cent) concentrate in their hands more than a third of the total area under crops, for the tilling and harvesting of which masses of seasonal and day labourers are required.

Lastly, here are the data for Novouzensk Uyezd, Samara Gubernia. In Chapter II we took only Russian peasants farming community allotments; now we add Germans and farmstead peasants (those farming non-community holdings). Unfortunately no data are available for the farms of private landowners.***

There is no need, apparently, to comment on these data. We have had occasion to observe that the area described is the most typical of agricultural capitalism in Russia—typical not in the agricultural sense, of course, but in the social-economic sense. These colonies, having developed with the greatest freedom, show us what relations could and should have developed in the rest of Russia, had not the numerous survivals of pre-Reform life retarded the development of capitalism. The forms, however, of agricultural capitalism, as will be seen from what follows, are extremely varied.

III. THE COMMERCIAL STOCK-FARMING AREA. GENERAL DATA ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF DAIRY FARMING

We now pass to another very important area of agricultural capitalism in Russia, namely, the region in which not cereal, but livestock produce is of predominant significance. This region embraces, apart from the Baltic and the western gubernias, the northern, the industrial and parts of some of the central gubernias (Ryazan, Orel, Tula, and Nizhni-Novgorod). Here animals are kept for dairy produce, and the whole character of agriculture is adapted to obtaining as large a quantity as possible of the more valuable market produce of this sort.* “Before our very eyes a marked transition is taking place from stock farming for manure to stock farming for dairy produce; it has been particularly noticeable during the past ten years” (work quoted in previous footnote, ibid.). It is very difficult by the use of statistics to describe the various regions of Russia in this respect, because it is not the total number of horned cattle that is here important, but the number of dairy cattle and their quality. If we take the total number of animals per hundred inhabitants, we shall find that it is biggest in the outer steppe regions of Russia and smallest in the non-black-earth belt (Agriculture and Forestry, 274); we shall find that as time goes on the number diminishes (Productive Forces, III, 6. Cf. Historico-Statistical Survey, I). Hence, we observe here what Roscher noted in his day, namely, that the number of animals per unit of the population is largest in districts of “extensive livestock farming” (W. Roscher, Nationaloekonomik des Ackerbaues. 7-te Aufl., Stuttg., 1873, S. 563-564**). We, however, are interested in intensive livestock farming, and in dairy farming in particular. We are compelled, therefore, to confine ourselves to the approximate computation made by the authors of the above-mentioned, Sketch, without claiming to make an exact estimate of the phenomenon; such a computation clearly illustrates the relative positions of the various regions of Russia as to degree of dairy-farm development. We quote this computation in extenso, supplementing it with some averages arrived at and data on the cheese-making industry in 1890 according to “factory” statistics.

This table clearly illustrates (though the data are very obsolete) the emergence of special dairy-farming areas, the development there of commercial farming (the sale of milk and milk-processing) and the increase in the productivity of dairy cattle.

To judge the development of dairy farming, we can only make use of data on butter production and cheese making. This industry arose in Russia at the very end of the 18th century (1795); cheese making on landlords’ estates began to develop in the 19th century, but suffered a severe crisis in the 1860s, which opened the period of cheese making by peasants and merchants.

The number of cheese-making establishments in the 50 gubernias of European Russia was as follows:*

In

1866

72

with

226

workers

and

output

valued

at

   119,000

rbs.

”

1879

108

”

289

”

”

”

”

”

   225,000

”

”

1890

265

”

865

”

”

”

”

”

1,350,000

”

Thus, in 25 years production increased more than tenfold; only the dynamics of the phenomenon may be judged from these data, which are extremely incomplete. Let us quote some more detailed material. In Vologda Gubernia an improvement in dairy farming began, properly speaking, in 1872, when the Yaroslavl-Vologda railway was opened; since then “farmers have begun to see to the improvement of their herds, to introduce grass cultivation, to acquire improved implements … and have tried to place dairy farming on a purely commercial basis” (Statistical Sketch, 20). In Yaroslavl Gubernia “the ground was prepared” by the so-called “cheesemaking artels” of the 70s, and “cheese making continues to develop on the basis of private enterprise, merely retaining the title of ‘artel’ ” (25); cheese-making “artels” figure—may we add—in the Directory of Factories and Works as establishments employing wageworkers. Instead of 295,000 rubles, the authors of the Sketch estimate the output of cheese and butter, according to official returns, at 412,000 rubles (computed from figures scattered throughout the book); correction of the figure brings the value of the output of fresh butter and cheese to 1,600,000 rubles, and if we add clarified butter and soft cheese, to 4,701,400 rubles, not counting either the Baltic or the western gubernias.

For the later period let us quote the following opinions from the above-cited publication of the Department of Agriculture Hired Labour, etc. Concerning the industrial gubernias in general we read: “A complete revolution in the position of the farms in this area has been brought about by the development of dairy farming”; it “indirectly has also helped to bring about an improvement in agriculture”; “dairy farming in the area is developing with every year” (258). In Tver Gubernia “there is to be observed the tendency both among private landowners and peasants to improve the methods of maintaining cattle”; the income from stock farming is estimated at 10 million rubles (274). In Yaroslavl Gubernia “dairy farming … is developing with every year…. Cheese and butter making have even begun to assume something of an industrial character … milk … is bought up from neighbours and even from peasants. One comes across cheese factories run by a whole company of owners” (285). “The general trend of private-landowner farming here,” writes a correspondent from Danilov Uyezd, Yaroslavl Gubernia, “is marked at the present time by the following: 1) the transition from three-field to five- and seven-field crop rotation, with the sowing of herbage in the fields; 2) the ploughing up of disused lands; 3) the introduction of dairy farming, and as a consequence, the stricter selection of cattle and an improvement in their maintenance” (292). The same thing is said of Smolensk Gubernia, where the value of the output of cheese and butter amounted to 240,000 rubles in 1889—according to a report of the Governor (according to statistical returns, 136,000 rubles in 1890). The development of dairy farming is noted in the Kaluga, Kovno, Nizhni-Novgorod, Pskov, Esthland and Vologda gubernias. The value of the output of butter and cheese in the last-mentioned gubernia was estimated at 35,000 rubles according to statistics for 1890, to 108,000 rubles according to the Governor’s report, and to 500,000 rubles according to local returns for 1894, which gave a total of 389 factories. “That is what the statistics say. Actually, however, there are far more factories, since, according to investigations by the Vologda Zemstvo Board, there are 224 factories in Vologda Uyezd alone.” Production is developed in three uyezds, and has partly penetrated a fourth.* One can judge from this how many times the above-quoted figures need to be multiplied in order to approach the real situation. The plain view of an expert that at the present time the number of butter and cheese-making establishments “amounts to several thousand” (Agriculture and Forestry in Russia, 299), gives a truer picture of the facts than the allegedly exact figure of 265.

Thus the data leave not the slightest doubt about the enormous development of this special type of commercial farming. The growth of capitalism was accompanied here too by the transformation of routine technique. “In the sphere of cheese making,” we read, for example, in Agriculture and Forestry, “more has been done in Russia during the last 25 years than perhaps in any other country” (301). Mr. Blazhin says the same thing in his article “Technical Progress in Dairy Farming” (Productive Forces, III, 38-45). The principal change is that the “age-old” method of leaving cream to settle has been replaced by the system of separating cream in centrifugal machines (separators);* The machine has enabled the work to be carried on irrespective of atmospheric temperature, increased the butter yield from milk by 10%, improved the quality of the product, reduced the cost of butter production (the machine requires less labour, space, and ice, as well as fewer utensils), and has led to the concentration of production. Large peasant butteries have grown up, handling “as much as 500 poods of milk a day, which was physically impossible … when the milk was left to settle” (ibid.). Improvements are being made in the instruments of production (permanent boilers, screw presses, improved cellars), and production is being assisted by bacteriology, which is providing pure cultures of the type of lactic-acid bacilli needed for fermenting cream.

Thus, in the two areas of commercial farming we have described, the technical improvements called into being by the requirements of the market were effected primarily in those operations that were easiest to change and are particularly important for the market: reaping, threshing and winnowing in commercial grain farming, and the technical processing of animal produce in the area of commercial stock farming. As to the keeping of cattle, capital finds it more profitable for the time being to leave that to the small producer: let him “diligently” and “industriously” tend “his” cattle (and charm Mr. V. V. with his diligence—see Progressive Trends, p. 73), let him bear the brunt of the hardest and roughest work of tending the milk-yielding machine. Capital possesses the latest improvements and methods not only of separating the cream from the milk, but also of separating the “cream” from this “diligence”, of separating the milk from the children of the peasant poor.

IV. CONTINUATION. THE ECONOMY OF LANDLORD FARMING IN THE AREA DESCRIBED

We have cited the evidence of agronomists and farmers to the effect that dairy farming on the landlord estates leads to the rationalisation of agriculture. Let us add here that the analysis of the Zemstvo statistics on this question made by Mr. Raspopin* fully confirms this conclusion. We refer the reader to Mr. Raspopin’s article for detailed data and give here only his main conclusion. “The interdependence of the condition of stock raising and dairy farming, on the one hand, and the number of dilapidated estates and the intensity of farming, on the other, is beyond question. The uyezds (of Moscow Gubernia) where dairy cattle raising, dairy farming, is most developed show the smallest percentage of dilapidated farms and the highest percentage of estates with highly developed field cultivation. Throughout Moscow Gubernia ploughland is being reduced and turned into meadow and pastureland, while grain rotations are yielding place to multi-field herbage rotations. Fodder grasses and dairy cattle, and not grain, are now predominant … not only on the farming estates in Moscow Gubernia but throughout the Moscow industrial district” (loc. cit.).

The scale of butter production and cheese making is particularly important precisely because it testifies to a complete revolution in agriculture, which becomes entrepreneur farming and breaks with routine. Capitalism subordinates to itself one of the products of agriculture, and all other aspects of farming are fitted in with this principal product. The keeping of dairy cattle calls forth the cultivation of grasses, the change-over from the three-field system to multi-field systems, etc. The waste products of cheese making go to fatten cattle for the market. Not only milk processing, but the whole of agriculture becomes a commercial enterprise.** The influence of cheese production and butter making is not confined to the farms on which they are carried on, since milk is often bought up from the surrounding peasants and landlords. By buying up the milk, capital subordinates to itself the small agriculturists too, particularly with the organisation of the so-called “amalgamated dairies,” the spread of which was noted in the 70s (see Sketch by Messrs. Kovalevsky and Levitsky). These are establishments organised in big towns, or in their vicinity, which process very large quantities of milk brought in by rail. As soon as the milk arrives the cream is skimmed and sold fresh, while the skimmed milk is sold at a low price to poorer purchasers. To ensure that they get produce of a certain quality, these establishments sometimes conclude contracts with the suppliers, obliging them to adhere to certain rules in feeding their cows. One can easily see how great is the significance of large establishments of this kind: on the one hand they capture the public market (the sale of skimmed milk to the poorer town-dwellers), and on the other hand they enormously expand the market for the rural entrepreneurs. The latter are given a tremendous impetus to expand and improve commercial farming. Large-scale industry brings them into line, as it were, by demanding produce of a definite quality and forcing out of the market (or placing at the mercy of the usurers) the small producer who falls below the “normal” standard. There should also operate in the same direction the grading of milk as to quality (fat content, for example), on which technicians are so busily engaged, inventing all sorts of lactodensimeters, etc., and of which the experts are so heartily in favour (cf. Productive Forces, III, 9 and 38). In this respect the role of the amalgamated dairies in the development of capitalism is quite analogous to that of elevators in commercial grain farming. By sorting grain as to quality the elevators turn it into a product that is not individual but generic (res fungibilis,⁹⁷ as the lawyers say), i.e., for the first time they adapt it fully to exchange (cf. M. Sering’s article on the grain trade in the United States of America in the symposium Landownership and Agriculture, p. 281 and foll.). Thus, the elevators give a powerful impetus to commodity-grain production and spur on its technical development by also introducing grading for quality. Such a system strikes a double blow at the small producer. Firstly, it sets up as a standard, legalises, the higher-quality grain of the big crop sowers and thereby greatly depreciates the inferior grain of the peasant poor. Secondly, by organising the grading and storing of grain on the lines of large-scale capitalist industry, it reduces the big sowers’ expenses on this item and facilitates and simplifies the sale of grain for them, thereby placing the small producer, with his patriarchal and primitive methods of selling from the cart in the market, totally at the mercy of the kulaks and the usurers. Hence, the rapid development of elevator construction in recent years means as big a victory for capital and degradation of the small commodity-producer in the grain business as does the appearance and development of capitalist “amalgamated dairies.”

From the foregoing material it is clear that the development of commercial stock farming creates a home market,* firstly, for means of production—milk-processing equipment, premises, cattle sheds, improved agricultural implements required for the change-over from the routine three-field system to multi-field crop rotations, etc.; and secondly, for labour-power. Stock farming placed on an industrial footing requires a far larger number of workers than the old stock farming “for manure.” The dairy farming area—the industrial and north-western gubernias—does really attract masses of agricultural labourers. Very many people go to seek agricultural work in the Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl and Vladimir gubernias; fewer, but nevertheless a considerable number, go to the Novgorod, Nizhni-Novgorod and other non-black-earth gubernias. According to correspondents of the Department of Agriculture in the Moscow and other gubernias private-landowner farming is actually conducted in the main by labourers from other areas. This paradox—the migration of agricultural workers from the agricultural gubernias (they come mostly from the central black-earth gubernias and partly from the northern) to the industrial gubernias to do agricultural jobs in place of industrial workers who abandon the area en masse—is an extremely characteristic phenomenon (see S. A. Korolenko on this point, loc. cit). It proves more convincingly than do any calculations or arguments that the standard of living and the conditions of the working people in the central black-earth gubernias, the least capitalist ones, are incomparably lower and worse than in the industrial gubernias, the most capitalist ones; it proves that in Russia, too, the following has become a universal fact, namely, the phenomenon characteristic of all capitalist countries, that the conditions of the workers in industry are better than those of the workers in agriculture (because in agriculture oppression by capitalism is supplemented by the oppression of pre-capitalist forms of exploitation). That explains the flight from agriculture to industry, whereas not only is there no flow from the industrial gubernias towards agriculture (for example, there is no migration from these gubernias at all), but there is even a tendency to look down upon the “raw” rural workers, who are called “cowherds” (Yaroslavl Gubernia), “cossacks” (Vladimir Gubernia) and “land labourers” (Moscow Gubernia).

It is important also to note that cattle herding requires a larger number of workers in winter than in summer. For that reason, and also because of the development of agricultural processing trades, the demand for labour in the area described not only grows, but is more evenly distributed over the whole year and over a period of years. The most reliable material for judging this interesting fact is the data on wages, if taken for a number of years. We give these data, confining ourselves to the groups of Great-Russian and Little-Russian gubernias.⁹⁸ We omit the western gubernias, owing to their specific social conditions and artificial congestion of population (the Jewish pale of settlement), and quote the Baltic gubernias only to illustrate the relations that arise where capitalism is most highly developed.*

Let us examine this table, in which the three principal columns are printed in italics. The first column shows the proportion of summer to yearly pay. The lower this proportion is, and the nearer the summer pay approximates to half the yearly pay, the more evenly is the demand for labour spread over the entire year and the less the winter unemployment. The least favourably placed in this respect are the central black-earth gubernias—the area where labour-service prevails and where capitalism is poorly developed.* In the industrial gubernias, in the dairy-farming area the demand for labour is higher and winter unemployment is less. Over a period of years, too, the pay is most stable here, as may be seen from the second column, which shows the difference between the lowest and the highest pay in the harvest season. Lastly, the difference between the pay in the sowing season and the pay in the harvest season is also least in the non-black-earth belt, i.e., the demand for workers is more evenly distributed over the spring and summer. In all respects mentioned the Baltic gubernias stand even higher than the non-black-earth gubernias, while the steppe gubernias, with their immigrant workers and with harvest fluctuations of the greatest intensity, are marked by the greatest instability of wages. Thus, the data on wages testify that agricultural capitalism in the area described not only creates a demand for wage-labour, but also distributes this demand more evenly over the whole year.

Lastly, reference must be made to one more type of dependence of the small agriculturist in the area described upon the big farmer. This is the replenishment of landlords’ herds by the purchase of cattle from peasants. The landlords find it more profitable to buy cattle from peasants driven by need to sell “at a loss” than to breed cattle themselves—just as our buyers-up in so-called handicraft industry often prefer to buy finished articles from the handicraftsmen at a ruinously cheap price rather than manufacture them in their own workshops. This fact, which testifies to the extreme degradation of the small producer, and to his being able to keep going in modern society only by endlessly reducing his requirements, is turned by Mr. V. V. into an argument in favour of small “people’s” production! … “We are entitled to draw the conclusion that our big farmers … do not display a sufficient degree of independence…. The peasant, however … reveals greater ability to effect real farming improvements” (Progressive Trends, 77). This lack of independence is expressed in the fact that “our dairy farmers … buy up the peasants’ (cows) at a price rarely amounting to half the cost of raising them—usually at not more than a third, and often even a quarter of this cost” (ibid., 71). The merchant’s capital of the stock farmers has made the small peasants completely dependent, it has turned them into its cowherds, who breed cattle for a mere song, and has turned their wives into its milkmaids.* One would think that the conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is no sense in retarding the transformation of merchant’s capital into industrial capital, no sense in supporting small production, which leads to forcing down the producer’s standard of living below that of the farm labourer. But Mr. V. V. thinks otherwise. He is delighted with the “zeal” (p. 73, loc. cit.) of the peasant in tending his cattle; he is delighted with the “good results from livestock farming” obtained by the peasant woman who “spends all her life with her cow and sheep” (80). What a blessing, to be sure! To “spend all her life with her cow” (the milk of which goes to the improved cream separator), and as a reward for this life, to receive “one-fourth of the cost” of tending this cow! Now really, how after that can one fail to declare in favour of “small people’s production”!

V. CONTINUATION. THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PEASANTRY IN THE DAIRY-FARMING AREA

In the literature dealing with the effect of dairy farming on the conditions of the peasantry, we constantly come up against contradictions: on the one hand reference is made to progress in farming, the enlargement of incomes, the improvement of agricultural technique and the acquisition of improved implements; on the other hand, we have statements about the deterioration of food, the creation of new types of bondage and the ruin of the peasants. After what was stated in Chapter II, we should not be surprised at these contradictions: we know that these opposite opinions relate to opposite groups of the peasantry. For a more precise judgement of the subject, let us take the data showing the classification of peasant households according to the number of cows per household.*

Thus, the distribution of cows among the peasants in the non-black-earth belt is found to be very similar to the distribution of draught animals among the peasants in the black-earth gubernias (see Chapter II). Moreover, the concentration of dairy cattle in the area described proves to be greater than the concentration of draught animals. This clearly points to the fact that it is with the local form of commercial farming that the differentiation of the peasantry is closely connected. The same connection is evidently indicated by the following data (unfortunately, not sufficiently complete). If we take the aggregate Zemstvo statistics (given by Mr. Blagoveshchensky; for 122 uyezds of 21 gubernias), we get an average of 1.2 cows per household. Hence, in the non-black-earth belt the peasantry evidently own more cows than in the black-earth belt, and in Petersburg Gubernia they are better off than in the non-black-earth belt in general. On the other hand, in 123 uyezds of 22 gubernias the cattleless households constitute 13%, while in the 18 uyezds we have taken, they amount to 17%, and in the 6 uyezds of Petersburg Gubernia 18.8%. Hence, the differentiation of the peasantry (in the respect we are now examining) is most marked in Petersburg Gubernia, followed by the non-black-earth belt in general. By this indication, commercial farming is the principal factor in the differentiation of the peasantry.

The data show that about half the peasant households (those having no cows, or one cow) can take only a negative part in the benefits of dairy farming. The peasant with one cow will sell milk only out of need, to the detriment of his children’s nourishment. On the other hand, about one-fifth of the households (those with 3 cows and more) concentrate in their hands probably more than half the total dairy farming since the quality of their cattle and the profitableness of their farms should be higher than in the case of the “average” peasant.* An interesting illustration of this conclusion is provided by the data on a locality where dairy farming and capitalism in general are highly developed. We refer to Petersburg Uyezd.** Dairy farming is particularly widely developed in the summer residential part of the uyezd, inhabited mainly by Russians; here the most widely cultivated crops are: grasses (23.5% of the allotment arable, as against 13.7% for the uyezd), oats (52.3% of the arable) and potatoes (10.1%). Agriculture is directly influenced by the St. Petersburg market, which needs oats, potatoes, hay, milk and horse traction (loc. cit., 168). The families of the registered population are 46.3% engaged “in the milk industry.” Of the total number of cows 91% provide milk for the market. The income from this industry amounts to 713,470 rubles (203 rubles per family, 77 rubles per cow). The nearer the locality is to St. Petersburg, the higher is the quality of the cattle and the better the attention they receive. The milk is sold in two ways: 1) to buyers-up on the spot and 2) in St. Petersburg to “dairy farms,” etc. The latter type of marketing is much more profitable, but “the majority of the farms having one or two cows, and sometimes more, are not … able to deliver their milk to St. Petersburg direct”—they have no horses, it does not pay to cart small quantities, etc. The buyers-up of the milk include not only specialist merchants, but individuals with dairies of their own. The following data are for two volosts in the uyezd:

One can judge from this how the benefits of dairy farming are distributed among all the peasants in the non-black-earth belt, among whom, as we have seen, the concentration of dairy cattle is even greater than among these 560 families. It remains for us to add that 23.1% of the peasant families in St. Petersburg Uyezd hire workers (most of whom, here, as everywhere in agriculture, are day labourers). Bearing in mind that agricultural workers are hired almost exclusively by families having fully-operating farms” (constituting only 40.4% of the total number of families in the uyezd) “the conclusion must be that more than half of such farms do not manage without hired labour” (158).

Thus, at opposite ends of Russia, in the most varying localities, in St. Petersburg and, say, Taurida gubernias, the social and economic relations within the “village community,” prove to be absolutely identical. The “muzhik-cultivators” (Mr. N. —on’s term) in both places differentiate into a minority of rural entrepreneurs and a mass of rural proletarians. The specific feature of agriculture is that capitalism subjugates one aspect of rural economy in one district, and another aspect in another, which is why identical economic relations are manifested in the most varied forms of agronomy and everyday life.

Having established the fact that in the area described, too, the peasantry splits up into opposite classes, we shall easily achieve clarity about the contradictory opinions usually expressed as to the role of dairy farming. Quite naturally, the well-to-do peasantry receive an incentive to develop and improve their farming methods and as a result grass cultivation is widespread and becomes an essential part of commercial stock-farming. The development of grass cultivation is observed, for example, in Tver Gubernia; in Kashin Uyezd, the most progressive in that gubernia, as many as one-sixth of all peasant households plant clover (Returns, XIII, 2, p. 171). It is interesting, moreover, to note that on the purchased lands a larger proportion of arable is occupied by herbage than on the allotments: the peasant bourgeoisie naturally prefer private ownership of land to communal tenure.* In the Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia (Vol. II, 1896) we also find numerous references to the increase in grass cultivation, and again mainly on purchased and rented lands.** In the same publication we find references to the spread of improved implements: iron ploughs, threshing machines, rollers, etc. Butter and cheese making, etc., are developing very considerably. In Novgorod Gubernia it was noted as far back as the beginning of the 80s that along with a general deterioration and diminution of peasant stockbreeding, there was an improvement in certain individual localities where there was a profitable market for milk and where the milk-feeding of calves was an old-established industry (Bychkov: An Essay in the House-to-House Investigation of the Economic Position and Farming of the Peasants in Three Volosts of Novgorod Uyezd, Novgorod, 1882). The milk-feeding of calves, which is also a type of commercial livestock farming, is, generally speaking, a fairly widespread industry in the Novgorod and Tver gubernias and in other places not far from the big cities (see Hired Labour, etc., published by the Department of Agriculture). “This industry,” says Mr. Bychkov, “by its very nature, brings an income to the already well-provided peasants possessing considerable numbers of cows, since with one cow, and sometimes even with two of poor yield, the milk-feeding of calves is unthinkable” (loc. cit., 101).*

But the most outstanding index of the economic successes of the peasant bourgeoisie in the area described is the hiring of labourers by peasants. The local landowners feel that they are being confronted by competitors, and in their communications to the Department of Agriculture they sometimes even attribute the shortage of workers to the fact that these are snatched up by the well-to-do peasants (Hired Labour, 490). The hiring of labourers by peasants is noted in the Yaroslavl, Vladimir, St. Petersburg and Novgorod gubernias (loc. cit., passim). A mass of such references is also scattered throughout the Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia.

This progress of the well-to-do minority, however, is a heavy burden upon the mass of the poor peasants. In Koprin Volost, Rybinsk Uyezd, Yaroslavl Gubernia, for example, one finds the spread of cheese making—on the initiative of “V. I. Blandov, the well-known founder of cheese-making artels.”** “When the poorer peasants, with only one cow each, deliver … their milk (to the cheese factory) they do so, of course, to the detriment of their own nourishment”; whereas the well-to-do peasants improve their cattle (pp. 32-33). Among the types of wage-labour undertaken, one finds employment away from home, at cheese-making establishments; from among the young peasants a body of skilled cheese makers is arising. In the Poshekhonye Uyezd “the number … of cheese and butter establishments is increasing from year to year,” but “the benefits accruing to peasant farming from cheese and butter making hardly compensate for the disadvantages to peasant life resulting from our cheese and butter establishments.” On the peasants’ own admission they are often compelled to starve, for with the opening of a cheese or butter factory in some locality, the milk is sent there and the peasants usually drink diluted milk. The system of payment in kind is coming into vogue (pp. 43, 54, 59 and others), so that it is to be regretted that our “people’s” petty production is not covered by the law prohibiting payment in kind in “capitalist” factories.*

Thus, the opinions of people directly acquainted with the matter confirm our conclusion that the majority of the peasants play a purely negative part in the progress of local agriculture. The progress of commercial farming worsens the position of the bottom groups of peasants and forces them out of the ranks of the cultivators altogether. Be it noted that reference has been made in Narodnik literature to this contradiction between the progress of dairy farming and the deterioration of the peasants’ nourishment (for the first time, I think, by Engelhardt). But it is precisely this example that enables one to see the narrowness of the Narodnik appraisal of the phenomena occurring among the peasantry and in agriculture. They note a contradiction in one form, in one locality, and do not realise that it is typical of the entire social and economic system, manifesting itself everywhere in different forms. They note the contradictory significance of one “profitable industry,” and strongly urge the “implanting” among the peasantry of all sorts of other “local industries.” They note the contradictory significance of one form of agricultural progress and do not understand that machines, for example, have exactly the same political and economic significance in agriculture as in industry.

VI. THE FLAX-GROWING AREA

We have described the first two areas of capitalist agriculture in fairly great detail because of their widespread character and of the typical nature of the relations observed there. In our further exposition we shall confine ourselves to briefer remarks on some highly important areas.

Flax is the chief of the so-called “industrial crops.” The very term indicates that we are dealing here with commercial farming. For example, in the “flax” gubernia of Pskov, flax has long been the peasants’ “first money,” to use a local expression (Military Statistical Abstract, 260). Flax growing is simply a means of making money. The post-Reform period is marked on the whole by an undoubted increase in commercial flax growing. Thus, at the end of the 60s, the output of flax in Russia was estimated at approximately 12 million poods of fibre (ibid., 260); at the beginning of the 80s at 20 million poods of fibre (Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1883, p. 74); at the present time, in the 50 gubernias of European Russia over 26 million poods of fibre are gathered.* In the flax-growing area proper (19 gubernias of the non-black-earth belt) the area under flax has changed in recent years as follows; 1893—756,600 dess.; 1894—816,500 dess.; 1895—901,800 dess.; 1896—952,100 dess., and 1897—967,500 dess. For the whole of European Russia (50 gubernias) the figure for 1896 was 1,617,000 dess. under flax and for 1897—1,669,000 dess. (Vestnik Finansov, ibid., and 1898, No. 7), as against 1,399,000 dess. at the beginning of the 1890s (Productive Forces, I, 36). Similarly, general opinions expressed in publications also testify to the growth of commercial flax growing. Thus, regarding the first two decades after the Reform, the Historico-Statistical Survey states that “the region of flax cultivation for industrial purposes has been enlarged by several gubernias” (loc. cit., 71), which is due particularly to the extension of the railways. Concerning the Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, Mr. V. Prugavin wrote at the beginning of the eighties: “The cultivation of flax … has become very widespread here during the past 10 to 15 years.” “Some large-family households sell flax to the extent of 300 to 500 rubles and more per annum…. They buy” (flax seed) “in Rostov…. The peasants in these parts are very careful in selecting seed” (The Village Community, Handicraft Industries and Agriculture of Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, Moscow, 1884, pp. 86-89). The Zemstvo Statistical Returns for Tver Gubernia (Vol. XIII, Pt. 2) notes that “the most important spring grain crops, barley and oats, are yielding place to potatoes and flax” (p. 151); in some uyezds flax occupies from ⅓ to ¾ of the area under spring crops, for example, in Zubtsov, Kashin and other uyezds, “in which flax growing has assumed the clearly expressed speculative character of an industry” (p. 145), developing particularly on rented virgin and disused land. Moreover, it is noted that in some gubernias, where free land is still available (virgin soil, wasteland, forest-cleared tracts), flax growing is particularly expanding, but in some of the old established flax-growing gubernias “the cultivation of flax is either on the old scale or is even yielding place, for example, to the newly-introduced cultivation of root-crops, vegetables, etc.” (Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 6, p. 376, and 1897, No. 29), i.e., to other types of commercial farming.

As for flax exports, during the first two decades after the Reform they increased with remarkable rapidity: from an average of 4.6 million poods in the years 1857-1861 to 8.5 million poods in the years 1867-1871 and to 12.4 million poods in the years 1877-1881; but then exports seemed to become stationary, amounting in the years 1894-1897 to an average of 13.3 million poods.* The development of commercial flax growing led, naturally, to exchange not only between agriculture and industry (sale of flax and purchase of manufactured goods), but between different types of commercial agriculture (sale of flax and purchase of grain). The following data concerning this interesting phenomenon clearly demonstrate that a home market for capitalism is created not only by the diversion of population from agriculture to industry, but also by the specialisation of commercial farming.**

Railway traffic to and from Pskov (“flax”)
Gubernia. (Averages, in thousand poods)

Periods

Outgoing flax

Incoming grain and flour

1860-1861

   255.9

     43.4

1863-1864

   551.1

   464.7

1865-1866

   793.0

   842.6

1867-1868

1,053.2

1,157.9

1869-1870

1,406.9

1,809.3

How does this growth of commercial flax growing affect the peasantry, who, as we know, are the principal flax producer?* “Travelling through Pskov Gubernia and observing its economic life, one cannot help noticing that side by side with occasional large and rich units, hamlets and villages, there are extremely poor units; these extremes are a characteristic feature of the economic life of the flax area.” “Flax growing has taken a speculative turn,” and “the greater part” of the income from flax “is pocketed by buyers-up and by those who lease out land for flax growing” (Strokin, 22-23). The ruinous rents constitute real “money rent” (see above), and the mass of the peasants are in a state of “complete and hopeless dependence” (Strokin, ibid.) upon the buyers-up. The sway of merchant’s capital was established in this locality long ago,** and what distinguishes the post-Reform period is the enormous concentration of this capital, the undermining of the monopoly of the former small buyers-up and the formation of “flax agencies” which have captured the whole flax trade. The significance of flax growing, says Mr. Strokin about Pskov Gubernia, “is expressed … in the concentration of capital in a few hands” (p. 31). Turning flax growing into a gamble, capital ruined vast numbers of small agriculturists, who worsened the quality of the flax, exhausted the land, were reduced to leasing out their allotments and finally swelled the ranks of “migratory” workers. On the other hand, a slight minority of well-to-do peasants and traders were able—and competition made it necessary—to introduce technical improvements. Couté scutchers, both hand-worked (costing up to 25 rubles) and horse-operated (three times dearer), were introduced. In 1869 there were only 557 such machines in Pskov Gubernia, in 1881 there were 5,710 (4,521 hand-worked and 1,189 horse-operated).* “Today,” we read in the Historico-Statistical Survey, “every sound peasant family engaged in flax growing has a Couté hand-machine, which has actually come to be called the ‘Pskov scutcher’ ” (loc. cit., 82-83). What proportion this minority of “sound” householders who acquire machines is to the rest of the peasantry, we have already seen in Chapter II. Instead of the primitive contrivances which cleaned the seeds very badly, the Pskov Zemstvo began to introduce improved seed-cleaners (trieurs), and “the more prosperous peasant industrialists” now find it profitable to buy these machines themselves and to hire them out to flax growers (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 29, p. 85). The bigger buyers-up of flax establish drying rooms and presses and hire workers to sort and scutch the flax (see example given by Mr. V. Prugavin, loc. cit., 115). Lastly, it should be added that the processing of flax-fibre requires quite a large number of workers: it is estimated that the cultivation of one dessiatine of flax requires 26 working days of agricultural work proper, and 77 days to extract the fibre from stalks (Historico-Statistical Survey, 72). Thus, the development of flax growing leads, on the one hand, to the farmer being more fully occupied during the winter and, on the other, to the creation of a demand for wage-labour on the part of those landlords and well-to-do peasants who engage in flax growing (see the example in Chapter III, §VI).

Thus, in the flax-growing area, too, the growth of commercial farming leads to the domination of capital and to the differentiation of the peasantry. A tremendous obstacle to the latter process is undoubtedly the ruinously high renting prices of land,** the pressure of merchant’s capital, the tying of the peasant to his allotment and the high payments for the allotted land. Hence, the wider the development of land purchase by the peasants,* and of migration in search of employment,** and the more widespread the use of improved implements and methods of cultivation, the more rapidly will merchant’s capital be supplanted by industrial capital, and the more rapidly will a rural bourgeoisie be formed from among the peasantry, and the system of labour-service for the landlord replaced by the capitalist system.

VII. THE TECHNICAL PROCESSING OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE

Above we have already had occasion to note (Chapter I, §I) that writers on agriculture, in classifying systems of farming according to the principal market product, assign the industrial or technical system of farming to a special category. The essence of this system is that the agricultural product, before going into consumption (personal or productive), undergoes technical processing. The establishments which effect this processing either constitute part of the very farms on which the raw material is produced or belong to special industrialists who buy up the raw material from the peasant farmers. From the standpoint of political economy the difference between these two types is unimportant. The growth of agricultural technical trades is extremely important as regards the development of capitalism. Firstly, this growth represents one of the forms of the development of commercial farming, and is, moreover, the form that shows most vividly the conversion of agriculture into a branch of industry of capitalist society. Secondly, the development of the technical processing of agricultural produce is usually connected intimately with technical progress in agriculture: on the one hand, the very production of the raw material for processing often necessitates agricultural improvement (the planting of root-crops, for example); on the other hand, the waste products of the processing are frequently utilised in agriculture, thus increasing its effectiveness and restoring, at least in some measure, the equilibrium, the interdependence, between agriculture and industry, the disturbance of which constitutes one of the most profound contradictions of capitalism.

We must accordingly now describe the development of technical agricultural trades in post-Reform Russia.

1) Distilling

Here we regard distilling only from the point of view of agriculture. Accordingly, there is no need for us to dwell on the rapid concentration of distilling in large plants (partly due to excise requirements), on the rapid progress of factory technique, with the consequent cheapening of production, and the increase in excise duties which has outstripped this cheapening of production and because of its excessive amount has retarded the growth of consumption and production.

Here are data for “agricultural” distilling in the whole of the Russian Empire*:

Thus, over images of the distilleries (accounting for over ⅘ of the total output) are directly connected with agriculture. Being large capitalist enterprises, these establishments lend the same character to all the landlord farms on which they are set up (the distilleries belong almost without exception to landlords, mainly to members of the nobility). The type of commercial farming under review is particularly developed in the central black-earth gubernias, in which are concentrated over images of the total number of distilleries in the Russian Empire (239 in 1896-97, of which 225 were agricultural and mixed), producing over a quarter of the total output of spirits (7,785,000 vedros in 1896-97, of which 6,828,000 at agricultural and at mixed distilleries). Thus in the area where labour-service predominates, the commercial character of agriculture most frequently (as compared with other areas) manifests itself in the distilling of vodka from grain and potatoes. Distilling from potatoes has undergone a particularly rapid development since the Reform, as may be seen from the following data relating to the whole of the Russian Empire*:

Thus, with a general twofold increase in the quantity of crops distilled, the quantity of potatoes used increased about 15-fold. This fact strikingly corroborates the proposition established above (§I in this chapter) that the enormous increase in the potato area and crop signifies the growth of precisely commercial and capitalist farming, along with improvement of agricultural technique, with the replacement of the three-field system by multi-field crop rotation, etc.* The area of the biggest development of distilling is also distinguished for the biggest (in the Russian gubernias, i.e., not counting the Baltic and the western gubernias) net per-capita harvest of potatoes. Thus in the northern black-earth gubernias the figures for 1864-1866, 1870-1879 and 1883-1887 were 0.44, 0.62 and 0.60 chetverts respectively, whereas for the whole of European Russia (50 gubernias) the corresponding figures were 0.27, 0.43 and 0.44 chetverts. As far back as the beginning of the 80s the Historico-Statistical Survey noted that “the region marked by the greatest expansion of potato cultivation covers all the gubernias of the central and northern parts of the black-earth belt, the Volga and Transvolga gubernias and the central non-black-earth gubernias” (loc. cit., p. 44).**

The expansion of potato cultivation by landlords and well-to-do peasants means an increase in the demand for hired labour; the cultivation of a dessiatine of potatoes absorbs much more labour*** than the cultivation of a dessiatine of cereals and the use of machinery in, for example, the central black-earth area is still very slight. Thus, while the number of workers engaged in the distilling industry proper has decreased,* the elimination of labour-service by the capitalist system of farming, with the cultivation of root-crops, has increased the demand for rural day labourers.

2) Beet-Sugar Production

The processing of sugar-beet is even more highly concentrated in big capitalist enterprises than distilling is, and is likewise an adjunct of the landlords’ (mainly noblemen’s) estates. The principal area of this industry is the south-western gubernias, and then the southern black-earth and central black-earth gubernias. The area under sugar-beet amounted in the 60s to about 100,000 dess.,** in the 70s to about 160,000 dess.***; in 1886-1895 to 239,000 dess.,**** in 1896-1898 to 369,000 dess.,(*) in 1900 to 478,778 dess., in 1901 to 528,076 dess. (Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta, 1901, No. 123), in 1905-06 to 483,272 dess. (Vestnik Finansov, 1906, No. 12). Hence, in the period following the Reform the area cultivated has increased more than 5-fold. Incomparably more rapid has been the growth of the amount of sugar-beet harvested and processed: on an average the weight of sugar-beet processed in the Empire in the years 1860-1864 was 4.1 million berkovets*; in 1870-1874—9.3 million; in 1875-1879—12.8 million; in 1890-1894—29.3 million; and in 1895-96 and 1897-98—35 million.** The amount of processed sugar-beet has grown since the 60s more than 8-fold. Hence, there has been an enormous increase in the beet yield, i.e., in labour productivity, on the big estates organised on capitalist lines.*** The introduction of a root-plant like beet into the rotation is indissolubly linked with the transition to a more advanced system of cultivation, with improved tillage and cattle feed, etc. “The tillage of the soil for beetroot,” we read in the Historico-Statistical Survey (Vol. I), “which, generally speaking, is rather complicated and difficult, has been brought to a high degree of perfection on many beet farms, especially in the south-western and Vistula gubernias. In different localities, various more or less improved implements and ploughs are used for tilling; in some cases even steam ploughing has been introduced” (p. 109).

This progress of large-scale capitalist farming gives rise to quite a considerable increase in the demand for agricultural wage-workers—regular and particularly day labourers—the employment of female and child labour being particularly extensive (cf. Historico-Statistical Survey, II, 32). Among the peasants of the neighbouring gubernias a special type of migration has arisen, known as migration “to sugar” (ibid., 42). It is estimated that the complete cultivation of a morg (=⅔ dess.)**** of beet land requires 40 working days (Hired Labour, 72). The Combined Material on the Position of the Rural Population (published by Committee of Ministers) estimates that the cultivation of one dessiatine of beet land, when done by machine, requires 12, and when by hand 25, working days of males, not counting women and juveniles (pp. X-XI). Thus, the cultivation of the total beet area in Russia probably engages not less than 300,000 agricultural day labourers, men and women. But the increase in the number of dessiatines under beet is not enough to give a complete idea of the demand for hired labour, since some jobs are paid for at so much per berkovets. Here, for example, is what we read in Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry in Russia (published by Ministry of State Properties, Vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1894, p. 82).

“The female population both of the town, and of the uyezd” (the town of Krolevets, Chernigov Gubernia, is referred to) “think highly of work on the beet fields; in the autumn the cleaning of beets is paid at 10 kopeks per berkovets, and two women clean from six to ten berkovets a day, but some contract to work during the growing season as well, weeding and hoeing; in that case, for the full job, including digging and cleaning, they get 25 kopeks per berkovets of cleaned beets.” The conditions of the workers on the beet plantations are extremely bad. For instance, the Vrachebnaya Khronika Kharkovskoi Gubernii* (September 1899, quoted in Russkiye Vedomosti, 1899, No. 254) cites “a number of exceedingly deplorable facts about the conditions of those working on the red-beet plantations. Thus, the Zemstvo physician, Dr. Podolsky, of the village of Kotelva, Akhtyrka Uyezd, writes: ‘In the autumn typhus usually breaks out among young people employed on the red-beet plantations of the well-to-do peasants. The sheds assigned for the workers’ leisure and sleeping quarters are kept by such planters in a very filthy condition; by the time the job ends the straw used for sleeping is literally converted into dung, for it is never changed: this becomes a breeding ground of infection. Typhus has had to be diagnosed immediately in the case of four or five patients brought in from one and the same plantation.’ In the opinion of this doctor, ‘most of the syphilis cases come from the red-beet plantations.’ Mr. Feinberg rightly asserts that ‘work on the plantations, which is no less injurious to the workers themselves and to the surrounding population than work in the factories, has particularly disastrous consequences, because large numbers of women and juveniles are engaged in it, and because the workers here are without the most elementary protection from society and the State’; in view of this, the author wholly supports the opinion expressed by Dr. Romanenko at the Seventh Congress of Doctors of Kharkov Gubernia that ‘in issuing compulsory regulations, consideration must also be given to the conditions of the workers on the beet plantations. These workers lack the most essential things; they live for months under the open sky and eat from a common bowl.’ ”

Thus, the growth of beet cultivation has enormously increased the demand for rural workers, converting the neighbouring peasantry into a rural proletariat. The increase in the number of rural workers has been but slightly checked by the inconsiderable drop in the number of workers engaged in the beet-sugar industry proper.*

3) Potato-Starch Production

From branches of technical production conducted exclusively on landlord farms let us pass to such as are more or less within the reach of the peasantry. These include, primarily, the processing of potatoes (partly also wheat and other cereals) into starch and treacle. Starch production has developed with particular rapidity in the post-Reform period owing to the enormous growth of the textile industry, which raises a demand for starch. The area covered by this branch of production is mainly the non-black-earth, the industrial, and, partly, the northern black-earth gubernias. The Historico-Statistical Survey (Vol. II) estimates that in the middle of the 60s, there were about 60 establishments with an output valued at about 270,000 rubles, while in 1880 there were 224 establishments with an output valued at 1,317,000 rubles. In 1890, according to the Directory of Factories and Works there were 192 establishments employing 3,418 workers, with an output valued at 1,760,000 rubles.** “In the past 25 years,” we read in the Historico-Statistical Survey, “the number of establishments engaged in starch production has increased 4½ times and the total output 10 ¾ times; nevertheless, this productivity is far from covering the demand for starch” (p. 116), as evidenced by the increased starch imports from abroad. Analysing the data for each gubernia, the Historico-Statistical Survey reaches the conclusion that our production of potato-starch (unlike that of wheat-starch) is of an agricultural character, being concentrated in the hands of peasants and landlords. “Showing promise of extensive development” in the future, “it is even now furnishing our rural population with considerable advantages” (126).

We shall see in a moment who enjoys these advantages. But first let us note that two processes must be distinguished in the development of starch production: on the one hand, the appearance of new small factories and the growth of peasant production, and on the other, the concentration of production in large steam-powered factories. For instance, in 1890 there were 77 steam-powered factories, with 52% of the total number of workers and 60% of the total output concentrated in them. Of these works only 11 were established before 1870, 17 in the 70s, 45 in the 80s, and 2 in 1890 (Mr. Orlov’s Directory).

To acquaint ourselves with the economy of peasant starch production, let us turn to local investigations. In Moscow Gubernia, in 1880-81, 43 villages in 4 uyezds engaged in starch making.* The number of establishments was estimated at 130, employing 780 workers and having an output valued at not less than 137,000 rubles. The industry spread mainly after the Reform; its technique gradually improved and larger establishments were formed requiring more fixed capital and showing a higher productivity of labour. Hand graters were replaced by improved ones, then horse power appeared, and finally the drum was introduced, considerably improving and cheapening production. Here are data we have compiled from a house-to-house census of “handicraftsmen,” according to size of establishment:

____________

* See Appendix to Chapter V, Industry No. 24.

Thus we have here small capitalist establishments in which, as production expands, the employment of hired labour increases and the productivity of labour rises. These establishments bring the peasant bourgeoisie considerable profit, and also improve agricultural technique. But the situation of the workers in these workshops is very unsatisfactory, owing to the extremely insanitary working conditions and the long working day.**

The peasants who own “grating” establishments farm under very favourable conditions. The planting of potatoes (on allotment, and chiefly on rented land) yields a considerably larger income than the planting of rye or oats. To enlarge their business the workshop owners rent a considerable amount of allotment land from the poor peasants. For example, in the village of Tsybino (Bronnitsy Uyezd), 18 owners of starch workshops (out of 105 peasant families in the village) rent allotments from peasants who have left in search of employment, and also from horseless peasants, thus adding to their own 61 allotments 133 more, which they have rented; concentrated in their hands are a total of 194 allotments, i.e., 44.5% of the total number of allotments in the village. “Exactly similar things,” we read in the Returns, “are met with in other villages where the starch industry is more or less developed” (loc. cit., 42).* The owners of the starch workshops have twice as much livestock as the other peasants: they average 3.5 horses and 3.4 cows per household, as against 1.5 horses and 1.7 cows among the local peasants in general. Of the 68 workshop owners (covered by the house-to-house census) 10 own purchased land, 22 rent non-allotment land and 23 rent allotment land. In short, these are typical representatives of the peasant bourgeoisie.

Exactly analogous relations are to be found in the starch-making industry in the Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia (V. Prugavin, loc. cit., p. 104 and foll.). Here, too, the workshop owners carry on production mainly with the aid of wage-labour (out of 128 workers in 30 workshops, 86 are hired); and here, too, the workshop owners are far above the mass of the peasantry as far as stock-breeding and agriculture are concerned; they use potato pulp as feed for their cattle. Even real capitalist farmers emerge from among the peasants. Mr. Prugavin describes the farm of a peasant who owns a starch works (valued at about 1,500 rubles) employing 12 wage-workers. This peasant grows potatoes on his own farm, which he has enlarged by renting land. The crop rotation is seven-field and includes clover. For the farm work he employs from 7 to 8 workers, hired from spring to autumn (“from end to end”). The pulp is used as cattle feed, and the owner intends to use the waste water for his fields.

Mr. Y. Prugavin assures us that this works enjoys “quite exceptional conditions.” Of course, in any capitalist society the rural bourgeoisie will always constitute a very small minority of the rural population, and in this sense will, if you like, be an “exception.” But this term will not eliminate the fact that in the starch-making area, as in all the other commercial farming areas in Russia, a class of rural entrepreneurs is being formed, who are organising capitalist agriculture.*

4) Vegetable-Oil Production

The extraction of oil from linseed, hemp, sunflower and other seeds is also frequently an agricultural industry. One can gauge the development of vegetable-oil production in the post-Reform period from the fact that in 1864 the vegetable-oil output had an estimated value of 1,619,000 rubles, in 1879 of 6,486,000 rubles, and in 1890 of 12,232,000 rubles.** In this branch of production, too, a double process of development is to be observed: on the one hand, small peasant (and sometimes also landlord) oil presses producing oil for sale are established in the villages. On the other hand, large steam-driven works develop, which concentrate production and oust the small establishments.*** Here we are interested solely in the agricultural processing of oil-bearing plants. “The owners of the hempseed oil presses,” we read in the Historico-Statistical Survey (Vol. II), “belong to the well-to-do members of the peasantry”; they attach particular value to vegetable-oil production because it enables them to obtain excellent feed for their cattle (oilcake). Mr. Prugavin (loc. cit.), noting the “extensive development of the production of linseed oil” in the Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, states that the peasants derive “no little advantage” from it (pp. 65-66), that crop and stock raising is conducted on a far higher level by peasants who own oil presses than by the bulk of the peasantry and that some of the oil millers also resort to the hire of rural workers (loc. cit., tables, pp. 26-27 and 146-147). The Perm handicraft census for 1894-95 also showed that crop raising is conducted on a much higher level by handicraft oil millers than by the bulk of the peasants (larger areas under crops, far more animals, better harvests, etc.), and that this improvement in cultivation is accompanied by the hiring of rural workers.* In the post-Reform period in Voronezh Gubernia, there has been a particular development of the commercial cultivation of sunflower seed, which is crushed for oil in local presses. The area under sunflowers in Russia in the 70s was estimated at about 80,000 dess. (Historico-Statistical Survey, I), and in the 80s at about 136,000 dess., of which ⅔ belonged to peasants. “Since then, however, judging by certain data, the area under this plant has considerably increased, in some places by 100 per cent and even more” (Productive Forces, I, 37). “In the village of Alexeyevka alone” (Biryuch Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia), we read in the Historico-Statistical Survey, Vol. II, “there are more than 40 oil presses, and Alexeyevka itself, solely owing to sunflowers, has prospered and grown from a wretched little hamlet into a rich township, with houses and shops roofed with sheet iron” (p. 41). How this wealth of the peasant bourgeoisie was reflected in the condition of the mass of the peasantry may be seen from the fact that in 1890, in the village of Alexeyevka, out of 2,273 families registered (13,386 persons of both sexes), 1,761 had no draught animals, 1,699 had no implements, 1,480 cultivated no land, and only 33 families did not engage in industries.*

In general, it should be stated that peasant oil presses usually figure, in Zemstvo house-to-house censuses, among the “commercial and industrial establishments,” of whose distribution and role we have already spoken in Chapter II.

5) Tobacco Growing

In conclusion, let us make some brief observations on the development of tobacco growing. The average crop in Russia for the years 1863-1867 was 1,923,000 poods from 32,161 dess.; for 1872-1878 it was 2,783,000 poods from 46,425 dess.; for the 80s, it was 4 million poods from 50,000 dess.** The number of plantations in the same periods was estimated at 75,000, 95,000 and 650,000 respectively, which evidently indicates a very considerable increase in the number of small cultivators drawn into this type of commercial farming. Tobacco growing requires a considerable number of workers. Among the types of agricultural migration note is therefore made of migration to tobacco plantations (particularly to the outer gubernias in the South, where the cultivation of tobacco has recently expanded with exceptional rapidity). Reference has already been made in publications to the fact that the workers on the tobacco plantations lead a very hard life.*

In the Survey of Tobacco Growing in Russia (Parts II and III, St. Petersburg, 1894, published by order of the Department of Agriculture), there are very detailed and interesting data on tobacco growing as a branch of commercial farming. Mr. V. S. Shcherbachov, describing tobacco growing in Malorossia, gives wonderfully precise information on three uyezds of Poltava Gubernia (Priluki, Lokhvitsa and Romny). This information, gathered by the author and arranged by the Bureau of Statistics, Poltava Gubernia Zemstvo Board, covers 25,089 peasant farms in the three uyezds that grow tobacco; they have 6,844 dessiatines under tobacco and 146,774 dessiatines under cereals. The farms are distributed as follows:

Three uyezds of Poltava Gubernia (1888)

Area in dessiatines

Groups of farms according to area under cereals

No. of farms

under tobacco

under cereals

Less

than

1

dess.

  2,231

 374

    448

From

1 to

3

”

  7,668

 895

  13,974

 ”

3 to

6

”

  8,856

 1,482

  34,967

 ”

6 to

9

”

  3,319

 854

  22,820

Over

9

”

  3,015

 3,239

  74,565

Total

25,089

 6,844

146,774

We see an enormous concentration of both the tobacco and the cereal area in the hands of the capitalist farms. Less than one-eighth of the farms (3,000 out of 25,000) hold more than half the area under cereals (74,000 dess. out of 147,000), with an average of nearly 25 dess. per farm. Almost half the area under tobacco (3,200 dess. out of 6,800) belongs to these farms, the average per farm being over 1 dessiatine, whereas for all the other groups the area under tobacco does not exceed one- to two-tenths of a dessiatine per household.

Mr. Shcherbachov, in addition, gives data showing the same farms grouped according to area under tobacco:

From this it can be seen that the concentration of the tobacco area is considerably greater than that of the cereal area. The branch of specifically commercial agriculture in this locality is concentrated in the hands of capitalists to a greater extent than is agriculture in general. Out of 25,000 farms, 2,773 account for 4,145 dess. under tobacco out of 6,844 dess., or more than three-fifths. The biggest tobacco planters, numbering 324 (a little over one-tenth of all the planters), have 2,360 dess. under tobacco, or over one-third of the total area. This averages over 7 dessiatines under tobacco per farm. To judge of the sort of farm it must be, let us recall that tobacco cultivation requires at least two workers for a period of 4 to 8 summer months, depending on the grade of tobacco.

The owner of 7 dessiatines under tobacco must therefore have at least 14 workers; in other words, he must undoubtedly base his farm on wage-labour. Some grades of tobacco require not two but three seasonal workers per dessiatine, and day labourers in addition. In a word, we see quite clearly that the greater the degree to which agriculture becomes commercial, the more highly developed is its capitalist organisation.

The preponderance of small and tiny farms among the tobacco growers (11,997 farms out of 25,089 have up to one-tenth of a dessiatine planted) does not in the least refute the fact of the capitalist organisation of this branch of commercial agriculture; for this mass of tiny farms accounts for an insignificant share of the output (11,997, i.e., nearly half the farms, have in all 522 dess. out of 6,844, or less than one-tenth). Nor do “average” figures, to which people so often confine themselves, provide a picture of the real situation (the average per farm is a little over ¼ dessiatine under tobacco).

In some uyezds the development of capitalist agriculture and the concentration of production are still more marked. In the Lokhvitsa Uyezd, for example, 229 farms out of 5,957 each have 20 dessiatines and more under cereals. Their owners have 22,799 dess. under cereals out of a total of 44,751, i.e., more than half. Each farmer has about 100 dess. under crops. Of the land under tobacco they have 1,126 dess. out of 2,003 dess. And if the farms are grouped according to area under tobacco, we have in this uyezd 132 farmers out of 5,957 with two and more dessiatines under tobacco. These 132 farmers have 1,441 dess. under tobacco out of 2,003, i.e., 72% and more than ten dessiatines under tobacco per farm. At the other extreme of the same Lokhvitsa Uyezd we have 4,360 farms (out of 5,957) having up to one-tenth of a dessiatine each under tobacco, and altogether 133 dessiatines out of 2,003, i.e., 6%.

It goes without saying that the capitalist organisation of production is accompanied here by a very considerable development of merchant’ s capital and by all sorts of exploitation outside the sphere of production. The small tobacco growers have no drying sheds, are unable to give their tobacco time to ferment and to sell it (in 3 to 6 weeks) as a finished product. They sell the unfinished product at half the price to buyers-up, who very often plant tobacco themselves on rented land. The buyers-up “squeeze the small planters in every way” (p. 31 of cited publication). Commercial agriculture is commercial capitalist production: this relation can be clearly traced (if only one is able to select the proper methods) in this branch of agriculture too.

VIII. INDUSTRIAL VEGETABLE AND FRUIT GROWING; SUBURBAN FARMING

With the fall of serfdom, “landlord fruit growing,” which had been developed on quite a considerable scale, “suddenly and rapidly fell into decline almost all over Russia.”* The construction of railways changed the situation, giving a “tremendous impetus” to the development of new, commercial fruit growing, and brought about a “complete change for the better” in this branch of commercial agriculture.** On the one hand, the influx of cheap fruit from the South undermined the industry in the centres where it was formerly conducted***; and on the other hand, industrial fruit growing developed, for example, in the Kovno, Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev and Nizhni-Novgorod gubernias, along with the expansion of the fruit market.**** Mr. V. Pashkevich points out that an investigation into the condition of fruit farming in 1893-94 revealed a considerable development of it as an industrial branch of agriculture in the previous ten years, an increase in the demand for gardeners, undergardeners, etc.(*) Statistics confirm such views: the amount of fruit carried by the Russian railways is increasing,(**) fruit imports, which increased in the first decade after the Reform, are declining.(***)

It stands to reason that commercial vegetable growing, which provides articles of consumption for incomparably larger masses of the population than fruit growing does, has developed still more rapidly and still more extensively. Industrial vegetable growing becomes widespread, firstly, near the towns(****); secondly, near factory and commercial and industrial settlements* and also along the railways; and thirdly, in certain villages, scattered throughout Russia and famous for their vegetables.** It should be observed that there is a demand for this type of produce not only among the industrial, but also among the agricultural population: let us recall that the budgets of the Voronezh peasants show a per-capita expenditure on vegetables of 47 kopeks, more than half of this expenditure being on purchased produce.

To acquaint ourselves with the social and economic relations that arise in this type of commercial agriculture we must turn to the data of local investigations in the particularly developed vegetable-growing areas. Near St. Petersburg, for example, frame and hot-house vegetable growing is widely developed, having been introduced by migratory vegetable growers from Rostov. The number of frames owned by big growers runs into thousands, and by medium growers, into hundreds. “Some of the big vegetable growers supply tens of thousands of poods of pickled cabbage to the army.”*** According to Zemstvo statistics in Petersburg Uyezd 474 households of the local population are engaged in vegetable growing (about 400 rubles income per household) and 230 in fruit growing. Capitalist relations are very extensively developed both in the form of merchant’s capital (the industry is “ruthlessly exploited by profiteers”) and in the form of hiring workers. Among the immigrant population, for example, there are 115 master vegetable growers (with an income of over 3,000 rubles each) and 711 worker vegetable growers (with an income of 116 rubles each.)****

The peasant vegetable growers near Moscow are the same sort of typical members of the rural bourgeoisie. “According to an approximate estimate, over 4 million poods of vegetables and greens reach Moscow’s markets every year. Some of the villages do a big trade in pickled vegetables: Nogatino Volost sells nearly a million vedros of pickled cabbage to factories and barracks, and even sends consignments to Kronstadt…. Commercial vegetable growing is widespread in all the Moscow uyezds, chiefly in the vicinity of towns and factories.”* “The cabbage is chopped by hired labourers who come from Volokolamsk Uyezd” (Historico-Statistical Survey, I, p. 19).

Exactly similar relations exist in the well-known vegetable-growing district in Rostov Uyezd, Yaroslavl Gubernia, embracing 55 vegetable-growing villages—Porechye, Ugodichi and others. All the land, except pastures and meadows, has long been turned into vegetable fields. The technical processing of vegetables—preserving—is highly developed.** Together with the product of the land, the land itself and labour-power are converted into commodities. Despite the “village community,” the inequality of land tenure, for example, in the village of Porechye, is very great: in one case a family of 4 has 7 “vegetable plots,” in another a family of 3 has 17; this is explained by the fact that no periodical land redistribution takes place here; only private redivisions take place, and the peasants “freely exchange” their “vegetable plots” or “patches” (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, 97-98).*** “A large part of the field-work … is done by male and female day labourers, many of whom come to Porechye in the summer season both from neighbouring villages and from neighbouring gubernias” (ibid., 99). It is estimated that in the whole of Yaroslavl Gubernia 10,322 persons (of whom 7,689 are from Rostov) engaged in “agriculture and vegetable growing” are migratory workers—i.e., in the majority of cases are wage-workers in the given occupation.* The above quoted data on the migration of rural workers to the metropolitan gubernias,¹⁰¹ Yaroslavl Gubernia, etc., should be brought into connection with the development not only of dairy farming but also of commercial vegetable growing.

Vegetable growing also includes the hot-house cultivation of vegetables, an industry that is rapidly developing among the well-to-do peasants of Moscow and Tver gubernias.** In the first-named gubernia the 1880-81 census showed 88 establishments with 3,011 frames; there were 213 workers, of whom 47 (22.6%) were hired; the total output was valued at 54,400 rubles. The average hot-house vegetable grower had to put at least 300 rubles into the “business.” Of the 74 peasants for whom house-to-house returns are given, 41 possess purchased land, and as many rent land, there is an average of 2.2 horses per peasant. It is clear from this that the hot-house vegetable industry is only within the reach of members of the peasant bourgeoisie.***

In the south of Russia melon growing also comes within the type of commercial agriculture under review. Here are some brief observations about its development in a district described in an interesting article in the Vestnik Finansov (1897, No. 16) on “industrial melon growing.” This branch of production arose in the village of Bykovo (Tsarev Uyezd, Astrakhan Gubernia) at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. The melons, which at first went only to the Volga region, were consigned, with the coming of the railways, to the capital cities. In the 80s the output “increased at least tenfold” owing to the enormous profits (150 to 200 rubles per dess.) made by the initiators of the business. Like true petty bourgeois, they did all they could to prevent the number of growers from increasing and were most careful in guarding from their neighbours the “secret” of this new and profitable occupation. Of course, all these heroic efforts of the “muzhik cultivator”* to stave off “fatal competition”** were in vain, and the industry spread much wider—to Saratov Gubernia and the Don region. The drop in grain prices in the 90s gave a particularly strong impetus to production, compelling “local cultivators to seek a way out of their difficulties in crop rotation systems.”*** The expansion of production considerably increased the demand for hired labour (melon growing requires a considerable amount of labour, so that the cultivation of one dessiatine costs from 30 to 50 rubles), and still more considerably increased the profits of the employers and ground-rent. Near “Log” Station (Gryazi-Tsaritsyn Railway), the area under water-melons in 1884 was 20 dess., in 1890 between 500 and 600 dess., and in 1896 between 1,400 and 1,500 dess., while rent rose from 30 kopeks to between 1.50 and 2 rubles and to between 4 and 14 rubles per dess. for the respective years. The over-rapid expansion of melon planting led at last, in 1896, to overproduction and a crisis, which finally confirmed the capitalist character of this branch of commercial agriculture. Melon prices fell to a point where they did not cover railway charges. The melons were left ungathered in the fields. After tasting tremendous profits the entrepreneurs now learned what losses were like. But the most interesting thing is the means they have chosen for combating the crisis: the means chosen is to win new markets, to effect such a cheapening of produce and of railway tariffs as to transform it from an item of luxury into an item of consumption for the people (and at points of production, into cattle feed). “Industrial melon growing,” the entrepreneurs assure us, “is on the road to further development; apart from high railway tariffs there is no obstacle to its further growth. On the contrary, the Tsaritsyn-Tikhoretskaya Railway now under construction … opens a new and extensive area for industrial melon growing.” Whatever the further destiny of this “industry” may be, at any rate the history of the “melon crisis” is very instructive, constituting a miniature picture, it is true, but a very vivid one, of the capitalist evolution of agriculture.

We still have to say a few words about suburban farming. The difference between it and the above-described types of commercial agriculture is that in their case the entire farm is adapted to some one chief market product. In the case of suburban farming, however, the small cultivator trades in bits of everything: he trades in his house by letting it to summer tenants and permanent lodgers, in his yard, in his horse and in all sorts of produce from his fields and farmyard: grain, cattle feed, milk, meat, vegetables, berries, fish, timber, etc.; he trades in his wife’s milk (baby-farming near the capitals), he makes money by rendering the most diverse (not always even mentionable) services to visiting townsfolk,* etc., etc.** The complete transformation by capitalism of the ancient type of patriarchal farmer, the complete subjugation of the latter to the “power of money” is expressed here so vividly that the suburban peasant is usually put in a separate category by the Narodnik who says that he is “no longer a peasant.” But the difference between this type and all preceding types is only one of form. The political and economic essence of the all-round transformation effected in the small cultivator by capitalism is everywhere the same. The more rapid the increase in the number of towns, the number of factory, commercial and industrial townships, and the number of railway stations, the more extensive is the area of the transformation of our “village-community man” into this type of peasant. We should not forget what was said in his day by Adam Smith—that improved communications tend to convert every village into a suburb.* Remote areas cut off from the outside world, already an exception, are with every passing day increasingly becoming as rare as antiquities, and the cultivator is turning with ever-growing rapidity into an industrialist subjected to the general laws of commodity production.

In thus concluding the review of the data on the growth of commercial agriculture, we think it not superfluous to repeat here that our aim has been to examine the main (by no means all) forms of commercial agriculture.

IX. CONCLUSIONS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIAN AGRICULTURE

In chapters II-IV the problem of capitalism in Russian agriculture has been examined from two angles. First we examined the existing system of social and economic relations in peasant and landlord economy, the system which has taken shape in the post-Reform period. It was seen that the peasantry have been splitting up at enormous speed into a numerically small but economically strong rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. Inseparably connected with this “depeasantising” process is the landowners’ transition from the labour-service to the capitalist system of farming. Then we examined this same process from another angle: we took as our starting-point the manner in which agriculture is transformed into commodity production, and examined the social and economic relations characteristic of each of the principal forms of commercial agriculture. It was shown that the very same processes were conspicuous in both peasant and private-landowner farming under a great variety of agricultural conditions.

Let us now examine the conclusions that follow from all the data given above.

1) The main feature of the post-Reform evolution of agriculture is its growing commercial, entrepreneur character. As regards private-landowner farming, this fact is so obvious as to require no special explanation. As regards peasant farming, however, it is not so easily established, firstly, because the employment of hired labour is not an absolutely essential feature of the small rural bourgeoisie. As we have observed above, this category includes every small commodity-producer who covers his expenditure by independent farming, provided the general system of economy is based on the capitalist contradictions examined in Chapter II. Secondly, the small rural bourgeois (in Russia, as in other capitalist countries) is connected by a number of transitional stages with the small-holding “peasant,” and with the rural proletarian who has been allotted a patch of land. This circumstance is one of the reasons for the viability of the theories which do not distinguish the existence of a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat among “the peasantry.”*

2) From the very nature of agriculture its transformation into commodity production proceeds in a special way, unlike the corresponding process in industry. Manufacturing industry splits up into separate, quite independent branches, each devoted exclusively to the manufacture of one product or one part of a product. The agricultural industry, however, does not split up into quite separate branches, but merely specialises in one market product in one case, and in another market product in another, all the other aspects of agriculture being adapted to this principal (i.e., market) product. That is why the forms of commercial agriculture show immense diversity, varying not only in different areas, but also on different farms. That is why, when examining the question of the growth of commercial agriculture, we must on no account confine ourselves to gross data for agricultural production as a whole.*

3) The growth of commercial agriculture creates a home market for capitalism. Firstly, the specialisation of agriculture gives rise to exchange between the various agricultural areas, between the various agricultural undertakings, and between the various agricultural products. Secondly, the further agriculture is drawn into the sphere of commodity circulation the more rapid is the growth of the demand made by the rural population for those products of manufacturing industry that serve for personal consumption; and thirdly, the more rapid is the growth of the demand for means of production, since neither the small nor the big rural entrepreneur is able, with the old-fashioned “peasant” implements, buildings, etc., etc., to engage in the new, commercial agriculture. Fourthly and lastly, a demand is created for labour-power, since the formation of a small rural bourgeoisie and the change-over by the landowners to capitalist farming presuppose the formation of a body of regular agricultural labourers and day labourers. Only the fact of the growth of commercial agriculture can explain the circumstance that the post-Reform period is characterised by an expansion of the home market for capitalism (development of capitalist agriculture, development of factory industry in general, development of the agricultural engineering industry in particular, development of the so-called peasant “agricultural industries,” i.e., work for hire, etc.).

4) Capitalism enormously extends and intensifies among the agricultural population the contradictions without which this mode of production cannot exist. Notwithstanding this, however, agricultural capitalism in Russia, in its historical significance, is a big progressive force. Firstly, capitalism has transformed the cultivator from a “lord of the manor,” on the one hand, and a patriarchal, dependent peasant, on the other, into the same sort of industrialist that every other proprietor is in present-day society. Before capitalism appeared, agriculture in Russia was the business of the gentry, a lord’s hobby for some, and a duty, an obligation for others; consequently, it could not be conducted except according to age-old routine, necessarily involving the complete isolation of the cultivator from all that went on in the world beyond the confines of his village. The labour-service system—that living survival of old times in present-day economy—strikingly confirms this characterisation. Capitalism for the first time broke with the system of social estates in land tenure by converting the land into a commodity. The farmer’s product was put on sale and began to be subject to social reckoning—first in the local, then in the national, and finally in the international market, and in this way the former isolation of the uncouth farmer from the rest of the world was completely broken down. The farmer was compelled willy-nilly, on pain of ruin, to take account of the sum-total of social relations both in his own country and in other countries, now linked together by the world market. Even the labour-service system, which formerly guaranteed Oblomov an assured income without any risk on his part, without any expenditure of capital, without any changes in the age-old routine of production, now proved incapable of saving him from the competition of the American farmer. That is why one can fully apply to post-Reform Russia what was said half a century ago about Western Europe—that agricultural capitalism hag been “the motive force which has drawn the idyll into the movement of history.”*

Secondly, agricultural capitalism has for the first time undermined the age-old stagnation of our agriculture; it has given a tremendous impetus to the transformation of its technique, and to the development of the productive forces of social labour. A few decades of “destructive work” by capitalism have done more in this respect than entire centuries of preceding history. The monotony of routine natural economy has been replaced by a diversity of forms of commercial agriculture; primitive agricultural implements have begun to yield place to improved implements and machines; the immobility of the old-fashioned farming systems has been undermined by new methods of agriculture. The course of all these changes is linked inseparably with the above-mentioned phenomenon of the specialisation of agriculture. By its very nature, capitalism in agriculture (as in industry) cannot develop evenly: in one place (in one country, in one area, on one farm) it pushes forward one aspect of agriculture, in another place another aspect, etc. In one case it transforms the technique of some, and in other cases of other agricultural operations, divorcing them from patriarchal peasant economy or from the patriarchal labour-service. Since the whole of this process is guided by market requirements that are capricious and not always known to the producer, capitalist agriculture, in each separate instance (often in each separate area, sometimes even in each separate country), becomes more onesided and lopsided than that which preceded it, but, taken as a whole, becomes immeasurably more many-sided and rational than patriarchal agriculture. The emergence of separate types of commercial agriculture renders possible and inevitable capitalist crises in agriculture and cases of capitalist overproduction, but these crises (like all capitalist crises) give a still more powerful impetus to the development of world production and of the socialisation of labour.*

Thirdly, capitalism has for the first time created in Russia large-scale agricultural production based on the employment of machines and the extensive co-operation of workers. Before capitalism appeared, the production of agricultural produce was always carried on in an unchanging, wretchedly small way—both when the peasant worked for himself and when he worked for the landlord—and no “community character” of land tenure was capable of destroying this tremendously scattered production. Inseparably linked with this scattered production was the scattered nature of the farmers themselves.** Tied to their allotment, to their tiny “village community,” they were completely fenced off even from the peasants of the neighbouring village community by the difference in the categories to which they belonged (former landowners’ peasants, former state peasants, etc.), by differences in the size of their holdings—by differences in the terms on which their emancipation took place (which terms were sometimes determined simply by the individual attributes of the landlords and by their whims). Capitalism for the first time broke down these purely medieval barriers—and it was a very good thing that it did. Now the differences between the various grades of peasants, between the various categories based on the size of allotment holdings, are far less important than the economic differences within each grade, each category and each village community. Capitalism destroys local seclusion and insularity, and replaces the minute medieval divisions among cultivators by a major division, embracing the whole nation, that divides them into classes occupying different positions in the general system of capitalist economy.* The mass of cultivators were formerly tied to their place of residence by the very conditions of production, whereas the creation of diverse forms and diverse areas of commercial and capitalist agriculture could not but cause the movement of enormous masses of the population throughout the country; and unless the population is mobile (as we have said above) there can be no question of developing its understanding and initiative.

Fourthly, and lastly, agricultural capitalism in Russia for the first time cut at the root of labour-service and the personal dependency of the farmer. This system of labour-service has held undivided sway in our agriculture from the days of Russkaya Pravda** down to the present-day cultivation of the fields of private landowners with the peasants’ implements; the wretchedness and uncouthness of the farmer, degraded by his labour being “semi-free” if not feudal, in character, are inevitable concomitants of this system; if the civil rights of the cultivator had not been impaired (by, for example, his belonging to the lowest social estate; corporal punishment; assignment to public works; attachment to allotment, etc.) the labour-service system would have been impossible. That is why agricultural capitalism in Russia has performed a great historical service in replacing labour-service by hired labour.* Summing up what has been said above on the progressive historical role of Russian agricultural capitalism, it may be said that it is socialising agricultural production. Indeed, the fact that agriculture has been transformed from the privileged occupation of the top estate or the duty of the bottom estate into an ordinary commercial and industrial occupation; that the product of the cultivator’s labour has become subject to social reckoning on the market; that routine, uniform agriculture is being converted into technically transformed and diverse forms of commercial farming; that the local seclusion and scattered nature of the small farmers is breaking down; that the diverse forms of bondage and personal dependence are being replaced by impersonal transactions in the purchase and sale of labour-power, these are all links in a single process, which is socialising agricultural labour and is increasingly intensifying the contradiction between the anarchy of market fluctuations, between the individual character of the separate agricultural enterprises and the collective character of large-scale capitalist agriculture.

Thus (we repeat once more), in emphasising the progressive historical role of capitalism in Russian agriculture we do not in the least forget either the historically transient character of this economic regime or the profound social contradictions inherent in it. On the contrary, we have shown above that it is precisely the Narodniks who, capable only of bewailing the “destructive work” of capitalism, give an extremely superficial appraisal of these contradictions, glossing over the differentiation of the peasantry, ignoring the capitalist character of the employment of machinery in our agriculture, and covering up with such expressions as “agricultural industries” and “employments” the emergence of a class of agricultural wage-workers.

X. NARODNIK THEORIES ON CAPITALISM IN AGRICULTURE. “THE FREEING OF WINTER TIME”

The foregoing positive conclusions regarding the significance of capitalism must be supplemented by an examination of certain special “theories” on this question current in our literature. Our Narodniks in most cases have been totally unable to digest Marx’s fundamental views on agricultural capitalism. The more candid among them have bluntly declared that Marx’s theory does not cover agriculture (Mr. V. V. in Our Trends), while others (like Mr. N. —on) have preferred diplomatically to evade the question of the relation between their “postulates” and Marx’s theory. One of the postulates most widespread among the Narodnik economists is the theory of “the freeing of winter time.” The essence of it is as follows.*

Under the capitalist system agriculture becomes a separate industry, unconnected with the others. However, it is not carried on the whole year but only for five or six months. Therefore, the capitalisation of agriculture leads to “the freeing of winter time,” to the “limitation of the working time of the agricultural class to part of the working year,” which is the “fundamental cause of the deterioration of the economic conditions of the agricultural classes” (N. — on, 229), of the “diminishing of the home market” and of “the wastage of the productive forces” of society (Mr. V. V.).

Here you have the whole of this celebrated theory, which bases the most sweeping historical and philosophical conclusions solely on the great truth that in agriculture jobs are distributed over the year very unevenly! To take this one feature, to reduce it to absurdity by means of abstract assumptions, to discard all the other specific features of the complex process which transforms patriarchal agriculture into capitalist agriculture—such are the simple methods used in this latest attempt to restore the romantic theories about pre-capitalist “people’s production.”

To show how inordinately narrow this abstract postulate is, let us indicate briefly those aspects of the actual process that are either entirely lost sight of, or are underrated by our Narodniks. Firstly, the further the specialisation of agriculture proceeds, the more the agricultural population decreases, becoming an ever-diminishing part of the total population. The Narodniks forget this, although in their abstractions they raise the specialisation of agriculture to a level it hardly ever reaches in actual fact. They assume that only the operations of sowing and reaping grain have become a separate industry; the cultivation and the manuring of the soil, the processing and the carting of produce, stock raising, forestry, the repair of buildings and implements, etc., etc.—all these operations have been turned into separate capitalist industries. The application of such abstractions to present-day realities will not contribute much towards explaining them. Secondly, the assumption that agriculture undergoes such complete specialisation presupposes a purely capitalist organisation of agriculture, a complete division into capitalist farmers and wage-workers. To talk under such circumstances about “the peasant” (as Mr. N. —on does, p. 215) is the height of illogicality. The purely capitalist organisation of agriculture presupposes, in its turn, a more even distribution of jobs throughout the year (due to crop rotation, rational stock raising, etc.), the combination with agriculture, in many cases, of the technical processing of produce, the application of a greater quantity of labour to the preparation of the soil, etc.* Thirdly, capitalism presupposes the complete separation of agricultural from industrial enterprises. But whence does it follow that this separation does not permit the combination of agricultural and industrial wage-labour? We find such a combination in developed capitalist society everywhere. Capitalism separates the skilled workers from the plain labourers, the unskilled, who pass from one occupation to another, now drawn into jobs at some large enterprise, and now thrown into the ranks of the workless.** The greater the development of capitalism and large-scale industry, the greater, in general, are the fluctuations in the demand for workers not only in agriculture, but also in industry.* Therefore, if we presuppose the maximum development of capitalism, we must also presuppose the maximum facility for the transfer of workers from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations, we must presuppose the formation of a general reserve army from which labour-power is drawn by all sorts of employers. Fourthly, if we take the present-day rural employers, it cannot, of course, be denied that sometimes they experience difficulty in providing their farms with workers. But it must not be forgotten, either, that they have a means of tying the workers to their farms, namely, by allotting them patches of land, etc. The allotment-holding farm labourer or day labourer is a type common to all capitalist countries. One of the chief errors of the Narodniks is that they ignore the formation of a similar type in Russia. Fifthly, it is quite wrong to discuss the freeing of the farmer’s winter time independently of the general question of capitalist surplus-population. The formation of a reserve army of unemployed is characteristic of capitalism in general, and the specific features of agriculture merely give rise to special forms of this phenomenon. That is why the author of Capital, for instance, deals with the distribution of employment in agriculture in connection with the question of “relative surplus-population,”** as well as in a special chapter where he discusses the difference between the “working period” and the “time of production” (Das Kapital, II. B., Chapter 13). The working period is the period in which labour is applied to the product; the time of production is the time during which the product is in production, including the period in which labour is not applied to it. The working period does not coincide with the time of production in very many industries, among which agriculture is merely the most typical, but by no means the only one.* In Russia, as compared with other European countries, the difference between the working period in agriculture and the time of production is a particularly big one. “When capitalist production later accomplishes the separation of manufacture and agriculture, the rural labourer becomes ever more dependent on merely casual accessory employment and his condition deteriorates thereby. For capital … all differences in the turnover are evened out. Not so for the labourer” (ibid., 223-224).¹⁰⁹ So then, the only conclusion that follows from the specific features of agriculture in the instance under review is that the position of the agricultural worker must be even worse than that of the industrial worker. This is still a very long way from Mr. N. —on’s “theory” that the freeing of winter time is the “fundamental reason” for the deterioration of the conditions of the “agricultural classes” (?!). If the working period in our agriculture equalled 12 months, the process of the development of capitalism would go on exactly as it does now; the entire difference would be that the conditions of the agricultural worker would come somewhat closer to those of the industrial worker.**

Thus the “theory” of Messrs. V. V. and N. —on makes absolutely no contribution whatever even to the general problem of the development of agricultural capitalism. As for the specific features of Russia, it not only does not explain them, but on the contrary obscures them. Winter unemployment among our peasantry depends not so much on capitalism as on the inadequate development of capitalism. We have shown above (§IV of this chapter), from the data on wages, that of the Great-Russian gubernias, winter unemployment is most prevalent in those where capitalism is least developed and where labour-service prevails. That is quite understandable. Labour-service retards the development of labour productivity, retards the development of industry and agriculture, and, consequently, the demand for labour-power, and at the same time, while tying the peasant to his allotment, provides him neither with employment in winter time nor with the possibility of existing by his wretched farming.

XI. CONTINUATION.—THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY.—MARX’S VIEWS ON SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE.—ENGELS’S OPINION OF THE CONTEMPORARY AGRICULTURAL CRISIS

“The community principle prevents capital from seizing agricultural production,”—that is how Mr. N. —on (p. 72) expresses another current Narodnik theory, formulated in just as abstract a fashion as the previous one. In Chapter II we quoted a series of facts showing the fallacy of this stock premise. Now let us add the following. It is a great mistake to think that the inception of agricultural capitalism itself requires some special- form of land tenure. “But the form of landed property with which the incipient capitalist mode of production is confronted does not suit it. It first creates for itself the form required by subordinating agriculture to capital. It thus transforms feudal landed property, clan property, small-peasant property in mark communes* (Markgemeinschaft)—no matter how divergent their juristic forms may be—into the economic form corresponding to the requirements of this mode of production” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 156). Thus, by the very nature of the case, no peculiarities in the system of land tenure can serve as an insurmountable obstacle to capitalism, which assumes different forms in accordance with the different conditions in agriculture, legal relationships and manner of life. One can see from this how wrong is the very presentation of the question by our Narodniks, who have created a whole literature on the subject of “village community or capitalism?” Should some Anglomaniac aristocrat happen to offer a prize for the best work on the introduction of capitalist farming in Russia, should some learned society come forward with a scheme to settle peasants on farmsteads, should some idle government official concoct a project for 60-dessiatine holdings, the Narodnik hastens to throw down the gauntlet and fling himself into the fray against these “bourgeois projects” to “introduce capitalism” and destroy that Palladium of “people’s industry,” the village community. It has never entered the head of our good Narodnik that capitalism has been proceeding on its way while all sorts of projects have been drafted and refuted, and the community village has been turning, and has actually turned,* into the village of small agrarians.

That is why we are very indifferent to the question of the form of peasant land tenure. Whatever the form of land tenure may be, the relation between the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat will not undergo any essential change. The really important question concerns not the form of land tenure at all, but the remnants of the purely medieval past, which continue to weigh down upon the peasantry—the social-estate seclusion of the peasant communities, collective responsibility, excessively high taxation of peasant land out of all proportion to the taxation of privately-held land, the absence of full freedom in the purchase and sale of peasant lands, and in the movement and settlement of the peasantry.* All these obsolete institutions, while not in the least safeguarding the peasantry against break-up, only lead to the multiplication of diverse forms of labour-service and bondage, to tremendous delay in social development as a whole.

In conclusion we must deal with an original Narodnik attempt to give an interpretation to some statements made by Marx and Engels in Volume III of Capital, in favour of their views that small-scale agriculture is superior to large-scale, and that agricultural capitalism does not play a progressive historical role. Quite often, with this end in view, they quote the following passage from Volume III of Capital:

“The moral of history, also to be deduced from other observations concerning agriculture, is that the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (although the latter promotes technical improvements in agriculture), and needs either the hand of the small farmer living by his own labour (selbst arbeitenden) or the control of associated producers” (III, 1, 98. Russ. trans., 83).¹¹¹

What follows from this assertion (which, let us note in passing, is an absolutely isolated fragment that has found its way into a chapter dealing with the way changes in the prices of raw materials affect profits, and not into Part VI, which deals specifically with agriculture)? That capitalism is incompatible with the rational organisation of agriculture (as also of industry) has long been known; nor is that the point at issue with the Narodniks. And the progressive historical role of capitalism in agriculture is especially emphasised by Marx here. There remains Marx’s reference to the “small peasant living by his own labour.” None of the Narodniks who have referred to this point has taken the trouble to explain how he understands this, has taken the trouble to connect this point with the context, on the one hand, and with Marx’s general theory of small-scale agriculture, on the other.—In the passage quoted from Capital the point dealt with is how considerably the prices of raw materials fluctuate, how these fluctuations disturb the proportionality and systematic working of production, how they disturb the conformity of agriculture and industry. It is only in this respect—in respect of the proportionality, systematic working and planned operation of production—that Marx places small peasant economy on a par with the economy of “associated producers.” In this respect, even small medieval industry (handicraft) is similar to the economy of “associated producers” (cf. Misère de la philosophie, edition cited, p. 90), whereas capitalism differs from both these systems of social economy in its anarchy of production. By what logic can one draw the conclusion from this that Marx admitted the viability of small-scale agriculture,* that he did not acknowledge the progressive historical role of capitalism in agriculture? Here is what Marx said about this in the special part dealing with agriculture, in the special section on small peasant economy (Chapter 47, §V):

“Proprietorship of land parcels by its very nature excludes the development of social productive forces of labour, social forms of labour, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle raising, and the progressive application of science.

“Usury and a taxation system must impoverish it everywhere. The expenditure of capital in the price of the land withdraws this capital from cultivation. An infinite fragmentation of means of production, and isolation of the producers themselves. Monstrous waste of human energy. Progressive deterioration of conditions of production and increased prices of means of production—an inevitable law of proprietorship of parcels. Calamity of seasonal abundance for this mode of production” (III, 2, 341-342. Russ. trans., 667).¹¹³

“Small landed property presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is rural, and that not social, but isolated labour predominates; and that, therefore, under such conditions wealth and development of reproduction, both of its material and spiritual prerequisites, are out of the question, and thereby also the prerequisites for rational cultivation” (III, 2, 347. Russ. trans., p. 672).¹¹⁴

The writer of these lines, far from closing his eyes to the contradictions inherent in large-scale capitalist agriculture, ruthlessly exposed them. But this did not prevent him from appreciating the historical role of capitalism:

“… One of the major results of the capitalist mode of production is that, on the one hand, it transforms agriculture from a mere empirical and mechanical self-perpetuating process employed by the least developed part of society into the conscious scientific application of agronomy, in so far as this is at all feasible under conditions of private property; that it divorces landed property from the relations of dominion and servitude, on the one hand, and, on the other, totally separates land as an instrument of production from landed property and landowner…. The rationalising of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale, and the reduction ad absurdum of property in land, on the other, are the great achievements of the capitalist mode of production. Like all of its other historical advances, it also attained these by first completely impoverishing the direct producers” (III, 2, 156-157. Russ. trans., 509-510).¹¹⁵

One would think that after such categorical statements by Marx there could be no two opinions as to how he viewed the question of the progressive historical role of agricultural capitalism. Mr. N. —on, however, found one more subterfuge: he quoted Engels’s opinion on the present agricultural crisis, which should, in his view, refute the proposition of the progressive role of capitalism in agriculture.*

Let us see what Engels actually says. After summarising the main propositions of Marx’s theory of differential rent, Engels establishes the law that “the more capital is invested in the land, and the higher the development of agriculture and civilisation in general in a given country, the more rents rise per acre as well as in total amount, and the more immense becomes the tribute paid by society to the big landowners in the form of surplus-profits” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 258. Russ. trans., 597).¹¹⁶ This law, says Engels, explains “the wonderful vitality of the class of big landowners,” who accumulate a mass of debts and nevertheless “land on their feet” in all crises; for example, the abolition of the Corn Laws in England, which caused a drop in grain prices, far from ruining the landlords, exceedingly enriched them.

It might thus seem that capitalism is unable to weaken the power of the monopoly represented by landed property.

“But everything is transitory,” continues Engels. “Transoceanic steamships and the railways of North and South America and India” called forth new competitors. The North American prairies and the Argentine pampas, etc., flooded the world market with cheap grain. “And in face of this competition—coming from virgin plains as well as from Russian and Indian peasants ground down by taxation—the European tenant farmer and peasant could not prevail at the old rents. A portion of the land in Europe fell decisively out of competition as regards grain cultivation, and rents fell everywhere; our second case, variant 2—falling prices and falling productivity of the additional investment of capital—became the rule for Europe; and therefore the lament of landlords from Scotland to Italy and from the south of France to the east of Prussia. Fortunately, the plains are far from being entirely brought under cultivation; there are enough left to ruin all the big landlords of Europe and the small ones into the bargain” (ibid., 260. Russ. trans., 598, where the word “fortunately” is omitted.)¹¹⁷

If the reader has read this passage carefully it should be clear to him that Engels says the very opposite of what Mr. N. —on wants to foist on him. In Engels’s opinion the present agricultural crisis is reducing rent and is even tending to abolish it altogether; in other words, agricultural capitalism is pursuing its natural tendency to abolish the monopoly of landed property. No, Mr. N. —on is positively out of luck with his “quotations.” Agricultural capitalism is taking another, enormous step forward; it is boundlessly expanding the commercial production of agricultural produce and drawing a number of new countries into the world arena; it is driving patriarchal agriculture out of its last refuges, such as India or Russia; it is creating something hitherto unknown to agriculture, namely, the purely industrial production of grain, based on the co-operation of masses of workers equipped with the most up-to-date machinery; it is tremendously aggravating the position of the old European countries, reducing rents, thus undermining what seemed to be the most firmly established monopolies and reducing landed property “to absurdity” not only in theory, but also in practice; it is raising so vividly the need to socialise agricultural production that this need is beginning to be realised in the West even by representatives of the propertied classes.* And Engels, with his characteristic cheerful irony, welcomes the latest steps of world capitalism: fortunately, he says, there is still enough uncultivated prairie land left to enable things to continue as they have been doing. But our good Mr. N. —on, à propos des bottes,* sighs for the “muzhik cultivator” of yore, for the “time-hallowed” … stagnation of our agriculture and of all the various forms of agricultural bondage which “neither the strife among the appanage princes nor the Tartar invasion” could shake, and which now—oh, horror!—are beginning to be most thoroughly shaken by this monstrous capitalism! O, sancta simplicitas!

CHAPTER V

THE FIRST STAGES OF CAPITALISM IN INDUSTRY

Let us now pass from agriculture to industry. Here, too, our task is formulated as in the case of agriculture: we have to analyse the forms of industry in post-Reform Russia, that is, to study the present system of social and economic relations in manufacturing industry and the character of the evolution of that system. Let us start with the most simple and primitive forms of industry and trace their development.

I. DOMESTIC INDUSTRY AND HANDICRAFTS

By domestic industry we mean the processing of raw materials in the household (peasant family) that produces them. Domestic industries are a necessary adjunct of natural economy, remnants of which are nearly always retained where there is a small peasantry. It is natural, therefore, that in Russian economic literature one should meet repeated references to this type of industry (the domestic production of articles from flax, hemp, wood, etc., for consumption in the home). However, the existence of domestic industry on any extensive scale is rarely found nowadays and only in the most remote localities; until very recently, Siberia, for example, was one of them. Industry as a profession does not yet exist in this form: industry here is linked inseparably with agriculture, together they constitute a single whole.

The first form of industry to be separated from patriarchal agriculture is artisan production, i.e., the production of articles to the order of a consumer.* The raw materials may belong either to the customer-consumer or to the artisan, and payment for the latter’s work is made either in cash or in kind (artisan’s premises and keep, remuneration with part of the product, for example, flour, etc.). While constituting an essential part of urban life, artisan production is to be met on a considerable scale in the rural districts too, where it serves as a supplement to peasant farming. A certain percentage of the rural population consists of specialist-artisans engaged (sometimes exclusively, sometimes in conjunction with agriculture) in tanning, boot-making, tailoring, blacksmithery, dyeing of homespun fabrics, finishing of peasant-made woollens, flour-milling, etc. Owing to the extremely unsatisfactory state of our economic statistics we have no precise data on the degree to which artisan production is spread throughout Russia; but isolated references to this form of industry are scattered through nearly all descriptions of peasant farming and investigations of what is called “handicraft” industry,** and are even to be found in official factory statistics.*** The Zemstvo statistical returns, in registering peasant industries, sometimes single out a special group, “artisans” (cf. Rudnev, loc. cit.), but this category (according to current terminology) includes all building workers. From the viewpoint of political economy this is utterly wrong, for the bulk of the building workers belong to the category, not of independent industrialists working on orders from customers, but of wage-workers employed by contractors. Of course, it is not always easy to distinguish the village-artisan from the small commodity-producer or from the wage-worker; this requires an economic analysis of the data concerning every small industrialist. A noteworthy attempt to draw a strict line of demarcation between artisan production and the other forms of small industry is the analysis of the returns of the Perm handicraft census of 1894-95.* The number of local village artisans was estimated at approximately one per cent of the peasant population, and (as might have been expected) the largest percentage of artisans was found in the uyezds where industry was least developed. As compared with the small commodity-producers, the artisans are more closely connected with the land: 80.6 per 100 artisans engage in agriculture (among the other “handicraftsmen” the percentage is lower). The employment of wage-labour is met with among artisans too, but is less developed among industrialists of this type than among the others. The size of establishments (taking the number of workers) is also smaller among the artisans. The average earnings of the artisan-cultivator are estimated at 43.9 rubles per year, and of the non-cultivator at 102.9 rubles.

We confine ourselves to these brief remarks, since a detailed examination of artisan production does not enter into our task. In this form of industry commodity production does not yet exist; here only commodity circulation makes its appearance, in the case where the artisan receives payment in money, or sells the share of the product he has received for work done and buys himself raw materials and instruments of production. The product of the artisan’s labour does not appear in the market, hardly ever leaving the sphere of peasant natural economy.* It is natural, therefore, that artisan production is characterised by the same routine, fragmentation and narrowness as small patriarchal agriculture. The only element of development native to this form of industry is the migration of artisans to other areas in search of employment. Such migration was fairly widely developed, particularly in the old days, in our rural districts; usually it led to the organisation of independent artisan establishments in the areas of attraction.

II. SMALL COMMODITY-PRODUCERS IN INDUSTRY. THE CRAFT SPIRIT IN THE SMALL INDUSTRIES

We have seen that the artisan appears on the market, although not with the wares he produces. Naturally, once he comes into contact with the market, he begins in time to produce for the market, i.e., becomes a commodity-producer. This transition takes place gradually, at first as an experiment: goods are sold which are left on his hands by chance, or are produced in his spare time. The gradualness of the transition is heightened by the fact that the market for wares is at first extremely restricted, so that the distance between the producer and the consumer increases very slightly, and the product passes as hitherto directly from the producer to the consumer, its sale sometimes being preceded by its exchange for agricultural produce.** The further development of commodity production is expressed in the expansion of commerce in the appearance of specialist-merchants, buyers-up; the market for wares is not the small village bazaar or the district fair,* but the whole region, then the whole country, and sometimes even other countries. The production of industrial wares in the shape of commodities is the first step to the separation of industry from agriculture, and to mutual exchange between them. Mr. N. —on, with his characteristically stereotyped and abstract way of understanding things, limits himself to declaring that the “separation of industry from agriculture” is a quality of “capitalism” in general, without taking the trouble to examine either the different forms of this separation or the different stages of capitalism. It is important to note, therefore, that commodity production on the smallest scale in the peasant industries already begins to separate industry from agriculture, although at that stage of development the industrialist does not, in the majority of cases, separate from the agriculturist. Later on we shall show how the more developed stages of capitalism lead to the separation of industrial from agricultural enterprises, to the separation of industrial workers from agriculturists.

In the rudimentary forms of commodity production, competition among the “handicraftsmen” is still very slight, but as the market expands and embraces wide areas, this competition grows steadily stronger and disturbs the small industrialist’s patriarchal prosperity, the basis of which is his virtually monopolist position. The small commodity-producer feels that his interests, as opposed to the interests of the rest of society, demand the preservation of this monopolist position, and he therefore fears competition. He exerts every effort, individually and with others, to check competition, “not to let” rivals into his district, and to consolidate his assured position as a small master possessing a definite circle of customers. This fear of competition so strikingly reveals the true social nature of the small commodity-producer that we think it necessary to examine the relative facts in greater detail. In the first place, let us quote an example relative to handicraft. The Kaluga sheepskin dressers go off to other gubernias to treat sheepskins; this industry has declined since the abolition of serfdom; the landlords, when they released serfs for “sheepskinning,” in return for a sizable tribute, took great care that the sheepskinners knew their “definite places” and did not permit other dressers to invade their districts. Organised on these lines the industry was so profitable that “places” were transferred for as much as 500 and 1,000 rubles, and if an artisan came to a district other than his own, it sometimes led to sanguinary clashes. The abolition of serfdom undermined this medieval prosperity: “the convenience of railway travel in this case also aids competition.”* One of the phenomena of the same type observed in a number of industries and bearing fully the character of a general rule, is the desire of the small industrialists to keep technical inventions and improvements secret, to conceal profitable occupations from others, in order to stave off “fatal competition.” Those who establish a new industry or introduce some improvement in an old one, do their utmost to conceal these profitable occupations from their fellow-villagers and resort to all sorts of devices for this purpose (e.g., as a make-believe they keep the old arrangements in the establishment), let no one enter their workshops, work in garrets and say nothing about their work even to their own children.** The slow development of the brush-making industry in Moscow Gubernia “is usually attributed to the present producers’ objection to having new competitors. It is said that they do all they can to conceal their work from strangers, and so only one producer has apprentices from outside.”* Concerning the village of Bezvodnoye, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, famous for its metalware industry, we read the following: “It is remarkable that to this day” (the beginning of the 80s; the industry has existed since the beginning of the 50s) “the inhabitants of Bezvodnoye carefully conceal their craft from the neighbouring peasants. They have made more than one attempt to induce the volost administration to issue an instruction making it a punishable offence to carry the craft to another village; though they have failed to get this formality adopted, each of them seems to be morally bound by such an instruction, in virtue of which they refrain from giving their daughters in marriage to inhabitants of neighbouring villages, and as far as possible avoid taking girls in marriage from those villages.”**

The Narodnik economists have not only tried to obscure the fact that the bulk of the small peasant industrialists belong to the category of commodity-producers, but have even created quite a legend about some profound antagonism allegedly existing between the economic organisation of the small peasant industries and large-scale industry. The unsoundness of this view is also evident, by the way, from the above-quoted data. If the big industrialist stops at nothing to ensure himself a monopoly, the peasant engaging in “handicrafts” is in this respect his twin brother; the petty bourgeois endeavours with his petty resources to uphold substantially the same class interests the big manufacturer seeks to protect when he clamours for protection, bonuses,-privileges, etc.***

III. THE GROWTH OF SMALL INDUSTRIES AFTER THE REFORM. TWO FORMS OF THIS PROCESS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

From the foregoing there also emerge the following features of small production that merit attention. The appearance of a new industry signifies, as we have already observed, a process of growing social division of labour. Hence, such a process must necessarily take place in every capitalist society, to the extent that a peasantry and semi-natural agriculture still remain to one degree or other, and to the extent that diverse ancient institutions and traditions (due to bad means of communication, etc.) prevent large-scale machine industry from directly replacing domestic industry. Every step in the development of commodity economy inevitably leads to the peasantry producing an ever-increasing number of industrialists from their ranks; this process turns up new soil, as it were, prepares new regions in the most backward parts of the country, or new spheres in the most backward branches of industry, for subsequent seizure by capitalism. The very same growth of capitalism manifests itself in other parts of the country, or in other branches of industry, in an entirely different way; not in an increase but in a decrease in the number of small workshops and of home workers absorbed by the factory. It is clear that a study of the development of capitalism in the industry of a given country requires that the strictest distinction be made between these processes; to mix them up is to lead to an utter confusion of concepts.*

In post-Reform Russia the growth of small industries, expressing the first steps in the development of capitalism, has manifested, and manifests, itself in two ways: firstly, in the migration of small industrialists and handicraftsmen from the central, long-settled and economically most advanced gubernias, to the outer regions; secondly, in the formation of new small industries and the spread of previously existing industries among the local population.

The first of these processes is one of the manifestations of the colonisation of the border regions to which we have referred (Chapter IV, §II). The peasant industrialist in the Nizhni-Novgorod, Vladimir, Tver, Kaluga and other gubernias, sensing the increased competition accompanying the growth of the population, and the growth of capitalist manufacture and of the factory that constitute a menace to small production, leaves for the South, where “artisans” are still few, earnings high and the living cost low. In the new locality a small establishment was set up which laid the foundations for a new peasant industry that spread later in the village concerned and in its environs. The central districts of the country, possessing an industrial culture of long standing, thus helped the development of the same culture in new parts of the country, where settlement was beginning. Capitalist relations (which, as we shall see below, are also characteristic of the small peasant industries) were thus carried to the entire country.*

Let us pass to the facts that express the second of the above-mentioned processes. We shall first say that although we note the growth of small peasant establishments and industries, we do not as yet deal with their economic organisation: from what follows it will be evident that these industries either lead to the formation of capitalist simple co-operation and merchant’s capital or constitute a component part of capitalist manufacture.

The fur industry in Arzamas Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, began in the town of Arzamas and then gradually spread to the surrounding villages, embracing an ever larger area. At first there were few furriers in the villages and they employed numerous workers; labour was cheap, since people hired themselves out in order to learn the trade. After learning it they left and opened small establishments of their own, thus preparing a wider field for the domination of capital, which now controls a large section of the industrialists.* Let us note in general that this abundance of wage-workers in the first establishments of a rising industry and the subsequent transformation of these wage-workers into small masters is a very widespread phenomenon, bearing the character of a general rule.** Obviously, it would be a profound error to deduce from this that “in spite of various historical considerations … it is not big establishments that absorb small ones, but small ones that grow out of big ones.”*** The large size of the first establishments expresses no concentration of the industry; it is explained by the solitary character of these establishments and by the eagerness of local peasants to learn a profitable trade in them. As to the process of the spread of peasant industries from their old centres to the surrounding villages, it is observed in many cases. For example, the post-Reform period saw the development (as regards the number of villages involved in industry, the number of industrialists, and the total output) of the following exceptionally important industries: the lock and cutlery industry of Pavlovo, tanning and boot-making in the village of Kimry, the knitting of woollen slippers in the town of Arzamas and in its environs,¹²⁰ the metalware industry of the village of Burmakino, the cap-making industry of the village and of the district of Molvitino, the glass, hat and lace industries of Moscow Gubernia, the jewellery industry of Krasnoselskoye District, etc.* The author of an article on handicraft industries in seven volosts of Tula Uyezd notes as a general phenomenon “an increase in the number of artisans since the peasant Reform,” “the appearance of artisans and handicraftsmen in places where there were none in pre-Reform times.”** A similar view is expressed by Moscow statisticians.*** We can support this view with statistics regarding the date of origin of 523 handicraft establishments in 10 industries of Moscow Gubernia.****

Similarly, the Perm handicraft census revealed (according to data showing the time of origin of 8,884 small artisan and handicraft establishments) that the post-Reform period is characterised by a particularly rapid growth of small industries. It will be interesting to take a closer glance at this process of the rise of new industries. The production of woollen and semi-silk fabrics in Vladimir Gubernia began recently, in 1861. At first this was a peasant outside occupation, but later “subcontractors” made their appearance in the villages, who distributed yarn. One of the first “factory owners” at one time traded in groats, buying them up in the Tambov and Saratov “steppes.” With the building of railways, grain prices were levelled out, the grain trade became concentrated in the hands of millionaires, and so our merchant decided to invest his capital in an industrial weaving enterprise; he went to work in a factory, learnt the business and became a “subcontractor.”* Thus, the formation of a new “industry” in this locality was due to the fact that the general economic development of the country was forcing capital out of trade and directing it towards industry.** The investigator of the industry we have taken as an example points out that the case he has described is by no means an isolated one: the peasants who earned their living by outside employments “were pioneers in all sorts of industries, carried their technical knowledge to their native villages, got new labour forces to follow their example and migrate, and fired the imagination of the rich muzhiks with stories of the fabulous profits which the industry brought the workroom owner and the subcontractor. The rich muzhik, who used to store his money away in a chest, or traded in grain, paid heed to these stories and put his money into industrial undertakings” (ibid.). The boot and felt industries in Alexandrov Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, arose in some places in the following way: the owners of calico workrooms or of small yarn-distributing shops, seeing that handweaving was declining, opened workshops of another kind, sometimes hiring craftsmen so as to get to know the trade and to teach their children.* To the extent that large-scale industry forces small capital out of the branch of production, this capital flows into others and stimulates their development in the same direction.

The general conditions of the post-Reform period which called forth the development of small industries in the rural districts are very vividly described by investigators of Moscow industries. “On the one hand, the conditions of peasant life have greatly deteriorated during this period,” we read in a description of the lace industry, “but on the other, the requirements of the population, of that part which lives under more favourable conditions, have considerably increased.** And the author, using the data of the region he has taken, notes an increase in the number of those owning no horses and raising no crops, side by side with an increase in the number of peasants owning many horses and in the total number of cattle belonging to peasants. Thus, on the one hand, there was an increase in the number of persons in need of “outside earnings” and in search of industrial work, while on the other, a minority of prosperous families grew rich, accumulated “savings,” and were “able to hire a worker or two, or give out work to poor peasants to be done at home.” “Of course,” the author explains, “we are not dealing here with cases where individuals who are known as kulaks, or blood-suckers, develop from among such families; we are merely examining most ordinary phenomena among the peasant population.”

So then, local investigators point to a connection between the differentiation of the peasantry and the growth of small peasant industries. And that is quite natural. From the data given in Chapter II it follows that the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry had necessarily to be supplemented by a growth of small peasant industries. As natural economy declined, one form of raw-material processing after another turned into separate branches of industry; the formation of a peasant bourgeoisie and of a rural proletariat increased the demand for the products of the small peasant industries, while at the same time supplying free hands for these industries and free.*

IV. THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE SMALL COMMODITY-PRODUCERS. DATA ON HOUSE-TO-HOUSE CENSUSES OF HANDICRAFTSMEN IN MOSCOW GUBERNIA

Let us now examine the social and economic relations that develop among the small commodity-producers in industry. The task of defining the character of these relations is similar to the one outlined above, in Chapter II, in relation to the small farmers. Instead of the scale of farming, we must now take as our basis the size of the industrial establishments; we must classify the small industrialists according to the size of their output, ascertain the part wage-labour plays in each group, the conditions of technique, etc.** The handicraft house-to-house censuses that we need for such an analysis are available for Moscow Gubernia.*** For a number of industries the investigators quote precise statistics on output, and sometimes also on the farms of each separate craftsman (date of origin of establishment, number of workers, family and hired, total annual output, number of horses owned by craftsmen, method of cultivating the soil, etc.). The investigators provide no classified tables, however, and we have therefore been obliged to compile them ourselves, dividing the craftsmen in each industry into grades (I, bottom; II, middle and III, top) according to the number of workers (family and hired) per establishment, and sometimes according to the volume of output, technical organisation, etc. In general, the criteria according to which the craftsmen have been divided into grades are based on all the data given in the description of the industry; but in different industries we have found it necessary to take different criteria for dividing the craftsmen into grades. For example, in very small industries we have placed in the bottom grade establishments with 1 worker, in the middle grade those with 2, and in the top grade those with 3 and more; whereas in the bigger industries we have placed in the bottom grade establishments with 1 to 5 workers, in the middle grade those with 6 to 10, etc. Had we not employed different methods of classification we could not have presented for each industry data concerning establishments of different size. The table drawn up on these lines is given in the Appendix (see Appendix I); it shows the criteria according to which the craftsmen in each industry are divided up into grades, gives for each grade in each industry absolute figures of the number of establishments, workers (family and hired combined), aggregate output, establishments employing wage-workers, number of wage-workers. To describe the farms of the handicraftsmen we have calculated the average number of horses per peasant household in each grade and the percentage of craftsmen who cultivate their land with the aid of “a labourer” (i.e., resort to the hire of rural workers). The table covers a total of 37 industries, with 2,278 establishments and 11,833 employed and an aggregate output valued at over 5 million rubles; but if we subtract the 4 industries not included in the general list because of incompleteness of data, or because of their exceptional character,* there is a total of 33 industries, 2,085 establishments, 9,427 workers and an aggregate output of 3,466,000 rubles, or, with corrections (in the case of 2 industries), about 3¾ million rubles.

Since there is no need to examine the data for all the 33 industries, and as it would be too arduous a task, we have divided these industries into four categories: 1) 9 industries with an average of 1.6 to 2.5 workers (family and hired combined) per establishment; 2) 9 industries with an average of 2.7 to 4.4 workers; 3) 10 industries with an average of 5.1 to 8.4 workers; and 4) 5 industries with an average of 11.5 to 17.8 workers. Thus, in each category we have combined industries that are fairly similar as regards the number of workers per establishment, and in our further exposition we shall limit ourselves to the data for these four categories of industries. We give these data in extenso. (See Table on p. 347.)

This table combines those principal data on the relations between the top and bottom grades of handicraftsmen that will serve us for our subsequent conclusions. We can illustrate the summarised data for all four categories with a chart drawn up in exactly the same way as the one with which, in Chapter II, we illustrated the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry. We ascertain what percentage each grade constitutes of the total number of establishments, of the total number of family workers, of the total number of establishments with wage-workers, of the total number of workers (family and wage combined), of the aggregate output and of the total number of wage-workers, and we indicate these percentages (in the manner described in Chapter II) on the chart (see chart on p. 349).

____________

* The letters a) b) c) indicate that figures relating respectively to the items mentioned in the heading follow successively in the given column.

** These are percentages of the total number of establishments and workers in the given category of industries or in the given grade.

*** For two industries, instead of the value of the product (= aggregate output) the figures of the value of the raw material used are given. This reduces the aggregate output by about 300,000 rubles.

Let us now examine the conclusions to be drawn from these data.

We begin with the role of wage-labour. In the 33 industries wage-labour predominates over family labour: 51% of the workers are hired; for the “handicraftsmen” of Moscow Gubernia this percentage is even lower than the actual one. We have computed the data for 54 industries of Moscow Gubernia for which exact figures as to wage-workers employed are available, and got the figure of 17,566 wage-workers out of a total of 29,446 workers, i.e., 59.65%. For Perm Gubernia the percentage of wage-workers among all handicraftsmen and artisans combined was established as 24.5%, and among commodity-producers alone, as from 29.4 to 31.2%. But these gross figures, as we shall see below, embrace not only small commodity-producers, but also capitalist manufacture. Far more interesting, therefore, is the conclusion that the role of wage-labour rises parallel to the increase in the size of establishments: this is observed both in comparing one category with another and in comparing the different grades in the same category. The larger the establishments, the higher the percentage of those employing wage-workers and the higher the percentage of wage-workers. The Narodnik economists usually limit themselves to declaring that among the “handicraftsmen” small establishments with exclusively family workers prevail, and in support of this often cite “average” figures. As is evident from the data given, these “averages” are unsuitable for characterising the phenomenon in this regard, and the numerical preponderance of small establishments with family workers does not in the least eliminate the basic fact that the tendency of small commodity production is towards the ever-growing employment of wage-labour, towards the formation of capitalist workshops. Moreover, the data cited also refute another, no less widespread, Narodnik assertion, namely, that wage-labour in “handicraft” production really serves to “supplement” family labour, that it is resorted to not for the purpose of profit-making, etc.* Actually, however, it turns out that among the small industrialists—just as among the small agriculturists—the growing employment of wage-labour runs parallel to the increase in the number of family workers. In the majority of industries we see that the employment of wage-labour increases as we pass from the bottom grade to the top, notwithstanding the fact that the number of family workers per establishment also increases. The employment of wage-labour does not smooth out differences in the size of the “handicraftsmen’s” families, but accentuates them. The chart very clearly shows this common feature of the small industries: the top grade employs the bulk of the wage-workers, despite the fact that it is best provided with family workers. “Family co-operation” is thus the basis of capitalist co-operation.* It goes without saying, of course, that this “law” applies only to the smallest commodity-producers, only to the rudiments of capitalism; this law proves that the tendency of the peasantry is to turn into petty bourgeois. As soon as workshops with a fairly large number of wage-workers arise, the significance of “family co-operation” must inevitably decline. And we see, indeed, from our data that this law does not apply to the biggest grades of the top categories. When the “handicraftsman” turns into a real capitalist employing from 15 to 30 wage-workers, the part played by family labour in his workshops declines and becomes quite insignificant (for example, in the top grade of the top category, family workers constitute only 7% of the total number of workers). In other words, to the extent that the “handicraft” industries are so small that “family cooperation” predominates in them, this family co-operation is the surest guarantee of the development of capitalist co-operation. Here, consequently, stand out in full relief the dialectics of commodity production, which transform “working with our own hands” into working with others’ hands, into exploitation.

CHART OF SUMMARIZED DATA GIVEN
IN PRECEDING TABLE

The continuous line indicates the percentages (from above downwards) the share of the top, third, grade of handicraftsmen in the total number of establishments, workers, etc. for the 33 industries.

The continuous line indicates the percentages (from below upwards) the share of the top, third, grade of handicraftsmen in the total number of establishments, workers, etc. for the 33 industries.

Let us pass to the data on productivity of labour. The data on total output per worker in each grade show that with the increase in the size of the establishment labour productivity improves. This is to be observed in the overwhelming majority of the industries, and in all categories of industries without exception; the chart graphically illustrates this law, showing that the share of the top grade in total output is greater than is its share in the total number of workers; in the bottom grade the reverse is the case. The total output per worker in the establishments of the top grades is from 20 to 40 per cent higher than that in the bottom grade establishments. It is true that the big establishments usually have a longer working period and sometimes handle more valuable material than do the small ones, but these two circumstances cannot eliminate the fact that labour productivity is considerably higher in the big workshops than in the small ones.* Nor can it be otherwise. The big establishments have from 3 to 5 times as many workers (family and hired combined) as the small ones, and co-operation on a larger scale cannot but increase the productivity of labour. The big workshops are always better equipped technically, they have better implements, tools, accessories, machines, etc. For example, in the brush industry, a “properly organised workshop” must have as many as 15 workers, and in hook-making 9 to 10 workers. In the toy industry the majority of handicraftsmen make shift with ordinary stoves for drying their goods; the bigger toy-makers have special drying ovens, and the biggest makers have special drying premises. In metal toy-making, 8 makers out of 16 have special workshops, divided as follows: I) 6 have none; II) 5 have 3; and III) 5 have 5. A total of 142 mirror and picture-frame makers have 18 special workshops, the figures by grades being: I) 99 have 3; II) 27 have 4; and III) 16 have 11. In the screen-plaiting industry screens are plaited by hand (in grade I), and woven mechanically (in grades II and III). In the tailoring industry the number of sewing-machines per owner according to grade is as follows: I) 1.3; II) 2.1; and III) 3.4, etc., etc. In investigating the furniture industry, Mr. Isayev notes that the one-man business suffers the following disadvantages: 1) lack of a complete set of tools; 2) limited assortment of articles made, because there is no room in the craftsman’s hut for bulky articles; 3) much higher cost of materials when bought retail (30 to 35% higher); 4) necessity of selling wares cheaper, partly due to lack of confidence in the small “handicraftsman” and partly to his need of money.* It is well known that exactly the same sort of thing is to be observed not only in the furniture industry, but also in the vast majority of small peasant industries. Lastly, it must be added that the value of the goods produced per worker not only increases from the bottom to the top grade in the majority of industries, but also from the small to the big industries. In the first category of industries the average output per worker is 202 rubles, in the second and third about 400 rubles, and in the fourth over 500 rubles (the figure 381 should, for the reason stated above, be increased by about fifty per cent). This circumstance points to the connection between the rise in the price of raw materials and the ousting of the small establishments by the big ones. Every step in the development of capitalist society is inevitably accompanied by a rise in the price of such materials as timber, etc., and thus hastens the doom of the small establishments.

From the foregoing it follows that the relatively big capitalist establishments also play a tremendous part in the small peasant industries. While constituting a small minority of the total number of establishments, they concentrate, however, quite a big share of the total number of workers, and a still bigger share of the total output. Thus, in 33 industries of Moscow Gubernia, the top-grade establishments, constituting 15% of the total, account for 45% of the aggregate output; while the bottom-grade establishments, constituting 53% of the total, account for only 21% of the aggregate output. It goes without saying that the distribution of the net income from the industries must be far more uneven. The data of the Perm handicraft census of 1894-95 clearly illustrate this. Selecting the largest establishments in 7 industries we get the following picture of the relations between the small and big establishments.*

An insignificant number of big establishments (less than of the total number), which employ about ⅕ of the total number of workers, account for almost half the total output and nearly ⅖ of the total income (combining the workers’ wages and the employers’ incomes). The small proprietors obtain a net income considerably below the wages of the hired workers employed in the big establishments; elsewhere we have shown in detail that this phenomenon is no exception but is a general rule for small peasant industries.**

Summing up the conclusions that follow from the data we have analysed, we must say that the economic system of the small peasant industries is typically petty bourgeois, the same as that which we have seen among the small farmers. The expansion, development and improvement of the small peasant industries cannot take place in the present social and economic atmosphere except by generating a minority of small capitalists on the one hand, and a majority of wage-workers, or of “independent craftsmen” who lead a harder and worse life than the wage-workers, on the other. We observe, consequently, in the smallest peasant industries the most pronounced rudiments of capitalism—of that very capitalism which various economists of the Manilov¹²¹ type depict as something divorced from “people’s production.” From the viewpoint of the home market theory the facts we have examined are also of no little importance. The development of small peasant industries leads to an expansion of the demand by the more prosperous industrialists for means of production and for labour-power, which is drawn from the ranks of the rural proletariat. The number of wage-workers employed by village artisans and small industrialists all over Russia should be quite impressive, if in the Perm Gubernia alone, for example, there are about 6,500.*

V. CAPITALIST SIMPLE CO-OPERATION

The establishment by small commodity-producers of relatively large workshops marks the transition to a higher form of industry. Out of scattered small production rises capitalist simple co-operation. “Capitalist production only then really begins … when each individual capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently the labour-process is carried on on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of products. A greater number of labourers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production. With regard to the mode of production itself, manufacture, in its strict meaning, is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the artisan trades of the guilds, otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual capital. The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman is simply enlarged” (Das Kapital, I², S. 329).¹²²

It is this starting-point of capitalism that is to be seen, consequently, in our small peasant (“handicraft”) industries. The different historical situation (absence or slight development of guild handicrafts) merely changes the way in which identical capitalist relations are made manifest. The difference between the capitalist workshop and the workshop of the small industrialist lies at first only in the number of workers simultaneously employed. That is why the first capitalist establishments, being numerically in the minority, are submerged, as it were, in the general mass of small establishments. However, the employment of a larger number of workers inevitably leads to consecutive changes in production itself, to the gradual transformation of production. Under primitive hand technique differences between the individual workers (in strength, dexterity, skill, etc.) are always very considerable; if only for this reason the position of the small industrialist is extremely precarious; his dependence upon market fluctuations assumes the most burdensome forms. Where, however, several workers are employed in an establishment, the individual differences between them are smoothed out in the workshop itself: “the collective working day of a large number of workmen simultaneously employed … gives one day of average social labour,”¹²³ and as a consequence, the manufacture and sale of the products of the capitalist workshop acquire incomparably greater regularity and stability. It becomes possible to make fuller use of premises, warehouses, implements, instruments of labour, etc.; and this leads to a cheapening of production costs in the larger workshops.* The organisation of production on a larger scale and the simultaneous employment of many workers require the accumulation of a fairly large capital, which is often formed, not in the sphere of production, but in the sphere of trade, etc. The size of this capital determines the form in which the proprietor himself takes part in the enterprise—whether he himself is a worker, if his capital is still very small, or whether he gives up working himself and specialises in commercial and entrepreneur functions. “One can establish a connection between the position of the workshop owner and the number of his workers”—we read, for example, in a description of the furniture industry. “The employment of 2 or 3 workers provides the proprietor with such a small surplus that he has to work alongside of them…. The employment of 5 workers already gives the proprietor enough to enable him to give up manual labour in some measure, to take it easy somewhat, and to engage mainly in the last two business functions” (i.e., purchase of materials and sale of goods). “As soon as the number of wage-workers reaches 10 or exceeds this figure, the proprietor not only gives up manual labour but practically ceases to supervise his workers: he appoints a foreman for the purpose…. He now becomes a small capitalist, a ‘born master’ ” (Isayev, Industries of Moscow Gubernia, I, 52-53). The statistics we have cited graphically confirm this description, showing a decline in the number of family workers with the appearance of a considerable number of wage-workers.

The general significance of capitalist simple co-operation in the development of capitalist forms of industry is described by the author of Capital as follows:

“Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition to peasant agriculture and to the carrying on of independent handicrafts whether in guilds or not…. Just as the social productive power of labour that is developed by co-operation, appears to be the productive power of capital, so co-operation itself, contrasted with the process of production carried on by isolated independent labourers, or even by small employers, appears to be a specific form of the capitalist process of production. It is the first change experienced by the actual labour-process, when subjected to capital…. The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers, in one and the same process, which is a necessary condition of this change, also forms the starting-point of capitalist production…. If then, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production presents itself to us historically, as a necessary condition to the transformation of the labour-process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this social form of the labour-process presents itself, as a method employed by capital for the more profitable exploitation of labour, by increasing that labour’s productiveness.

“In the elementary form, under which we have hitherto viewed it, co-operation is a necessary concomitant of all production on a large scale, but it does not, in itself, represent a fixed form characteristic of a particular epoch in the development of the capitalist mode of production. At the most it appears to do so, and that only approximately, in the handicraft-like beginnings of manufacture…” (Das Kapital, I², 344-345).¹²⁵

We shall see later how closely small “handicraft” establishments in Russia which employ wage-workers are connected with incomparably more highly developed and more widespread forms of capitalism. As for the role of these establishments in the small peasant industries, the statistics already given show that these establishments create fairly wide capitalist co-operation in place of the previous scattered production and considerably raise the productivity of labour.

Our conclusion as to the tremendous role of capitalist co-operation in the small peasant industries and as to its progressive significance is in sharp contrast to the widespread Narodnik doctrine of the predominance of all sorts of manifestations of the “artel principle” in the small peasant industries. As a matter of fact, the reverse is the case; the distinguishing feature of small industry (and handicrafts) is the extremely scattered nature of the individual producers. In support of the contrary view Narodnik literature could advance nothing more than a collection of individual examples, the overwhelming majority of which do not apply to co-operation at all, but to temporary, miniature associations of masters, big and small, for the common purchase of raw materials, for the building of a common workshop, etc. Such artels do not in the least affect the predominant significance of capitalist co-operation.* To obtain an exact idea of how widely the “artel principle” is actually applied it is not enough to cite examples taken at random here and there; it is necessary to take the data for some area which has been thoroughly investigated, and to examine the relative incidence and significance of the various forms of co-operation. Such, for example, are the data of the Perm “handicrafts” census of 1894-95; and we have shown elsewhere (Studies, pp. 182-187*) what an amazing dispersion of small industrialists was revealed by the census, and what importance attaches to the very few big establishments. The conclusion we have drawn as to the role of capitalist co-operation is based not on isolated examples, but on the precise data of the house-to-house censuses, which embrace scores of the most diverse industries in different localities.

VI. MERCHANT’S CAPITAL IN THE SMALL INDUSTRIES

As we know, the small peasant industries in many cases give rise to special buyers-up, who are particularly engaged in the commercial operations of marketing products and purchasing raw materials, and who usually in one way or another subject the small tradesmen to themselves. Let us see what connection this phenomenon has with the general system of small peasant industries and what its significance is.

The principal economic operation of the buyer-up is to buy goods (finished products or raw materials) in order to resell them. In other words, the buyer-up is a representative of merchant’s capital. The starting-point of all capital —both industrial and merchant’s—is the accumulation of free money in the hands of individuals (by free money we mean that money which is not needed for personal consumption, etc.). How this property differentiation takes place in our rural districts has been shown in detail above by the data on the differentiation of the agricultural and the industrial peasantry. These data revealed one of the conditions giving rise to the appearance of the buyer-up, namely: the scattered nature, the isolation of the small producers, the existence of economic conflict and strife among them. Another condition relates to the character of the functions performed by merchant’s capital, i.e., to the marketing of wares and to the purchase of raw materials. Where the development of commodity production is slight, the small producer limits himself to disposing of his wares in the small local market, sometimes even to disposing of them directly to the consumer. This is the lowest stage of the development of commodity production, hardly to be distinguished from artisan production. As the market expands, this petty, scattered marketing (which fully conforms to petty, scattered production) becomes impossible. In the big market, selling must he on a big, on a mass scale. And so the petty character of production proves to be in irreconcilable contradiction with the need for big, wholesale marketing. Under the existing social and economic conditions, with the isolation of the small producers and their differentiation, this contradiction could only be resolved by the well-to-do minority taking charge of marketing, concentrating it in their hands. By buying-up goods (or raw materials) on a large scale, the buyers-up thus cheapened marketing costs and transformed marketing from a petty, casual and irregular operation into a large and regular one; and this purely economic advantage of large-scale marketing inevitably led to the small producer finding himself cut off from the market and defenceless in face of the power of merchant’s capital. Thus, under commodity economy, the small producer inevitably falls into dependence upon merchant’s capital by virtue of the purely economic superiority of large, mass-scale marketing over scattered, petty marketing.* It goes without saying that actually the profits of the buyers-up are often far from limited to the difference between the returns of mass sales and those of petty sales, just as the profits of the industrial capitalists often consist of deductions from normal wages. Nevertheless, to explain the profits of the industrial capitalists we must assume that labour-power is sold at its real value. Similarly, to explain the role of the buyer-up we must assume that he buys and sells goods in accordance with the general laws of commodity exchange. Only these economic causes of the domination of merchant’s capital can provide the key to an understanding of the variety of forms which it assumes in real life, and among which we constantly meet (there can be no doubt of that) the plainest fraud. To proceed otherwise, as the Narodniks usually do, that is, to confine oneself to enumerating the various tricks of the “kulaks,” and on these grounds completely to brush aside the economic nature of the phenomenon would be to adopt the viewpoint of vulgar economics.*

To substantiate our thesis concerning a necessary causal relation between small production for the market and the domination of merchant’s capital, lot us deal in greater detail with one of the best descriptions of how the buyer-up appears and of the part he plays. We have in mind the investigation of the lace industry in Moscow Gubernia (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. II). The “tradeswomen” came into being in the following way. In the 1820s, when this industry first developed, and later, when the number of lace-makers was still small, the principal buyers were the landlords, the “gentry”. The consumer was in the neighbourhood of the producer. As the industry spread, the peasants began to send their lace to Moscow “as chance offered,” for example, through comb-makers. The inconvenience of this primitive form of marketing very soon made itself felt: “how can a muzhik not engaged in this business go from house to house?” The sale of the lace was entrusted to one of the lace-makers, who was compensated for the time she lost. “She also brought back thread for the lace.” Thus the inconveniences of isolated marketing led to turning trade into a special function performed by one person who gathered the wares from many lace-makers. The patriarchal proximity of these women workers one to the other (relatives, neighbours, fellow-villagers, etc.) at first gave rise to attempts at the co-operative organisation of sales, to attempts at entrusting this function to one of the women workers. But money economy at once causes a breach in the age-old patriarchal relations, at once gives rise to the phenomena we noted above when examining the mass-scale data on the differentiation of the peasantry. Production for sale teaches that time is money. It becomes necessary to compensate the intermediary for her lost time and labour; she becomes accustomed to this occupation and begins to make it her profession. “Journeys of this kind, repeated several times, gave rise to the tradeswoman type” (loc. cit., 30). The woman who has been to Moscow several times establishes the permanent connections which are so necessary for proper marketing. “Thus the need and habit of living on earnings from commission operations develops.” In addition to commission earnings, the tradeswoman “does what she can to advance the price of materials, paper, thread”; she sells the lace above the set price and pockets the difference; the tradeswomen declare that the price received was less than the one agreed on: “take it or leave it,” they say. “The tradeswomen begin … to bring goods from the towns and make a considerable profit.” The commission agent thus becomes an independent trader who now begins to monopolise sales and to take advantage of her monopoly to subjugate the lace-makers completely. Usurious operations appear alongside commercial operations—the lending of money to the lace-makers, the taking of goods from them at reduced prices, etc. “The girls … pay 10 kopeks per ruble as a commission for sales…. They know very well that the tradeswoman makes even more out of them by selling the lace at a higher price. But they simply do not know how to arrange things differently. When I suggested that they should take turns in going to Moscow, they replied that this would be worse, because they did not know where to sell the lace, whereas the tradeswoman already knew all the places. She sells the finished lace for them and brings back orders, materials, patterns, etc.; she always gives them money in advance, or on loan, and one can even sell her a piece of lace outright, should the need arise. Thus, on the one hand, the tradeswoman becomes a most needed, indispensable person; on the other, she gradually develops into a person who cruelly exploits the labour of others—a woman kulak” (32). To this it should be added that such types develop from among the small producers themselves: “However many enquiries we made, we found that all the tradeswomen had formerly been lace-makers themselves, and consequently, were familiar with the trade; they came from the ranks of these same lace-makers; they had had no capital to start with, and had only gradually begun to trade in calico and other goods, as they made money out of their commissions” (31).* There can, therefore, be no doubt that under commodity economy, not only prosperous industrialists in general, but also, and particularly, representatives of merchant’s capital emerge from among the small producers.** And once they have emerged, the elimination of small, scattered marketing by large-scale, wholesale marketing becomes inevitable.*** Here are a few examples of how marketing is organised by the bigger “handicraft” proprietors who are at the same time buyers-up. The marketing of abacuses by craftsmen of Moscow Gubernia (see the statistics relating to them in our table; Appendix I) is done mainly at fairs all over Russia. To do business oneself at a fair one must have, firstly, a considerable amount of capital, as only wholesale trade is conducted at the fairs; and, secondly, one must have an agent to buy up wares where they are made, and to send them on to the merchant. These requirements are met “by the one merchant-peasant,” who is also a “craftsman,” possesses a considerable amount of capital and engages in finishing the abacuses (i.e., fitting the frames and beads) and marketing them; his six sons are “engaged exclusively in commerce,” so that two persons have to be hired to cultivate the allotment. “It is not surprising,” observes the investigator, “that he is able to sell his wares … at all the fairs, whereas the smaller traders usually sell theirs at nearby markets” (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VII, Pt. I, Sec. 2, p. 141). In this case the representative of merchant’s capital was still so little differentiated from the general mass of “muzhik cultivators” that he even continued to retain his allotment farm and his large patriarchal family. The spectacle-frame makers of Moscow Gubernia are entirely dependent upon the industrialists to whom they sell their wares. These buyers-up are at the same time “craftsmen” possessing their own workshops; they lend raw materials to the poor on condition that the finished articles are delivered to them, the “masters,” etc. The small industrialists made an attempt to sell their wares in Moscow themselves, but failed; it did not pay to sell goods in small quantities amounting to a matter of 10 or 15 rubles (ibid., 263). In the lace industry of Ryazan Gubernia the tradeswomen make profits amounting to 12 to 50% of the lace-makers’ earnings. The “substantial” tradeswomen have established regular-connections with marketing centres and send goods by mail, which saves travelling expenses. How necessary wholesale marketing is can be seen from the fact that the traders consider that even sales amounting to 150 and 200 rubles do not cover marketing expenses (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VII, 1184). The marketing of Belyov lace is organised as follows. In the town of Belyov there are three grades of tradeswomen: 1) The distributor, who hands out small orders, makes the round of the lace-makers herself and delivers the finished article to the bigger tradeswomen. 2) The subcontractor, who places orders herself, or buys up goods from the distributors and delivers them to the big cities, etc. 3) The big tradeswomen (2 or 3 “firms”), who do business with commission agents, to whom they send lace and from whom they receive big orders. It is “practically impossible” for the provincial tradeswomen to sell their goods to the big shops: “the shops prefer to do business with the wholesale buyers-up who deliver the wares in big quantities … of the most diverse patterns”; the tradeswomen are obliged to sell to these “suppliers”; “it is from them that they learn all the requirements of the market; it is they who fix prices; in short, but for them, there is no way out” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, X, pp. 2823-2824). Numerous such examples could be given. But those given are quite sufficient to show how utterly impossible is small, scattered marketing where production is for big markets. In view of the scattered state of the small producers and of their complete differentiation* large-scale marketing can only be organised by large capital, which, by virtue of this, reduces the handicraftsmen to a position of utter helplessness and dependence. One can therefore judge how absurd are the current Narodnik theories which recommend helping the “handicraftsmen” by “organising marketing.” From the purely theoretical aspect such theories belong to the category of petty-bourgeois utopias, based on a failure to understand the indissoluble connection between commodity production and capitalist marketing.** As for the facts of Russian reality, the authors of such theories simply ignore them: they ignore the scattered state of the small commodity-producers and their utter differentiation; they ignore the fact that it is from their very midst that “buyers-up” have emerged and continue to emerge; that in capitalist society marketing can only be organised by big capital. It is natural that if one leaves out of account all these features of the unpleasant but undoubted reality, it is not difficult to conjure up phantasies* ins Blaue hinein.**

We are unable here to go into descriptive details showing exactly how merchant’s capital manifests itself in our “handicraft” industries, and how helpless and wretched is the position in which it places the small industrialist. Moreover, in the next chapter we shall have to describe the dominance of merchant’s capital at a higher stage of development, where (as an adjunct of manufacture) it organises capitalist domestic industry on a mass scale. Here let us confine ourselves to indicating the main forms assumed by merchant’s capital in the small industries. The first and simplest form is the purchase of wares by the merchant (or owner of a big workshop) from the small commodity producers. Where buying-up is poorly developed, or where there are numerous competing buyers-up, the sale of goods to the merchant may not differ from any other sale; but in the vast majority of cases the local buyer-up is the only person to whom the peasant can regularly dispose of his wares, and then the buyer-up takes advantage of his monopoly position to force the price he pays to the producer down to rock bottom. The second form of merchant’s capital consists in its combination with usury: the peasant, who is constantly in need of money, borrows it from the buyer-up and repays the debt with his goods. The sale of his goods in this case (which is very widespread) always takes place at artificially reduced prices, which often do not leave the handicraftsman as much as a wage-worker could get. Moreover, the relations of the creditor to the debtor inevitably lead to the personal dependence of the latter, to bondage, to the creditor taking advantage of specific occasions of the debtor’s need, etc. The third form of merchant’s capital is payment for wares with goods, a common practice among village buyers-up. The specific feature of this form is that it is typical not only of the small industries but of absolutely all undeveloped stages of commodity production and capitalism. Only large-scale machine industry, which has socialised labour and broken radically with all patriarchal usages, has eliminated this form of bondage by causing it to be legally prohibited in large industrial establishments. The fourth form of merchant’s capital is payment by the merchant with the particular kinds of goods that are needed by the “handicraftsman” for production (raw or auxiliary materials, etc.). The sale of materials of production to the small industrialist may also be an independent operation of merchant’s capital, quite analogous to the operation of buying-up finished goods. When, however, the buyer-up of finished goods begins to pay for them with the raw materials needed by the “handicraftsman,” this marks a very big step in the development of capitalist relations. Having cut off the small industrialist from the finished-goods market, the buyer-up now cuts him off from the raw-materials market, and thereby brings him completely under his sway. It is only one step from this form to that higher form of merchant’s capital under which the buyer-up directly hands out materials to the “handicraftsmen” to be worked up for a definite payment. The handicraftsman becomes de facto a wage-worker, working at home for the capitalist; the merchant’s capital of the buyer-up is here transformed into industrial capital.* Capitalist domestic industry arises. In the small industries it is met with more or less sporadically; its introduction on a mass scale, however, relates to the next and higher stage of capitalist development.

VII. “INDUSTRY AND AGRICULTURE”

Such is the usual heading of special sections in descriptions of peasant industries. In view of the fact that at the initial stage of capitalism which we are examining the industrialist has hardly yet become differentiated from the peasant, his connection with the land is something indeed highly characteristic and requires special examination.

Let us begin with the data given in our table (see Appendix I). To characterise the farms of the “handicraftsmen” there are given here, firstly, data on the average number of horses owned by the industrialists of each grade. By combining the 19 industries for which such data are available we get an all-round average per industrialist (master or petty-master) of 1.4 horses, and for the grades: I) 1.1; II) 1.5 and III) 2.0. Thus the higher the proprietor’s position in respect to the size of his industrial establishment, the higher his position as an agriculturist. The biggest industrialists have almost twice as many draught animals as the small ones. But with regard to their farms even the smallest industrialists (grade I) are above the middle peasantry, for the general average for Moscow Gubernia in 1877 was 0.87 horses per peasant household.** Thus it is only the relatively prosperous peasants who become master and petty-master industrialists. The poor peasants, on the other hand, do not, in the main, provide master industrialists but worker industrialists (wage-workers employed by “handicraftsmen,” migratory workers, etc.). Unfortunately, for the overwhelming majority of Moscow industries no data are available on the farms of the wage-workers engaged in small industries. An exception is the hat industry (see general data on it in our table, Appendix I). Here are exceedingly instructive data on the farms of master hat-makers and worker hat-makers.

Thus, the master industrialists belong to the category of very “sound” farmers, i.e., are members of the peasant bourgeoisie, whereas the wage-workers are recruited from the mass of ruined peasants.* Still more important for characterising the relations described are the data on the methods by which the master industrialists cultivate their land. The Moscow investigators distinguished three methods of cultivating the soil: 1) by means of the personal labour of the householder; 2) by “hiring,” i.e., by hiring some neighbour who tills the land of the “distressed” householder with his own implements. This method of cultivation is characteristic of the poor peasant who is being steadily ruined. Of opposite significance is the third method, namely, cultivation with the aid of a “labourer,” i.e., the hire of agricultural (“land”) labourers by the farmer. These workers are usually hired for the whole summer; and, particularly in the busy season, the master usually reinforces them with employees from his workshop. “Thus, the method of cultivating the soil with the aid of the ‘land’ labourer is quite a profitable one” (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VI, I, 48). In our table we have assembled the data on this method of cultivation for 16 industries, in 7 of which there are no masters who hire “land labourers.” In all these 16 industries the master industrialists who hire rural labourers constitute 12% of the total, and by grades: I) 4.5%; II) 16.7% and III) 27.3%. The better off the industrialists are, the more often we find rural entrepreneurs among them. The analysis of the data on the industrial peasantry consequently reveals the same picture of parallel differentiation in both industry and agriculture that we observed in Chapter II on the basis of the data on the agricultural peasantry.

The hiring of “land labourers” by “handicraft” masters is very widespread in all the industrial gubernias. We meet, for example, with references to the hiring of agricultural labourers by the rich bast-matting makers of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia. The furriers of the same gubernia hire agricultural labourers, who usually come from the purely agricultural surrounding villages. The “village-community peasants of Kimry Volost engaged in the boot industry find it profitable to hire for the cultivation of their fields men and women labourers who come to Kimry in large numbers from Tver Uyezd and neighbouring … localities.” The pottery decorators of Kostroma Gubernia send their wage-workers, when not occupied at their regular jobs, to work in the fields.* “The independent masters” (metal-beaters of Vladimir Gubernia) “keep special field workers”; that is why their fields are well cultivated, although they themselves “quite often can neither plough nor mow.”* In Moscow Gubernia, the hiring of “land labourers” is resorted to by many industrialists apart from those about whom data are given in our table; for example, pin-makers, felt-makers and toy-makers send their workers to jobs in the fields too; the glass-bead-makers, metal-beaters, button-makers, cap-makers and harness-makers employ agricultural labourers, etc.** The significance of this fact—the hiring of agricultural workers by peasant industrialists—is very great. It shows that even in the small peasant industries the phenomenon characteristic of all capitalist countries is beginning to be manifested, and that goes to confirm the progressive historical role of capitalism, namely, a rise in the standard of living of the population, an increase in its requirements. The industrialist is beginning to look down upon the “raw” agriculturist with his coarse patriarchal manners and is trying to rid himself of the hardest and worst-paid agricultural jobs. In the small industries, in which capitalism is least developed, this is to be observed very slightly as yet; the industrial worker is only just beginning to be differentiated from the agricultural worker. In the succeeding stages of development of capitalist industry this phenomenon, as we shall see, is to be observed on a mass scale.

The importance of the “tie between agriculture and industry” compels us to review in greater detail the data relating to other gubernias besides Moscow.

Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia. Among the mass of bast-matting makers agriculture is on the decline, and they are neglecting the land; about ⅓ of the winter-crop area and ½ of the spring-crop area are “wasteland.” For the “well-to-do muzhiks,” however, “the land is no longer a wicked stepmother, but a mother bountiful”: they have enough animals, they have manure, they rent land, they try to keep their strips out of the periodical redistribution and tend them better. “Now the wealthy muzhik has become a landlord, while the other muzhik, the poor one, is in serf dependence upon him” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, 65). The furriers “are bad farmers,” but here too we must single out the bigger proprietors who “rent land from their poor fellow-villagers,” etc. The following is a summary of typical budgets of furriers of different groups:

____________

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, 38, and foll. The figures are approximate and have been arrived at on the author’s estimate as to how long the family’s own grain suffices.

The parallel process of differentiation of the agriculturists and industrialists stands out here in bold relief. Concerning the blacksmiths, the investigator says that “industry is more important than agriculture” for the rich masters, on the one hand, and for the “landless” labourers, on the other (ibid., IV, 168).

In Industries of Vladimir Gubernia the question of the relation between industry and agriculture is dealt with much more thoroughly than in any other work of investigation. For a whole number of industries precise data are given on the farms, not only of “handicraftsmen” in general (such “average” figures, as is clear from all the aforesaid, are quite fictitious), but of the various grades and groups of “handicraftsmen,” such as: big masters, small masters, wage-workers; workroom owners and weavers; master industrialists and the rest of the peasantry; households engaged in local and in outside industries, etc. The general conclusion drawn by Mr. Kharizomenov from these data is that if the “handicraftsmen” are divided into three categories, viz.—1) big industrialists; 2) small and medium industrialists; 3) wage-workers, there is to be observed a deterioration of agriculture as from the first category to the third, a diminution in the amount of land and animals, an increase in the proportion of “distressed” farms, etc.* Unfortunately, Mr. Kharizomenov examined these data too restrictedly and one-sidedly, and paid no attention to the parallel and independent process of the differentiation of the peasant agriculturists. That is why he failed to draw from these data the conclusion that inevitably follows from them, namely, that the peasantry both in agriculture and in industry are splitting up into a petty bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat.** That is why, in describing the different industries, he quite often sinks to the traditional Narodnik arguments about the influence of “industry” in general over “agriculture” in general (see, for example, Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, II, 288; III, 91), i.e., to the ignoring of the profound contradictions in the very system of both industry and agriculture, the existence of which he himself was obliged to admit. Another investigator of the industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Mr. V. Prugavin, is a typical spokesman of the Narodnik views on this subject. Here is a sample of his reasoning. The cotton-weaving industry in Pokrov Uyezd “cannot be regarded at all as a harmful factor (sic!!) in the agricultural life of the weavers” (IV, 53). The data testify to the poor farms of the mass of weavers, and to the fact that among the workroom owners, farming is conducted at a level far above the general (ibid.); from the tables it is evident that some workroom owners hire agricultural labourers too. Conclusion: “industry and agriculture march hand in hand, conditioning each other’s development and prosperity” (60). A fine specimen of the phrases used to obscure the fact that the development and prosperity of the peasant bourgeoisie go hand in hand both in industry and in agriculture.*

The data of the Perm handicraft census of 1894-95 revealed the same thing: it is among the small commodity-producers (masters and petty masters) that the level of agriculture is highest and rural labourers are met with; among the artisans agriculture is on a lower level, while among the craftsmen who work for buyers-up the condition of agriculture is worst (as to the agriculture of the wage-workers and of various groups of masters, no data, unfortunately, have been gathered). The census also revealed that the “handicraftsmen” who do not engage in agriculture differ from those who do in that 1) their labour productivity is higher, 2) their net incomes from industry are incomparably higher, and 3) their level of culture and literacy is higher. All these are evidences which confirm the conclusion drawn above, namely, that even the initial stage of capitalism manifests the tendency of industry to raise the population’s standard of living (see Studies, p. 138 and foll.).*

Lastly, the following point is connected with the question of the relation of industry to agriculture. The larger establishments usually have a longer working period. For example, in the furniture industry of Moscow Gubernia, the working period of those working in plain wood equals 8 months (the average workshop staff here is 1.9 workers); for the bent-wood establishments it is 10 months (2.9 workers per establishment), and in the heavy-furniture trade it is 11 months (4.2 workers per establishment). In the shoe industry of Vladimir Gubernia the working period in 14 small workshops equals 40 weeks, and that in 8 large ones (9.5 workers per establishment, as against 2.4 in the small workshops) 48 weeks, etc.** Naturally, this fact is connected with the large number of workers (family, hired industrial and hired agricultural) in the big establishments and explains the great stability of these establishments and their tendency to specialise in industrial activities.

Let us now sum up the data given above on “industry and agriculture.” It is usual at the lower stage of capitalism which we are reviewing for the industrialist still to be scarcely differentiated from the peasant. The combination of industry with agriculture plays an extremely important part in aggravating and accentuating the differentiation of the peasantry: the prosperous and the well-off peasants open workshops, hire workers from among the rural proletariat, and accumulate money for commercial and usurious transactions. The peasant poor, on the other hand, provide the wage-workers, the handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up, and the bottom groups of petty-master handicraftsmen, those most crushed by the power of merchant’s capital. Thus, the combination of industry with agriculture consolidates and develops capitalist relations, spreading them from industry to agriculture and vice versa.* That characteristic feature of capitalist society, the separation of industry from agriculture, manifests itself at this stage in the most rudimentary form, but it does manifest itself and—what is particularly important—in a way totally different from what the Narodniks imagine. When the Narodnik says that industry does no “damage” to agriculture, he discerns damage in the abandonment of agriculture for profitable industry. But such a notion is an invention (and not a deduction from the facts), and a bad invention at that, for it ignores the contradictions which permeate the entire economic system of the peasantry. The separation of industry from agriculture takes place in connection with the differentiation of the peasantry, and does so by different paths at the two poles of the countryside: the well-to-do minority open industrial establishments, enlarge them, improve their farming methods, hire farm labourers to till the land, devote an increasing part of the year to industry, and—at a certain stage of the development of the industry—find it more convenient to separate their industrial from their agricultural undertakings, i.e., to hand over the farm to other members of the family, or to sell farm buildings, animals, etc., and adopt the status of burghers, of merchants.** The separation of industry from agriculture is preceded in this case by the formation of entrepreneur relations in agriculture. At the other pole of the countryside the separation of industry from agriculture consists in the fact that the poor peasants are being ruined and turned into wage-workers (industrial and agricultural). At this pole of the countryside it is not the profitableness of industry, but need and ruin, that compels the peasant to abandon the land, and not only the land but also independent industrial labour; here the process of the separation of industry from agriculture is one of the expropriation of the small producer.

VIII. “THE COMBINATION OF INDUSTRY WITH AGRICULTURE”

Such is the favourite Narodnik formula with the aid of which Messrs. V. V., N. —on and Co. hope to solve the problem of capitalism in Russia. “Capitalism” separate industry from agriculture; “people’s production” combines them in the typical and normal peasant farm—in this ingenuous contra-position lies a good part of their theory. We are now in a position to sum up as regards the question of how in reality our peasantry “combine industry with agriculture,” since a detailed examination has been made above of the typical relations existing among the agricultural and among the industrial peasantry. Let us enumerate the diverse forms of the “combination of industry with agriculture” to be observed in the economics of Russian peasant farming.

1) Patriarchal (natural) agriculture is combined with domestic industries (i.e., with the working up of raw materials for home consumption) and with corvée service for the landowner.

This form of combining peasant “industries” with agriculture is most typical of the medieval economic regime, of which it is an essential component.* In post-Reform Russia all that is left of such patriarchal economy—in which there is as yet absolutely no capitalism, commodity production, or commodity circulation—is vestiges in the shape of the domestic industries of the peasants and labour-service.

2) Patriarchal agriculture is combined with industry in the form of artisan production.

This form of combination is still very close to the preceding one, differing from it only in that here commodity circulation manifests itself—when the artisan is paid in money and appears on the market to purchase tools, raw materials, etc.

3) Patriarchal agriculture is combined with the small-scale production of industrial products for the market, i.e., with commodity production in industry. The patriarchal peasant is transformed into a small commodity-producer, who, as we have shown, tends to the employment of wage-labour, i.e., to capitalist production. A condition for this transformation is now a certain degree of differentiation among the peasantry: we have seen that the small masters and petty masters in industry belong, in the majority of cases, to the prosperous or to the well-off group of peasants. In its turn, the development of small commodity production in industry gives a further impetus to the differentiation of the peasant agriculturists.

4) Patriarchal agriculture is combined with work for hire in industry (and also in agriculture).*

This form is a necessary addition to the preceding one: there it is the product that becomes a commodity, here it is labour-power. Small-scale commodity production in industry is necessarily accompanied, as we have seen, by the appearance of wage-workers and of handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up. This form of the “combination of agriculture with industry” is characteristic of all capitalist countries, and one of the most striking features of the post-Reform history of Russia is the extremely rapid and extremely wide incidence of this form.

5) Petty-bourgeois (commercial) agriculture is combined with petty-bourgeois industries (small commodity production in industry, petty trade, etc.).

The difference between this form and the third is that here petty-bourgeois relations embrace not only industry but also agriculture. Being the most typical form of the combination of industry with agriculture in the economy of the small rural bourgeoisie, this form is therefore characteristic of all capitalist countries. The honour of discovering a capitalism without a petty bourgeoisie fell to the Russian Narodnik economists alone.

6) Wage-labour in agriculture is combined with wage-labour in industry. We have already discussed how such a combination of industry and agriculture manifests itself and what it signifies.

Thus, the forms of the “combination of agriculture with industry” among our peasantry are extremely varied: there are those which express the most primitive economic system with the dominance of natural economy; there are those which express a high development of capitalism; there are a whole number of transitional stages between the former and the latter. By confining oneself to general formulas such as: the “combination of industry with agriculture,” or the “separation of industry from agriculture”), one cannot advance a single step in explaining the actual process of development of capitalism.

IX. SOME REMARKS ON THE PRE-CAPITALIST ECONOMY OF OUR COUNTRYSIDE

The essence of the problem of “the destiny of capitalism in Russia” is often presented as though prime importance attaches to the question: how fast? (i.e., how fast is capitalism developing?). Actually, however, far greater importance attaches to the question: how exactly? and to the question: where from? (i.e., what was the nature of the pre-capitalist economic system in Russia?). The principal errors of Narodnik economics are the false replies given to precisely these two questions, i.e., in a wrong presentation of exactly how capitalism is developing in Russia, in a false idealisation of the pre-capitalist order. In Chapter II (and partly in III) and in the present one we have examined the most primitive stages of capitalism in small-scale agriculture and in the small peasant industries; in doing so we could not avoid many references to the features of the pre-capitalist order. If we now try to summarise these features we shall arrive at the conclusion that the pre-capitalist countryside constituted (from the economic point of view) a network of small local markets which linked up tiny groups of small producers, severed from each other by their separate farms, by the innumerable medieval barriers between them, and by the remnants of medieval dependence.

As to the scattered nature of the small producers, it stands out in boldest relief in their differentiation both in agriculture and in industry, which we established above. But their fragmentation is far from being confined to this. Although united by the village community into tiny administrative, fiscal and land-holding associations, the peasants are split up by a mass of diverse divisions into grades, into categories according to size of allotment, amount of payments, etc. Let us take, for example, the Zemstvo statistical returns for Saratov Gubernia; there the peasants are divided into the following grades: gift-land, owner, full owner and state peasants, state peasants with community holdings, state peasants with quarter holdings,¹²⁸ state peasants that formerly belonged to landlords, appanage, state-land tenant, and landless peasants, owners who were formerly landlords’ peasants, peasants whose farmsteads have been redeemed, owners who are former appanage peasants, colonist freeholder, settler, gift-land peasants who formerly belonged to landlords, owners who were former state peasants, manumitted, those who did not pay quitrent, free tiller,¹²⁹ temporarily bound, former factory-bound, etc.; further, there are registered peasants, migrant, etc. All these grades differ in the history of their agrarian relations, in size of allotments, amount of payments, etc., etc. And within the grades there are innumerable differences of a similar kind: sometimes even the peasants of one and the same village are divided into two quite distinct categories: “Mr. X’s former peasants” and “Mrs. Y’s former peasants.” All this diversity was natural and necessary in the Middle Ages, in the remote past; at the present time, however, the preservation of the social-estate exclusiveness of the peasant communities is a crying anachronism and greatly worsens the conditions of the toiling masses, while at the same time not in the least safeguarding them against the burdens of the new, capitalist era. The Narodniks usually shut their eyes to this fragmentation, and when the Marxists express the view that the splitting up of the peasantry is progressive, the Narodniks confine themselves to hackneyed outcries against “supporters of land dispossession,” thereby covering up the utter fallacy of their views about the pre-capitalist countryside. One has only to picture to oneself the amazing fragmentation of the small producers, an inevitable consequence of patriarchal agriculture, to become convinced of the progressiveness of capitalism, which is shattering to the very foundations the ancient forms of economy and life, with their age-old immobility and routine, destroying the settled life of the peasants who vegetated behind their medieval partitions, and creating new social classes striving of necessity towards contact, unification, and active participation in the whole of the economic (and not only economic) life of the country, and of the whole world.

If we take the peasants who are handicraftsmen or small industrialists we shall find the same thing. Their interests do not transcend the bounds of the small area of surrounding villages. Owing to the insignificant area covered by the local market they do not come into contact with the industrialists of other districts; they are in mortal terror of “competition,” which ruthlessly destroys the patriarchal paradise of the small handicraftsmen and industrialists, who live lives of stagnant routine undisturbed by anybody or anything. With respect to these small industrialists, competition and capitalism perform a useful historical function by dragging them out of their backwoods and confronting them with all the issues that already face the more developed strata of the population.

A necessary attribute of the small local markets is, apart from primitive forms of artisan production, primitive forms of merchant’s and usury capital. The more remote a village is, the further away it is from the influence of the new capitalist order, from railways, big factories and large-scale capitalist agriculture, the greater the monopoly of the local merchants and usurers, the more they subjugate the surrounding peasantry, and the cruder the forms of this subjugation. The number of these small leeches is enormous (when compared with the meagre produce of the peasants), and there is a rich variety of local names to designate them. Recall all these “prasols,” “shibais,” “shchetinniks,” “mayaks,” “ivashes,” “bulinyas,” etc., etc. The predominance of natural economy, which accounts for the scarcity and dearness of money in the countryside, results in the assumption of an importance by all these “kulaks” out of all proportion to the size of their capital. The dependence of the peasants on the money owners inevitably acquires the form of bondage. Just as one cannot conceive of developed capitalism without large-scale merchant’s capital in the form of commodities or money so the precapitalist village is inconceivable without small traders and buyers-up, who are the “masters” of the small local markets. Capitalism draws these markets together, combines them into a big national market, and then into a world market, destroys the primitive forms of bondage and personal dependence, develops in depth and in breadth the contradictions which in a rudimentary form are also to be observed among the community peasantry—and thus paves the way for their resolution.

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CHAPTER VI

CAPITALIST MANUFACTURE AND CAPITALIST DOMESTIC INDUSTRY

I. THE RISE OF MANUFACTURE AND ITS MAIN FEATURES

By manufacture is meant, as we know, co-operation based on division of labour. In origin, manufacture belongs directly to the above-described “first stages of capitalism in industry.” On the one hand, workshops with a more or less considerable number of workers gradually introduce division of labour, and in this way capitalist simple co-operation grows into capitalist manufacture. The statistics on the Moscow industries quoted in the preceding chapter clearly show the process of this genesis of manufacture: the larger workshops in all fourth category industries, in some of the third category, and in individual cases of the second category, systematically apply division of labour on a wide scale and must therefore be classed as types of capitalist manufacture. More detailed data on the technique and the economics of some of these industries will be given below.

On the other hand, we have seen how merchant’s capital in the small industries, upon reaching its highest stage of development, reduces the producer to the position of a wage-worker processing the raw material of others for payment by the piece. If further development leads to the introduction of systematic division of labour into production and transforms the technique of the small producer, if the “buyer-up” singles out certain detailed operations and gets them done by wage-workers in his own workshop, if, parallel with the distribution of work to be done in the home, and inseparably connected with it, big workshops with division of labour emerge (belonging very often to these same buyers-up), we are confronted with a process of the genesis of capitalist manufacture of another kind.*

Manufacture is highly important in the development of capitalist forms of industry, as the link between handicrafts and small commodity production with primitive forms of capital, and large-scale machine industry (the factory). Manufacture is closer to the small industries because it continues to be based on hand technique, so that the big establishments cannot, therefore, fully displace the small ones, cannot completely divorce the industrialist from agriculture. “Manufacture was unable, either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise that production to its very core (in ihrer Tiefe). It towered up as an economic work of art, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic industries.”** What brings manufacture closer to the factory is the rise of the big market, of big establishments with wage-workers, of big capital, which has brought masses of propertyless workers under its complete domination.

In Russian literature the prejudice regarding the isolation of so-called “factory” production from “handicraft” production, regarding the “artificiality” of the former and the “people’s” character of the latter, is so widespread that we think it particularly important to examine the data on all the more important branches of manufacturing industry and to show their economic organisation after they had grown out of the stage of small peasant industries, and before they were transformed by large-scale machine industry.

II. CAPITALIST MANUFACTURE IN RUSSIAN INDUSTRY

Let us begin with the industries that process fibres.

1) The Weaving Industries

The weaving of linen, wool, cotton and silk fabrics, galloons, etc., was organised everywhere in Russia as follows (before the appearance of large-scale machine industry). The industry was headed by big capitalist workshops employing tens and hundreds of wage-workers; the owners of these workshops, possessing sizable capital, undertook the large-scale purchase of raw material, partly working it up in their own establishments, and partly giving out yarn and warp to small producers (workroom owners, middle-men,¹³³ subcontractors, peasant-“handicraftsmen” etc.) who wove the cloth at home or in small workshops at piece rates. The work itself was done by hand, and the following operations were distributed among the workers: 1) yarn-dyeing; 2) yarn-winding (very often women and children specialised in this operation); 3) yarn-fixing (“fixers”); 4) weaving; 5) weft-winding for weavers (bobbin hands, mostly children). Sometimes in the big workshops there were special “threaders” (who threaded the warp through the eyes of the batten and reed.)* Division of labour is usually applied, not only to single operations, but to wares, that is, the weavers specialise in producing various sorts of cloth. The selection of some operations to be done in the home does not, of course, make any change whatever to the economic structure of this type of industry. The workrooms or homes where the weavers work are simply external departments of the manufactory. The technical basis of such industry is hand production with extensive and systematic division of labour; from the economic point of view we see here the formation of large capital which controls the purchase of raw materials and the sale of wares on an extremely extensive (national) market, and under whose complete sway are a mass of proletarian weavers; a few large establishments (manufactories in the narrow sense of the term) dominate a mass of small ones. Division of labour leads to the emergence of specialist artisans from among the peasantry; non-agricultural centres of manufacture arise, such as the village of Ivanovo in Vladimir Gubernia (in 1871 it became the town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and is now a centre of large-scale machine industry), the village of Velikoye in Yaroslavl Gubernia, and many other villages in Moscow, Kostroma, Vladimir and Yaroslavl gubernias, which have now turned into factory towns.* In our economic literature and statistics the industry organised in this way is usually split up into two parts: peasants who work in their homes, or in not particularly big workrooms, workshops, etc., are classed under “handicraft” industry, while the bigger workrooms and workshops are placed among the “factories and works” (and, moreover, quite fortuitously, since no definitely established and uniformly applied rules exist as to the separation of small establishments from big ones, of workrooms from manufactories, of workers occupied in their homes from workers occupied in the workshop of the capitalist).** Naturally, such classification, which places some wage-workers on one side, and some masters who hire these very wage-workers (in addition to the workers in their establishments) on the other, is nonsense from the scientific viewpoint.

Let us illustrate this by detailed data regarding one of the “handicraft weaving” industries, namely, silk-weaving in Vladimir Gubernia.* The “silk industry” is a typical specimen of capitalist manufacture. Hand labour prevails. Of the total number of establishments the small ones constitute the majority (179 out of 313, or 57% of the total, have from 1 to 5 workers), but in greater part they are not independent and are far behind the big ones in their significance to the industry as a whole. Establishments with 20 to 150 workers constitute 8% of the total (25), but in them 41.5% of the aggregate number of workers are concentrated, and they account for 51% of the total output. Of the total number of workers in the industry (2,823) there are 2,092 wage-workers, i.e., 74.1%. “On the job we meet with division of labour both in wares and in individual operations.” Weavers are rarely able to make both “velvet” and “satin” (the two principal lines in this trade). “The division of labour into separate operations within the workshop is most strictly practised only in the big factories” (i.e., manufactories) “that employ wage-workers.” The fully independent proprietors number only 123, who alone buy the raw materials themselves and sell the finished article; they have 242 family workers and “employ 2,498 wage-workers, who in greater part are paid by the piece,” a total, consequently, of 2,740 workers, or 97% of the aggregate number of workers. It is thus clear that the distribution by these manufactory owners, through the medium of “middle-men” (workroom owners), of work to be done in the home is no special form of industry at all, but is merely one of the operations of capital in manufacture. Mr. Kharizomenov rightly observes that the “mass of small establishments (57%) alongside the small number of big ones (8%), and the insignificant number of workers employed per establishment (7½) conceal the true character of the trade” (loc. cit., 39). The specialisation characteristic of manufacture is seen here clearly in the separation of the industrialists from agriculture (the land is abandoned, on the one hand by the impoverished weavers, and on the other by the big manufactory owners) and in the formation of a special type of industrial population, who live much more “decently” than do the agriculturists, and look down upon the muzhik (loc. cit., 106). Our factory statistics have always registered only a very casually selected fraction of this industry.*

The “galloon industry” in Moscow Gubernia is capitalist manufacture organised in a quite analogous fashion.** Such precisely is the case with regard to the printed calico industry in Kamyshin Uyezd, Saratov Gubernia. According to the Directory for 1890, there were here 31 “factories” with 4,250 workers and output totalling 265,000 rubles, while according to the List there was one “work-distributing office” with 33 workers in the establishment and an output totalling 47,000 rubles. (In other words, in 1890 workers employed in the establishment and on the side were lumped together!) According to local investigators, in 1888 nearly 7,000 looms were engaged in producing printed calico,*** an output totalling 2 million rubles, and “the whole business is run by a few manufacturers,” who employ “handicraftsmen” too, including children of 6 and 7 years of age for a payment of 7 to 8 kopeks per day (Reports and Investigations, Vol. I).* And so forth.

2) Other Branches of the Textile Industry. The Felt Trade

To judge by official factory statistics, felt production shows a very poor development of “capitalism”: in all European Russia there are altogether 55 factories, with 1,212 workers and an output totalling 454,000 rubles (Directory for 1890). But these figures merely show a casually picked fragment of a widely developed capitalist industry. Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia occupies first place for the development of “factory” felt production, and in that gubernia the principal centre of the industry is the town of Arzamas and the suburb Viyezdnaya Sloboda (where there are 8 “factories” with 278 workers and an output totalling 120,000 rubles; in 1897 there were 3,221 inhabitants; and in the village of Krasnoye, 2,835). It is in the environs of these centres that “handicraft” felt-making is developed, in some 243 establishments, employing 935 workers, with an output totalling 103,847 rubles (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, V). To illustrate clearly the economic organisation of felt-making in this district, let us try the graphic method and indicate by specific symbols the producers who occupy special places in the general structure of the industry.

It is clear, therefore, that the separation of “factory” and “handicraft” industry is purely artificial, that what we have before us is a single and integral structure of industry which fully fits into the concept of capitalist manufacture.** From the technical aspect it is hand production. The organisation of the work is that of co-operation based on division of labour, which is here observed in two forms: as to wares (some villages specialise in plain felt, others in boots, hats, socks, etc.), and as to individual operations (for example, the whole village of Vasilyev Vrag shapes hats and socks for the village of Krasnoye, where the semi-prepared article is finished, etc.). This is capitalist co-operation, for it is headed by big capital, which has created large manufactories and has brought under its sway (by an intricate web of economic relations) a mass of small establishments. The overwhelming majority of the producers have been transformed into workers performing one operation and producing for entrepreneurs under extremely insanitary conditions.* The long standing of the industry and the fully established capitalist relations result in the separation of the industrialists from agriculture: in the village of Krasnoye agriculture is in utter ruin, and the life of the inhabitants differs from that of the agricultural population.**

Diagram illustrating the organisation of the felt industry

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* The sources are shown in the text. The number of establishments is about half the number of independent workers (52 establishments in Vasilyev Vrag, 5+55+110 in Krasnoye village and 21 establishments in the 4 small villages). On the other hand, the figures for the town of Arzamas and Viyezdnaya Sloboda stands for the number of “factories,” and not of workers.

Quite analogous is the organisation of the felt industry in a number of other districts. In 363 village communities of Semyonov Uyezd in the same gubernia, the industry in 1889 was carried on by 3,180 households, with 4,038 persons working. Of 3,946 workers, only 752 worked for the market, 576 were wage-workers and 2,618 worked for masters on the basis, in greater part, of using the latter’s materials; 189 households gave out work to 1,805 households. The big owners have workshops with as many as 25 wage-workers, and buy wool to a value of some 10,000 rubles per year.* The big owners are called thousanders; their turnover runs to from 5,000 to 100,000 rubles; they have their own wool warehouses, and their own booths for the sale of wares.** For Kazan Gubernia the List gives 5 felt “factories,” with 122 workers and an output totalling 48,000 rubles, as well as 60 outside workers. Evidently the latter are also included among the “handicraftsmen,” concerning whom we read that they often work for “buyers-up” and that there are establishments having 60 workers.*** Of 29 felt “factories” in Kostroma Gubernia, 28 are concentrated in Kineshma Uyezd, and have 593 workers employed in the establishments and 458 outside (List, pp. 68-70; two of the enterprises have only outside workers. Steam-engines already appear). From the Transactions of the Handicraft Commission (XV) we learn that out of a total of 3,908 wool-carders and felt-makers in this gubernia, 2,008 are concentrated in Kineshma Uyezd. The Kostroma felt-makers are in greater part dependent or work for wages in extremely insanitary workshops.**** In Kalyazin Uyezd, Tver Gubernia, we find, on the one hand, that home work is done for “factory owners” (List, 113), and, on the other, that precisely this uyezd is a centre of “handicraft” felt-makers; as many as 3,000 of them come from this uyezd, passing through the wasteland called “Zimnyak” (in the 60s it was the site of Alexeyev’s cloth mill), and forming “an enormous labour market of wool-carders and felt-makers.”(*) In Yaroslavl Gubernia outside work for “factory owners is also done” (List, 115) and there are “handicraftsmen” who work for merchant proprietors, using the latter’s wool, etc.

3) The Hat-and-Cap and Hemp-and-Rope Trades

Above we gave statistics for the hat industry of Moscow Gubernia.(**) They show that two-thirds of the total output and of the total number of workers are concentrated in 18 establishments, which have an average of 15.6 wage-workers.* The “handicraft” hat-makers perform only part of the hat-making operations: they make the shapes, which are sold to Moscow merchants who have their own “finishing establishments”; on the other hand, “clippers” (women who clip the down) work at home for the “handicraft” hat-makers. Thus, all in all, we find here capitalist co-operation based on division of labour and entangled in a whole network of diverse forms of economic dependence. In the centre of the industry (the village of Klenovo, Podolsk Uyezd) the separation of the industrialists (mainly wage-workers) from agriculture** is clearly to be seen, together with a rise in the level of the population’s requirements: they live “more decently,” dress in calico and even in cloth, buy samovars, abandon ancient customs, etc., thereby evoking the bitter complaints of the local admirers of old times.*** The new era even occasioned the appearance of migratory hat-makers.

A typical example of capitalist manufacture is the cap industry in the village of Molvitino, Bui Uyezd, Kostroma Gubernia.**** “The principal … occupation in the village of Molvitino and in … 36 hamlets is the cap industry.” Agriculture is being abandoned. Since 1861 the industry has greatly developed; sewing-machines have become widely used. In Molvitino 10 workshops are busy all year round with 5 to 25 male and 1 to 5 female workers each. “The best workshop … has a turnover of about 100,000 rubles per annum.”(*) Work is also distributed to homes (for example, materials for the crowns are made by women in their homes). Division of labour cripples the workers, who work under the most insanitary conditions and usually contract tuberculosis. The lengthy existence of the industry (for over 200 years) has produced highly skilled craftsmen; the Molvitino craftsmen are known in the big cities and in the remote outer regions.

The centre of the hemp industry in the Medyn Uyezd, Kaluga Gubernia, is the village of Polotnyani Zavod. This is a large village (according to the census of 1897 it had 3,685 inhabitants) with a population that is landless and highly industrial (over 1,000 “handicraftsmen”); it is the centre of the “handicraft” industries of Medyn Uyezd.* The hemp industry is organised in the following way: the big proprietors (of whom there are three, the biggest being Yerokhin) have workshops employing wage-workers and circulating capital of more or less considerable dimensions for purchasing raw materials. The hemp is combed in the “factory,” spun by spinners in their homes, and twisted both in the factory and in the home. It is warped in the factory and woven both in the factory and in the home. In 1878 a total of 841 “handicraftsmen” was counted in the hemp industry; Yerokhin is considered to be both a “handicraftsman” and a “factory owner,” employing 94-64 workers in 1890 and in 1894-1895; according to Reports and Investigations (Vol. II, p. 187), “hundreds of peasants” work for him.

In Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, the rope industry is also centred in non-agricultural industrial villages, Nizhni Izbylets and Verkhni Izbylets in the Gorbatov Uyezd.** According to Mr. Karpov (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. VIII), the Gorbatov-Izbylets district is one large rope-making area; part of the inhabitants of the town of Gorbatov are also engaged in the industry, and the villages of Verkhni Izbylets and Nizhni Izbylets are, in fact, “almost part of the town of Gorbatov”; the inhabitants live like townspeople, drink tea every day, wear clothing bought in the shops, and eat white bread. Altogether, as many as two-thirds of the inhabitants of 32 villages are engaged in the industry, a total of 4,701 working (2,096 men and 2,605 women) with an output of about 1½ million rubles. The industry has been in existence for nearly 200 years, and is now declining. It is organised as follows: all work for 29 proprietors, using the latter’s materials, are paid by the piece, are “totally dependent upon the proprietors” and work from 14 to 15 hours a day. According to Zemstvo statistics (1889) the industry employs 1,699 male workers (plus 558 females and males of non-working age). Of 1,648 working only 197 work for sale, 1,340 work for proprietors* and 111 are wage-workers employed in the workshops of 58 proprietors. Of 1,288 allotment households, only 727, or a little over half, cultivate all their land themselves. Of 1,573 allotment-holding working persons, 306, or 19.4%, do not engage in agriculture at all. Turning to the question as to who these “proprietors” are, we must pass from the sphere of “handicraft” industry to that of “factory” industry. According to the List for 1894-95 there were two rope factories there, with 231 workers employed on the premises and 1,155 working outside, with an output totalling 423,000 rubles. Both these establishments have installed motors (which they did not have either in 1879 or in 1890), and we therefore clearly see here the transition from capitalist manufacture to capitalist machine industry, and the transformation of “handicraft” work distributors and buyers-up into real factory owners.

In Perm Gubernia the handicraft census of 1894-95 registered 68 peasant rope-and-string yards, with 343 workers (of whom 143 were hired) and an output totalling 115,000 rubles.** These small establishments are headed by big manufactories, which are reckoned together, viz.: 6 owners employ 101 workers (91 hired) and have an output totalling 81,000 rubles.*** The system of production in these big establishments may serve as the most striking example of “serial manufacture” (as Marx calls it¹³⁵), i.e., the sort of manufacture in which different workers perform different consecutive operations in working up the raw material: 1) hemp scutching; 2) combing; 3) spinning; 4) coiling; 5) tarring; 6) winding on drum; 7) passing threads through perforated board; 8) passing threads through iron bush; 9) stranding of plaits, twisting and gathering of ropes.*

The organisation of the hemp industry in Orel Gubernia is evidently similar: from among the considerable number of small peasant establishments big manufactories emerge, principally in the towns, and are included among the “factories and works” (according to the Directory for 1890 there were in Orel Gubernia 100 hemp-scutching factories, with 1,671 workers and an output totalling 795,000 rubles). The peasants work in the hemp industry “for merchants” (probably for the very same manufacturers), using the latter’s materials, at piece rates, the work being divided up into special operations: “scutchers” scutch the hemp; “spinners” spin it; “bearders” trim it, “wheelmen” turn the wheel. The work is very hard; many contract consumption and “rupture.” The dust is so thick that “unless accustomed you will not stay in it for a quarter of an hour.” The work is done in ordinary sheds from dawn to dusk, from May to September.**

4) The Wood-Working Trades

The most typical example of capitalist manufacture in this sphere is the chest-making industry. According to the data, for instance, of the Perm investigators, “this industry is organised as follows: a few big proprietors, owning workshops that employ wage-workers, purchase materials, partly make the wares on their own premises, but mainly give out material to small workshops making parts, and in their own shops assemble them and, after finishing, send the ready article to market. Division of labour … is employed on the job extensively: the making of the entire chest is divided into ten or twelve operations, each separately performed by handicraftsmen. The organisation of the industry consists in the combination of workers performing one operation (Teilarbeiter, as they are called in Das Kapital) under the command of capital.”* This is heterogeneous manufacture (heterogene Manufaktur, as Marx calls it¹³⁶), in which the different workers do not perform consecutive operations in turning the raw material into the product, but make the various parts of the product, which are afterwards assembled. The preference of the capitalists for the domestic work of “handicraftsmen” is to be explained partly by the above-mentioned character of manufacture, and partly (and mainly) by the cheaper labour of the home workers.** Let us observe that the relatively big workshops in this industry are sometimes also included among “factories and works.”***

In all probability, the chest-making industry is organised similarly in Vladimir Gubernia, in Murom Uyezd where, according to the List, there are 9 “factories” (all hand-operated), with 89 workers on the premises and 114 outside, and an output totalling 69,810 rubles.

The carriage industry, in Perm Gubernia, for example, is organised on similar lines: from among the mass of small establishments there emerge assembly workshops employing wage-workers; the small handicraftsmen are workers who make parts of the carriages both out of their own materials, and out of materials supplied by the “buyers-up” (i.e., owners of the assembly workshops.)**** We read about the Poltava “handicraft” carriage builders that in the suburb of Ardon there are workshops that employ wage-workers and also distribute work to homes (the bigger masters having as many as 20 outside workers).(*) In Kazan Gubernia, division of labour as to wares is to be observed in the building of town carriages: some villages specialise in sleighs, others in wheeled vehicles, etc. “The town carriages, completely assembled in the villages (but without the metal-work, wheels or shafts), are sent to Kazan merchant customers, who in turn send them to blacksmiths for the metal-work. The carriages are then sent back again to the shops and workshops in the town, where they are finished off, i.e., are upholstered and painted…. Kazan, where town carriages were formerly iron-mounted, gradually passed this work on to handicraftsmen, who work at home for a smaller payment than do the town craftsmen….”* Hence, capital prefers to distribute work to home workers because this reduces the cost of labour-power. The organisation of the carriage industry, as is evident from the data quoted, constitutes, in the majority of cases, a system of handicraftsmen making parts, who are under the sway of capital.

The large industrial village of Vorontsovka, Pavlovsk Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia (9,541 inhabitants in 1897), constitutes, as it were, a single manufactory of wooden articles (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, etc., Vol. IX, article by Rev. M. Popov). Over 800 houses are engaged in the industry (as well as some households in the suburb of Alexandrovka, which has over 5,000 inhabitants). They make carts, tarantasses, wheels, chests, etc., to a total of about 267,000 rubles. Less than one-third are independent masters; hired workers in masters’ workshops are rare.** The majority work to order for peasant merchants at piece rates. The workers are in debt to the proprietors and are worn out by arduous toil: the people are growing feebler. The inhabitants of the suburb are industrial, not of the rural type, and scarcely engage in agriculture at all (except to work vegetable plots), since their allotments are miserably small. The industry has been long in existence, diverting the population from agriculture and increasingly widening the rift between the rich and the poor. The people subsist on meagre food; they dress “more smartly than before,” “but beyond their means,” in clothing that is entirely bought. “The population has succumbed to the spirit of industry and trade.” “Nearly all who have no craft carry on some trading…. Under the influence of industry and trade, the peasant has, generally speaking, become more unreserved, and this has made him more developed and resourceful.”*

The celebrated wooden-spoon industry of the Semyonov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, is close to capitalist manufacture in its organisation. True, there are no big workshops standing out from among the mass of small workshops and dominating them, but we find a deeply-rooted division of labour and the complete subjection of the mass of part-job workers to capital. Before it is ready, the spoon passes through no less than 10 hands, the buyers-up getting some of the operations done by specially hired workers or giving them out to specialist workers (for example, for varnishing); some of the villages specialise in particular operations (for example, the village of Dyakovo specialises in spoon-finishing to the order of the buyer-up, at piece rates; the villages of Khvostikovo, Dianovo and Zhuzhelka specialise in varnishing, etc.). The buyers-up purchase the timber wholesale in the Samara and other gubernias, where they send parties of hired workers; they own warehouses for raw material and manufactured goods, supply the most valuable material to handicraftsmen for processing, etc. The mass of workers doing part jobs merge into a single, complex mechanism of production, entirely under the sway of capital. “It is all the same to the spoon-makers whether they work for hire at the master’s cost and on his premises, or are occupied in their own cottages, for in this industry, as in others, everything has been weighed, measured and counted. The spoon-maker never earns more than just enough to keep body and soul together.”* It is quite natural that under such conditions the capitalists who dominate the whole trade are in no hurry to open their own workshops, and the industry, based on hand skill and traditional division of labour, stagnates in its seclusion and immobility. Tied to the land, the “handicraftsmen” seem to have become petrified in their routine: as in 1879, so in 1889, they still count money in the old style, in banknotes and not in silver.

The toy industry in Moscow Gubernia is headed similarly by establishments of the capitalist-manufactory type.** Of 481 workshops, 20 have over 10 workers each. Division of labour, both as to wares and as to individual operations, is practised on a very wide scale, enormously raising the productivity of labour (at the cost of crippling the worker). For example, it is estimated that a small workshop yields a return of 26% of the selling price, and a big workshop, one of 58%.*** Of course, the fixed capital of the big proprietors is also much larger; technical devices are met with (for example, drying sheds). The centre of the industry is a non-agricultural township, the suburb of Ser-giyevsky (where there are 1,055 workers out of a total of 1,398, with an output to the amount of 311,000 rubles out of a total of 405,000 rubles; the population, according to the 1897 census, numbers 15,155). The author of the article on this industry, referring to the prevalence of small workshops, etc., considers it more, but still not very, likely that the industry will develop into manufacture rather than into factory industry. “In the future, too,” he says, “the small producers will always be able to compete more or less successfully with large-scale production” (loc. cit., 93). The author forgets that in manufacture the technical basis is always the same hand-production that obtains in the small industries; that the division of labour can never be such a decisive advantage that it will entirely eliminate the small producers, particularly if the latter resort to such means as lengthening the working day, etc.; and that manufacture is never in a position to embrace the whole of production, but remains a mere superstructure over the mass of small establishments.

5) The Processing of Live stock Produce. The Leather and Fur Trades

The most extensive areas of the leather industry present particularly striking examples of the complete merging of “handicraft” and factory industry, examples of capitalist manufacture highly developed (in depth and in breadth). What is characteristic is the fact that the gubernias which are conspicuous for the size of their “factory” leather industry (Vyatka, Nizhni-Novgorod, Perm and Tver) are marked by a particular development of “handicraft” industries in this sphere.

In the village of Bogorodskoye, Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, there were, according to the Directory for 1890, 58 “factories” with 392 workers and an output totalling 547,000 rubles; according to the List for 1894-95 there were 119 “works,” with 1,499 workers on the premises and 205 outside, and with an output totalling 934,000 rubles (the latter figures covering only the processing of livestock produce, the principal local industry). But these data deal only with the top levels of capitalist manufacture. Mr. Karpov in 1879 computed in this village and its environs over 296 establishments, with 5,669 workers (a large number of whom worked at home for capitalists), and with an output totalling about 1,490,000 rubles* in the following industries: tanning, shingle-gluing, basket-weaving (for packing goods), harness-making, horse-collar-making, mitten-making and, standing by itself, pottery. The Zemstvo census of 1889 listed 4,401 industrialists for this district, and of 1,842 workers for whom detailed information is given, 1,119 work for hire in other people’s workshops and 405 work at home for masters.** “Bogorodskoye, with its population of 8,000, is a huge tannery in continuous operation.”* To be more precise, it is a “serial” manufactory controlled by a few big capitalists who buy the raw materials, tan the hides, and turn them into a variety of articles, hiring several thousand absolutely propertyless workers for the job and ruling over the small establishments.** This industry has had a very long existence, since the 17th century; particularly memorable in the industry’s history are the Sheremetevs (beginning of the 19th century), landlords who helped considerably to develop the industry and, incidentally, protected the proletariat, which came into existence here long ago, from the local rich. After 1861 the industry greatly developed, and particularly did big establishments grow at the expense of the small ones; centuries of industrial activity produced from among the population remarkably skilled craftsmen who have carried the trade all over Russia. The firmly-rooted capitalist relations have led to the separation of industry from agriculture: hardly any farming is done in Bogorodskoye village itself, which, on the contrary, divorces neighbouring peasants who move into this “town” from the land.*** Mr. Karpov notes in this village “a complete absence of peasant characteristics among the inhabitants,” so that “you would never think you were in a village and not a town.” This village leaves Gorbatov and all the other uyezd towns of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia far behind, with the exception, perhaps, of Arzamas. It is “one of the considerable commercial and industrial centres in the gubernia, and its industry and commerce run into the millions.” “The radius of the industrial and commercial influence of Bogorod-skoye is very wide; but most closely connected with the industry of Bogorodskoye is that of its environs within a radius of 10 to 12 versts. These industrial environs are, as it were, a continuation of Bogorodskoye itself.” “The inhabitants of Bogorodskoye do not in the least resemble the ordinary, raw muzhiks: they are artisans of the burgher type, shrewd, experienced people, who look down on the peasants. The manner of life and the ethical standards of the Bogorodskoye inhabitants are completely urban.” To this we must add that the industrial villages of Gorbatov Uyezd are marked by a relatively high level of literacy among the population. Thus, the percentage of literate and student men and women is, in the villages of Pavlovo, Bogorodskoye and Vorsma, 37.8% and 20% respectively, as against 21.5% and 4.4% in the rest of the uyezd (see Zem-stvo statistical Material).

Quite analogous (only on a smaller scale) are the relations in the leather-processing industries of the villages of Katunki and Gorodets (Balakhna Uyezd), Bolshoye Murashkino (Knyaginin Uyezd), Yurino (Vasil Uyezd), and Tubanayevka, Spasskoye, Vatras and Latyshikha in the same uyezd. These are similar non-agricultural centres with a “ring” of surrounding agricultural villages, and with similar diverse industries and numerous small establishments (and also workers in the home) subordinated to big entrepreneurs, whose capitalist workshops are occasionally included among “factories and works.”* Without going into statistical details, which will provide nothing new compared with what has already been said, let us merely quote the following extremely interesting description of the village of Katunki:**

“A certain patriarchal simplicity in the relations between masters and workmen, which, however, is not so noticeable at first sight

and is, unfortunately (?), disappearing increasingly every year … testifies to the handicraft character of the industries (?). It is only recently that the factory character both of the industries and of the population has begun to be observed, under the influence, in particular, of the town, intercourse with which has been facilitated by the inauguration of the steamboat service. Today the village looks like a regular industrial township: there is no sign of agriculture whatever, the houses are built close together as in the towns; the fine brick houses of the rich, and alongside of them the miserable hovels of the poor; the long wooden and brick buildings of the factories crowded in the middle of the village—all this sharply distinguishes Katunki from the neighbouring villages and clearly points to the industrial character of the local population. The inhabitants themselves possess features of character that also call to mind the type of “factory hand” who has already taken shape in Russia: a certain showiness in house furniture, in clothes and manners, spendthrift habits of life in most cases, and little care for the morrow, a forwardness and often affectation in speech, a certain superciliousness towards the country yokel—all these features are possessed by them in common with all Russian factory people.”*

In the town of Arzamas, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, the “factory” statistics listed in 1890 a total of 6 tanneries, employing 64 workers (Directory); this is only a small fraction of the capitalist manufacture which embraces the fur, boot-making and other industries. The same factories employ workers in the home, both in the town of Arzamas (in 1878, estimated at 400) and in 5 suburban villages, where out of the 360 furrier households, 330 work for Arzamas merchants, using their materials and working 14 hours a day for 6 to 9 rubles per month**; that is why the furriers are pallid, feeble and degenerating folk. In the suburb of Viyezdnaya Sloboda, of the 600 boot-maker households, 500 work for masters, from whom they receive the cut-out leather. The industry is of long standing, being about 200 years old, and is still growing and developing. The inhabitants hardly engage in agriculture at all; their whole manner of life is purely urban, and they live “in grand style.” The same applies to the furrier villages mentioned above, the inhabitants of which “look down with disdain upon the peasant and call him a ‘country bumpkin’.”*

We find exactly the same thing in Vyatka Gubernia. The Vyatka and Slobodskoi uyezds are centres both of “factory” and of “handicraft” leather and fur trades. In the Vyatka Uyezd, the handicraft tanneries are concentrated on the outskirts of the town and “supplement” the industrial activities of the big works,** for example, by working for the big owners; working for the latter also, in the majority of cases, are the handicraft harness-makers and glue-makers. The fur factory owners have hundreds working for them in the home, sewing sheepskins, etc. This is just a single capitalist manufactory with branches: sheepskin-dressing and sheepskin-coat-making, leather and harness, etc. Still more striking are the relations existing in the Slobodskoi Uyezd (the centre of the industries is the suburb of Demyanka); here we see a small number of big factory owners*** at the head of handicraft tanners (numbering 870), boot- and mitten-makers (855), sheepskin-dressers (940), and tailors (309 make short sheepskin coats to order from capitalists). Generally speaking, such organisation of the production of leather goods is evidently very widespread: thus, in the town of Sarapul, Vyatka Gubernia, the List gives 6 tanneries, also making footwear, which employ, in addition to 214 workers on the premises, 1,080 outside workers (p. 495). What would become of our “handicraftsmen,” those representatives of “people’s” industry who are depicted in such bright hues by all sorts of Manilovs, if all the Russian merchants and factory owners were to compute with equal detail and precision the outside workers employed by them?*

Reference should be made here to the industrial village of Rasskazovo, Tambov Uyezd, Tambov Gubernia (population in 1897 was 8,283), a centre both of “factory” industry (cloth mills, soap-works, tanneries and distilleries) and of “handicraft” industry, the latter being closely connected with the former; and to the industries: tanning, felt-making (as many as 70 masters, and establishments employing from 20 to 30 workers), glue-making, boot-making, stocking knitting (there is not a household where stockings are not knit from wool that “buyers-up” give out by weight), etc. Near this village is the suburb of Belaya Polyana (300 households), celebrated for industries of the same kind. In Morshansk Uyezd, the centre of the handicraft industries is the village of Pokrovskoye-Vasilyevskoye, which is also the centre of factory industry (see Directory and Reports and Investigations, Vol. III). In Kursk Gubernia, noteworthy as industrial villages and centres of “handicraft” industries are the suburbs: Veliko-Mikhailovka (Novy Oskol Uyezd; population in 1897 was 11,853), Borisovka (Graivoron Uyezd—18,071 inhabitants), Tomarovka (Belgorod Uyezd, 8,716 inhabitants), Miropolye (Sudzha Uyezd, over 10,000 inhabitants. See Reports and Investigations, Vol. I, Information for 1888-1889). In the same villages you will also find leather “works” (see Directory for 1890). The principal “handicraft” industry is leather and boot-making. It arose as far back as the first half of the 18th century and reached the peak of its development in the 60s of the 19th century having become “a stable organisation of a purely commercial character.” The whole business was monopolised by contractors, who bought the leather and gave it out to be processed by handicraftsmen. The railways destroyed this monopoly character of capital, and the capitalist contractors transferred their capital to more profitable undertakings. Today it is organised as follows: there are about 120 big entrepreneurs; they own workshops where wage-workers are employed, and also distribute work to homes; there are as many as 3,000 small independent masters (who, however, buy their leather from the big ones); there are 400 people who work at home (for the big masters), and as many wage-workers; then there are the apprentices. The total number of boot-makers is over 4,000. In addition, there are handicraft potters, icon-case makers, icon painters, table-cloth weavers, etc.

A highly characteristic and typical example of capitalist manufacture is the squirrel-fur industry in Kargopol Uyezd, Olonets Gubernia, described with such knowledge of the facts, and with truthful and artless presentation of the whole life of the industrial population by a craftsman and teacher in the Transactions of the Handicraft Commission (Vol. IV). According to his description (in 1878), the industry has existed since the beginning of the 19th century: 8 masters employ 175 workers, in addition to which they have as many as 1,000 seamstresses and some 35 families of furriers working for them at home (in different villages), 1,300 to 1,500 persons in all, with an output totalling 336,000 rubles. As a point of interest, it should be noted that when this was a flourishing industry it was not included in the “factory” statistics. The Directory for 1879 makes no mention of it. But when it began to decline the statistics included it. The Directory for 1890 listed for the town and the uyezd of Kargopol 7 works, with 121 workers and an output totalling 50,000 rubles, whereas the List gave 5 works, with 79 workers (plus 57 outside) and an output totalling 49,000 rubles.* The order of things prevailing in this branch of capitalist manufacture is very instructive as a specimen of what goes on in our age-old, purely native “handicraft industries,” that have been left stranded in one of Russia’s numerous rural backwoods. The craftsmen work 15 hours a day in a very unhealthy atmosphere and earn 8 rubles per month, less than 60 or 70 rubles per year. The masters’ incomes amount to about 5,000 rubles per annum. The relations between masters and workers are “patriarchal”: according to ancient custom, the master gives the workers kvass and salt gratis, which they have to beg from his cook. As a mark of gratitude to the master (for “giving” them work) the workers come, without pay, to pull squirrel tails, and also clean furs after work. The workers live in the workshop all the week, and the masters knock them about, seemingly in a joke (p. 218, loc. cit.), make them do all sorts of jobs, such as raking hay, shovelling snow, fetching water, rinsing clothes, etc. Labour is astonishingly cheap in Kargopol itself, and the peasants in the vicinity “are ready to work for next to nothing.” Work is done by hand, there is systematic division of labour, and there is a lengthy apprenticeship (8 to 12 years); the lot of the apprentices can easily be imagined.

6) The Remaining Live stock Processing Trades

A particularly noteworthy example of capitalist manufacture is the celebrated boot industry of the village of Kimry, Korcheva Uyezd, Tver Gubernia, and its environs.* The industry is a very old one, having existed since the 16th century. Since the Reform, it has continued to grow and develop. In the early 70s Pletnev counted 4 volosts in the area covered by this industry, but in 1888 the area included 9 volosts. Basically the organisation of the industry is as follows. It is headed by the owners of big workshops employing wage-workers; they distribute the cut-out leather to be made up by outside workers. Mr. Pletnev counted 20 such masters, employing 124 adults and 60 boys, with an output totalling 818,000 rubles, while the number of workers occupied at home for these capitalists is estimated by the author approximately at 1,769 adults and 1,833 boys. Then come the small masters, each with 1 to 5 wage-workers and 1 to 3 boys. These masters dispose of their goods mainly in the village market in Kimry; they number 224 and have 460 adults and 301 boys working for them; output totals 187,000 rubles. Hence, there are 244 masters altogether, employing 2,353 adults (of whom 1,769 work at home) and 2,194 boys (of whom 1,833 work at home), with an output totalling 1,005,000 rubles. Further, there are workshops which do various individual operations: currying (skin-cleaning with scraper); chipping (gluing of chips left from currying); special carting (4 masters, with 16 employees and up to 50 horses); special carpentry (box-making), etc.* Pletnev calculated the total output at 4.7 million rubles for the whole district. In 1881 the number of handicraftsmen was computed at 10,638, and with migrants, 26,000, with an output totalling 3.7 million rubles. As to conditions of labour, it is important to note the excessively long working day (14 to 15 hours) and the extremely insanitary working conditions, payment in goods, etc. The centre of the industry, Kimry village, “is more like a small town” (Reports and Investigations, I, 224); the inhabitants are poor agriculturists, and are engaged in their industry all the year round; only the rural handicraftsmen give up the industry during haymaking. The houses in Kimry village are urban, and the inhabitants are distinguished for their urban habits of life (such as “showiness”). Until very recently this industry was not included in “factory” statistics, probably because the masters “readily style themselves handicraftsmen” (ibid., 228). The List has for the first time included 6 boot workshops in Kimry district, with 15 to 40 workers each on the premises, and with no outside workers. Of course, it contains no end of gaps.

Manufacture also includes the button industry of Moscow Gubernia, Bronnitsi and Bogorodskoye uyezds—the making of buttons from hoofs and rams’ horns. Engaged in this industry are 487 workers, employed in 52 establishments; the output totals 264,000 rubles. Establishments with fewer than 5 employees number 16; those with 5 to 10—26; those with 10 and more—10. Masters who do without wage-workers number only 10; these work for big masters, using the latter’s materials. Only the big industrialists (who, as is evident from the figures given, should have from 17 to 21 workers per establishment) are quite independent. It is they, evidently, who figure in the Directory as “factory owners” (see p. 291: 2 establishments with an output totalling 4,000 rubles and with 73 workers). This is “serial manufacture”; the horns are first steamed in what is called the “smithy” (a wooden hut with a furnace); then they are passed on to the workshop where they are cut up, after which they go to a stamping press, where the pattern is imprinted, and, lastly, are finished and polished on lathes. The industry has its apprentices. The working day is 14 hours. Payment in goods is a regular thing. The relations between masters and men are patriarchal, as seen in the following: the master calls the workers “boys,” and the pay-book is called the “boys’ book”; when the master pays the workers, he lectures them and never grants in full their “requests” for payment.

The horn industry, which is included in our table of small industries (Appendix I to Chapter V, Industries Nos. 31 and 33), is also of the same type. “Handicraftsmen” employing dozens of wage-workers figure also in the Directory as “factory owners” (p. 291). Division of labour is practised; work is also given out to home workers (horn trimmers). The centre of the industry in Bogorodsk Uyezd is the big village of Khoteichi, where agriculture is receding into the background (population in 1897 was 2,494). The Moscow Zemstvo publication stated quite rightly: Handicraft Industries of Bogorodsk Uyezd, Moscow Gubernia, in 1890, that this village “is nothing but a large comb manufactory” (p. 24, our italics). In 1890, over 500 industrialists were counted in this village, with an output of from 3.5 to 5.5 million combs. “More often than not, the horn dealer is also a buyer-up of finished goods, and in many cases a big comb-maker as well.” The position of those makers who are compelled to take horns “at piece rates” is particularly bad: “their position is actually worse than that of the wage-workers in the big establishments.” Dire need compels them to exploit the labour of their whole families beyond measure, to lengthen their working day and to put juveniles to work. “During the winter, work in Khoteichi starts at one o’clock in the morning, and it is hard to say for certain when it ends in the cottage of the ‘independent’ craftsman doing ‘piece-work.’ ” Payment in goods is widely practised. “This system, eliminated with such difficulty from the factories, is still in full force in the small handicraft establishments” (27). Probably, the horn goods industry is organised on similar lines in Kadnikov Uyezd, Vologda Gubernia, in the area of Ustye village (known as “Ustyanshchina”), where there are 58 hamlets. Mr. V. Borisov (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. IX) counts 388 handicraftsmen here, with an output totalling 45,000 rubles; all the handicraftsmen work for capitalists, who buy horns in St. Petersburg and tortoise-shell abroad.

At the bead of the brush industry in Moscow Gubernia (see Appendix I to Chapter V, Industry No. 20) we find big establishments with a large number of wage-workers and with systematic division of labour.* It is interesting to note at this point the changes that took place in the organisation of this industry between 1879 and 1895 (see Moscow Zemstvo publication: The Brush Industry According to the Investigation of 1895). Some well-to-do industrialists went to Moscow to carry on the industry there. The number of industrialists increased 70%, the increase being particularly large in the number of women (+170%) and girls (+159%). The number of big workshops with wage-workers diminished: the proportion of establishments with wage-workers dropped from 62% to 39%. This was due to the fact that the masters began to distribute work to be done in the home. The introduction into general use of the drilling machine (for making holes in brush blocks) accelerated and facilitated one of the main processes in brushmaking. The demand for “setters” (craftsmen who “set” bristle in the block) increased; and this operation, which became increasingly specialised, fell to the lot of women, their labour being cheaper. The women began to work at home setting bristle, and were paid by the piece. Thus, the growing resort to domestic industry was caused in this case by progress in technique (drilling machine), progress in division of labour (the women do nothing but set bristle), and progress in capitalist exploitation (the labour of women and girls being cheaper). This example shows very clearly that domestic industry by no means eliminates the concept of capitalist manufacture, but, on the contrary, is sometimes even a sign of its further development.

7) The Processing of Mineral Products

In the section relating to ceramics we get an example of capitalist manufacture in the industries of the Gzhel district (an area of 25 villages Bronnitsi and Bogorodskoye uyezds, Moscow Gubernia). The relevant statistics are given in our table of small industries (Appendix I to Chapter V, Industries Nos. 15, 28 and 37). From these data it is evident that despite the enormous differences between the three Gzhel industries: pottery, porcelain and decorative, these differences disappear as we pass from one grade of establishment to another in each industry, and we get a series of workshops of successively increasing dimensions. Here are the average numbers of workers per establishment according to grade in these three industries: 2.4—4.3—8.4—4.4.—7.9—13.5—18—69—226.4. In other words, the workshops range from the very smallest to the very biggest. There is no doubt that the big establishments belong to the category of capitalist manufacture (inasmuch as they have not introduced machines, have not developed into factories); what is important, however, is not only this, but also that the small establishments are connected with the big ones; that we have a single system of industry here and not separate workshops of one or other type of economic organisation. “Gzhel constitutes a single economic whole” (Isayev, loc. cit., 138), and the big workshops in the district have grown slowly and gradually out of the small ones (ibid., 121). The work is done by hand,* with considerable division of labour: among the potters we find wheel hands (specialising in different sorts of pottery), kilnmen, etc., and sometimes special workers for preparing colours. In the manufacture of porcelain-ware division of labour is extremely detailed: crushers, wheel hands, feeders, kilnmen, decorators, etc. The wheel hands even specialise in the various kinds of porcelain ware (cf. Isayev, loc. cit., 140: in one case division of labour increases productivity of labour by 25%). The decorators’ shops work for the porcelain makers and are, therefore, only departments of the latter’s manufactories, performing a special detailed operation. It is characteristic of developed capitalist manufacture that physical strength itself becomes a speciality. Thus, in Gzhel, some of the villages are engaged (almost to a man) in clay digging; for heavy work not requiring special skill (grinding), workers from the Tula and Ryazan gubernias are employed almost exclusively, being superior in strength and vigour to the not very robust Gzhelians. Payment in goods is widely practised. Agriculture is in a bad way. “The Gzhelians are a degenerating race” (Isayev, 168)—weak-chested, narrow-shouldered, feeble; the decorators lose their sight at an early age, etc. Capitalist division of labour breaks up the worker and deforms him. The working day is from 12 to 13 hours.

8) The Metal Trades. The Pavlovo Industries

The celebrated Pavlovo lock and cutlery industries cover the whole of Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, and Murom Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia. These industries originated very long ago. Smirnov states that as far back as 1621 there were (according to the cadastres¹³⁷) 11 smithies in Pavlovo. By the middle of the 19th century these industries constituted a far-flung network of fully developed capitalist relations. After the Reform, the industries in this district continued to develop and expand. According to the Zemstvo census of 1889, in Gorbatov Uyezd 13 volosts and 119 villages were engaged in industry; a total of 5,953 households, 6,570 male workers (54% of the total number working in these villages) and 2,741 old men, juveniles and women, 9,311 persons in all. In the Murom Uyezd, Mr. Grigoryev in 1881 registered 6 industrial volosts, 66 villages, 1,545 households and 2,205 male workers (39% of the total number working in these villages). Not only were large, non-agricultural industrial villages formed (Pavlovo, Vorsma), but even the surrounding peasants were diverted from agriculture: outside of Pavlovo and Vorsma, in Gorbatov Uyezd, 4,492 persons were engaged in industries, of whom 2,357, or more than half did not engage in agriculture. Life in centres like Pavlovo has become quite urban and has given rise to incomparably more developed requirements, more cultured environment, clothes, manner of life, etc., than among the surrounding “raw” peasants.*

Turning to the economic organisation of the Pavlovo industries, we must first of all note the indubitable fact that the “handicraftsmen” are headed by the most typical capitalist manufactories. For example, in the Zavyalovs’ establishment (which already in the 60s employed over 100 workers at the bench and has now introduced a steam-engine) a penknife passes through 8 or 9 hands: the forger, blade-maker, handle-maker (usually an outside worker), hardener, facer, polisher, finisher, grinder and marker. This is extensive capitalist co-operation based on division of labour, with a considerable number of the workers performing individual operations employed at home and not in the capitalist’s workshop. Here are facts given by Mr. Labzin (in 1866) on the bigger establishments in the villages of Pavlovo, Vorsma and Vacha, covering all branches of production in this district: 15 proprietors had 500 workers occupied on the premises and 1,134 workers outside, making a total of 1,634, with an output totalling 351,700 rubles. How far this description of economic relations is applicable to the whole district at the present time may be seen from the following data*:

Thus, the organisation of the industry as outlined by us prevails in all the districts. All in all, about three-fifths of the total number of workers are employed capitalistically. Here too, consequently, we find manufacture predominating in the general structure of the industry* and holding masses of workers under its sway, without, however, being able to eradicate small production. The relative tenacity of the latter is fully explained, firstly, by the fact that in some branches of the Pavlovo industry mechanised production has not yet been introduced at all (for instance, in lock-making); and, secondly, by the fact that the small producer tries to save himself from sinking by resorting to means that cause him to sink far lower than the wage-worker. These means are: lengthening the working day, and reducing the standard of living and of general requirements. “The earnings of the group of handicraftsmen who work for proprietors are less subject to fluctuation (Grigoryev, loc. cit., 65); at Zavyalovs’, for example, the lowest-paid worker is the handle-maker; “he works at home, and that is why he is satisfied with lower earnings” (68). The handicraftsmen who work “for factory owners” are “able to earn somewhat more than the average earnings of the one who takes his products to the market. Larger earnings are particularly noticeable among the workers who live in the factories” (70).** The working day in the “factories” is from 14½ to 15 hours, with a maximum of 16 hours. “The working day of the home-working handicraftsmen, on the other hand, is never less than 17 hours and sometimes as much as 18 and even 19 hours” (ibid.). It would not be in the least surprising if the law of June 2, 1897¹³⁸ caused an increase here in home-work; it is high time these “handicraftsmen” directed their efforts towards compelling the proprietors to organise factories! Let the reader also recall the notorious Pavlovo “loan-purchase,” “exchange,” “wife-pawning” and similar forms of bondage and personal degradation which grind down the quasi-independent small producer.* Fortunately, rapidly developing large-scale machine industry does not so readily tolerate these worst forms of exploitation as manufacture does. Running ahead a little, let us quote data on the growth of factory production in this district.**

We thus see that ever-increasing numbers of workers are being drawn into large establishments, which are going over to the use of machines.***

9) Other Metal Trades

The industries of Bezvodnoye village, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia and Uyezd also come under the head of capitalist manufacture. This is also an industrial village, the majority of whose inhabitants do not engage in agriculture at all, and which serves as the centre of an industrial area of several villages. According to the Zemstvo census of 1889 (Material, Vol. VIII, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1895), in the Bezvodnoye Volost (581 households) 67.3% of the households cultivated no land, 78.3% had no horses, 82.4% engaged in industries, and 57.7% had literate persons and schoolchildren in the family (as against an average for the uyezd of 44.6%). The Bezvodnoye industries are devoted to the production of various metal goods: chains, fishhooks, and metal fabrics; the output was estimated at 2½ million rubles in 1883* and 12 million rubles in 1888-89.** The organisation of the industry is as follows: work for proprietors, using their materials, which is distributed among a number of workers performing single operations and done partly in the employers’ workshops and partly in the home. For example, in the making of fish-hooks the various operations are performed by “benders,” “cutters” (who work in a special shed) and “pointers” (women and children who sharpen the hook-points in their homes); all these work at piece rates for the capitalist, while the bender gives out work on his own account to the cutters and pointers. “Metal wire is now done by horse-driven windlasses; formerly the wire was drawn by blind men, who were brought here in large numbers….” One of the “specialities” of capitalist manufacture! “The conditions under which this work is done differ very much from those in all the other trades. People have to work in a stifling atmosphere filled with the harmful vapours emanating from accumulated horse dung.”* Organised on the same lines of capitalist manufacture are the screen,** the pin,*** and the gold-thread industries.**** In the last-named industry at the beginning of the 80s there were 66 establishments, employing 670 workers (of whom 79% were hired), with an output totalling 368,500 rubles; some of these capitalist establishments were occasionally also included among the “factories and works.”(*)

The locksmith industries of the Burmakino Volost (and surrounding volosts) of Yaroslavl Gubernia and Uyezd are probably organised on the same lines. At all events, here we observe the same division of labour (blacksmiths, blowers and locksmiths), the same extensive development of wage-labour (of 307 smithies in the Burmakino Volost, 231 employ wage-workers), the same predominance of big capital over all these detail workers (the buyers-up are at the top; the blacksmiths work for them, and the locksmiths for the blacksmiths), the same combination of the buying-up of wares with the production of wares in capitalist workshops, some of which are occasionally included among the “factories and works.”(***)

In the appendix to the preceding chapter, statistics were given on the tray and the copper industries (***) of Moscow Gubernia (the latter in the district known as “Zagarye”). The data show that wage-labour plays a predominant part in these industries, that the industries are headed by large workshops employing an average of from 18 to 23 wage-workers per establishment, with an average output of from 16,000 to 17,000 rubles. If we add to this that division of labour is very widely practised here,* it will be clear that what we have is capitalist manufacture.** “The small industrial units, which are an anomaly under the existing conditions of technique and division of labour, can only hold out alongside the big workshops by lengthening the working day to the utmost” (Isayev, loc. cit., p. 33)—among the tray-makers, for example, for as long as 19 hours. The ordinary working day here is from 13 to 15 hours; with the small proprietors it is from 16 to 17 hours. Payment in goods is widely practised (both in 1876 and in 1890).*** Let us add that the lengthy existence of this industry (it arose at the beginning of the 19th century, at the latest) and extensive specialisation have, in this case too, produced highly skilled workers; the Zagarians are famed for their craftsmanship. Specialities have also sprung up in the industry which need no preliminary training and are within the grasp of even under-age workers. “This very possibility,” Mr. Isayev rightly observes, “of becoming an under-age worker at once and acquiring a trade, as it were, without having to study, indicates that the handicraft spirit, which demands the training of labour-power, is disappearing; the simplicity of many of the detailed operations is a symptom of the transition of handicraft to manufacture” (loc. cit., 34). Let us only observe that to a certain degree the “handicraft spirit” always remains in manufacture, for its basis is the same hand production.

10) The Jewellery, Samovar and Accordion Trades

The village of Krasnoye, Kostroma Gubernia and Uyezd, is one of the industrial villages usually held up as centres of our “people’s” capitalist manufacture. This large village (in 1897 it had 2,612 inhabitants) is purely urban in character; the inhabitants live like townspeople and (with very few exceptions) do not engage in agriculture. Krasnoye is the centre of the jewellery industry which covers 4 volosts and 51 villages (including Sidorovskoye Volost of Nerekhta Uyezd), and in them 735 households and about 1,706 workers.* “The principal representatives of industry,” said Mr. Tillo, “are undoubtedly the big industrialists of the village of Krasnoye: the Pushilovs, Mazovs, Sorokins, Chulkovs and other merchants. They buy materials (gold, silver and copper), employ craftsmen, buy up finished articles, distribute orders for work to be done in the home, supply samples, etc.” (2043). The big industrialists have their workshops, so-called “rabotorni” (laboratories), where the metal is smelted and forged, then to be given out for finishing to “handicraftsmen”; they have technical appliances, such as “pretsi” (presses and dies for stamping), “punches” (for embossing designs), “rollers” (for stretching the metal), benches, etc. Division of labour is widely practised: “Nearly every article passes through several hands in an established order in the course of manufacture. For example, in the making of ear-rings, the master industrialist first sends the silver to his own workshop, where part of it is rolled and part drawn into wire; then on receipt of an order the material is given to a craftsman who, if he has a family, divides the work among several persons; one uses a punch to cut the silver plates into the shapes for the ear-rings, another bends the wire into the rings with which the ear-rings are attached to the ears, a third solders these parts, and, lastly, a fourth polishes the finished ear-rings. None of this work is difficult, or requires much training; very often the soldering and the polishing are done by women and by children of 7 or 8 years of age” (2041).* Here, too, the working day is excessively long, usually as much as 16 hours. Payment in provisions is common.

The following statistics (published quite recently by a local assay inspector) clearly illustrate the economic structure of the industry:¹³⁹

“Both the first groups (about two-thirds of the total number of craftsmen) should be classed as home-working factory workers rather than as handicraftsmen.” In the top group “wage-labour occurs more and more frequently…. The craftsmen have begun to buy articles made by others”; in the upper strata of this group “buying-up predominates,” and “four of the buyers-up have no workshops at all.”*

The samovar and accordion industries in Tula town and environs are highly typical examples of capitalist manufacture. Generally speaking, the “handicraft” industries in this district have a long history, dating back to the 15th century.** They evidenced a particularly rapid development in the middle of the 17th century; Mr. Borisov considers that the second period in the development of the Tula industries then began. In 1637 the first iron foundry was built (by the Dutchman Vinius). The Tula gunsmiths formed a separate smiths’ suburb, constituted a separate social estate, enjoying special rights and privileges. In 1696 the first iron foundry was erected in Tula by a famous Tula blacksmith, and the industry spread to the Urals and Siberia.*** Then began the third period in the history of the Tula industries. The craftsmen set up their own workshops and taught the trade to surrounding peasants. In the 1810s and 1820s the first samovar factories were started. “By 1825 there were in Tula 43 different factories that belonged to gunsmiths, while those in existence at the present time nearly all belong to one-time gunsmiths, now Tula merchants” (loc. cit., 2262). Here, consequently, we observe a direct continuity and connection between the old guild-masters and the principals of subsequent capitalist manufacture. In 1864 the Tula gunsmiths were freed from serf dependence¹⁴⁰ and assigned to the burgher estate; earnings dropped as a consequence of the severe competition of the village handicraftsmen (which caused a reverse flow of industrialists from town to country); the workers turned to the samovar, lock, cutlery, and accordion industries (the first Tula accordions appeared in 1830-1835).

The samovar industry is at present organised as follows. It is headed by big capitalists who own workshops employing tens and hundreds of wage-workers, but they also distribute many separate operations to be done by workers, urban and rural, in their homes; those who perform these operations sometimes still have their own workshops and employ wage-workers. Naturally, side by side with the big there are small workshops, with all the consecutive stages of dependence upon the capitalists. Division of labour is the general basis of the whole structure of this trade. The process of samovar-making is divided into the following separate operations: 1) rolling the copper sheets into tubes (tubing); 2) soldering the tubes; 3) filing the seams; 4) fitting the bottoms; 5) beating out the shapes; 6) cleaning the insides: 7) turning the bodies and necks; 8) plating; 9) press-punching the vents in the bottoms and the covers; 10) assembling the samovars. Further, there are the separate processes of casting the small copper parts: a) preparing the moulds and b) casting.* Where work is given out to be done in the home, each of these operations may constitute a special “handicraft” industry. One of these “industries” was described by Mr. Borisov in Vol. VII of the Transactions of the Handicraft Commission. This industry (samovar tubing) consists in peasants doing at piece rates one of the operations we have described, using merchants’ materials. The handicraftsmen left Tula town to work in the countryside after 1861; the cost of living and standard of requirements were lower in the countryside (loc. cit., p. 893). Mr. Borisov quite rightly attributes this tenacity of the “handicraftsman” to the retention of hand-labour in the beating out of samovars; “it will always be profitable for the manufacturer to employ the village handicraftsman, because he works at from 10 to 20% below the rate of the urban artisan” (916).

Mr. Borisov estimated the value of the output of samovars in 1882 at approximately 5 million rubles, the number of workers (handicraftsmen included) totalling from 4,000 to 5,000. In this case also the factory statistics cover only a fraction of capitalist manufacture. The Directory for 1879 counted in Tula Gubernia 53 samovar “factories” (all hand-operated) with 1,479 workers and an output totalling 836,000 rubles. The Directory for 1890 gives 162 factories, 2,175 workers, and an output of 1.1 million rubles; the list of firms, however, contains only 50 factories (1 steam-operated), with 1,326 workers and an output totalling 698,000 rubles. Evidently, some hundred small establishments were in this case classed as “factories.” Lastly, the List gives the following for 1894-95: 25 factories (4 steam-operated), 1,202 workers (+607 outside), and an output totalling 1,613,000 rubles. In these data neither the number of factories nor the number of workers are comparable (for the reason given above, and also because of the lumping together in previous years of workers on the premises and outside). The only thing beyond doubt is that manufacture is being steadily displaced by large-scale machine industry: in 1879, there were 2 factories with 100 and more workers; in 1890 there were 2 (one steam-operated) and in 1894-95 there were 4 (three steam-operated).*

The accordion industry, which is at a lower stage of economic development, is organised in precisely the same way.** “In the making of accordions there are over ten separate trades” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX, 236); the making of the different parts of an accordion or the performance of some of the operations constitute separate, quasi-independent “handicraft” industries. “When things are quiet all the handicraftsmen work for factories or for more or less big workshops, the owners of which supply them with materials; when, however, there is a brisk demand for accordions, a large number of small producers appear, who buy up parts from the handicraftsmen, assemble them and take the finished articles to the local shops where accordions are very readily purchased” (ibid.). Mr. Borisov in 1882 estimated from 2,000 to 3,000 workers in this industry, with an output totalling about 4 million rubles; factory statistics in 1879 showed two “factories,” with 22 workers and an output totalling 5,000 rubles; in 1890, 19 factories, with 275 workers and an output totalling 82,000 rubles; in 1894-95 one factory, with 23 workers (plus 17 outside) and an output totalling 20,000 rubles.* Steam-engines are not employed at all. All these figure variations indicate a purely haphazard picking of individual establishments which are component parts of the complex organism of capitalist manufacture.

III. TECHNIQUE IN MANUFACTURE. DIVISION OF LABOUR AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

Let us now draw conclusions from the foregoing data and see whether they are really indicative of a special stage in the development of capitalism in our industry.

__________

The feature common to all the industries we have examined is the retention of hand production and systematic, widely practised division of labour. The process of production is split up into several single operations performed by different specialist craftsmen. The training of such specialists takes a fairly long time, and therefore a natural concomitant of manufacture is apprenticeship. It is well known that under the general conditions of commodity economy and capitalism this gives rise to the worst forms of personal dependence and exploitation.* The disappearance of apprenticeship is connected with a higher development of manufacture and with the advent of large-scale machine industry, when machines reduce the period of training to a minimum or when such simple single operations arise as can be done even by children (see above example of Zagarye).

The retention of hand production as the basis of manufacture explains its comparative immobility, which is particularly striking when compared with the factory. The development and extension of division of labour proceeds very slowly, so that for whole decades (and even centuries) manufacture retains its form once it has been adopted; as we have seen, quite a number of the industries examined are of quite ancient origin, yet no great changes in methods of production have been observed in the majority of them until recently.

As for division of labour, we shall not repeat here the commonly known tenets of theoretical economics concerning the part it plays in the process of development of the productive powers of labour. On the basis of hand production no other progress in technique was possible except by division of labour.** Let us merely note the two major circumstances that make clear the need for division of labour as a preparatory stage for large-scale machine industry. Firstly, the introduction of machines is possible only when the production process has been split into a number of the simplest, purely mechanical operations; machines are first used for the simplest operations and their spread to the more complicated processes is very gradual. For example, in weaving, the power-loom has long predominated in the production of plain fabrics, whereas silk weaving continues to be carried on mainly by hand; in the engineering trade the machine is applied first of all to one of the simplest operations—grinding, etc. But this splitting of production into the simplest operations, while being a necessary preparatory step to the introduction of large-scale machine production, leads at the same time to a growth of small industries. The surrounding population is enabled to perform such detailed operations in its homes, either to order of the manufactory owners, using their materials (bristle-setting in brush manufacture, sewing sheepskins, sheepskin coats, mittens, boots, etc., in the leather trade, horn-trimming in comb manufacture, samovar “tubing,” etc.), or even “independently” buying the materials, making certain parts of the product and selling them to the manufacturers (in the hat, carriage, accordion and other industries, etc.). It seems paradoxical that the growth of small (sometimes even “independent”) industries should be an expression of the growth of capitalist manufacture: nevertheless it is a fact. The “independence” of such “handicraftsmen” is quite fictitious. Their work could not be done, and their product would on occasion even have no use-value, if there were no connection with other detailed operations, with other parts of the product. And only big capital, ruling (in one form or another) over a mass of workers performing separate operations was able* to and did create this connection. One of the main errors of Narodnik economics is that it ignores or obscures the fact that the “handicraftsman” performing a single operation is a constituent part of the capitalist manufactory.

The second circumstance that must particularly be stressed is that manufacture trains skilled workers. Large-scale machine industry could not have developed so quickly in the post-Reform period had it not been preceded by a long period in which manufacture trained workers. For instance, the investigators of the “handicraft” weaving industry of the Pokrov Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, note the remarkable “technical skill and experience” of the weavers of Kudykino Volost (where the village of Orekhovo and the famous Morozov mills are situated): “nowhere… do we find such intensity … of labour … ; a strict division of labour between the weaver and the bobbin-hand is invariably practised here….” “The past … has imparted to the Kudykinians … expert skill in the technique of production … an ability to cope with all sorts of difficulties.”* “Factories cannot be erected in any village and in any number,” we read in reference to silk weaving: “the factory must follow the weaver into the villages where, due to migratory labour” (or, let us add, due to domestic industry), “a contingent of proficient workers has been formed.”** Establishments like the St. Petersburg boot factory¹⁴¹*** could not have developed so quickly if in the district around Kimry village, say, skilled workers who have now taken to migration had not been developing for centuries, etc. That, incidentally, is why very great importance attaches to the formation by manufacture of a whole number of large districts which specialised in certain trades and trained large numbers of skilled workers.****

Division of labour in capitalist manufacture disfigures and cripples the worker, including the “handicraftsman” who makes single parts. It produces virtuosi and cripples; the former as rare exceptions, whose skill arouses the astonishment of investigators,* and the latter in the shape of the mass of “handicraftsmen,”—weak-chested, with inordinately developed arms, “curvature of the spine,”** etc., etc.

IV. THE TERRITORIAL DIVISION OF LABOUR AND THE SEPARATION OF AGRICULTURE FROM INDUSTRY

Directly connected with division of labour in general is, as has been noted, territorial division of labour—the specialisation of certain districts in the production of some one product, of one sort of product and even of a certain part of a product. The predominance of hand production, the existence of a mass of small establishments, the preservation of the worker’s connection with the land, the tying of the craftsman to a given trade,—all this inevitably gives rise to the seclusion of the different industrial districts of manufacture; sometimes this local seclusion amounts to complete isolation from the rest of the world,*** with which only the merchant masters have dealings.

In the following effusion Mr. Kharizomenov underrates the significance of the territorial division of labour: “The vast distances of the Empire go hand in hand with sharp differences of natural conditions: one locality is rich in timber and wild animals, another in cattle, while a third abounds in clay or iron. These natural features determined the character of industry. The great distances and inconveniences of communication made the transport of raw materials impossible, or extremely costly. As a result, industry had necessarily to nestle where an abundance of raw material was close at hand. Hence the characteristic feature of our industry—the specialisation of commodity production in large and compact areas” (Yuridichesky Vestnik, loc. cit., p. 440).

Territorial division of labour is not a characteristic feature of our industry, but of manufacture (both in Russia and in other countries); the small industries did not produce such extensive districts, while the factory broke down their seclusion and facilitated the transfer of establishments and masses of workers to other places. Manufacture not only creates compact areas, but introduces specialisation within these areas (division of labour as to wares). The availability of raw materials in the given locality is not at all essential for manufacture, and is hardly even usual for it, for manufacture presupposes fairly wide commercial intercourse.*

Connected with the above-described features of manufacture is the circumstance that this stage of capitalist evolution is marked by a specific form of separation of agriculture from industry. It is no longer the peasant who is the most typical industrialist, but the non-farming “artisan” (and at the other pole—the merchant and the workshop owner). In most cases (as we have seen) the industries organised on the lines of manufacture have non-agricultural centres: either towns or (much more often) villages, whose inhabitants hardly engage in agriculture at all, and which should be classed as settlements of a commercial and industrial character. The separation of industry from agriculture is here deeply rooted in the technique of manufacture, in its economy, and in the peculiarities of its way of life (or culture). Technique ties the worker to one trade and therefore, on the one hand, renders him unfit for agriculture (physically weak, etc.), and, on the other, demands continuous and long pursuit of the craft. The economic structure of manufacture is characterised by a far deeper differentiation among the industrialists than is the case in the small industries; and we have seen that in the small industries, differentiation in industry is paralleled by differentiation in agriculture. With the utter pauperisation of the mass of producers, which is a condition and a consequence of manufacture, its working personnel cannot be recruited from among farmers who are at all economically sound. Among the cultural peculiarities of manufacture are, firstly, the very lengthy (sometimes age-old) existence of the industry, which leaves its impress upon the population; and secondly, the higher standard of living of the population.* We shall deal with the latter circumstance in greater detail further on, but first let us note that manufacture does not bring about the complete separation of industry from agriculture. Under hand technique the big establishments cannot eliminate the small ones completely, especially if the small handicraftsmen lengthen their working day and reduce the level of their requirements: under such conditions, manufacture, as we have seen, even develops the small industries. It is natural, therefore, that in the majority of cases we see around the non-agricultural centre of manufacture a whole region of agricultural settlements, the inhabitants of which also engage in industries. Hence, in this respect, too, we find clearly revealed the transitional character of manufacture between small hand production and the factory. If even in the West the manufacturing period of capitalism could not bring about the complete separation of the industrial workers from agriculture,* in Russia, with the preservation of many institutions that tie the peasants to the land, such separation could not but be retarded. Therefore, we repeat, what is most typical of Russian capitalist manufacture is the non-agricultural centre which attracts the population of the surrounding villages—the inhabitants of which are semi-agriculturists and semi-industrialists—and dominates these villages.

Particularly noteworthy in this connection is the fact of the higher cultural level of the population of such non-agricultural centres. A higher degree of literacy, a considerably higher standard of requirements and life, vigorous dissociation from the “rawness” of “native village soil”—such are the usual distinguishing features of the inhabitants of such centres.** One can understand the enormous significance of this fact, which clearly demonstrates the progressive historical role of capitalism, and moreover of purely “people’s” capitalism, which even the most ardent Narodnik would scarcely dare characterise as “artificial,” since the overwhelming majority of the centres described are usually classified under the heading of “handicraft” industry! The transitional character of manufacture is revealed here too, since it merely begins the transformation of the mentality of the population, and only large-scale machine industry completes it.

V. THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF MANUFACTURE

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 resourcefulness) 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:

“The final victory of large-scale industry over small industry, the bringing together of the workers, scattered in numerous work rooms, within the walls of a single silk mill, is only a matter of time, and the sooner this victory is achieved the better it will be for the weavers.

“Characteristic of the present organisation of the silk industry are the instability and indefiniteness of economic categories, the struggle between large-scale production, and small production and agriculture. This struggle drags the small master and the weaver into fevers of excitement, yielding them nothing but divorcing them from the land, dragging them into debt and overwhelming them in periods of depression. Concentration of production will not reduce the weaver’s wages, but will make it unnecessary to entice workers and intoxicate them, to attract them with advances that do not correspond to their annual earnings. With the diminution of mutual competition factory owners lose interest in expending considerable sums on involving the weaver in debt. Moreover, large-scale production so clearly counterposes the interests of the factory owner and the workers, the wealth of the one and the poverty of the others, that the weaver cannot develop the desire to become a factory owner himself. Small production gives the weaver no more than large-scale production does, but it lacks the stability of the latter and for that reason corrupts the worker much more deeply. False hopes arise in the mind of the handicraft weaver, he looks forward to the opportunity of setting up his own loom. To achieve this ideal he strains himself to the utmost, falls into debt, steals, lies, regards his fellow-weavers not as friends in misfortune, but as enemies, as competitors for the very wretched loom that he sees in his mind’s eye in the remote future. The small master does not understand his economic insignificance; he cringes to the buyers-up and the factory owners, hides from his fellow-weavers where and on what terms he buys his raw materials and sells his product. Imagining that he is an independent master, he becomes a voluntary and wretched tool, a plaything in the hands of the big traders. No sooner does he succeed in dragging himself out of the mire, in acquiring three or four looms, than he begins to talk about the troubles of the employer, the laziness and drunkenness of the weavers, about the necessity of insuring the factory owner against non-payment of debts. The small master is the incarnation of industrial servility, just as in the good old days the butler and the housekeeper were the incarnation of serf servility. So long as the instruments of production are not entirely divorced from the producer and the latter still has opportunities of becoming an independent master, so long as the economic gulf between the buyer-up and the weaver is bridged by proprietors, small masters and middle-men, who direct and exploit the lower economic categories and are subject to the exploitation of the upper ones, the social consciousness of those who work is obscured and their imagination is distorted by fictions. Competition arises where there should be solidarity, and the interests of what are really antagonistic economic groups are united. Not confining itself to economic exploitation, the present organisation of silk production finds its agents among the exploited and lays upon them the task of obscuring the minds and corrupting the hearts of those who work” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. III, pp. 124-126).

VI. MERCHANT’S AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL IN MANUFACTURE. THE “BUYER-UP” AND THE “FACTORY OWNER”

From the data given above it is evident that along with big capitalist workshops we always find an extremely large number of small establishments at this stage of capitalist development; numerically, these, as a rule, even predominate, although they play a quite subordinate role in the sum-total of production. This retention (and even, as we have seen above, development) of small establishments under manufacture is quite a natural phenomenon. Under hand production, the large establishments have no decisive advantage over the small ones; division of labour, by creating the simplest detailed operations, facilitates the rise of small workshops. For this reason, a typical feature of capitalist manufacture is precisely the small number of relatively large establishments side by side with a considerable number of small establishments. Is there any connection between the one and the other? The data examined above leave no doubt that the connection between them is of the closest, that it is out of the small establishments that the large ones grow, that the small establishments are sometimes merely outside departments of the manufactories, that in the overwhelming majority of cases the connection between them is maintained by merchant’s capital, which belongs to the big masters and holds sway over the small ones. The owner of the big workshop has to buy raw materials and sell his wares on a large scale; the bigger his turnover, the smaller (per unit of product) are his expenses on the purchase and sale of goods, on sorting, warehousing, etc., etc.; and so there arises the retail reselling of raw materials to small masters, and the purchase of their wares, which the manufactory owner resells as his own.* If (as is often the case) bondage and usury are linked with these transactions in the sale of raw materials and the purchase of wares, if the small master gets materials on credit and delivers wares in payment of debt, the big manufactory owner obtains a high level of profit on his capital such as he could never obtain from wage-workers. Division of labour gives a fresh impetus to the development of such relations of dependence of the small masters upon the big ones: the latter either distribute materials in the homes for making up (or for the performance of certain detailed operations), or buy up from the “handicraftsmen” parts of products, special sorts of products, etc. In short, the closest and most inseparable tie between merchant’s and industrial capital is one of the most characteristic features of manufacture. The “buyer-up” nearly always merges here with the manufactory owner (the “factory owner,” to use the current but wrong term, which classifies every workshop of any size as a “factory”). That is why, in the overwhelming majority of cases, data on the scale of production of the big establishments in themselves give no idea of their real significance in our “handicraft industries,”* for the owners of such establishments have at their command the labour, not only of the workers employed in their establishments, but of a mass of domestic workers, and even (de facto) of a mass of quasi-independent small masters, in relation to whom they are buyers-up.”** The data on Russian manufacture thus bring out in striking relief the law established by the author of Capital, namely, that the degree of development of merchant’s capital is inversely proportional to the degree of development of industrial capital.¹⁴³ And indeed, we may characterise all the industries described in §II as follows: the fewer the big workshops in them, the more is “buying-up” developed, and vice versa; all that changes is the form of capital that dominates in each case and that places the “independent” handicraftsman in conditions which often are incomparably worse than those of the wage-worker.

The fundamental error of Narodnik economics is that it ignores, or glosses over, the connection between the big and the small establishments, on the one hand, and between merchant’s and industrial capital, on the other. “The factory owner of the Pavlovo area is nothing more than a complex type of buyer-up,” says Mr. Grigoryev (loc. cit., p. 119). That is true, not only of Pavlovo, but of the majority of industries organised on the lines of capitalist manufacture; the reverse is likewise true: the buyer-up in manufacture is a complex type of “factory owner”; this, incidentally, is one of the fundamental differences between the buyer-up in manufacture and the buyer-up in the small peasant industries. But to see in this fact of the connection between the “buyer-up” and the “factory owner” some argument in favour of small industry (as Mr. Grigoryev and many other Narodniks do) means drawing absolutely arbitrary conclusions and distorting facts to fit preconceived notions. A host of facts testify, as we have seen, to the point that the combination of merchant’s capital with industrial capital makes the position of the direct producer considerably worse than that of the wage-worker, lengthens his working day, reduces his earnings, and retards economic and cultural development.

VII. CAPITALIST DOMESTIC INDUSTRY AS AN APPENDAGE OF MANUFACTURE

Capitalist domestic industry—i.e., the processing at home, for payment by the piece, of raw materials obtained from an entrepreneur—is also met with, as indicated in the preceding chapter, in the small peasant industries. Later we shall see that it is met with again (and on a large scale) alongside the factory, i.e., large-scale machine industry. Thus, capitalist domestic industry is met with at all stages of the development of capitalism in industry, but is most characteristic of manufacture. Both the small peasant industries and large-scale machine industry manage very easily without domestic industry. The manufactory period, however, of capitalist development, with its characteristic retention of the worker’s connection with the land, and with an abundance of small establishments around big ones—can be imagined with difficulty, or hardly at all, without the distribution of home work.* And the facts of Russia do indeed show, as we have seen, that in the industries organised on the lines of capitalist manufacture the distribution of home work is particularly widespread. That is why we think it most appropriate to examine in precisely this chapter the characteristic features of capitalist domestic industry, although some of the examples quoted below cannot be assigned specifically to manufacture.

Let us point, first of all, to the multitude of middlemen between the capitalist and the worker in domestic industry. The big entrepreneur cannot himself distribute materials to hundreds and thousands of workers, scattered sometimes in different villages; what is needed is the appearance of middle-men (in some cases even of a hierarchy of middle-men) to take the materials in bulk and distribute them in small quantities. We get a regular sweating system,** a system of the severest exploitation: the “subcontractor” (or “workroom owner,” or “tradeswoman” in the lace industry, etc., etc.), who is close to the worker, knows how to take advantage even of specific cases of his distress and devises such methods of exploitation as would be inconceivable in a big establishment, and as absolutely preclude all possibility of control or supervision.***

Alongside the sweating system, and perhaps as one of its forms, should be placed the truck system*—the system of payment in provisions—which is prohibited in factories, but continues to reign in handicraft industries, especially where the work is distributed to homes. Above, in describing the various industries, instances were given of this widespread practice.

Further, capitalist domestic industry inevitably entails extremely insanitary working conditions. The utter poverty of the worker, the utter impossibility of controlling working conditions by regulations of any kind, and the combination of the living and working premises, such are the conditions that convert the dwellings of the home workers into hotbeds of infection and occupational disease. In the large establishments one can fight such things; domestic industry, however, is in this respect the most “liberal” form of capitalist exploitation.

An excessively long working day is also an essential feature of domestic work for the capitalist and of the small industries in general. Instances have been given illustrating the comparative length of the working day in the “factories” and among the “handicraftsmen.”

The drawing of women and of children of the tenderest age into production is nearly always observed in domestic industry. To illustrate this, let us cite some facts from a description of the women’s industries of Moscow Gubernia. There are 10,004 women engaged in cotton winding; children start work at the age of 5 or 6 (!); daily earnings are 10 kopeks, yearly 17 rubles. The working day in the women’s industries in general is as much as 18 hours. In the knitting industry children start work from the age of six, daily earnings are 10 kopeks, yearly 22 rubles. Altogether 37,514 females are employed in the women’s industries; they begin working from the age of 5 or 6 (in 6 out of 19 industries, which 6 industries account for 32,400 female workers); the average daily earnings are 13 kopeks, yearly 26 rubles 20 kopeks.*

One of the most pernicious aspects of capitalist domestic industry is that it leads to a reduction in the level of the worker’s requirements. The employer is able to recruit workers in remote districts where the popular standard of living is particularly low and where the worker’s connection with the land enables him to work for a bare pittance. For example, the owner of a village stocking establishment explains that in Moscow rents are high and that, besides, the knitters “have to be … supplied with white bread … whereas here the workers do the job in their own cottages and eat black bread…. Now how can Moscow compete with us!”** In the cotton-winding industry the explanation of the very low wages is that for the peasants’ wives, daughters, etc., this is merely a supplementary source of income. “Thus, the system prevailing in this trade forces down to the utmost limit the wages of those for whom it is the sole means of livelihood, reduces the wages of those who obtain their livelihood exclusively by factory labour below their minimum needs, or retards the raising of their standard of living. In both cases it creates extremely abnormal conditions.”*** “The factory seeks cheap weavers,” says Mr. Kharizomenov, “and it finds them in their native villages, far from the centres of industry…. That wages drop steadily as one moves from the industrial centres to the outer regions is an undoubted fact.”**** Hence, the employers are perfectly well able to take advantage of the conditions which artificially tie the population to the rural districts.

The isolation of the home workers is a no less pernicious aspect of this system. Here is a graphic description of this aspect of the matter, as given by buyers-up themselves: “The operations of both” (the small and the big buyers-up of nails from the Tver blacksmiths) “are organised according to one system—when they collect the nails, they pay partly in money and partly in iron, and to make the blacksmiths more tractable always have them working in their homes.”* These words provide a simple clue to the “vitality” of our “handicraft” industry!

The isolation of the home workers and the abundance of middle-men naturally lead to widespread bondage, to all kinds of personal dependence, which usually accompany “patriarchal” relationships in remote rural districts. Workers’ indebtedness to employers is extremely widespread in the “handicraft” industries in general, and in domestic industry in particular.** Usually the worker is not only a Lohnsklave but also a Schuldsklave.*** Instances were given above of the conditions in which the worker is placed by the “patriarchal character” of rural relationships.****

Passing from the description of capitalist domestic industry to the conditions making for its spread, we must first make mention of the connection between this system and the tying of the peasant to his allotment. The lack of freedom of movement, the necessity of occasionally suffering monetary loss in order to get rid of land (when payments for the land exceed returns from it, so that a peasant who leases his allotment finds himself paying a sum to the lessee), the social-estate exclusiveness of the peasant community—all this artificially enlarges the sphere of application of capitalist home-work, artificially binds the peasant to these worst forms of exploitation. Obsolete institutions and an agrarian system that is thoroughly saturated with the social-estate principle thus exert a most pernicious influence in both agriculture and industry, perpetuating technically backward forms of production which go hand in hand with the greatest development of bondage and personal dependence, with the hardest lot and the most helpless position of the working people.*

Furthermore, there is also an undoubted connection between home-work for capitalists and the differentiation of the peasantry. Extensive incidence of home-work presupposes two conditions: 1) the existence of a mass of rural proletarians who have to sell their labour-power, and to sell it cheaply; 2) the existence of well-to-do peasants, well acquainted with local conditions, who can undertake the function of agents in distributing work. A salesman sent in by the merchant will not always be able to fulfil this function (particularly in the more or less complex industries) and will hardly ever be able to fulfil it with such “virtuosity” as can a local peasant, “one of themselves.”** The big entrepreneurs would probably be unable to carry out half their operations in distributing work to home workers if they did not have at their command a whole army of small entrepreneurs who can be trusted with goods on credit or on commission, and who greedily clutch at every opportunity of enlarging their small commercial operations.

Finally, it is extremely important to point to the significance of capitalist domestic industry in the theory of the surplus-population created by capitalism. No one has talked so much about the “freeing” of the Russian workers by capitalism as have Messrs. V. V., N. —on and other Narodniks, but none of them has taken the trouble to analyse the specific forms of the “reserve army” of labour that have arisen and are arising in Russia in the post-Reform period. None of the Narodniks has even noticed the trifling detail that home workers constitute what is, perhaps, the largest section of our “reserve army” of capitalism.* By distributing work to be done in the home the entrepreneurs are enabled to increase production immediately to the desired dimensions without any considerable expenditure of capital and time on setting up workshops, etc. Such an immediate expansion of production is very often dictated by the conditions of the market, when increased demand results from a livening up of some large branch of industry (e.g., railway construction), or from such circumstances as war, etc.** Hence, another aspect of the process which we described in Chapter II as the formation of an agricultural proletariat of millions, is, incidentally, the enormous development in the post-Reform period of capitalist domestic industry. “What has become of the hands released from the occupations of domestic, strictly natural economy, which had in view the family and the few consumers in the neighbouring market? The factories overcrowded with workers, the rapid expansion of large-scale domestic industry provide a clear answer” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 20. Our italics). The figures given in the following section will show how great the number of workers employed by entrepreneurs in domestic industry must be in Russia today.

VIII. WHAT IS “HANDICRAFT” INDUSTRY?

In the two preceding chapters we dealt mainly with what in Russia is usually called “handicraft” industry; we may now try to answer the question put in the heading.

Let us begin with some statistics, so as to judge which of the forms of industry analysed above figure in publications among the general mass of “handicraft industries.”

The Moscow statisticians, in concluding their investigation of the peasant “industries,” summarised all and sundry non-agricultural occupations. They listed altogether 141,329 persons (Vol. VII, Pt. III) engaged in local industries (in the making of commodities), but among these were included artisans (a section of the shoe-makers, glaziers and many others), wood sawyers, etc., etc. Not fewer than 87,000 (according to our calculations of the different industries) were domestic workers employed by capitalists.* The number of wage-workers in the 54 industries for which we have been able to combine the data is 17,566, out of 29,446, i.e., 59.65%. For Vladimir Gubernia we have obtained the following results (from five issues of Industries of Vladimir Gubernia): altogether, 18,286 engaged in 31 industries; of these 15,447 were engaged in industries in which capitalist domestic industry predominates (including 5,504 wage-workers, i.e., hirelings of the second degree, so to speak). Further, there are 150 rural artisans (of whom 45 are hired) and 2,689 small commodity-producers (of whom 511 are hired). The total number of capitalistically engaged workers is (15,447+45+511=) 16,003, i.e., 87.5%.* In Kostroma Gubernia (on the basis of Mr. Tillo’s tables in the Transactions of the Handicraft Commission), there are 83,633 local industrialists, of whom 19,701 are lumber-workers (fine “handicraftsmen”!), while 29,564 work in their homes for capitalists; some 19,954 are engaged in industries in which small commodity-producers predominate, and some 14,414 are village artisans.** In 9 uyezds of Vyatka Gubernia there are (according to the same Transactions) 60,019 local industrialists; of these, 9,672 are millers and oil-pressers; 2,032 are pure artisans (engaged in fabric-dyeing); 14,928 are partly artisans and partly commodity-producers, the overwhelming majority working independently; 14,424 engage in industries partly subordinated to capital; 14,875 engage in industries entirely subordinated to capital; 4,088 engage in industries in which wage-labour completely predominates.** On the basis of the data in the Transactions regarding the other gubernias we have compiled a table of those industries on the organisation of which more or less detailed information is available. We get 97 industries employing 107,957 persons, with an output totalling 21,151,000 rubles. Of these, industries in which wage-labour and capitalist domestic industry predominate employ 70,204 persons (18,621,000 rubles); industries in which wage-workers and workers occupied at home for capitalists constitute only a minority employ 26,935 persons (1,706,000 rubles); and, finally, industries in which independent labour almost completely predominates employ 10,818 persons (824,000 rubles). According to Zemstvo statistical materials regarding 7 industries of Gorbatov and Semyonov uyezds of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, there are 16,303 handicraftsmen, of whom 4,614 work for the local market; 8,520 work “for a master,” and 3,169 as wage-workers; in other words, 11,689 are capitalistically employed workers. According to the returns of the 1894-95 Perm handicraft census, of 26,000 handicraftsmen, 6,500 (25%) are wage-workers, and 5,200 (20%) work for buyers-up, in other words, 45% are capitalistically employed workers.*

Fragmentary as the data are (no others were available), they nevertheless clearly show that, taken as a whole, a mass of capitalistically employed workers are classified among the “handicraftsmen.” For instance, those working at home for capitalists number (according to the above-quoted data) over 200,000. And this is for some 50 or 60 uyezds, by no means all of which have been investigated thoroughly. For the whole of Russia the number of workers of this type must be something like two million.** If to these are added the wage-workers employed by “handicraftsmen”—and, as may be seen from the above-quoted figures, their number is by no means as small as is sometimes thought here in Russia—we shall have to concede that the figure of 2 million industrial workers capitalistically employed outside the so-called “factories and works” is, if anything, a minimum figure.*

To the question—“What is handicraft industry?”—the data quoted in the last two chapters compel us to give the answer that the term used is absolutely unsuitable for purposes of scientific investigation, and is one usually employed to cover all and sundry forms of industry, from domestic industries and handicrafts to wage-labour in very large manufactories.** This lumping together of the most diverse types of economic organisation, which prevails in a host of descriptions of “handicraft industries,”*** was taken over quite uncritically and quite senselessly by the Narodnik economists, who made a tremendous step backward by comparison, for example, with a writer like Korsak, and availed themselves of the prevailing confusion of terms to evolve the most curious theories. “Handicraft industry” was regarded as something economically homogeneous, something sufficient unto itself, and was “counterposed” (sic!) to “capitalism,” which without further ado was taken to mean “factory” industry. Let us take Mr. N. —on, for instance. On p. 79 of his Sketches we find the heading “Capitalisation (?) of Industries,”* and then, without any reservation or explanation, “Data on Factories.”… The simplicity is positively touching: “capitalism” = “factory industry,” and factory industry = what is classified under this heading in official publications. And on the basis of such a profound “analysis” the masses of capitalistically employed workers included among the “handicraftsmen” are wiped off capitalism’s account. On the basis of this sort of “analysis” the question of the different forms of industry in Russia is completely evaded. On the basis of this sort of “analysis” one of the most absurd and pernicious prejudices is built up concerning the distinction between our “handicraft” industry and our “factory” industry, the divorcement of the latter from the former, the “artificial character” of “factory” industry, etc. It is a prejudice because no one has ever so much as attempted to examine the data, which in all branches of industry show a very close and inseparable connection between “handicraft” industry and “factory” industry.

The object of this chapter has been to show in what precisely this connection consists and precisely which specific technical, economic and cultural features are represented by the form of industry that in Russia stands between small-scale industry and large-scale machine industry.

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CHAPTER VII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE-SCALE MACHINE INDUSTRY

I. THE SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTION OF THE FACTORY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “FACTORY” STATISTICS¹⁴⁸

Before dealing with large-scale machine (factory) industry, we must first establish the fact that the scientific conception of the term does not correspond at all to its common, everyday meaning. In our official statistics, and in literature generally, a factory is taken to mean any more or less big industrial establishment with a more or less considerable number of wage-workers. According to Marx’s theory, however, the term large-scale machine (factory) industry applies only to a definite stage of capitalism in industry, namely, the highest stage. The principal and most important feature of this stage is the employment of a system of machines for production.* The transition from the manufactory to the factory signifies a complete technical revolution, which does away with the craftsman’s manual skill that has taken centuries to acquire, and this technical revolution is inevitably followed by the most thoroughgoing destruction of social production relations, by a final split among the various groups of participants in production, by a complete break with tradition, by an intensification and extension of all the dark aspects of capitalism, and at the same time by a mass socialisation of labour by capitalism. Large-scale machine industry is thus the last word of capitalism, the last word of its “elements of social progress”** and regress.

From this it is clear that the transition from the manufactory to the factory is particularly important when we deal with the development of capitalism. Whoever confuses these two stages deprives himself of the possibility of understanding the transforming, progressive role of capitalism. That is the mistake made by our Narodnik economists, who, as we have seen, naïvely identify capitalism generally with “factory” industry and propose to solve the problem of the “mission of capitalism” and even of its “unifying significance”* by simply referring to factory statistics. Apart from the fact that on matters of factory statistics these writers (as we shall show in detail below) have betrayed astonishing ignorance, they commit a still graver error in their amazingly stereotyped and narrow understanding of Marx’s theory. In the first place, it is ridiculous to reduce the problem of the development of large-scale machine industry to mere factory statistics. It is a question not only of statistics, but of the forms assumed and the stages traversed by the development of capitalism in the industry of the country under consideration. Only after the substance of these forms and their distinguishing features have been made clear is there any sense in illustrating the development of this or that form by means of properly compiled statistics. If, however, they restrict themselves to Russian statistics, this inevitably leads to lumping together the most diverse forms of capitalism, to not seeing the wood for the trees. Secondly, to reduce the whole mission of capitalism to that of increasing the number of “factory” workers means to betray as profound an understanding of theory as did Mr. Mikhailovsky when he expressed surprise as to why people talk about the socialisation of labour by capitalism, when all that this socialisation amounts to, he averred, is that several hundred or thousand workers saw, chop, cut, plane, etc., under one roof.**

The task of our further exposition is twofold: on the one hand, we shall examine in detail the condition of our factory statistics and the question of their suitability. This, largely negative, work is necessary because the data involved are positively abused in our literature. On the other hand, we shall examine the data attesting to the growth of large-scale machine industry in the post-Reform period.

II. OUR FACTORY STATISTICS

The main source of factory statistics in Russia is the returns supplied annually by owners of factories and works to the Department of Commerce and Manufacture, in conformity with the law passed at the very beginning of the present century.* The very detailed regulations in this law concerning the submission of information by factory owners are nothing but a pious wish, and to this day the factory statistics are organised on the old, purely pre-Reform lines and are simply appendices to gubernatorial reports. There is no precise definition of the term “factory-and-works,” and consequently gubernia and even uyezd authorities employ it in the most diverse ways. There is no central body to direct the proper and uniform collection, and verification, of returns. The distribution of industrial establishments among various departments (Mining, Department of Commerce and Manufacture, Miscellaneous Taxes Department, etc.) still further increases the confusion.**

In Appendix II we cite the data on our factory industry in the post-Reform period that are to be found in official publications, namely, for the years of 1863-1879 and 1885-1891. These data relate only to trades not subject to excise duty; moreover, for different periods information is given for a different number of trades (the returns for 1864-1865 and for 1885 and subsequent years being the fullest); that is why we have singled out 34 trades for which data are available for 1864-1879 and 1885-1890, i.e., for 22 years. To judge the value of these data, let us first examine the most important publications on our factory statistics. Let us begin with the 60s.

The compilers of factory statistics in the 60s fully appreciated the extremely unsatisfactory nature of the returns they were handling. In their unanimous opinion the number of workers and the total output were considerably understated in the factory-owners’ reports; “there is no uniform definition, even for the different gubernias, of what should be regarded as a factory and a works, since many gubernias include among the factories and works, for example, windmills, brick-making sheds and small industrial establishments, while others take no account of them, with the result that even comparative data on the total numbers of factories and works in the different gubernias are valueless.”* Still more trenchant is the criticism by Bushen, Bok and Timiryazev,** who, in addition, point to the inclusion of those occupied at home among the factory workers, to the fact that some factory owners supply returns only for workers who live on the factory premises, etc. “There are no correct official statistics on manufactory and factory industry,” says Mr. Bushen, “and there will be none until there is a change in the main principles on which the primary material is gathered.”*** “The tables of factories and works for many trades include, evidently by misunderstanding, numerous purely artisan and handicraft establishments that possess nothing of the character of a factory or works.”**** In view of this, the editors of the Yearbook refused even to summarise the data printed, “not desiring to pass on to the public incorrect and obviously exaggerated figures.”**** To give the reader a precise idea of the extent of this obvious exaggeration, let us turn to the data given in the Yearbook, which differs to advantage from all other sources, in that it contains a list of factories with an output exceeding 1,000 rubles. At the present time (since 1885), establishments with a smaller total output are not counted as factories. An estimate of these small establishments according to the Yearbook reveals that 2,366 were included in the general list of factories, employing 7,327 workers and an output amounting to 987,000 rubles. The total number of factories, however, in 71 trades, according to the Yearbook, was 6,891, with 342,473 workers and an output totalling 276,211,000 rubles. Consequently, the small establishments represent 34.3% of the total number of establishments, 2.1% of the total number of workers, and 0.3% of the total output. It stands to reason that it is absurd to regard such small establishments (with an average per establishment of a little over 3 workers and less than 500 rubles output) as factories, and that there can be no question of there being anything like a complete registration of them. Not only have such establishments been classed as factories in our statistics, but there have even been cases of hundreds of handicraftsmen being quite artificially and arbitrarily combined as a “factory.” For example, this very Yearbook mentions in the rope-making trade of the Izbylets Volost, Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, a factory “of the peasants of the Izbylets Volost; 929 workers; 308 spinning wheels; output 100,400 rubles” (p. 149); or in the village of Vorsma in the same uyezd, a factory of “temporarily bound peasants of Count Sheremetev; 100 smithies; 250 carpenters’ benches (in homes); 3 horse-operated and 20 hand-operated grindstones; 902 workers; output 6,610 rubles” (p. 281). One can imagine what an idea of the real situation such statistics give!*

A special place among the sources of factory statistics of the 60s is held by the Military Statistical Abstract (Vol. IV. Russia, St. Petersburg, 1871). It gives data on all the factories and works of the Russian Empire, including mining and excise-paying establishments, and estimates that in 1866 there were in European Russia no more nor less than 70,631 factories, 829,573 workers, with an output totalling 583,317,000 rubles!! These curious figures were arrived at, firstly, because they were taken, not from the reports of the Ministry of Finance, but from the special returns of the Central Statistical Committee (these returns were never published in any of the Committee’s publications, nor is it known by whom, how and when they were gathered and processed);* secondly, because the compilers of the Military Statistical Abstract did not hesitate in the least to class even the smallest establishments as factories. (Military Statistical Abstract, p. 319) and furthermore supplemented the basic returns with other material: returns of the Department of Commerce and Manufacture, returns of the Commissariat, returns of the Ordnance and Naval Departments, and finally, returns “from the most diverse sources” (ibid., p. XXIII).** Therefore, in using the data of the Military Statistical Abstract for purposes of comparison with present-day data, Messrs. N.—on,* Karyshev** and Kablukov*** revealed their total unfamiliarity with the principal sources of our factory statistics and their utterly uncritical attitude towards these statistics.

During the debate in the Free Economic Society on the paper read by M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, who pointed to the completely erroneous character of the figures in the Military Statistical Abstract, several speakers declared that even if there was an error in the number of workers, it was only a slight one—10 to 15%. That was said, for example, by Mr. V. V. (see verbatim report of debate, St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 1). He was “joined” by Mr. V. Pokrovsky, who also confined himself to a bald statement (p. 3). Without even attempting a critical examination of the various sources of our factory statistics, these people and their supporters contented themselves with generalities about the unsatisfactory nature of factory statistics, and about the data having recently become more exact (??) and so forth. The main issue, the crude error of Messrs. N.—on and Karyshev, was thus simply glossed over, as P. B. Struve quite rightly observed (p. 11). We therefore think it worth while to calculate those exaggerations in the data of the Military Statistical Abstract which could and should have been noticed by anybody handling the sources attentively. For 71 trades we have the parallel statistics for 1866 both of the Ministry of Finance (Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I) and of unknown origin (Military Statistical Abstract). For these trades, leaving out the metallurgical, the Military Statistical Abstract exaggerated the number of workers employed in factories and works in European Russia by 50,000. Further, for those trades for which the Yearbook gave only gross figures for the Empire, refusing to analyse them in detail in view of their “obvious exaggeration” (Yearbook, p. 306), the Military Statistical Abstract gives 95,000 workers over and above these figures. In brick-making the number of workers is exaggerated by a minimum of 10,000; to convince oneself of this, one should compare the data by gubernias given in the Military Statistical Abstract and those in Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance, No. 4 of 1866 and No. 6 of 1867. For the metallurgical trades the Military Statistical Abstract exaggerated the number of workers by 86,000 as compared with that in the Yearbook, having evidently included some of the mine workers in its figure. For the excise-paying trades the Military Statistical Abstract, as we shall show in the next section, exaggerates the number of workers by nearly 40,000. Altogether there is an exaggeration of 280,000. This is a minimum and incomplete figure, for we lack material to verify the data of the Military Statistical Abstract for all trades. One can therefore judge to what extent those who assert that the error of Messrs. N. —on and Karyshev is trifling are informed on this subject!

In the 1870s much less was done to combine and analyse factory statistics than in the 1860s. The Ministry of Finance Yearbook contains data for only 40 trades (not subject to excise duty) for 1867-1879 (Vols. VIII, X and XII; see Appendix II), the exclusion of the other trades being ascribed to the “extremely unsatisfactory nature of the material” for industries “which are connected with agricultural life, or are appendages of artisan and handicraft industries” (Vol. VIII, p. 482; same, Vol. X, p. 590). The most valuable source for the 1870s is Mr. P. Orlov’s Directory of Factories and Works (1st edition, St. Petersburg, 1881, returns for 1879 taken from the same reports of factory owners to the Department of Commerce and Manufacture). This publication lists all establishments with an output of not less than 2,000 rubles. The others, being small and inseparable from handicraft establishments, are not enumerated in this list, but are included in the summarised data given by the Directory. Since no separate totals are given for establishments with an output of 2,000 rubles and over, the general data of the Directory, like those of previous publications, combine the small establishments with the large ones; for different trades and different gubernias unequal numbers of small establishments are included (quite fortuitously, of course) in the statistics.* Regarding trades connected with agriculture, the Directory repeats (p. 396) the Yearbook’s reservation and refuses to give “even approximate totals” (author’s italics) owing to the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the data.** This view (quite a legitimate one, as we shall see below) did not, however, prevent the inclusion in the Directory’s general totals of all these particularly unreliable figures, which are thus lumped together with relatively reliable ones. Let us give the Directory’s total figures for European Russia, with the observation that, unlike previous figures, they also embrace excise-paying trades (the second edition of the Directory, 1887, gives the returns for 1884; the third, 1894, those for 1890):

Years

No. of factories and works

Total output (thousand rubles)

No. of workers

1879***

27,986

1,148,134

763,152

1884    

27,235

1,329,602

826,794

1890    

21,124

1,500,871

875,764

We shall show further that the drop in the number of factories indicated by these data was actually fictitious; the whole point is that at different times different numbers of small establishments were classed as factories. Thus, the number of establishments with an output exceeding 1,000 rubles was estimated in 1884 at 19,277, and in 1890, at 21,124; with an output of 2,000 rubles and over: in 1884 at 11,509, and in 1890 at 17,642.****

In 1889 the Department of Commerce and Manufactures began to issue in separate editions Collections of Data on Factory Industry in Russia (for 1885 and subsequent years). These data are based on the material mentioned (factory owners’ reports), and their treatment is far from satisfactory, being inferior to that in the above-mentioned publications of the 60s. The only improvement is that the small establishments, i.e., those with an output of under 1,000 rubles, are not included among the factories and works, and information regarding them is given separately, without their being distributed according to trades.* This, of course, is a totally inadequate criterion of what a “factory” is; a complete registration of establishments with an output exceeding 1,000 rubles is out of the question under the present system of gathering information; the separation of “factories” in trades connected with agriculture is done quite haphazardly—for instance, for some gubernias and in some years watermills and windmills are classed as factories, while in others they are not.** The author of the section “Chief Results of Factory Industry in Russia for 1885-1887” (in the Collections for these years) falls repeatedly into error in disregarding the fact that the data for the different gubernias are dissimilar and not comparable. Finally, to our characterisation of the Collections let us add that till 1891 inclusive they only covered trades not subject to excise duty, while from 1892 onwards they cover all trades, including mining and excise-paying; no special mention is made of data comparable with others given previously, and no explanation whatever is given of the methods by which ironworks are included in the total number of factories and works (for instance, ironworks statistics have never given the value but merely the volume of works’ output. How the compilers of the Collections arrived at the value of the output is unknown).

In the 1880s there was still another source of information about our factory industry, one deserving attention for its negative qualities and because Mr. Karyshev used data from this source.* This is the Returns for Russia for 1884-85 (St. Petersburg, 1887. Published by the Central Statistical Committee), which gives in one of its tables the “totals of output of factory industry in European Russia, 1885” (Table XXXIX); the number of factories and of workers is given only for Russia as a whole, without being distributed according to gubernias. The source of information is “data of reports of Messrs. the Governors” (p. 311). The data cover all trades, including both excise-paying and mining, and for every trade the “average” number of workers and output per works is given for the whole of European Russia. Now it is these “averages” that Mr. Karyshev proceeded to “analyse.” To judge their value, let us compare the data in the Returns with those in the Collection (to make such a comparison we must subtract from the first-mentioned data the metallurgical, excise-paying, fishing and “other” trades; this will leave 53 trades; the data are for European Russia):

Sources

Number of

Output (thousand rubles)

factories

workers

“Returns for Russia”

54,179

559,476

569,705

“Collection of Department of Commerce and Manufacture”

14,761

499,632

672,079

+39,418    

+59,844     

–102,374   

+267%     

+11.9%     

–15.2%     

Thus, the gubernatorial reports included tens of thousands of small agricultural and handicraft establishments among the “factories”! Of course, such establishments were included among the factories quite fortuitously for the various trades, and for the various gubernias and uyezds. Here are examples of the number of works according to the Returns and the Collection, in some trades: fur—1,205 and 259; leather—4,079 and 2,026; mat-and-bag—562 and 55; starch-and-treacle—1,228 and 184; flour-milling—17,765 and 3,940; oil-pressing—9,341 and 574; tar-distilling—3,366 and 328; brick-making—5,067 and 1,488; pottery and glazed tile—2,573 and 147. One can imagine the sort of “statistics” that will be obtained if one estimates the “size of establishments”* in our factory industry by taking “average figures” based on such a method of computing “factories”! But Mr. Karyshev forms his estimate in precisely this manner when he classes under large-scale industry only those trades in which the above-mentioned “average number” of workers per factory (for the whole of Russia) is over one hundred. By this phenomenal method the conclusion is reached that only a quarter of the total output is provided by “large-scale industry as understood within the above-indicated limits”!! (p. 47 of article cited).** Further on we shall show that factories with 100 and more workers actually account for more than half the total output of our factory industry.

Let us observe, incidentally, that the data of the local gubernia statistical committees (which are used for the gubernatorial reports) are always distinguished by the utter vagueness of the term “factory-and-works” and by the casual registration of small establishments. Thus, in Smolensk Gubernia, for 1893-94, some uyezds counted dozens of small oil-presses as factories, while others did not count any; the number of tar “works” in the gubernia was given as 152 (according to Directory for 1890, not one), with the same casual registration in the various uyezds, etc.* For Yaroslavl Gubernia, the local statisticians in the 90s gave the number of factories as 3,376 (against 472 in the Directory for 1890), including (for some uyezds) hundreds of flour-mills, smithies, small potato-processing works, etc.**

Quite recently our factory statistics have undergone a reform which has changed the plan for the gathering of information, changed the significance of the term “factory-and-works” (new criteria have been adopted; the presence of an engine or of not less than 15 workers), and enlisted factory inspectors in the work of gathering and verifying information. We refer the reader for details to the above-mentioned article in our Studies*** where a detailed examination is made of the List of Factories and Works (St. Petersburg, 1897)**** compiled according to the new plan, and where it is shown that despite the reform, improvements in our factory statistics are scarcely noticeable; that the term “factory-and-works” has remained absolutely vague; that the data are very often still quite haphazard and must, therefore, be handled with extreme caution.(*) Only a proper industrial census, organised on European lines, can extricate our industrial statistics from their chaotic condition.*

It follows from the review of our factory statistics that the data they contain cannot in the overwhelming majority of cases be used without being specially processed, the principal object of which should be to separate the relatively useful from the utterly useless. In the next section we shall examine in this respect the data on the most important trades, but at the moment we put the question: is the number of factories in Russia increasing or decreasing? The main difficulty in answering this question is that in our factory statistics the term “factory” is employed in the most chaotic manner; that is why the negative replies to this question which are sometimes given on the basis of factory statistics (e.g., by Mr. Karyshev) cannot be of any use. We must first establish some definite criterion for the term “factory”; without that condition it would be absurd to illustrate the development of large-scale machine industry with data for establishments of which the totals have at various times included various numbers of small flour-mills, oil-presses, brick-sheds, etc., etc. Let us take as a criterion the employment of not fewer than 16 workers in the establishment, and then we shall see that the number of such industrial establishments in European Russia in 1866 was a maximum of from 2,500 to 3,000, in 1879 about 4,500, in 1890 about 6,000, in 1894-95 about 6,400, and in 1903 about 9,000.* Consequently, the number of factories in Russia in the post-Reform period is growing, and growing fairly rapidly.-sional character

III. AN EXAMINATION OF HISTORICO-STATISTICAL DATA ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY

We have noted above that to judge the development of large-scale industry from factory statistics it is necessary to separate the relatively useful material in these statistics from the utterly useless. Let us, with this in view, examine the main branches of our manufacturing industry.

1) Textile Trades

At the head of the wool trades is cloth production, which in 1890 had an output of over 35 million rubles and employed 45,000 workers. The historico-statistical data on this trade indicate a considerable drop in the number of workers, namely, from 72,638 in 1866 to 46,740 in 1890.* To appraise this phenomenon we must take account of the fact that up to the 1860s inclusive, felt cloth production was organised on specific and original lines: it was concentrated in relatively large establishments which, however, did not in any way come under the category of capitalist factory industry, since they were based on the labour of serfs, or of temporarily bound peasants. In the surveys of the “factory” industry of the 60s we therefore meet with the division of cloth mills into 1) those owned by landlords or nobles, and 2) those owned by merchants. The former produced mainly army cloth, the government contracts having been distributed equally among the mills in proportion to the number of machines. Compulsory labour was the cause of the technical backwardness of such establishments and of their employing a much larger number of workers than the merchant mills based on the employment of hired labour.** The principal drop in the number of workers, engaged in felt cloth production took place in the gubernias with landlord factories; thus, in the 13 such gubernias (enumerated in the Survey of Manufactory Industries), the number of workers dropped from 32,921 to 14,539 (1866 and 1890), while in the 5 gubernias with merchant factories (Moscow, Grodno, Liflandia, Chernigov and St. Petersburg) it dropped from 31,291 to 28,257. From this it is clear that we have here two opposite trends, both of which, however, indicate the development of capitalism—on the one hand, the decline of landlord establishments of a manorial-possessional character,¹⁵⁰ and on the other, the development of purely capitalist factories out of merchant establishments. A considerable number of the workers employed in felt cloth production in the 60s were not factory workers at all in the strict sense of the term; they were dependent peasants working for landlords.* Cloth production is an example of that specific phenomenon of Russian history—the employment of serf labour in industry. Since we are dealing only with the post-Reform period, the above brief remarks will suffice to show the way in which this phenomenon is reflected in factory statistics.** We shall now quote some figures drawn from statistics on steam-engines in order to estimate the development of large-scale machine production in this industry: in 1875-1878, in the wool-spinning and cloth industries of European Russia there were 167 mechanised establishments using 209 steam-engines with a total of 4,632 h.p., and in 1890 there were 197 establishments using 341 steam-engines with a total of 6,602 h.p. The use of steam power, therefore, did not make very rapid progress; this is to be explained partly by the traditions of landlord factories and partly by the displacement of felt cloth by the cheaper worsted and mixed fabrics.* In the years 1875-1878 there were seven mechanised establishments using 20 steam-engines with a total of 303 h.p., and in 1890 there were 28 mechanised establishments employing 61 steam-engines to a total of 1,375 h.p.**

In regard to the woollen-goods industry let us also take note of felt-making, a branch that shows in particularly striking fashion the impossibility of comparing factory statistics for different times: the figures for 1866 are 77 factories with a total of 295 workers, while for 1890 they are 57 factories with 1,217 workers. The former figure includes 60 small establishments employing 137 workers with an output of under 2,000 rubles, while the latter includes an establishment with four workers. In 1866 39 small establishments were recorded in Semyonov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, where felt-making is now highly developed but is regarded as a “handicraft” and not a “factory” industry (see Chapter VI, §II, 2).

Further, a particularly important place in the textile trades is held by cotton processing, a branch which now employs over 200,000 workers. Here we observe one of the biggest errors of our factory statistics, namely, the combining of factory workers and capitalistically occupied home workers. Large-scale machine industry developed here (as in many other cases) by drawing home workers into the factory. It is obvious how distorted this process will appear if work-distributing offices and workrooms are classed as “factories,” if home workers are lumped together with factory workers! For 1866 (according to the Yearbook) up to 22,000 home workers were included among factory workers (by no means the full number, for the Yearbook, evidently by pure accident, omits in the case of Moscow Gubernia those notes about “work from village to village” which are so abundant for Vladimir Gubernia). For 1890 (according to the Directory) we found only about 9,000 such workers. Clearly, the figures given in the factory statistics (1866—59,000 workers in the cotton-weaving mills; 1890—75,000) underrate the increase in the number of factory workers that actually took place.* Here are data showing what different establishments were classed at different times as cotton-weaving “factories”:**

Years

Total cotton-weaving “factories”

These include

factories

offices

workrooms

1866

436

256

38

142

1879

411

209

66

136

1890

311

283

21

7

Thus, the decrease in the number of “factories” shown by the “statistics” actually indicates the displacing of distributing offices and workrooms by the factory. Let us illustrate this by the example of two factories:

Hence, to assess the development of large-scale machine production in this branch of industry it is best to take the data giving the number of power-looms. In the 1860s there were about 11,000,* and in 1890 about 87,000. Large-scale machine industry was consequently developing at enormous speed. In cotton spinning and weaving there was recorded in 1875-1878 a total of 148 mechanised establishments, having 481 steam-engines totalling 20,504 h.p., and in 1890, 168 mechanised establishments, having 554 steam-engines with a total of 38,750 h.p.

Precisely the same mistake is made in Russian statistics in relation to linen production, wherein a decrease in the number of factory workers is erroneously shown (1866—17,171; 1890—15,497). Actually, in 1866, of 16,900 looms belonging to linen-mill owners only 4,749 were kept in their establishments, the remaining 12,151 being held by workroom owners.** The number of factory workers for 1866, therefore, included about 12,000 home workers, and for 1890 only about 3,000 (computed from Directory). The number of power-looms, however, grew from 2,263 in 1866 (computed from Military Statistical Abstract) to 4,041 in 1890, and of spindles from 95,495 to 218,012. In flax-spinning and linen-weaving in the years 1875-1878 there were 28 mechanised establishments, having 47 steam-engines with a total of 1,604 h.p., while in 1890 there were 48 mechanised establishments, having 83 steam-engines with a total of 5,027 h.p.*

Lastly, of the textile trades mention should be made of dyeing, printing and finishing, in which trades the factory statistics combine factories and the very smallest handicraft establishments with only 1 or 2 workers each and an output of a few hundred rubles.** Naturally, this causes no little confusion and obscures the rapid growth of large-scale machine industry. The following figures reflect this growth: in the wool-cleaning, dyeing, bleaching and finishing trades in 1875-1878 there were 80 mechanised establishments with 255 steam-engines totalling 2,634 h.p.; in 1890 there were 189 mechanised establishments with 858 steam-engines totalling 9,100 h.p.

2) Wood-Working Industries

In this section the most reliable data are those on saw-milling, although in the past small establishments were also included here.*** The enormous development of this trade in the post-Reform period (1866—4 million rubles; 1890—19 million rubles), accompanied by a considerable increase in the number of workers (4,000 and 15,000) and in the number of steam-powered establishments (26 and 430), is particularly interesting, in that it affords striking evidence of the growth of the lumber industry. Saw-milling is but one of the operations of the lumber industry, which is a necessary concomitant of the first steps of large-scale machine industry.

As to the rest of the trades in this section, namely, furnishing and carpentry, bast-matting, and pitch and tar—the factory statistics relating to them are distinguished for their particularly chaotic condition. The small establishments so numerous in these trades were formerly included among the “factories” in numbers fixed arbitrarily, and the same is sometimes done even today.*

3) Chemical, Livestock-Product and Ceramic Industries

The statistics on the chemical industry proper are distinguished for their relative reliability. The following returns show its growth: in 1857 chemical products were consumed in Russia to a total of 14 million rubles (3.4 million rubles home produced and 10.6 million rubles imported); in 1880, to a total of 36¼ million rubles (7½ million rubles home produced and 28¾ imported); and in 1890, to a total of 42.7 million rubles (16.1 million rubles home produced and 26.6 imported).** These data are particularly interesting because the chemical industries are extremely important as producers of auxiliary materials for large-scale machine industry, i.e., articles of productive (and not personal) consumption. As to potash and saltpetre production, let us remark that the number of factories given is unreliable, again due to the inclusion of small establishments.***

The tallow trade has undoubtedly declined in the post-Reform period. Thus, the value of output of the tallow-candle and tallow-boiling trade was estimated in 1866-1868 at 13.6 million rubles, and in 1890 at 5 million rubles.* This decline is to be explained by the growing use of mineral oils for lighting, which are displacing the old-time tallow candle.

For leather production (1866: 2,308 establishments with 11,463 workers and an output totalling 14.6 million rubles; 1890: 1,621 establishments with 15,564 workers and an output totalling 26.7 million rubles) statistics constantly lump together factories and small establishments. The relatively high cost of raw materials, which explains the high total output, and the fact that this trade requires very few workers, make it particularly difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the handicraft establishments and the factories. In 1890, of the total number of factories (1,621), only 103 had an output of less than 2,000 rubles; in 1879 there were 2,008 out of a total of 3,320**; in 1866, of 2,308 factories*** 1,042 had an output of less than 1,000 rubles (these 1,042 factories employed 2,059 workers and had an output totalling 474,000 rubles). Thus, the number of factories increased, although the factory statistics show a decrease. As for the small leather establishments, their number is still very large today: for instance, The Factory Industry and Trade of Russia, published by the Ministry of Finance (St. Petersburg, 1893), gives a total of nearly 9,500 handicraft works, with 21,000 workers and an output of 12 million rubles. These “handicraft” establishments are much larger than those which in the 60s were included among “factories and works.” Since small establishments are included among the “factories and works” in unequal numbers in the different gubernias and in different years, the statistics on this trade should be treated with great caution. The steam-engine statistics for 1875-1878 gave for this industry 28 mechanised establishments with 33 steam-engines to a total of 488 h.p. and in 1890 there were 66 mechanised establishments with 82 steam-engines to a total of 1,112 h.p. In these 66 factories 5,522 workers (more than a third of the total) were concentrated with an output totalling 12.3 million rubles (46% of the total), so that the concentration of production was very considerable, and the productivity of labour in the large establishments far above the average.*

The ceramic trades fall into two categories in accordance with the character of the factory statistics: in some, there is hardly any combining of small-scale production with large. That is why these statistics are fairly reliable. This applies to the following industries: glass, porcelain and chinaware, plaster and cement. Particularly remarkable is the rapid growth of the last-mentioned trade, which is evidence of the development of the building industry: the total output in 1866 was estimated at 530,000 rubles (Military Statistical Abstract), and in 1890 at 3,826,000 rubles; the number of power-operated establishments in 1875-1878 was 8, and in 1890 it was 39. On the other hand, in the pottery and brick trades the inclusion of small establishments is observed on a tremendous scale, and for that reason the factory statistics are very unsatisfactory, being particularly exaggerated for the 60s and 70s. Thus, in the pottery trade in 1879 there were listed 552 establishments, with 1,900 workers and an output totalling 538,000 rubles, and in 1890, 158 establishments with 1,978 workers and an output totalling 919,000 rubles. If we subtract the small establishments (those with an output of less than 2,000 rubles) we get: 1879—70 establishments, with 840 workers and an output of 505,000 rubles; 1890—143 establishments, with 1,859 workers and an output of 857,000 rubles. That is to say, instead of the decrease in the number of “factories” and stagnation in the number of workers shown in the statistics, there was actually a considerable increase in both the one and the other. In brick-making the official data for 1879 showed 2,627 establishments, with 28,800 workers and an output totalling 6,963,000 rubles; for 1890—1,292 establishments, with 24,334 workers and an output of 7,249,000 rubles; and without the small establishments (those with an output of less than 2,000 rubles) we get for 1879—518 establishments, with 19,057 workers and an output of 5,625,000 rubles; and for 1890—1,096 establishments, with 23,222 workers and an output of 7,240,000 rubles.*

4) Metallurgical Industries

In the factory statistics for the metallurgical industries the sources of confusion are, firstly, the inclusion of small establishments (exclusively in the 60s and 70s),** and, secondly and mainly, the fact that metallurgical plants are “subject, not to the jurisdiction” of the Department of Commerce and Manufacture, but to that of the Department of Mines. The returns of the Ministry of Finance usually omit ironworks “on principle”; but there have never been uniform and invariable rules for the separation of ironworks from the other works (and it would hardly be possible to devise them). That is why the factory statistics published by the Ministry of Finance always include ironworks to some extent, although the actual degree to which they are included varies for different gubernias and for different years.* General data on the increased use of steam-engines in metallurgy since the Reform will be given below, when we deal with the mining and metallurgical industry.

5) Food Industries

These industries merit special attention for the question that concerns us, since the confusion in factory statistics attains here its maximum. And yet, these industries occupy a prominent place in our factory industry as a whole.

Thus, according to the Directory for 1890 these industries account for 7,095 factories, with 45,000 workers and an output totalling 174 million rubles out of a total for European Russia of 21,124 factories, with 875,764 workers and an output of 1,501 million rubles. The fact is that the principal trades of this group—flour-milling, groat-milling and oil-pressing—consist of the processing of agricultural produce. There are hundreds and thousands of small establishments in Russia engaged in this processing in every gubernia, and since there are no generally established rules for selecting the “factories and works” from among them, the statistics pick out such small establishments quite fortuitously. That is why the numbers of “factories and works” for different years and for different gubernias fluctuate enormously. Here, for example, are the figures for the flour-milling trade for various years, as taken from various sources: 1865—857 mills (Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance); 1866—2,176 (Yearbook); 1866—18,426 (Military Statistical Abstract); 1885—3,940 (Collection); 17,765 (Returns for Russia); 1889, 1890 and 1891—5,073, 5,605 and 5,201* (Collection); 1894-95—2,308 (List). Among the 5,041 mills listed in 1892 (Collection), 803 were steam-, 2,907 water-, 1,323 wind- and 8 horse-operated! Some gubernias counted only steam-mills, others included watermills (in numbers ranging from 1 to 425), still others (the minority) included also windmills (from 1 to 530) and horse-operated mills. One can imagine the value of such statistics, and of conclusions based on a credulous use of the data they provide!** Obviously, to judge the growth of large-scale machine industry we must first establish a definite criterion for the term “factory.” Let us take as such a criterion the employment of steam-engines: steam-mills are a characteristic concomitant of the epoch of large-scale machine industry.***

We get the following picture of the development of factory production in this branch of industry.****

Fifty gubernias of European Russia

Years

No. of steam-mills

No. of workers

Total output (thousand rubles)

1866

126

?

?

1879

205

  3,621

21,353

1890

649

10,453

67,481

1892

803

11,927

80,559

The statistics for the oil-pressing trade are unsatisfactory for the same reason. For instance, in 1879 2,450 works were listed with 7,207 workers and an output totalling 6,486,000 rubles, and in 1890 there were 383 works, with 4,746 workers and an output totalling 12,232,000 rubles. But this decrease in the number of factories and of workers is only apparent. If the data for 1879 and 1890 are made comparable, i.e., if we exclude establishments with an output of less than 2,000 rubles (not included in the lists) we get for 1879: 272 works, with 2,941 workers and an output totalling 5,771,000 rubles, and for 1890—379 works, with 4,741 workers and an output totalling 12,232,000 rubles. That large-scale machine industry has developed in this trade no less rapidly than in flour-milling is evident, for example, from the statistics for steam-engines; in 1875-1878 there were 27 steam-powered works, with 28 steam-engines of 521 h.p., while in 1890 there were 113 mechanised works, with 116 steam-engines totalling 1,886 h.p.

The other trades of this group are relatively small. Let us note that in the mustard and fish-products trades, for instance, the statistics of the 60s included hundreds of small establishments such as have nothing whatever in common with factories and are now not classed as such. The extent to which our factory statistics for various years need correction is evident from the following: with the exception of flour-milling, the Directory for 1879 gave in this section a total of 3,555 establishments with 15,313 workers, and for 1890—1,842 establishments with 19,159 workers. For 7 trades,* small establishments (with an output of less than 2,000 rubles) were included as follows: in 1879—2,487 with 5,176 workers and an output totalling 916,000 rubles and in 1890, seven establishments, employing ten workers and with an output totalling two thousand rubles! To make the data comparable, one should, consequently, subtract in one case five thousand workers, and in the other, ten persons!

6) Excise-Paying and Other Trades

In some of the excise-paying trades we observe a decrease in the number of factory workers between the 1860s and the present day, but the decrease is not nearly as considerable as is asserted by Mr. N. —on,** who blindly believes every figure in print. The fact is that for the majority of excise-paying trades the only source of information is the Military Statistical Abstract, which, as we know, tremendously exaggerates the totals in the factory statistics. Unfortunately, however, we have little material with which to verify the data in the Abstract. In distilling, the Military Statistical Abstract counted in 1866 a total of 3,836 distilleries with 52,660 workers (in 1890—1,620, with 26,102 workers), but the number of distilleries does not coincide with the data of the Ministry of Finance, which in 1865-66 calculated 2,947 operating distilleries and in 1866-67—3,386.* Judging by this, the number of workers is exaggerated by some 5,000 to 9,000. In vodka distilling, the Military Statistical Abstract computes 4,841 distilleries, with 8,326 workers (1890: 242 distilleries with 5,266 workers); of these Bessarabia Gubernia has 3,207 distilleries with 6,873 workers. The absurdity of these figures is glaring. In fact, we learn from material published by the Ministry of Finance** that the actual number of vodka distilleries in Bessarabia Gubernia was 10 or 12, and in the whole of European Russia 1,157. The number of workers was consequently exaggerated by a minimum of 6 thousand. The cause of this exaggeration is, evidently, that the Bessarabian “statisticians” included vineyard owners among the owners of distilleries (see below on tobacco-making). In beer- and mead-brewing, the Military Statistical Abstract counts 2,374 breweries, with 6,825 workers (1890—918 breweries, with 8,364 workers), whereas The Ministry of Finance Yearbook estimates a total of 2,087 breweries in European Russia for 1866. The number of workers is exaggerated here too.*** In the beet-sugar and sugar-refining trades, the Military Statistical Abstract exaggerates the number of workers by 11 thousand, counting 92,126 persons, as against 80,919 according to the data of The Ministry of Finance Yearbook (1890—77,875 workers). In tobacco-making, the Military Statistical Abstract gives 5,327 factories, with 26,116 workers (1890—281 factories, with 26,720 workers); of these, 4,993 factories with 20,038 workers are in Bessarabia Gubernia. Actually, the number of tobacco factories in Russia in 1866 was 343, and in Bessarabia Gubernia 13.* The number of workers has been exaggerated by about 20 thousand, and even the compilers of the Military Statistical Abstract themselves indicated that “the factories shown in Bessarabia Gubernia … are nothing but tobacco plantations” (p. 414). Mr. N. —on evidently thought it superfluous to glance at the text of the statistical publication he uses; that is why he failed to notice the error, and discoursed with a highly serious air about a “slight increase in the number of workers in the … tobacco factories” (article cited, p. 104)!! Mr. N. —on simply takes the total number of workers in the excise-paying trades from the Military Statistical Abstract and the Directory for 1890 (186,053 and 144,332) and calculates the percentage of decrease…. “In a period of 25 years there has been a considerable drop in the number of workers employed. It has diminished by 22.4%…. “Here” (i.e., in the excise-paying trades) “we see no signs of an increase, the plain fact being that the number of workers has simply declined by a quarter of its previous magnitude” (ibid.). Indeed, what could be “simpler”! Take the first figure you lay your hands on, and calculate a percentage! As for the trifling circumstance that the figure given in the Military Statistical Abstract exaggerates the number of workers by some forty thousand, that can be ignored.

7) Conclusions

The criticism of our factory statistics given in the last two sections leads us to the following main conclusions:

1. The number of factories in Russia has been rapidly growing in the post-Reform period.

The opposite conclusion, which follows from our factory statistics, is erroneous. The point is that the figures we are given of factories include small artisan, handicraft and agricultural establishments, and the further back we go from the present day, the larger the number of small establishments included in the number of factories.

2. The number of factory workers and the volume of output of factories and works are likewise exaggerated for the past period in our statistics. This is due, firstly, to the fact that formerly a greater number of small establishments were included. Hence, the data for the industries that merge with handicrafts are particularly unreliable.* Secondly, it is due to the fact that in the past more capitalistically employed home workers were classified as factory workers than today.

3. It is customary in this country to think that if figures are taken from the official factory statistics they must be considered comparable with other figures taken from the same source, and must be regarded as more or less reliable, until the contrary is proved. What has been said above, however, leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that all comparisons of our factory statistics for different times and for different gubernias must be regarded as unreliable until the reverse is proved.

IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MINING INDUSTRY**

In the initial period of Russia’s post-Reform development the principal centre of ore-mining was the Urals. Constituting a single area, until quite recently separated sharply from Central Russia, it has at the same time an original industrial structure. For ages the basis of the “organisation of labour” in the Urals was serfdom, which to this day, the very end of the 19th century, leaves its impress on quite important aspects of life in this mining area. In the old days serfdom was the basis of the greatest prosperity of the Urals and of its dominant position, not only in Russia, but partly also in Europe. In the 18th century iron was one of Russia’s principal items of export; in 1782 nearly 3.8 million poods of iron were exported; in 1800-1815 from 2 to 1½ million poods; in 1815-1838 about 1⅓ million poods. Already “in the 20s of the 19th century Russia was producing 12 times as much pig-iron as France, 42 times as much as Prussia and 3 times as much as Belgium.” But the very serfdom that helped the Urals to rise to such heights when European capitalism was in its initial period was the very cause of the Urals’ decline when capitalism was in its heyday. The iron industry in the Urals developed very slowly. In 1718 Russia’s output of pig-iron was about 62 million poods, in 1767 about 92 million poods, in 1806—12 million poods, in the 30s—9 to 11 million poods, in the 40s—11 to 13 million poods, in the 50s—12 to 16 million poods, in the 60s—13 to 18 million poods, in 1867—172 million poods. In one hundred years the output was not even doubled, and Russia dropped far behind other European countries, where large-scale machine industry had given rise to a tremendous development of metallurgy.

The main cause of stagnation in the Urals was serfdom; the ironmasters were at once feudal landlords and industrialists, and their power was based not on capital and competition, but on monopoly* and their possessional right. The Ural ironmasters are big landowners even today. In 1890, the 262 ironworks in the Empire had 11.4 million dessiatines of land (including 8.7 million dessiatines of forestland), of which 10.2 million belonged to 111 Urals ironworks (forestland covering 7.7 million dessiatines). On the average, consequently, each Urals works possesses vast latifundia covering some hundred thousand dessiatines. The allotment of land to the peasants from these estates has to this day not been completed. Labour is obtained in the Urals, not only by hire, but also on the labour-service basis. The Zemstvo statistics for Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, Perm Gubernia, for example, estimate that there are thousands of peasant farms that have the use of factory-owned land, pastures, woodland, etc., either gratis, or at a low rent. It stands to reason that this free use of the land actually has a very high cost, for it serves to reduce wages to a very low level; the ironworks get their “own” workers, tied down to the works and cheaply paid.** Here is the way Mr. V. D. Belov describes these relationships:

The Urals enjoy the advantage, says Mr. Belov, of having workers who have been moulded by their “original” history. “Workers in other factories, abroad, or even in St. Petersburg, have not the interests of their factory at heart: they are here today and gone tomorrow. While the factory is running they work; when losses take the place of profits, they take up their knapsacks and go off as fast and as readily as they came. They and their employers are permanent enemies…. The position is entirely different in the case of the Ural workers. They are natives of the place and in the vicinity of the works they have their land, their farms and their families. Their own welfare is closely, inseparably, bound up with the welfare of the works. If it does well, they do well; if it does badly, it is bad for them; but they cannot leave it (sic!): they have more here than a knapsack (sic!); to leave means to wreck their whole world, to abandon the land, farm and family…. And so they are ready to hang on for years to work at half pay, or, what amounts to the same thing, to remain unemployed half their working time so that other local workers like themselves may earn a crust of bread. In short, they are ready to accept any terms the employers offer, so long as they are allowed to remain…. Thus, there is an inseparable bond between the Ural workers and the works; the relationships are the same today as they were in the past, before their emancipation from serf dependence; only the form of these relationships has changed, nothing more. The former principle of serfdom has been superseded by the lofty principle of mutual benefit.”*

This lofty principle of mutual benefit manifests itself primarily in reduction of wages to a particularly low level. “In the South … a worker costs twice and even three times as much as in the Urals”—for example, according to data covering several thousand workers, 450 rubles (annually per worker) as against 177 rubles. In the South “at the first opportunity of earning a decent wage in the fields of their native villages or anywhere else, the workers leave the ironworks, and coal- or ore-mines” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 17, p. 265). In the Urals, however, a decent wage is not to be dreamt of.

Naturally and inseparably connected with the low wages and servile status of the Ural workers is the technical backwardness of the Urals. There pig-iron is smelted mostly with the aid of wood fuel, in old-fashioned furnaces with cold or slightly heated blast. In 1893, the number of cold-blast furnaces in the Urals was 37 out of 110, while in the South, there were 3 out of 18. A mineral-fuel furnace had an average output of 1.4 million poods per year, while a wood-fuel furnace had one of 217,000 poods. In 1890 Mr. Keppen wrote: “The refining process of smelting pig-iron is still firmly established in the ironworks of the Urals, whereas in other parts of Russia it has been almost entirely displaced by the puddling process.”¹⁵² Steam-engines are used to a far less extent in the Urals than in the South. Lastly, we cannot but note the seclusion of the Urals, its isolation from the centre of Russia owing to the vast distance and the absence of railways. Until quite recently the products of the Urals were transported to Moscow mainly by the primitive method of “floating” by river once a year.*

Thus the most direct survivals of the pre-Reform system, extensive practice of labour-service, bonded condition of the workers, low productivity of labour, backwardness of technique, low wages, prevalence of hand production, primitive and rapaciously antediluvian exploitation of the region’s natural wealth, monopolies, hindrances to competition, seclusion and isolation from the general commercial and industrial march of the times—such is the general picture of the Urals.

The mining area in the South** is in many respects the very opposite of the Urals. The South is in the period of formation and is as young as the Urals are old and the system prevailing there “time-hallowed.” The purely capitalist industry which has arisen here during recent decades recognises no traditions, no social-estate or national divisions, no seclusion of definite sections of the population. There has been a mass influx of foreign capital, engineers and workers into South Russia; and in the present period of boom (1898) entire factories are being brought there from America.* International capital has not hesitated to settle within the tariff wall and establish itself on “foreign” soil: ubi bene, ibi patria**…. The following are statistics on the displacement of the Urals by the South¹⁵³:

Years

Output of pig-iron (thousand poods)

Total Coal output for Empire (million poods)

Total for Empire

%

In Urals

%

In South

%

1867

  17,028

100

11,084

65.1

       56

  0.3

26.7

1877

  24,579

100

16,157

65.7

  1,596

   6.5

110.1

1887

  37,389

100

23,759

63.5

  4,158

 11.1

276.8

1897

114,782

100

41,180

35.8

46,349

40.4

683.9

1902

158,618

100

44,775

28.2

84,273

53.1

1,005.21

These figures clearly show what a technical revolution is now taking place in Russia, and what an enormous capacity for the development of productive forces is possessed by large-scale capitalist industry. The predominance of the Urals meant the predominance of serf labour, technical backwardness and stagnation.*** On the contrary, we now see that the development of metallurgical industry is proceeding faster in Russia than in Western Europe and in some respects even faster than in the United States. In 1870 Russia produced 2.9% of the world output of pig-iron (22 million poods out of 745 million), and in 1894—5.1% (81.3 million poods out of 1,584.2) (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 22). In the last 10 years (1886-1896) Russia has trebled her output of pig-iron (32½ to 96½ million poods), whereas it took France, for example, 28 years to do so (1852-1880), the U.S.A. 23 years (1845-1868), England 22 (1824-1846) and Germany 12 (1859-1871; see Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 50). The development of capitalism in the young countries is greatly accelerated by the example and the aid of the old countries. Of course, the last decade (1888-1898) has been a period of exceptional boom, which, like all capitalist prosperity, will inevitably lead to a crisis; but capitalist development cannot proceed at all except in spurts.

The introduction of machinery into production and the increase in the number of workers have been much more rapid in the South than in the Urals.*

Thus we see that in the Urals the increase in the use of steam-power was only some 2½ times, whereas in the South it was sixfold; the increase in the number of workers in the Urals was 1⅔ times, whereas in the South it was nearly fourfold.* Consequently, it is capitalist large-scale industry that rapidly increases the number of workers, at the same time enormously increasing the productivity of their labour.

Alongside of the South, mention should be made of the Caucasus, which is also characterised by an amazing growth of the mining industry in the post-Reform period. The output of oil, which in the 60s did not even reach a million poods (557,000 in 1865), was in 1870—1.7 million poods, in 1875—5.2 million poods, in 1880—21.5 million poods, in 1885—116 million poods, in 1890—242.9 million poods, in 1895—384 million poods and in 1902—637.7 million poods. Nearly all the oil is obtained in Baku Gubernia, and Baku “from an insignificant town has turned into a first-class Russian industrial centre, with 112,000 inhabitants.”** The enormous development of the extraction and processing of oil has given rise in Russia to a greater consumption of kerosene that has completely ousted the American product (increase of personal consumption with the cheapening of the product by factory processing), and to a still greater consumption of oil by-products as fuel in factories, in works and on the railways (increase of productive consumption).* The number of workers in the mining industry of the Caucasus has also grown very rapidly: from 3,431 in 1877 to 17,603 in 1890, i.e., has increased fivefold.

To illustrate the structure of industry in the South let us take the data for the coal industry in the Donets Basin (where the average mine is smaller than in any other part of Russia). Classifying the mines according to number of workers employed, we get the following picture:** (See Table on p. 493.)

Thus, in this area (and in this one only) there are extremely small peasants’ mines, which, however, despite their great number, play an absolutely insignificant part in the total output (104 small mines account for only 2% of the total coal output) and are marked by an exceedingly low productivity of labour. On the other hand, the 37 largest mines employ nearly ⅗ of the total number of workers and produce over 70% of the total coal output. Productivity of labour increases parallel with the increase in the size of the mines, even irrespective of whether machinery is used or not (cf., for example, categories V and III of mines, as to quantity of steam-power and output per worker). Concentration of production in the Donets Basin is steadily increasing: thus, in the four years 1882-1886, of 512 coal consigners, 21 dispatched over 5,000 wagon-loads (i.e., 3 million poods) each, making 229,700 wagon-loads out of 480,800, i.e., less than half. In the four years 1891-1895, however, there were 872 consigners, of whom 55 dispatched over 5,000 wagon-loads each, making 925,400 wagon-loads out of 1,178,000, i.e., over of the total number.*

The foregoing data on the development of the mining industry are particularly important in two respects: firstly, they reveal with exceptional clarity the essence of the change in social-economic relations that is taking place in Russia in all spheres of the national economy; secondly, they illustrate the theoretical proposition that in a developing capitalist society there is a particularly rapid growth of those branches of industry which produce means of production, i.e., articles not of personal, but of productive, consumption. The replacement of one form of social economy by another is particularly clear in the mining industry, because here the typical representatives of the two forms are distinct areas. In one area there is the old pre-capitalist world, with its primitive, routine technique, personal dependence of a population tied to place of residence, firmly established social-estate traditions, monopolies, etc.; while in the other area one finds a complete break with all tradition, a technical revolution, and the rapid growth of purely capitalist machine industry.** This example brings out in bold relief the mistake of the Narodnik economists. They deny the progressive nature of capitalism in Russia, pointing to the fact that in agriculture our entrepreneurs readily resort to labour-service and in industry to the distribution of home work and that in mining they seek to secure the tying down of the worker, legislative prohibition of competition by small establishments, etc., etc. The illogicality of such arguments and their flagrant distortion of historical perspective are glaring. Whence, indeed, does it follow that the efforts of our entrepreneurs to utilise the advantages of pre-capitalist methods of production should be charged to our capitalism, and not to those survivals of the past which retard the development of capitalism and which in many cases are preserved by force of law? Can one be surprised, for instance, at the southern mine owners being eager to tie the workers down and to secure the legislative prohibition of competition by small establishments, when in the other mining area such tying down and such prohibitions have existed for ages, and exist to this day, and when in another area the ironmasters, by using more primitive methods and employing cheaper and more docile labour, get a profit on their pig-iron, without effort, of “kopek per kopek and sometimes even one and a half kopeks per kopek”?* Should we not, on the contrary, be surprised at the fact that, under these circumstances, there are people who are capable of idealising the pre-capitalist economic order in Russia, and who shut their eyes to the most urgent and pressing necessity of abolishing all obsolete institutions that hinder the development of capitalism?**

On the other hand, the data on the growth of the mining industry are important because they clearly reveal a more rapid growth of capitalism and of the home market on account of articles of productive consumption than on account of articles of personal consumption. This circumstance is ignored by Mr. N. —on, for instance, who argues that the satisfaction of the entire home demand for the products of the mining industry “will probably take place very soon” (Sketches, 123). The fact is that the consumption of metals, coal, etc. (per inhabitant), does not and cannot remain stationary in capitalist society, but necessarily increases. Every new mile of railway, every new workshop, every iron plough acquired by a rural bourgeois increases the demand for the products of ore-mining. Although from 1851 to 1897 the consumption of pig-iron, for example, in Russia increased from 14 pounds per head to 13 poods, even this latter amount will have to increase very considerably before it approaches the size of the demand for pigiron in the advanced countries (in Belgium and England it is over 6 poods per inhabitant).

V. IS THE NUMBER OF WORKERS IN LARGE CAPITALIST ENTERPRISES GROWING?

Having examined the statistics of the factory and mining industries, we can now attempt to answer this question, one which has so much engaged the attention of the Narodnik economists, and which they have answered in the negative (Messrs. V. V., N. —on, Karyshev and Kablukov have asserted that the number of factory workers in Russia is increasing—if it is increasing—more slowly than the population). Let us observe first of all that the question must be whether an increase is taking place in the commercial and industrial population at the expense of the agricultural population (of this below), or whether an increase is taking place in the number of workers employed in large-scale machine industry. It cannot be asserted that the number of workers in small industrial establishments or in manufactories must increase in a developing capitalist society, for the factory constantly eliminates the more primitive forms of industry. Our factory statistics, however, as was shown in detail above, do not always refer to the factory in the scientific sense of the term.

To examine the data on the question that interests us, we must take, firstly, the returns for all branches, and, secondly, the returns for a long period. Only if we do that is there a guarantee that the data will be more or less comparable. We take the years 1865 and 1890, a stretch of twenty-five years in the post-Reform period. Let us sum up the available statistics. The factory statistics give the fullest data for 1865; for European Russia they showed 380,638 factory workers in all trades except distilling, brewing, beet-sugar and tobacco.* To determine the number of workers in these trades, we have to take the only data available, those of the Military Statistical Abstract, which, as has been shown above, must be corrected. By adding the 127,935 workers in the trades mentioned,** we get the total number of factory workers in European Russia in 1865 (in excise-paying and non-excise-paying trades) as 508,573.*** For 1890 the corresponding figure will be 839,730.**** The increase is 65%, much greater than the increase in population. It must, however, be borne in mind that actually the increase was undoubtedly bigger than these figures show: above it was demonstrated in detail that the factory statistics for the 1860s are exaggerated due to their inclusion of small handicraft, artisan and agricultural establishments, as well as home workers. Unfortunately, we are unable, for lack of material, to correct all these exaggerations in full, and prefer not to correct them in part, especially as more exact data will be given below regarding the number of workers in large factories.

Let us pass to the mining and metallurgical statistics. For 1865 the number of mine workers was given only for the copper and iron trades, as well as the gold and platinum fields; for European Russia it was 133,176.(*) In 1890, there were in the same trades 274,748 workers,* i.e., more than twice as many. The latter figure represents 80.6% of the total number of mine workers in European Russia in 1890; if we assume that in 1865 the trades mentioned also covered 80.6% of the total mine workers,** we get the total number of mine workers for 1865 as 165,230 and for 1890 as 340,912. An increase of 107%.

Further, railway workers also belong to the category of workers in big capitalist enterprises. In 1890, in European Russia, together with Poland and the Caucasus, they numbered 252,415.*** The figure for 1865 is unknown, but it can be determined with a sufficient degree of approximation, since the number of railway workers employed per verst of railway fluctuates very slightly. Counting 9 workers per verst, we get the total number of railway workers in 1865 as 32,076.****

Let us sum up our calculations.

Number of workers in large capitalist enterprises (in thousands)

Years

In factory industry

In mining

On railways

Total

1865

509

165

32

  706

1890

840

340

252

1,432

Thus, in 25 years the number of workers in large capitalist enterprises more than doubled, i.e., it increased not only much faster than the population in general, but even faster than the urban population.* The steadily increasing diversion of workers from agriculture and from the small industries to big industrial enterprises is consequently beyond doubt.** This is indicated by the very statistics that are so often resorted to and abused by our Narodniks. But the culminating point of their abuse of the statistics is the following truly phenomenal device: they work out the proportion of factory workers to the total population (!) and on the basis of the figure arrived at (about 1%) expatiate on how insignificant this “handful”*** of workers is! Mr. Kablukov, for example, after repeating the calculation of the proportion of “factory workers in Russia”* to the population, goes on to say: “In the West, however (!!), the number of workers engaged in manufacturing industry …” (is it not obvious to every schoolboy that “factory workers” and “workers engaged in manufacturing industry” are not one and the same thing at all?) … “constitute quite a different proportion of the population,” namely, from 53% in Britain to 23% in France. “It is not difficult to see that the difference in the proportion of the class of factory workers (!!) there and here is so great that it is out of the question to identify the course of our development with that of Western Europe.” And this is written by a professor and specialist in statistics! With extraordinary valour he perpetrates two misrepresentations at one blow: 1) factory workers are replaced by workers engaged in manufacturing industry, and 2) the latter are replaced by the population engaged in manufacturing industry. Let us explain the meaning of these categories to our learned statisticians. In France, according to the census of 1891, the workers engaged in manufacturing industry numbered 3.3 million—less than one-tenth of the population (36.8 million classified according to occupation; and 1.3 million not classified according to occupation). These are workers employed in all industrial establishments and enterprises, and not only factory workers. The population, however, that is engaged in manufacturing industry numbered 9.5 million (about 26% of the total population). Added here to the number of workers are employers, etc. (1 million); then office employees, clerks, etc., 0.2 million; dependents in household, 4.8 million; and domestic servants, 0.2 million.** To illustrate the corresponding proportions in Russia, we must take particular centres as our examples, for we have no statistics showing the occupations of the whole population. Let us take one urban and one rural centre. In Petersburg the factory statistics for 1890 gave the number of factory workers as 51,760 (according to the Directory), whereas according to the St. Petersburg census of December 15, 1890, the number of persons of both sexes engaged in manufacturing industry was 341,991, distributed as follows:*

Number of persons of both sexes

Independent (i.e., self-supporting)

Members of families and domestic servants

Total

Employers

 13,853

 37,109

 50,962

Managements staffs (clerks)

    2,226

   4,574

   6,800

Workers

148,111

 61,098

209,209

One-man producers

  51,514

 23,506

  75,020

Total

215,704

126,287

341,991

Another example: In Bogorodskoye village, Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia (which, as we have seen, does not engage in agriculture, but constitutes “a single tannery as it were”), there are, according to the Directory for 1890, 392 factory workers, whereas the population engaging in industries, according to the Zemstvo census of 1889, numbers nearly 8,000 (the total population equals 9,241; more than of the families engage in industries). Let these figures give food for thought to Messrs. N. —on, Kablukov and Co.!

Addendum to second edition. We now have the returns of the national census of 1897, giving statistics on the occupations of the entire population. Here are the data, summarised by us, for the whole of the Russian Empire** (in millions):

Independent

Members of families

Total population

Occupations

Both sexes

a)Government officials and armed forces

  1.5

  0.7

  2.2

b)Clergy and liberal professions

  0.7

  0.9

  1.6

c)Rentiers and pensioners

  1.3

  0.9

  2.2

d)Persons in custody, prostitutes, indefinite, unknown

  0.6

  0.3

  0.9

Total unproductive population

4.1

2.8

6.9

e)Commerce

  1.6

  3.4

  5.0

f)Railways and communication

  0.7

  1.2

  1.9

g)Private service, domestic servants, and day labours

  3.4

  2.4

  5.8

Total semi-productive population

5.7

7.0

12.7

h)Agriculture

18.2

75.5

93.7

i)Industry

  5.2

  7.1

 12.3

Total productive population

23.4

82.6

106.0

Grand total

33.2

92.4

125.6

Needless to say, these data fully confirm what has been said above regarding the absurdity of the Narodnik device of comparing the number of factory workers with the whole population.

It will be interesting, first of all, to group the data on the occupational distribution of the whole population of Russia, in a way that will illustrate the division of social labour as the basis of the whole of commodity production and capitalism in Russia. From this point of view, the entire population should be distributed into three large subdivisions: I. Agricultural. II. Commercial and industrial. III. Unproductive (more precisely, not participating in economic activity). Of the nine groups given (a to i), only one cannot be directly and entirely assigned to any one of these three main subdivisions. That is group g: private service, domestic servants and day labourers. This group has to be distributed approximately between the commercial-and-industrial and the agricultural population. We have assigned to the former the section of this group which is shown as residing in towns (2.5 million), and to the latter those residing in rural areas (3.3 million). We then get the following picture of the distribution of the total population of Russia:

Agricultural population of Russia

  97.0

million

Commercial and industrial

  21.7

”

Unproductive

    6.9

”

Total

125.6

million

This picture clearly shows, on the one hand, that commodity circulation and, hence, commodity production are firmly implanted in Russia. Russia is a capitalist country. On the other hand, it follows from this that Russia is still very backward, as compared with other capitalist countries, in her economic development.

To proceed. After the analysis we have made in the present work, the statistics of the occupations of the whole population of Russia can and should be used to determine approximately the main categories into which the entire population of Russia is divided according to class status, i.e., according to their status in the social system of production.

It is possible to determine these categories—only approximately, of course—because we know the main economic groups into which the peasantry are divided. And the entire mass of the agricultural population of Russia may safely be regarded as peasants, for the number of landlords in the sum-total is quite negligible. Quite a considerable section of landlords, moreover, are included in the category of rentiers, government officials, high dignitaries, etc. In the peasant mass of 97 millions, however, one must distinguish three main groups: the bottom group—the proletarian and semi-proletarian strata of the population; the middle group—the poor small peasant farmers; and the top group—the well-to-do small peasant farmers. We have analysed above the main economic features of these groups as distinct class elements. The bottom group is the propertyless population, which earns its livelihood mainly, or half of it, by the sale of labour-power. The middle group comprises the poor small peasant farmers, for the middle peasant in the best of years just barely manages to make ends meet, but the principal means of livelihood of this group is “independent” (supposedly independent, of course) small-scale farming. Finally, the top group consists of the well-to-do small peasant farmers, who exploit more or less considerable numbers of allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers and all sorts of wage-labourers in general.

These groups constitute approximately 50%, 30% and 20% respectively of the total. Above we invariably took the share of each group in the total number of households or farms. Now we shall take them as a proportion of the population. This change effects an increase in the bottom group and a decrease in the top one. But this, undoubtedly, is precisely the change that has taken place in Russia in the past decade, as is proved incontrovertibly by the decline in horse-ownership and by the ruin of the peasantry, the growth of poverty and unemployment in the rural districts, etc.

That is to say, among the agricultural population we have about 48.5 million proletarians and semi-proletarians; about 29.1 million poor small peasant farmers and their families, and about 19.4 million of the population on the well-to-do small farms.

Now the question is how to distribute the commercial and industrial and the unproductive population. The latter group contains sections of the population who obviously belong to the big bourgeoisie: all the rentiers (“living on income from capital and real estate”—first subdivision of group 14 in our statistics: 900,000), then part of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the high military and civil officials, etc. Altogether, these will number about 12 million. At the opposite pole of this group of unproductive population are the lower ranks of the army, navy, gendarmerie and police (about 1.3 million), domestics and numerous servants (about 2 million altogether), nearly 2 million beggars, tramps, etc., etc. Here we can only roughly distribute the groups that most closely approximate to the main economic types: about 2 million will go to the proletarian and semi-proletarian population (partly lumpen-proletarians), about 1.9 million to the poor small proprietors, and about 1.5 million to the well-to-do small proprietors, including the bulk of the clerks, managerial personnel, bourgeois intellectuals, etc.

Lastly, among the commercial and industrial population the largest section is undoubtedly the proletariat, and the gulf is widest between the proletariat and the big bourgeoisie. But the census returns supply no data as to the distribution of this section of the population into employers, one-man producers, workers, etc. We have no alternative but to take as a model the above-quoted data on the industrial population of St. Petersburg, classified according to position in production. On the basis of these data we may roughly assign about 7% to the big bourgeoisie, 10% to the well-to-do petty bourgeoisie, 22% to the poor small proprietors and 61% to the proletariat. In Russia as a whole, small production in industry is, of course, much more tenacious than it is in St. Petersburg, but then we do not assign to the semi-proletarian population the mass of one-man producers and handicraftsmen who work in their homes for masters. Hence, on the whole, the proportions taken will in all probability not differ very much from what they actually are. For the commercial and industrial population we shall then get about 1.5 million big bourgeoisie, about 2.2 million well-to-do, about 4.8 million needy small producers, and about 13.2 million belonging to the proletarian and semi-proletarian strata of the population.

By combining the agricultural, commercial and industrial, and unproductive sections of the population, we shall get the following approximate distribution of the entire population of Russia according to class status:

Total population, both sexes

Big bourgeoisie, landlords, high offialis, etc.

about

 3.0

million

Well-to-do small proprietors

”

23.1

”

Poor small proprietors

”

35.8

”

Proletarians* and semi-proletarians

”

63.7

”

Total

”

125.6

million

We have no doubt that our Cadet and quasi-Cadet economists and politicians will raise their voices in indignation against this “over-simplified” concept of the economy of Russia. After all, it is so convenient, so advantageous to gloss over the profundity of economic contradictions in a detailed analysis and at the same time to complain of the “crudity” of socialist views on these contradictions as a whole. Such criticism of the conclusion we have reached is, of course, without scientific value.

Differences of opinion are, of course, possible about the degree of approximation of various figures. It is of interest to note, from this point of view, the work of Mr. Lositsky, Studies of the Population of Russia Based on the Census of 1897 (Mir Bozhy,* 1905, No. 8). The author took the bare census figures of the number of workers and servants, and from these estimated the proletarian population in Russia at 22 million; the peasant and land-owning population at 80 million, employers and clerks in commerce and industry at about 12 million, and the population not engaged in industry at about 12 million.

The number of proletarians according to these figures comes quite close to the figure we have arrived at.** To deny the existence of a vast mass of semi-proletarians among the poor peasants who are dependent upon “employments,” among the handicraftsmen, etc., would be to scoff at all the data on the Russian economy. One need but recall the 3¼ million horseless households in European Russia alone, the 3.4 million one-horse households, the sum-total of Zemstvo statistics on rented land, “employments,” budgets, etc., to abandon all doubt about the huge size of the semi-proletarian population. To agree that the proletarian and semi-proletarian population taken together comprises one-half of the peasantry is probably no understatement and no exaggeration of its numbers. And outside of the agricultural population, the proletarians and semi-proletarians undoubtedly constitute a still higher percentage.

Further, if we are not to replace the complete economic picture by petty details, we should include among the well-to-do small proprietors a considerable section of the commercial and industrial managerial personnel, clerks, bourgeois intellectuals, government officials, and so on. Here we have perhaps been too cautious and fixed the number of this group of the population too high: it is quite possible that we-should have put the poor small proprietors at a higher figure and the well-to-do at a lower. But, of course, in making such divisions one does not lay claim to absolute statistical accuracy.

Statistics should illustrate the socio-economic relations established by an all-round analysis, and not be made an end in themselves, as too often happens in our country. To gloss over the large numbers of the petty-bourgeois strata in the population of Russia would be simply to falsify the picture of our real economic situation.

VI. STEAM-ENGINE STATISTICS

The employment of steam-engines in production is one of the most characteristic features of large-scale machine industry. It will be interesting therefore to examine the data available on this subject. For the years 1875-1878 the number of steam-engines is supplied by Material for the Statistics of Steam-Engines in the Russian Empire (St. Petersburg, 1882. Published by the Central Statistical Committee).* For 1892 we have the figures of Collection of Data on Factory Industry, which cover all factory and mining trades.

Here are these data compared:

In 16 years the total h.p. capacity of steam-engines in Russia increased threefold and in European Russia 2½ times. The number of steam-engines increased to a lesser degree, so that the average capacity per steam-engine rose considerably: in European Russia from 18 h.p. to 24 h.p., and in the Kingdom of Poland from 18 h.p. to 41 h.p. Large-scale machine industry, consequently, developed very rapidly during this period. As regards steam-power capacity, the following gubernias, in 1875-1878, were in the lead: St. Petersburg (17,808 h.p.), Moscow (13,668), Kiev (8,363), Perm (7,348) and Vladimir (5,684)—the total for these five gubernias being 52,871 h.p. or about ⅗ of the total for European Russia. Then follow the Podolsk (5,480), Petrokov (5,071) and Warsaw (4,760) gubernias. In 1892 the order changed: Petrokov (59,063), St. Petersburg (43,961), Ekaterinoslav (27,839), Moscow (24,704), Vladimir (15,857) and Kiev (14,211)—the total for the last five gubernias being 126,572 h.p., or nearly 2 the total for European Russia. Then follow the gubernias of Warsaw (11,310) and Perm (11,245). These figures clearly indicate the formation of two new industrial centres: in Poland and in the South. In Petrokov Gubernia, the total capacity increased 11.6-fold, and in the Ekaterinoslav and Don gubernias taken together,* from 2,834 to 30,932 h.p. or 10.9-fold. These industrial centres, which have grown so rapidly, have moved up from the bottom to the top places and have supplanted the old industrial centres. Let us observe that these data, too, reveal the particularly rapid growth of the industries producing articles of productive consumption, namely, the mining and metallurgical industries. In 1875-78 these industries employed 1,040 steam-engines with a total of 22,966 h.p. (in European Russia) and in 1890 1,960 steam-engines with a total of 74,204 h.p., i.e., an increase in 14 years that exceeds the increase in the total number of steam-engines in industry as a whole in 16 years. The industries producing means of production constitute an ever-growing part of industry as a whole.*

VII. THE GROWTH OF LARGE FACTORIES

The unsatisfactory nature of our factory statistics, as demonstrated above, has compelled us to resort to more complex calculations in order to determine the development of large-scale machine industry in Russia since the Reform. We have selected data for 1866, 1879, 1890 and 1894-95 on the largest factories, namely, those with 100 and more workers per establishment.** Outside workers are strictly separated only in the data of the List for 1894-95; hence, the data for previous years (particularly 1866 and 1879) may still be somewhat exaggerated, notwithstanding the corrections referred to in the footnote.

* Data for 1866, 1879, 1890 cover 71 trades for which information is available for 1866.

** Data for 1879 and 1890 cover all trades, both excise-paying and non-excise-paying.

*** Data for 1879, 1890, 1894-95 cover all trades except rail (steel) production.

We give the returns on these largest factories (p. 510).

Let us commence our analysis of this table with the data for the years 1866, 1879 and 1890. The total number of large factories changed during these years as follows: 644, 852, 951, or in percentages: 100, 132, 147. In the course of 24 years the number of large factories increased, consequently, by nearly fifty per cent. Moreover, if we take the data for the different categories of large factories, we shall see that the larger the factories, the faster their number grows (A: 512, 641, 712 factories; B: 90, 130, 140; C: 42, 81, 99). This indicates a growing concentration of production.

The number of mechanised establishments grows more rapidly than the total number of factories; in percentages as follows: 100, 178, 226. An increasing number of large factories introduce steam-engines. The larger the factories, the greater the number of mechanised establishments among them; if we calculate the percentage of these establishments to the total number of factories in the given category, we obtain the following: A) 39%, 53%, 63%; B) 75%, 91%, 100%; C) 83%, 94%, 100%. The employment of steam-engines is closely bound up with the expansion of the volume of output, with the expansion of co-operation in production.

The number of workers in all large factories changed in percentages as follows: 100, 168, 200. During the 24 years the number of workers doubled, i.e., exceeded the increase in the total number of “factory workers.” The average number of workers per large factory was by years: 359, 458, 488, and by categories: A) 213, 221, 220; B) 665, 706, 673; C) 1,495, 1,935, 2,154. An increasing number of workers are thus being concentrated in the largest factories. In 1866, factories with 1,000 workers and over employed 27% of the total number of workers in large factories; in 1879, 40%; in 1890, 46%.

The change in the output of all large factories expressed in percentages will be: 100, 243, 292; and by categories: A) 100, 201, 187; B) 100, 245, 308; C) 100, 323, 479. Hence, the volume of output of all large factories increased almost threefold, and the larger the factory, the more rapid the increase. But if we compare the productivity of labour for each separate year according to the different categories, we shall get a somewhat different picture. The average output per worker in all large factories will be: 866 rubles, 1,250, 1,260; and by categories: A) 901, 1,410, 1,191; B) 800, 1,282, 1,574; C) 841, 1,082, 1,188. Thus, for each separate year we observe no increase in output (per worker) as we pass from the bottom category to the top. This is because the various categories include, in unequal proportions, factories in industries using raw materials of different value and obtaining, therefore, an annual output per worker of different value.*

We do not think it worth while to examine in equal detail the data for the years 1879-1890 and for the years 1879-1890-1894-1895, since this would mean repeating all that has been said above for somewhat different percentages.

Latterly, the Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports has supplied data on the distribution of factories and works into groups according to the number of workers employed. Here are the data for 1903:

In 64 gubernias of Russia

In 50 gubernias of European Russia¹⁵⁴

Groups of establishments

No. of establishments

No. of workers

No. of establishments

No. of workers

Under

     20

workers

5,749

     63,652

4,533

  51,728

 21 to

     50

”

5,064

   158,602

4,253

  134,194

 51 to

   100

”

2,271

   156,789

1,897

  130,642

101 to

   500

”

2,095

   463,366

1,755

  383,000

501 to

1,000

”

   404

   276,486

   349

  240,440

Over

1,000

”

   238

   521,511

   210

  457,534

Total

15,821 

1,640,406

12,997  

1,397,538 

A comparison of these with the afore-cited data will involve a certain inaccuracy, a slight one, it is true. At all events, they show that the number of large factories (those with over 99 or over 100 workers) and the number of workers employed in them are rapidly increasing. The concentration of workers and, consequently, of production, also increases in the largest of these large factories.

Comparing the data on the large factories with those on all “factories and works” given in our of official statistics, we see that in 1879 the large factories, constituting 4.4% of all “factories and works” concentrated 66.8% of the total number of factory workers and 54.8% of the total output. In 1890 they constituted 6.7% of the total number of “factories and works,” and concentrated 71.1% of all factory workers and 57.2% of the total output. In 1894-95 they constituted 10.1% of all “factories and works,” and concentrated 74% of all factory workers and 70.8% of the total output. In 1903, the large factories in European Russia, those with over 100 workers, constituted 17% of the total number of factories and works and concentrated 76.6% of the total number of factory workers.* Thus, the large, mostly steam-powered, factories, despite their small numbers, concentrate an overwhelming and ever-growing proportion of the workers and output of all “factories and works.” The tremendous rapidity with which these large factories have been growing in the post-Reform period has already been noted. Let us now cite data on the equally large enterprises in the mining industry.**

Page 405 of The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1908 edition) with V. I. Lenin’s notes (Reduced)

Largest industrial enterprises in European Russia in 1890

Groups of factories, works, mines, pits, etc., according to number of workers

In the mining industry

In factory and mining industries

No. of enterprises

No. of workers

No. of enterprises

No. of workers

Total

Employing steam power

Total

Employing steam power

A)

From

100 to 499 workers

236

  89

  58,249

1,369

  858

310,906

B)

”

500 to 999 workers

  73

  38

  50,607

   256

  221

172,160

C)

”

1000 workers and more

  71

  49

149,098

   186

  164

398,035

Total

380

176

257,954

1,810

1,243

881,101

In the mining industry the concentration of workers in large enterprises is still greater (although the percentage of enterprises employing steam-engines is smaller); 258,000 workers out of 305,000, i.e., 84.5%, are concentrated in enterprises with 100 and more workers; almost half of the mine workers (145,000 out of 305,000) are employed in a few very large establishments each employing 1,000 and more workers. And of the total number of factory and mining workers in European Russia (1,180,000 in 1890), three-fourths (74.6%) are concentrated in enterprises employing 100 workers and over; nearly half (570,000 out of 1,180,000) are concentrated in enterprises each employing 500 and more workers.*

__________

We think it worth while to deal here with the question raised by Mr. N. —on concerning a “slowing down” of the development of capitalism and of the growth of the “factory population” in the period of 1880-1890, as compared with that of 1865-1880.** From this remarkable discovery Mr. N. —on contrived, thanks to the original logic that distinguishes him, to draw the conclusion that “the facts fully confirm” the assertion made in Sketches that “capitalism, after reaching certain limits of its development, effects a shrinkage of its own home market.”—Firstly, it is absurd to argue that a “slowing down in the rate of increase” indicates a shrinkage of the home market. If the number of factory workers is growing faster than the population (and this is precisely the case according to Mr. N. —on’s own data; an increase between 1880 and 1890 of 25%), this shows that the population is being diverted from agriculture and that the home market is growing even for articles of personal consumption. (We say nothing of the market for means of production.) Secondly, a “decline in the growth,” expressed in percentages always has to take place in a capitalist country at a certain stage of development, for small magnitudes always grow faster, in percentages, than big ones. The only deduction one can draw from the fact that the initial steps in the development of capitalism are particularly rapid is that the young country is striving to overtake the older ones. It is wrong, however, to take the percentage increase in the initial period as a standard for subsequent periods. Thirdly, the fact itself of a “decline in the growth” is not proved at all by comparing the periods taken by Mr. N. —on. The development of capitalist industry cannot proceed except in cycles; therefore, to compare different periods, one must take data for a whole number of years,* so that the particularly prosperous, boom years and the slump years may stand out distinctly. Mr. N. —on did not do this and slipped into profound error, for he overlooked the fact that the year 1880 was a high boom year. Moreover, Mr. N. —on did not even hesitate to “concoct” the opposite assertion. “We must also note,” he argues, “that the intervening year (between 1865 and 1890) of 1880 was a year of crop failure, so that the number of workers registered in that year was below the normal”!! (ibid., pp. 103-104). Mr. N. —on had only to glance at the text of the very publication from which he plucked the figures for 1880 (Directory, 3rd edition), to read there that 1880 was marked by a “spurt” in industry, particularly in leather and machine building (p. IV), and that this was due to the enhanced demand for goods after the war and to increased government orders. It is sufficient to look through the Directory for 1879 to get a clear idea of the extent of this spurt.* But Mr. N. —on does not hesitate completely to distort the facts to suit his romantic theory.

VIII. THE DISTRIBUTION OF LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY

Besides the concentration of production in very large establishments, the concentration of production in separate factory industrial centres and the different types of factory centres are also important in characterising large-scale machine industry. Unfortunately, our factory statistics not only supply unsatisfactory and incomparable material, but arrange it in a far from adequate manner. For example, in contemporary publications the distribution of industry is shown only by gubernias (and not by towns and uyezds as was done in the best publications of the 60s, which, in addition, illustrated the distribution of factory industry with maps). But in order to present an accurate picture of the distribution of large-scale industry, the data must be taken for separate centres, i.e., for separate towns, industrial settlements, or groups of industrial settlements situated close together; gubernias or uyezds are too big as territorial units.** In view of this, we thought it advisable to compute from the Directory for 1879 and 1890 data on the concentration of our factory industry in the most important centres. The table given in the appendix (Appendix III) contains data for 103 factory centres in European Russia, centres in which about half the total number of factory workers are concentrated.*

The table shows three main types of factory centres in Russia. 1) The towns. These take first place, being distinguished for the greatest concentration of both workers and establishments. Particularly outstanding in this respect are the large towns. In each of the metropolitan cities (including the suburbs) about 70,000 factory workers are concentrated; Riga has 16,000, Ivanovo-Voznesensk 15,000 and Bogorodsk had 10,000 in 1890; the other towns have fewer than 10,000 each. It is sufficient to take a cursory glance at the official figures on factory workers in several large cities (Odessa—8,600 in 1890, Kiev—6,000, Rostovon-Don—5,700, etc.) to be convinced that these figures are ridiculously low. The instance of St. Petersburg given above shows how many times these figures would have to be multiplied for the correct number of industrial workers in these centres to be obtained. In addition to the towns, the suburbs must also be indicated. The suburbs of large towns are very often big industrial centres, but from the data we possess we have been able to separate only one such centre, the suburbs of St. Petersburg, where in 1890 the number of workers was 18,900. Several of the settlements in the Moscow Uyezd included in our table are also actually suburbs.**

The second type of centre is the factory villages, which are particularly numerous in the Moscow, Vladimir and Kostroma gubernias (of the 63 most important rural centres included in our table, 42 are in these gubernias). These centres are headed by the township of Orekhovo-Zuyevo (in the table, Orekhovo and Zuyevo are given separately, but they are actually one centre); as to the number of workers, it comes second only to the capitals (26,800 in 1890).* In the three gubernias indicated, as also in the Yaroslavl and Tver gubernias, the majority of the rural factory centres are formed by huge textile mills (cotton-spinning and weaving, linen, wool-weaving, etc.). Formerly, there were almost always work-distributing offices in such villages, i.e., centres of capitalist manufacture, which held sway over masses of neighbouring hand weavers. In those cases where the statistics do not confuse home workers with factory workers, the data on the development of such centres clearly reveal the growth of large-scale machine industry which attracts thousands of peasants from the surrounding areas and transforms them into factory workers. Further, a considerable number of rural factory centres are formed by large mining and metallurgical plants (Kolomna Works in the village of Bobrovo, Yuzovka Works, Bryansk Works, and others); the majority of these are classified under mining, and for that reason were not included in our table. The beet-sugar refineries situated in the villages and townships of the south-western gubernias also form quite a number of village factory centres; for our example we have taken one of the largest, the township of Smela, in Kiev Gubernia.

The third type of factory centre is the “handicraft” villages, the largest establishments in which are often classified as “factories and works.” In our table, the villages of Pavlovo, Vorsma, Bogorodskoye and Dubovka serve as examples of such centres. A comparison between the number of factory workers in such centres and the total of their industrial population was made above in the case of Bogorodskoye village.

If we group the centres given in our table according to number of workers in each centre and according to the type of centre (town or village), we get the following data (see next page).

The table shows that in 1879 there were 356,000 workers (out of a total of 752,000) concentrated in these 103 centres, while in 1890 there were 451,000 (out of 876,000). Accordingly, the number of workers increased by 26.8%, whereas in the large factories in general (of 100 and more workers) the increase was only 22.2%, while the total number of workers increased over this period by only 16.5%. Thus the workers are being concentrated in the largest centres. In 1879, only 11 centres had over 5,000 workers; in 1890 there were 21. Particularly striking is the increase in the number of centres with from 5,000 to 10,000 workers. This occurred for two reasons: 1) because of the exceptional growth of factory industry in the South (Odessa, Rostov-on-Don, etc.); and 2) because of the growth of the factory villages in the central gubernias

A comparison between the urban and the rural centres shows that in 1890 the latter embraced about one-third of the total number of workers in the leading centres (152,000 out of 451,000). For the whole of Russia this proportion should be higher, i.e., more than one-third of the factory workers must be outside of the towns. Indeed, all the outstanding urban centres are included in our table, whereas rural centres with several hundred workers each, apart from those we have mentioned, exist in exceedingly large numbers (settlements with glass-works, brickworks, distilleries, beet-sugar refineries, etc.). Mining workers are also to be found mainly outside of towns. One may consider, therefore, that of the total number of factory and mining workers in European Russia not less (and maybe more) than half are to be found outside of towns. This conclusion is very important, for it shows that the industrial population in Russia greatly exceeds the urban population.*

If we now turn to the pace at which factory industry develops in urban and in rural centres, we see that it is undoubtedly faster in the latter. The number of urban centres with 1,000 workers and over in the period taken grew very slightly (from 32 to 33), while the number of rural centres in this category grew very considerably (from 38 to 53). The number of workers in the 40 urban centres grew by only 16.1 % (from 257,000 to 299,000), while in the 63 rural centres it grew by 54.7% (from 98,500 to 152,500). The average number of workers per urban centre rose only from 6,400 to 7,500, whereas the average number per rural centre rose from 1,500 to 2,400. Thus, factory industry evidently tends to spread with particular rapidity outside the towns, to create new factory centres and to push them forward faster than the urban centres, and to penetrate deep into remote rural areas that would seem to be isolated from the world of big capitalist enterprises. This supremely important circumstance shows us, firstly, the rapidity with which large-scale machine industry transforms social and economic relationships. What formerly took ages to take shape now springs up in a decade or so. We have only to compare, for instance, the formation of such non-agricultural centres as the “handicraft villages” indicated in the previous chapter—Bogorodskoye, Pavlovo, Kimry, Khoteichi, Velikoye and others—with the process of the establishment of new centres by the modern factory, which at once draws the rural population by the thousands into industrial settlements.** Social division of labour receives a tremendous impetus. Mobility of the population replaces the former immobility and isolation as a necessary condition of economic life. Secondly, the transfer of factories into the rural districts shows that capitalism is surmounting the obstacles which the social-estate seclusion of the peasant community creates for it, and is even deriving benefit from this seclusion. While the erection of factories in the countryside involves quite a few inconveniences, it does, however, guarantee a supply of cheap labour. The muzhik is not allowed to go to the factory, so the factory goes to the muzhik.* The muzhik lacks complete freedom (thanks to the collective-responsibility system and the obstacles to his leaving the community) to seek the employer who gives the greatest advantage; but the employer has a perfect way of seeking out the cheapest worker. Thirdly, the large number of rural factory centres and their rapid growth proves groundless the opinion that the Russian factory is isolated from the mass of the peasantry, that it exercises little influence over them. The specific character of the distribution of our factory industry shows, on the contrary, that its influence is very widespread, and that it is far from being confined to the walls of the factory.* On the other hand, however, this specific character of the distribution of our factory industry cannot but result in a temporary retardation of the transforming influence of large-scale machine industry on the population it employs. By converting the backwoodsman-muzhik into a factory worker at one stroke, the factory may for a time ensure for itself a supply of the cheapest, least developed and least exacting “hands.” It is obvious, however, that such retardation cannot go on for long, and that it is purchased at the price of a still greater expansion of the area subjected to the influence of large-scale machine industry.

IX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LUMBER AND BUILDING INDUSTRIES

One of the necessary conditions for the growth of large-scale machine industry (and a highly characteristic concomitant of its advance) is the development of the industry for the supply of fuel and building materials, as well as of the building industry. Let us begin with the lumber industry.

The felling and preliminary dressing of trees for their own needs has been an occupation of the peasantry from time immemorial, one that nearly everywhere forms part of the tiller’s round of work. By the lumber industry, however, we mean exclusively the preparation of lumber for sale. Characteristic of the post-Reform period is a particularly rapid growth of this industry, the demand for timber having grown rapidly both for personal consumption (the growth of towns, the increase of the non-agricultural population in the villages, and the loss of woodland by the peasants upon their emancipation) and, particularly, for productive consumption. The development of commerce, industry, urban life, military requirements, railroads, etc., etc., has led to an enormous increase in the demand for timber to be used, not by human beings, but by capital. In the industrial gubernias, for instance, the price of wood fuel has risen “by leaps and bounds”: “in the last five years (up to 1881) the price of wood fuel has more than doubled”.* “The price of timber has begun to rise enormously.”** In Kostroma Gubernia “with the huge consumption of wood fuel by the factories the price has doubled in the past seven years,”*** etc. Timber exports rose from 5,947,000 rubles in 1856 to 30,153,000 rubles in 1881 and 39,200,000 rubles in 1894, i.e., in the ratio 100: 507: 659.**** The amount of building timber and wood fuel transported along the inland waterways of European Russia in 1866-1868 averaged 156 million poods per year(*) and in 1888-1890, 701 million poods per year,(**) i.e., there was a more than fourfold increase. The amount transported by railway in 1888-1890 averaged 290 million poods,(***) whereas in 1866-1868 it was probably no more than 70 million poods.(****) That is to say, total timber freights in the 60s amounted to about 226 million poods, and in 1888-1890 to 991 million poods—a more than fourfold increase. The vast growth of the lumber industry in precisely the post-Reform period is thus beyond doubt.

How is this industry organised? On purely capitalist lines. Forestland is bought from landowners by entrepre-neurs—“lumber industrialists,” who hire workers to fell and saw the timber, to float it, etc. In Moscow Gubernia, for example, the Zemstvo statisticians listed only 337 lumber industrialists out of 24,000 peasants engaged in lumber industries.* In Slobodskoi Uyezd, Vyatka Gubernia, 123 lumber industrialists were listed (“the small ones are mostly subcontractors of the big ones,” of whom there were only 10), while the number of workers engaged in lumbering was 18,865, with average earnings of 19½ rubles per worker.** Mr. S. Korolenko calculated that in the whole of European Russia as many as 2 million peasants were engaged in lumbering,*** and this figure is hardly an exaggeration if, for instance, in 9 uyezds of Vyatka Gubernia (out of 11) about 56,430 lumber workers were listed, and in the whole of Kostroma Gubernia, about 47,000.**** Lumbering is one of the worst paid occupations; the sanitary conditions are atrocious, and the workers’ health is severely affected. Left to toil in the remote forest depths, these workers are in a totally defenceless position, and in this branch of industry bondage, the truck system, and such-like concomitants of the “patriarchal” peasant industries prevail. In confirmation of this description, let us quote some opinions of local investigators. Moscow statisticians mention the “compulsory purchase of provisions,” which usually reduces to a marked degree the lumber workers’ earnings. The Kostroma lumbermen “live in teams in the forests, in hastily and badly erected shanties, where there are no stoves, and which are heated by open hearths. Bad food, consisting of bad soup and of bread which is like stone by the end of the week, fetid air … constantly damp clothes … all this is bound to have a disastrous effect upon the health of the lumber industrialists.” The people live in “much dirtier” conditions in the “lumber” volosts than in the industrial volosts (i.e., the volosts in which outside employment predominates).(*) Regarding Tikhvin Uyezd, Novgorod Gubernia, we read: “Agriculture … constitutes an auxiliary source of income, although in all official statistics you will find that the people engage in farming…. All that the peasant gets to meet his essential needs is earned in felling and floating lumber for the lumber industrialists. But a crisis will set in soon: in some five or ten years, no forests will be left….” “The men who work in the lumber camps are more like boatmen¹⁵⁵; they spend the winter in the forest-encircled lumber camps … and in the spring, having lost the habit of working at home, are drawn to the work of lumber floating; harvesting and haymaking alone make them return to their homes….” The peasants are in “perpetual bondage” to the lumber industrialists.* Vyatka investigators note that the hiring season for lumbering is usually arranged to coincide with tax-paying time, and that the purchase of provisions from the employer greatly reduces earnings…. “Both the tree-fellers and the wood-choppers receive about 17 kopeks per summer day, and about 33 kopeks per day when they work with their own horses…. This paltry pay is an inadequate remuneration for labour, if we bear in mind the extremely insanitary conditions under which it is done,”** etc., etc.

Thus, the lumber workers constitute one of the big sections of the rural proletariat; they have tiny plots of land and are compelled to sell their labour-power on the most disadvantageous terms. The occupation is extremely irregular and casual. The lumbermen, therefore, represent that form of the reserve army (or relative surplus-population in capitalist society) which theory describes as latent*; a certain (and, as we have seen, quite large) section of the rural population must always be ready to undertake such work, must always be in need of it. That is a condition for the existence and development of capitalism. To the extent that the forests are destroyed by the rapacious methods of the lumber industrialists (which proceeds with tremendous rapidity), an ever-growing need is felt for replacing wood by coal, and the coal industry, which alone is capable of serving as a firm basis for large-scale machine industry, develops at an ever faster rate. Cheap fuel, obtainable at any time and in any quantity, at a definite and little fluctuating price—such is the demand of the modern factory. The lumber industry is not in a position to meet this demand.** That is why its predominance over the coal industry as a source of fuel supply corresponds to a low level of capitalist development. As for the social relations of production, in this respect the lumber industry is to the coal industry approximately what capitalist manufacture is to large-scale machine industry. The lumber industry means a technique of the most elementary kind, the exploitation of natural resources by primitive methods; the coal industry leads to a complete technical revolution and to the extensive use of machinery. The lumber industry leaves the producer a peasant; the coal industry transforms him into a factory hand. The lumber industry leaves all the old, patriarchal way of life practically intact, enmeshing in the worst forms of bondage the workers left to toil in the remote forest depths and taking advantage of their ignorance, defencelessness and isolation. The coal industry creates mobility of the population, establishes large industrial centres and inevitably leads to the introduction of public control over production. In a word, the change-over described is of the same progressive significance as the replacement of the manufactory by the factory.*

Building was originally also part of the peasant’s round of domestic occupations, and it continues to be so to this day wherever semi-natural peasant economy is preserved. Subsequent development leads to the building workers’ turning into specialist artisans, who work to customers’ orders. In the villages and small towns the building industry is largely organised on these lines even today; the artisan usually maintains his connection with the land and works for a very narrow circle of small clients. With the development of capitalism, the retention of this system of industry becomes impossible. The growth of trade, factories, towns and railways creates a demand for types of buildings that are architecturally and dimensionally different from the old buildings of the patriarchal epoch. The new buildings require very diverse and costly materials, the co-operation of masses of workers of the most varied specialities and a considerable length of time for their completion; the distribution of these new buildings does not correspond at all to the traditional distribution of the population; they are erected in large towns or suburbs, in uninhabited places, along railways in process of construction, etc. The local artisan turns into a migratory worker and is hired by an entrepreneur contractor, who gradually thrusts himself in between the consumer and the producer and becomes a real capitalist. The spasmodic development of capitalist economy, the alternation of prolonged periods of bad business with periods of “building booms” (like the one we are experiencing now, in 1898) tremendously accelerate the expansion and deepening of capitalist relationships in the building industry.

Such, according to the material of Russian economic literature, has been the post-Reform evolution of the industry under review.* This evolution finds particularly striking expression in the territorial division of labour, in the formation of large areas in which the working population specialises in some particular branch of building.** This specialisation of areas presupposes the formation of large markets for building work and, in this connection, the rise of capitalist relationships. To illustrate this point let us quote data for one such area. Pokrov Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, has long been celebrated for its carpenters, who already at the beginning of the century constituted more than half the total population. After the Reform carpentry continued to spread.*** In “the carpenters’ area the contractors are an element analogous to the subcontractors and factory owners”; they are usually drawn from among the most enterprising members of carpenters’ artels. “Cases are not rare of contractors in ten years accumulating from 50,000 to 60,000 rubles and more of clear profit. Some of the contractors employ from 300 to 500 carpenters and have become real capitalists…. It is not surprising that the local peasants say that ‘nothing pays so well as trading in carpenters.’ ”* It would be hard to give a more striking characterisation of the quintessence of the present organisation of the industry! “Carpentry has left a deep impress upon the whole of peasant life in this locality…. The peasant carpenter devotes less and less time to agriculture, and eventually gives it up altogether.” Life in the cities has laid the impress of culture on the carpenter: he lives a much cleaner life than do the surrounding peasants, and is conspicuous for his “cultured appearance,” for “his relatively high mental development.”**

The total number of building workers in European Russia must be very considerable, judging from the fragmentary data available. In Kaluga Gubernia the number of building workers in 1896 was estimated at 39,860, both local and migratory. In Yaroslavl Gubernia there were in 1894-95—according to official data—20,170 migratory. In Kostroma Gubernia there were about 39,500 migratory. In 9 uyezds of Vyatka Gubernia (out of 11), there were about 30,500 migratory (in the 80s). In 4 uyezds in Tver Gubernia (out of 12), there were 15,585, both local and migratory. In Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, there were 2,221, both local and migratory. The number of carpenters alone who left Ryazan Gubernia every year to work in other districts was, according to official figures for 1875 and 1876, not less than 20,000. In Orel Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, there are 2,000 building workers. In 3 uyezds of Poltava Gubernia (out of 15), there are 1,440. In Nikolayevsk Uyezd, Samara Gubernia, there are 1,339.* Judging by these figures, the number of building workers in European Russia must be not less than one million.** This figure must rather be considered a minimum, for all the sources show that the number of building workers has grown rapidly in the post-Reform period.*** The building workers are industrial proletarians in the making, whose connection with the land—already very slight today****—is becoming slighter every year. The conditions of building workers are very different from those of lumber workers and are more like those of factory workers. They work in large urban and industrial centres, which, as we have seen, considerably raise their cultural standards. While the declining lumber industry typifies weakly developed forms of a capitalism that still tolerates the patriarchal way of life, the developing building industry typifies a higher stage of capitalism, leads to the formation of a new class of industrial workers, and marks a deep-going differentiation of the old peasantry.

X. THE APPENDAGE TO THE FACTORY

By the appendage to the factory we mean those forms of wage-labour and small industry whose existence is directly connected with the factory. These include, first of all (in part), the lumber and building workers, of whom we have spoken and who in some cases directly form part of the industrial population of factory centres, and in others belong to the population of surrounding villages.* Further, they include workers employed on peat bogs—which are sometimes worked by factory owners themselves**; carters, loaders, packers, and so-called labourers generally, who always constitute a fairly considerable part of the population of industrial centres. In St. Petersburg, for instance, the census of December 15, 1890, registered 44,814 persons (of both sexes) in the group of “day labourers and labourers”; then 51,000 persons (of both sexes) in the carting industry, of whom 9,500 are specially engaged in carting heavy and miscellaneous loads. Further, certain auxiliary work is done for factories by small “independent” industrialists; in factory centres or their environs such industries spring up as barrel-making for oil-mills and distilleries,*** basket-making for packing glassware,**** packing-case making for hardware, the making of wooden handles for joiners’ and fitters’ tools,* the making of brads for footwear factories, and of “tanning” for leather works, etc.,** the weaving of bast-matting for the packing of factory wares (in the Kostroma and other gubernias), the making of “sticks” for matches (in the Ryazan, Kaluga and other gubernias), cardboard-box making for tobacco factories (in the environs of St. Petersburg),*** the making of wood-dust for vinegar factories,**** the spinning of waste yarn in small spinning sheds (in Lodz), which has developed owing to the demand created by the big mills,(*) etc., etc. All these small industrialists, like the wage-workers referred to above, belong either to the industrial population of factory centres, or to the semi-agricultural population of the surrounding villages. Furthermore, when a factory’s work is limited to the production of a semi-manufactured article, small industries are sometimes called into existence which engage in treating it further; for example, machine spinning has given an impetus to handicraft weaving, and “handicraft” producers of metal goods cluster around ironworks, etc. Finally, capitalist domestic industry is often an appendage to the factory.(**) The epoch of large-scale machine industry is marked in all countries by the extensive development of capitalist domestic industry in such branches as, for example, ready-made clothing. We have spoken above of the wide extent of such industry in Russia, of the conditions peculiar to it and of the reason for considering it more correct to describe it in the chapter on manufacture.

In order to give anything like a full description of the appendage to the factory one needs complete statistics on the occupations of the population, or monographic descriptions of the entire economic life of factory centres and their environs. But even the fragmentary data with which we have had to content ourselves show the incorrectness of the opinion widespread here that factory industry is isolated from other forms of industry, that the factory population is isolated from the population not employed in factories. The development of forms of industry, like that of all social relationships in general, cannot but proceed very gradually, among a mass of interlocking, transitional forms and seeming reversions to the past. Thus, the growth of small industries may express (as we have seen) the progress of capitalist manufacture; now we see that the factory, too, may sometimes develop small industries. Work for the “buyer-up,” is also an appendage to both the manufactory and the factory. To give a proper assessment of the significance of such phenomena, we must consider them in conjunction with the whole structure of industry at the given stage of its development and with the main trends of this development.

XI. THE COMPLETE SEPARATION OF INDUSTRY FROM AGRICULTURE

The complete separation of industry from agriculture is effected only by large-scale machine industry. The Russian facts fully confirm this thesis, which was established by the author of Capital for other countries,* but which is usually ignored by the Narodnik economists. Mr. N. —on in his Sketches talks in and out of season about “the separation of industry from agriculture,” without, however, taking the trouble to examine, on the basis of precise data, how this process is actually taking place and what different forms it assumes. Mr. V. V. points to the connection of our industrial worker with the land (in manufacture; our author does not think it necessary to distinguish the various stages of capitalism, although he pretends he is following the theory of the author of Capital!) and declaims in this regard about the “shameful (sic!) dependence” “of our (author’s italics) capitalist industry” upon the worker-farmer, etc. (Destiny of Capitalism, p. 114 and others). Mr. V. V. has apparently not heard, or has forgotten if he has beard, that not only in “our country” but everywhere in the West, capitalism failed to bring about the complete separation of the workers from the land before large-scale machine industry was established. Finally, Mr. Kablukov has quite recently presented his students with the following amazing distortion of the facts: “Whereas in the West work in the factory is the sole means of livelihood for the worker, in our country, with relatively few exceptions (sic!!!), the worker regards work in the factory as a subsidiary occupation, he is more attracted to the land.”*

A factual analysis of this question has been made in Mr. Dementyev’s essay on the “factory workers’ connection with agriculture” in the Moscow sanitary statistics.** Systematically collated statistics embracing about 20,000 workers have shown that only 14.1% of the factory workers leave for agricultural employment. But far more important is the fact, proved in the greatest detail in the work mentioned, that it is precisely machine production that divorces the workers from the land. Of a whole series of figures quoted in proof of this fact we select the following most striking ones.***

We have supplemented the author’s table by dividing 8 of the trades into those carried on by hand and those by machinery. As regards the ninth, felt cloth production, let us note that it is conducted partly by hand and partly by machinery. Of the weavers in hand-loom factories about 63% leave for field-work, while of those working on power-looms not one leaves; of the workers in departments of cloth mills that are mechanised 3.3% leave. “Thus, the most important reason for factory workers breaking their ties with the land is the transition from hand to machine production. Despite the still relatively considerable number of factories with hand production, the number of workers employed in them, as compared with the number in factories with machine production, is quite negligible, that is why, of those who leave for field-work, we get proportions as small as 14.1% of adult workers in general and 15.4% of adult workers belonging exclusively to the peasant social estate.”* Let us recall that the returns of the sanitary inspection of factories in Moscow Gubernia gave the following figures: mechanical factories, 22.6% of the total (including 18.4% using steam-engines); in these, 80.7% of the total number of workers are concentrated. Hand-labour factories constitute 69.2%, employing only 16.2% of the total number of workers. At the 244 mechanised factories there are 92,302 workers (378 workers per factory), while at the 747 hand-labour factories there are 18,520 workers (25 workers per factory).* We have shown above the considerable concentration of all Russian factory workers in the largest enterprises, mostly mechanised, which have an average of 488 and more workers per establishment. Mr. Dementyev has studied in detail the influence of the workers’ place of birth on their separation from the land, differences between local-born and migrant workers, differences in social estate (burgher or peasant), etc., and it turned out that all these differences are eclipsed by the influence of the main factor: the transition from hand to machine production.** “Whatever causes may have helped to turn the former cultivator into a factory worker, these special workers already exist. They are merely counted as peasants, but their only connection with the village is by way of the taxes they pay when renewing their passports, for actually they have no farm in the village, and very often not even a house, which has usually been sold. Even their right to land they retain only juridically, so to speak, and the disorders that took place in 1885-1886 at many factories showed that these workers themselves feel totally alien to the village, just as the peasants in their turn regard them, offspring of their fellow-villagers, as strangers. We are consequently faced with an already crystallised class of workers, possessing no homes of their own and virtually no property, a class bound by no ties and living from hand to mouth. And its origin does not date from yesterday. It has its factory genealogy, and a fairly large section of it is already in its third generation.”*** Lastly, interesting material on the separation of the factory from agriculture is provided by the latest factory statistics. The List of Factories and Works (data for 1894-95) gives information on the number of days in the year during which each factory operates. Mr. Kasperov hastened to use these data in support of the Narodnik theories when he calculated that “on the average, the Russian factory works 165 days a year,” that “35% of the factories in this country work less than 200 days a year.”* It goes without saying that in view of the vagueness of the term “factory,” such overall figures are practically valueless, since they do not indicate how many workers are employed for specific numbers of days in the year. We have computed the appropriate figures of the List for those large factories (with 100 and more workers) which, as we have seen above (§VII), employ about ¾ of the total number of factory workers. It turns out that the average number of working days per year in the different categories was as follows: A) 242; B) 235; C) 273,** and for all the large factories, 244. If we calculate the average number of working days per worker we will get 253 working days per year as the average number per worker of a large factory. Of the 12 sections into which the various trades are divided in the List, only in one is the average number of working days, for the bottom categories, below 200, namely in section XI (food products): A) 189; B) 148; C) 280. Factories in categories A and B in this section employ 110,588 workers, which is 16.2% of the total number of workers in the large factories (655,670). We would point out that this section combines quite diverse trades, e.g., beet-sugar and tobacco, distilling and flour-milling, etc. For the remaining sections the average number of working days per factory is as follows: A) 259; B) 271; C) 272. Thus, the larger the factories the greater the number of days they operate in the course of the year. The general data for all the biggest factories in European Russia, therefore, confirm the conclusions of the Moscow sanitary statistical returns and prove that the factory creates a class of permanent factory workers.

So then, the data on Russian factory workers fully confirm the theory of Capital that it is large-scale machine industry that brings about a complete and definite revolution in the conditions of life of the industrial population, separating it once and for all from agriculture and from the century-old traditions of patriarchal life connected with it. But, by destroying patriarchal and petty-bourgeois relationships, large-scale machine industry creates, on the other hand, conditions which draw wage-workers in agriculture and industry closer together: firstly, it introduces into the rural districts generally the commercial and industrial way of life which has first arisen in the non-agricultural centres; secondly, it creates mobility of the population and large markets for the hiring of both agricultural and industrial workers; thirdly, by introducing machinery into agriculture, large-scale machine industry brings into the rural districts skilled industrial workers, distinguished for their higher standard of living.

XII. THREE STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIAN INDUSTRY

Let us now sum up the main conclusions to be drawn from the data on the development of capitalism in our industry.*

There are three main stages in this development: small commodity-production (small, mainly peasant industries); capitalist manufacture; and the factory (large-scale machine industry). The facts utterly refute the view widespread here in Russia that “factory” and “handicraft” industry are isolated from each other. On the contrary, such a division is purely artificial. The connection and continuity between the forms of industry mentioned is of the most direct and intimate kind. The facts quite clearly show that the main trend of small commodity-production is towards the development of capitalism, in particular, towards the rise of manufacture; and manufacture is growing with enormous rapidity before our very eyes into large-scale machine industry. Perhaps one of the most striking manifestations of the intimate and direct connection between the consecutive forms of industry is the fact that many of the big and even the biggest factory owners were at one time the smallest of small industrialists and passed through all the stages from “popular production” to “capitalism.” Savva Morozov was a peasant serf (he purchased his freedom in 1820), a cowherd, a carter, a worker weaver, a handicraft weaver who used to journey to Moscow on foot in order to sell his goods to buyers-up; then he became the owner of a small establishment, a work-distributing office, a factory. When he died in 1862, he and his numerous sons owned two large factories. In 1890, the 4 factories belonging to his descendants employed 39,000 workers, producing goods to the value of 35 million rubles.* In the silk industry of Vladimir Gubernia, a number of big factory owners were formerly worker weavers or “handicraft” weavers.** The biggest factory owners in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (the Kuvayevs, Fokins, Zubkovs, Kokushkins, Bobrovs and many others) were formerly handicraftsmen.*** The brocade factories in Moscow Gubernia all grew out of handicraft workrooms.**** The factory owner Zavyalov, of Pavlovo district, still had in 1864 “a vivid recollection of the time when he was a plain employee of craftsman Khabarov.”(*) Factory owner Varypayev used to be a small handicraftsman.(**) Kondratov was a handicraftsman who used to walk to Pavlovo carrying his wares in a bag.(***) Millowner Asmolov used to be a pedlars’ horse-driver, then a small trader, then proprietor of a small tobacco workshop, and finally owner of a factory with a turnover of many millions.(****) And so on and so forth. It would be interesting to see how, in these and similar cases, the Narodnik economists would determine where “artificial” capitalism begins and “people’s” industry ends.

The three main forms of industry enumerated above differ first of all in their systems of technique. Small commodity-production is characterised by its totally primitive, hand technique that remained unchanged almost from time immemorial. The small producer in industry remains a peasant who follows tradition in his methods of processing raw material. Manufacture introduces division of labour, which effects a substantial change in technique and transforms the peasant into a factory-hand, a “labourer performing one detailed operation.” But production by hand remains, and, on its basis, progress in methods of production is inevitably very slow. Division of labour springs up spontaneously and is passed on by tradition just as peasant labour is. Large-scale machine industry alone introduces a radical change, throws manual skill overboard, transforms production on new, rational principles, and systematically applies science to production. So long as capitalism in Russia did not organise large-scale machine industry, and in those industries in which it has not done so yet, we see almost complete stagnation in technique, we see the employment of the same hand-loom and the same watermill or windmill that were used in production centuries ago. On the other hand, in industries subordinated to the factory we observe a complete technical revolution and extremely rapid progress in the methods of machine production.

We see that the different stages of the development of capitalism are connected with different systems of technique. Small commodity-production and manufacture are characterised by the prevalence of small establishments, from among which only a few large ones emerge. Large-scale machine industry completely eliminates the small establishments. Capitalist relationships arise in the small industries too (in the form of workshops employing wage-workers and of merchant’s capital), but these are still poorly developed and are not crystallised in sharp oppositions between the groups participating in production. Neither big capital nor extensive proletarian strata as yet exist. 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 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. Under manufacture this break is already very considerable. A whole number of industrial centres arise that do not engage in agriculture. The chief representative of industry is no longer the peasant, but the merchant and the manufactory owner on the one hand, and the “artisan” on the other. Industry and the relatively developed commercial intercourse with the rest of the world raise the standard of living and the culture of the population; the peasant is now regarded with disdain by the manufactory workman. Large-scale machine industry completes this transformation, separates industry from agriculture once and for all, and, as we have seen, creates a special class of the population totally alien to the old peasantry and differing from the latter in its manner of living, its family relationships and its higher standard of requirements, both material and spiritual.* In the small industries and in manufacture we always find survivals of patriarchal relations and of diverse forms of personal dependence, which, in the general conditions of capitalist economy, exceedingly worsen the condition of the working people, and degrade and corrupt them. Large-scale machine industry, which concentrates masses of workers who often come from various parts of the country, absolutely refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked by a truly “contemptuous attitude to the past.” It is this break with obsolete tradition that is one of the substantial conditions which have created the possibility and evoked the necessity of regulating production and of public control over it. In particular, speaking of the transformation brought about by the factory in the conditions of life of the population, it must be stated that the drawing of women and juveniles into production** is, at bottom, progressive. It is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labour, etc.; but endeavours completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian. By destroying the patriarchal isolation of these categories of the population who formerly never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in social production, large-scale machine industry stimulates their development and increases their independence, in other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably superior to the patriarchal immobility of pre-capitalist relations.*

The settled character of the population is typical of the first two stages of industrial development. The small industrialist, remaining a peasant, is bound to his village by his farm. The artisan under manufacture is usually tied to the small, isolated industrial area which is created by manufacture. In the very system of industry at the first and second stages of its development there is nothing to disturb this settled and isolated condition of the producer. Intercourse between the various industrial areas is rare. The transfer of industry to other areas is due only to the migration of individual small producers, who establish new small industries in the outlying parts of the country. Large-scale machine industry, on the other hand, necessarily creates mobility of the population; commercial intercourse between the various districts grows enormously; railways facilitate travel. The demand for labour increases on the whole—rising in periods of boom and falling in periods of crisis, so that it becomes a necessity for workers to go from one factory to another, from one part of the country to another. Large-scale machine industry creates a number of new industrial centres, which grow up with unprecedented rapidity, sometimes in unpopulated places, a thing that would be impossible without the mass migration of workers. Further on we shall speak of the dimensions and the significance of the so-called outside non-agricultural industries. At the moment we shall limit ourselves to a brief presentation of Zemstvo sanitation statistics for Moscow Gubernia. An inquiry among 103,175 factory workers showed that 53,238, or 51.6% of the total, were born in the uyezd in which they worked. Hence, nearly half the workers had migrated from one uyezd to another. The number of workers who were born in Moscow Gubernia was 66,038, or 64%.* More than a third of the workers came from other gubernias (chiefly from gubernias of the central industrial zone adjacent to Moscow Gubernia). A comparison of the different uyezds shows the most highly industrialised ones to be marked by the lowest percentage of locally-born workers. For example, in the poorly industrialised Mozhaisk and Volokolamsk uyezds from 92 to 93% of the factory workers are natives of the uyezd where they work. In the very highly industrialised Moscow, Kolomna and Bogorodsk uyezds the percentage of locally-born workers drops to 24%, 40% and 50%. From this the investigators draw the conclusion that “the considerable development of factory production in an uyezd encourages the influx of outside elements.”* These facts show also (let us add) that the movement of industrial workers bears the same features that we observed in the movement of agricultural workers. That is to say, industrial workers, too, migrate not only from localities where there is a surplus of labour, but also from those where there is a shortage. For example, the Bronnitsi Uyezd attracts 1,125 workers from other uyezds of Moscow Gubernia and from other gubernias, while at the same time providing 1,246 workers for the more highly industrialised Moscow and Bogorodsk uyezds. Hence, workers leave not only because they do not find “local occupations at hand,” but also because they make for the places where conditions are better. Elementary as this fact is, it is worth while giving the Narodnik economists a further reminder of it, for they idealise local occupations and condemn migration to industrial districts, ignoring the progressive significance of the mobility of the population created by capitalism.

The above-described characteristic features which distinguish large-scale machine industry from the preceding forms of industry may be summed up in the words—socialisation of labour. Indeed, production for an enormous national and international market, development of close commercial ties with various parts of the country and with different countries for the purchase of raw and auxiliary materials, enormous technical progress, concentration of production and of the population in colossal enterprises, demolition of the worn-out traditions of patriarchal life, creation of mobility of the population, and improvement of the worker’s standard of requirements and his development—all these are elements of the capitalist process which is increasingly socialising production in the country, and with it those who participate in production.*

On the problem of the relation of large-scale machine industry in Russia to the home market for capitalism, the data given above lead to the following conclusion. The rapid development of factory industry in Russia is creating an enormous and ever-growing market for means of production (building materials, fuel, metals, etc.) and is increasing with particular rapidity the part of the population engaged in making articles of productive and not personal consumption. But the market for articles of personal consumption is also growing rapidly, owning to the growth of large-scale machine industry, which is diverting an increasingly large part of the population from agriculture into commercial and industrial occupations. As for the home market for factory-made products, the process of the formation of that market was examined in detail in the early chapters of this book.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FORMATION OF THE HOME MARKET

We now have to sum up the data examined in the preceding chapters and to try to give an idea of the interdependence of the various spheres of the national economy in their capitalist development.

I. THE GROWTH OF COMMODITY CIRCULATION

It is well known that commodity circulation precedes commodity production and constitutes one of the conditions (but not the sole condition) of the rise of the latter. In the present work we have confined ourselves to an examination of data on commodity and capitalist production, and for that reason do not intend to deal in detail with the important problem of the growth of commodity circulation in post-Reform Russia. In order to give a general idea of how rapidly the home market has grown, the following brief data will suffice.

The length of the Russian railway system increased from 3,819 kilometres in 1865 to 29,063 km. in 1890,* i.e., more than 7-fold. Similar progress was made by Britain in a longer period (1845—4,082 km.; 1875—26,819 km., a 6-fold increase), by Germany in a shorter period (1845—2,143 km.; 1875—27,981 km., a 12-fold increase). The length of new railway opened per year differed considerably in different periods; for example, in the 5 years 1868-1872 8,806 versts of new railway were opened and in the 5 years 1878-1882, only 2,221.* The extent of this fluctuation enables us to judge what an enormous reserve army of unemployed is required by capitalism, which now expands, and then contracts the demand for labour. There have been two boom periods in railway development in Russia: the end of the 60s (and the beginning of the 70s), and the latter half of the 90s. From 1865 to 1875, the average annual increase in the length of the Russian railway system was 1,500 kilometres, and from 1893 to 1897, about 2,500 kilometres.

The amount of railway freight carried was as follows: 1868—439 million poods; 1873—1,117 million poods; 1881—2,532 million poods; 1893—4,846 million poods; 1896—6,145 million poods; 1904—11,072 million poods. No less rapid has been the growth of passenger traffic: 1868—10.4 million passengers; 1873—22.7; 1881—34.4; 1893—49.4; 1896—65.5; 1904—123.6 million.**

The development of water transport is as follows (data for the whole of Russia):***

The amount of freight carried on inland waterways in European Russia in 1881 was 899.7 million poods; in 1893—1,181.5 million poods; in 1896—1,553 million poods. The value of these freights was 186.5 million rubles; 257.2 million rubles; 290 million rubles.

Russia’s merchant marine in 1868 consisted of 51 steamers with a capacity of 14,300 lasts,¹⁶⁰ and of 700 sailing ships with a capacity of 41,800 lasts; and in 1896 of 522 steamers with a capacity of 161,600 lasts.*

The development of mercantile shipping at all ports on the outer seas was as follows: during the five years 1856-1860 the number of homeward plus outward bound vessels averaged 18,901, with a total capacity of 3,783,000 tons; for the period 1886-1890 it averaged 23,201 vessels (+23%) with a total capacity of 13,845,000 tons (+266%). Capacity, therefore, increased 3⅔ times. In 39 years (from 1856 to 1894) capacity grew 5.5-fold, and if we take Russian and foreign vessels separately, it is seen that during these 39 years the number of the former grew 3.4-fold (from 823 to 2,789), while their capacity grew 12.1-fold (from 112,800 tons to 1,368,000 tons), whereas the number of the latter grew by 16% (from 18,284 to 21,160) and their capacity 5.3-fold (from 3,448,000 tons to 18,267,000 tons).** Let us remark that the capacity of homeward and outward bound vessels also fluctuates very considerably from year to year (e.g., 1878—13 million tons; 1881—8.6 million tons), and these fluctuations enable us to gauge in part the fluctuations in the demand for unskilled labourers, dockers, etc. Here, too, capitalism requires the existence of a mass of people always in want of work and ready at the first call to accept it, however casual it may be.

The development of foreign trade can be seen from the following data:***

Years

No. of inhabitants of Russia without Finland (millions)

Value of exports and imports combined (million credit rubles)

Value of total foreign trade turnover per inhabitant (rubles)

1856-1860

  69.0

  314.0

 4.55

1861-1865

  73.8

  347.0

 4.70

1866-1870

  79.4

  554.2

 7.00

1871-1875

  86.0

  831.1

 9.66

1876-1880

  93.4

1,054.8

11.29

1881-1885

100.6

1,107.1

11.00

1886-1890

108.9

1,090.3

10.02

1897-1901

130.6

1,322.4

10.11

The following data give a general idea of the volume of bank turnover and capital accumulation. Total withdrawals from the State Bank rose from 113 million rubles in 1860-1863 (170 million rubles in 1864-1868) to 620 million rubles in 1884-1888, and total deposits on current account from 335 million rubles in 1864-1868 to 1,495 million rubles in 1884-1888.* The turnover of loan and savings societies and banks (rural and industrial) grew from 2¾ million rubles in 1872 (21.8 million rubles in 1875) to 82.6 million rubles in 1892., and 189.6 million rubles in 1903.** Mortgages increased from 1889 to 1894 as follows: the assessment of mortgaged land rose from 1,395 million rubles to 1,827 million rubles, and total loans from 791 million rubles to 1,044 million rubles.*** The operations of savings banks grew particularly in the 80s and 90s. In 1880 there were 75 savings banks, in 1897—4,315 (of which 3,454 were post-office banks). In 1880, deposits amounted to 4.4 million rubles, in 1897 to 276.6 million rubles. Balance on account at the end of the year totalled 9.0 million rubles in 1880, and 494.3 million rubles in 1897. The annual capital increase is particularly striking in the famine years 1891 and 1892 (52.9 and 50.5 million rubles), and in the last two years (1896—51.6 million rubles; 1897—65.5 million rubles).****

The latest statistics show an even greater development of the savings banks. In 1904, over the whole of Russia there were 6,557 savings banks with 5.1 million depositors and total deposits of 1,105.5 million rubles. Incidentally, in this country both the old Narodniks and the new opportunists in the socialist movement have frequently been very naïve (to put it mildly) in talking about the increase in the number of savings banks constituting a sign of the “people’s” well-being. It will perhaps not be out of place, therefore, to compare the distribution of savings-bank deposits in Russia (1904) with that of France (1900. Information from Bulletin de l’Office du travail, 1901, No. 10).

In Russia:

Size of deposits

No. of depositors (thousands)

%

Total deposits (million rubles)

%

Under

  25

rubles

1,870.4

38.7

11.2

  1.2

25 to

100

”

   967.7

20.0

52.8

  5.4

100 to

500

”

1,380.7

28.6

308.0

31.5

Over

500

”

   615.5

12.7

605.4

61.9

Total

4,834.3

 100

977.4

 100

In France:

Size of deposits

No. of depositors (thousands)

%

Total deposits (million francs)

%

Under

   100

fr.

  5,273.5

50.1

  143.6

  3.3

100 to

   500

”

  2,197.4

20.8

  493.8

11.4

500 to

1,000

”

  1,113.8

10.6

  720.4

16.6

Over

1,000

”

  1,948.3

18.5

2,979.3

68.7

Total

10,533.0

100

4,337.1

 100

What a wealth of material there is here for Narodnik-Revisionist-Cadet apologists! It is interesting, in passing, to note that in Russia deposits are also divided into 12 groups according to the occupations and professions of depositors. It appears that the largest sum of deposits—228.5 million rubles—is that of persons engaged in agriculture and rural industries, and these deposits are growing with particular rapidity. The village is becoming civilised, and to make the muzhik’s ruin a source of business is becoming increasingly profitable.

But let us return to our immediate theme. As we see, the data indicate an enormous growth of commodity circulation and capital accumulation. How the field for the employment of capital in all branches of the national economy was created and how merchant’s capital was transformed into industrial capital, i.e., was directed into production and created capitalist relationships between those taking part in production, has been shown above.

II. THE GROWTH OF THE COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POPULATION

We have stated above that the growth of the industrial population at the expense of the agricultural is a requisite phenomenon of every capitalist society. In what way the separation of industry from agriculture steadily takes place has also been examined, and now all that remains is to sum up on this question.

1) The Growth of the Towns

The most striking expression of the process under examination is the growth of the towns. Here are data on this growth in European Russia (50 gubernias) in the post-Reform period*:

V. I. Lenin’s grouping of towns in European Russia according to the population census of 1897

Thus, the percentage of urban population is constantly growing, that is, the population is being diverted from agriculture into commercial and industrial occupations.* The population of the towns is growing twice as fast as that of the rest of the country: from 1863 to 1897 the total population increased 53.3%, the rural 48.5%, while the urban increased 97%. Over a period of 11 years (1885-1897) “the influx, at a minimum, of the rural population into the towns” was 2½ million persons, according to Mr. V. Mikhailovsky’s estimate,** i.e., more than 200,000 per annum.

The population of towns that are important industrial and commercial centres is growing much more rapidly than the urban population generally. The number of towns with 50,000 and more inhabitants more than trebled between 1863 and 1897 (13 and 44). In 1863, of the total urban population only about 27% (1.7 million out of 6.1) were concentrated in such large centres; in 1885 it was nearly 41% (4.1 million out of 9.9),*** and in 1897 it was already more than half, about 53% (6.4 million out of 12 million). In the 1860s, therefore, the smaller towns provided the general pattern of the urban population, but in the 1890s they were completely outweighed by the big cities. The population of the 14 towns that had been the biggest in 1863 increased from 1.7 million inhabitants to 4.3 million, i.e., by 153%, whereas the overall urban population increased by only 97%. Hence, the enormous growth of large industrial centres and the emergence of a large number of new centres is one of the most characteristic features of the post-Reform period.

2) The Significance of Home Colonisation

As we have pointed out above (Chapter I, §II, p. 40), theory deduces the law that the industrial population grows at the expense of the agricultural from the fact that in industry variable capital increases absolutely (the growth of variable capital means a growth of the number of industrial workers and a growth of the total commercial and industrial population), whereas in agriculture the “variable capital required for the exploitation of a certain plot of land decreases absolutely.” “It can thus only increase,” Marx adds, “to the extent that new land is taken into cultivation, but this again requires as a prerequisite a still greater growth of the non-agricultural population.”¹⁶¹ Hence it is clear that the growth of the industrial population is a phenomenon observable in its pure form only when we have before us an already populated territory in which all the land is already occupied. The inhabitants of such a territory, when forced-out of agriculture by capitalism, have no other alternative but to migrate to the industrial centres or to other countries. But the situation is essentially different when we have before us a territory in which not all the land is occupied, and which is not yet fully populated. The inhabitants of such a territory, when forced out of agriculture in a populated area, may remove to an unpopulated part of that territory and set about “taking new land into cultivation.” The result will be an increase in the agricultural population, and this increase may be (for some time) no less, if not more, rapid than the increase in the industrial population. In that case, we have before us two different processes: 1) the development of capitalism in the old, populated country or part of the country; 2) the development of capitalism on “new land.” The first process expresses the further development of established capitalist relationships; the second, the rise of new capitalist relationships on new territory. The first process means the development of capitalism in depth, the second, in breadth. Obviously, to confuse these two processes must inevitably lead to a wrong conception of the process which diverts the population from agriculture to commercial and industrial occupations.

Post-Reform Russia affords us an example of the two processes going on simultaneously. At the beginning of the post-Reform period, in the 60s, the southern and eastern outer regions of European Russia were largely unpopulated, and there was an enormous influx into those areas of migrants from the central agricultural part of Russia. It was this formation of a new agricultural population on new territory that to some extent obscured the parallel process of the diversion of the population from agriculture to industry. To get a clear picture, from data on the urban population, of the specific feature of Russia here described, we must divide the 50 gubernias of European Russia into separate groups. We give data on the urban population in 9 areas of European Russia in 1863 and in 1897 (see p. 564).

As far as the question that interests us is concerned, the greatest importance attaches to three areas: 1) the non-agricultural industrial area (the 11 gubernias in the first two groups, including the 2 metropolitan gubernias).* This is an area from which migration to other areas has been very slight. 2) The central agricultural area (the 13 gubernias in group 3). Migration from this area has been very considerable, partly to the previous area, but mainly to the next. 3) The agricultural outer regions (the 9 gubernias in group 4) constitute an area that has been colonised in the post-Reform period. The percentage of urban population in all these 33 gubernias differs very little, as the table shows, from the percentage of urban population in European Russia as a whole.

In the first area, the non-agricultural or industrial, we observe a particularly rapid rise in the percentage of urban population: from 14.1% to 21.1%. The growth of the rural population is here very slight, being little more than half of that for the whole of Russia. The growth of the urban population, on the other hand, is considerably above the average (105% as against 97%). If Russia is to be compared with West-European industrial countries (as is often done here), then these countries should be compared with just this one area, for it alone has conditions approximately similar to those of the industrial capitalist countries.

Gubernias included in groups: I) St. Petersburg and Moscow; II) Vladimir, Kaluga, Kostroma, Nizhni-Novgorod, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Tver, Yaroslavl; III) Voronezh, Kazan, Kursk, Orel, Penza, Poltava, Ryazan, Saratov, Simbrisk, Tambov, Tula, Kharkov, Chernigov; IV) Astrakhan, Bessarabia, Don, Ekaterinoslav, Orenburg, Samara, Taurida, Kherson, Ufa; V) Kurland, Livonia, Esthland; VI) Vilna, Vitebsk, Grodno, Kovno, Minsk, Mogilev; VII) Volhynia, Podolsk, Kiev; VIII) Vyatka, Perm; IX) Archangel, Vologda, Olonets.

In the second, the central agricultural area, we see a different picture. The percentage of urban population here is very low and grows with less than average rapidity. The increase in the population between 1863 and 1897, both urban and rural, was much below the average for Russia. This is to be explained by the vast stream of migrants from this area to the border regions. According to Mr. V. Mikhailovsky’s calculations, between 1885 and 1897 nearly 3 million people, or more than one-tenth of the population left these parts.*

In the third area, the outer regions, we see that the percentage of urban population underwent an increase that “was slightly below the average (from 11.2% to 13.3%, i.e., in the proportion of 100 : 118, whereas the average is from 9.94 to 12.76, i.e., in the proportion of 100 : 128). And yet the absolute growth of the urban population here, far from being less, was considerably above the average (+130% as against +97%). The diversion of population from agriculture to industry has, consequently, been very intense, but it is hidden by the enormous growth of the agricultural population as a result of influx: in this area the rural population increased by 87%, as against an average for Russia of 48.5%. In certain gubernias this obscuring of the process of the industrialisation of the population is still more striking. For instance, in Taurida Gubernia the percentage of urban population was the same in 1897 as in 1863 (19.6%), and in Kherson Gubernia actually declined (from 25.9% to 25.4%), although the growth of the towns in both the gubernias was not far behind that of the metropolitan cities (+131%, +135%, as against +141% in the two metropolitan gubernias). The rise of a new agricultural population on new territory thus leads, in turn, to a still greater growth of the non-agricultural population.

3) The Growth of Factory and of Commercial and Industrial Townships and Villages

In addition to the towns, the following have the significance of industrial centres: firstly, suburbs, which are not always counted with the towns and which are spreading in an increasing area around the big towns; and secondly, factory townships and villages. Such industrial centres* are particularly numerous in the industrial gubernias where the percentage of urban population is extremely low.** The above table containing the data, by areas, of the town population shows that in the 9 industrial gubernias the percentage in 1863 was 7.3% and in 1897, 8.6%. The fact is that the commercial and industrial population of these gubernias is concentrated mainly, not in towns, but in industrial villages. Among the “towns” of Vladimir, Kostroma, Nizhni-Novgorod and other gubernias there are not a few with less than 3,000, 2,000 or even 1,000 inhabitants, whereas there are numerous “villages” in each of which there are 2,000, 3,000 or 5,000 factory workers alone. In the post-Reform period, rightly observes the compiler of the Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia (Vol. II., 191), “the towns have begun to grow still faster, and in addition there has been the growth of settlements of a new type, a type of factory centre midway between the town and the village.” We have cited data showing the enormous growth of these centres and the number of factory workers concentrated in them. We have seen that there are quite a few centres of this kind throughout Russia, not only in the industrial gubernias, but also in the South. In the Urals the percentage of urban population is lowest: in Vyatka and Perm gubernias it was 3.2% in 1863 and 4.7% in 1897. But here is an example of the relative size of the “urban” and the industrial populations: in Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, Perm Gubernia, the urban population numbers 6,400 (1897), whereas according to the Zemstvo census of 1888-1891, the population of the industrial section of the uyezd numbers 84,700, of whom 56,000 do not engage in agriculture at all, and only 5,600 obtain their livelihood mainly from the land. In Ekaterinburg Uyezd, according to the Zemstvo census, 65,000 inhabitants are landless and 81,000 have only meadow land. Hence, the industrial non-urban population of two uyezds alone is larger than the urban population of the whole gubernia (in 1897 it was 195,600!).

Finally, in addition to factory settlements, the significance of industrial centres attaches to the trading and industrial villages, which are either at the head of large handicraft districts, or have developed rapidly since the Reform, owing to their situation on the banks of rivers, near railway stations, etc. Several examples of such villages were given in Chapter VI, §II, and we saw that, like the towns, they attract the rural population, and that they are usually marked by a level of literacy among the population above the average.* As a further example let us quote data on Voronezh Gubernia in order to show the relative importance of urban and non-urban industrial and commercial centres of population. The Combined Returns for Voronezh Gubernia gives a combined table classifying the villages in 8 uyezds of the gubernia. In these uyezds there are 8 towns, with a population of 56,149 (in 1897). Of the villages, on the other hand, 4 stand out with 9,376 households, and with 53,732 inhabitants, i.e., they are much bigger than the towns. In 5 these villages there are 240 commercial and 404 industrial establishments. Of the total households, 60% do not cultivate at all, 21% cultivate by neighbour-hire or on a half-crop basis, 71% have neither draught animals nor implements, 63% buy grain all year round, 86% engage in industries. By placing the entire population of these centres in the category of commercial and industrial, we not only do not exaggerate, but rather minimise, the size of the latter, for altogether in these 8 uyezds 21,956 households cultivate no land at all. Nevertheless, in the agricultural gubernia we have taken, the commercial and industrial population outside the towns turns out to be not less than that inside the towns.

4) Non-Agricultural Outside Employments

But even if we add to the towns the factory and commercial and industrial villages and townships we are far from exhausting the total industrial population of Russia. The lack of freedom of movement and the social-estate exclusiveness of the village community fully explain the remarkable characteristic of Russia that we have to include no small part of the rural population in its industrial population, that part which obtains its livelihood by working in industrial centres and spends part of the year in these centres. We refer to the so-called non-agricultural “outside employments.” From the official point of view, these “industrialists” are peasant farmers who merely have “subsidiary employments,” and the majority of the Narodnik economists have, without further ado, adopted that viewpoint. There is no need, after what has been said above, to prove in detail how unsound it is. At all events, however much opinions on it may vary, there cannot be the slightest doubt that it indicates a diversion of the population from agriculture into commercial and industrial occupations.* How far this fact changes our idea of the size of the industrial population in the towns may be seen from the following example. In Kaluga Gubernia the percentage of urban population is much lower than the average for Russia (8.3%, as against 12.8%). Now the Statistical Survey of that gubernia for 1896 calculates, on the basis of passport data, the total number of months during which migratory workers were absent from their homes. It appears that the total is 1,491,600 months; divided by 12 this will give an absent population of 124,300 persons, i.e., “nearly 11% of the total population” (loc. cit., 46)! Add this number to the urban population (in 1897—97,900), and the percentage of industrial population will be a very considerable one.

Of course, a certain part of the migratory non-agricultural workers are registered among the existing town population, and are also part of the population of the non-urban industrial centres to which we have already referred. But only a part, for owing to the mobile character of this section of the population, it is difficult to cover them by any local census; furthermore, population censuses are usually taken in the winter, whereas most of these industrial workers leave their homes in the spring. Here are data for some of the principal gubernias of non-agricultural migration.**

The number of passports issued reaches the maximum everywhere in the spring. Hence, a large part of the temporarily absent workers are not included in the censuses of the towns.* But these temporary town-dwellers may also more legitimately be assigned to the urban rather than the rural population. “A family which gets its livelihood throughout the year, or during the greater part of it, in the town has far more reason to regard the town, which provides its subsistence, as its place of domicile than the village, with which it has only family and fiscal ties.”** The enormous significance these fiscal ties have to this day can be seen from the fact, for instance, that among migratory Kostroma people “it is a rare thing for peasants to get for it [the land] some small part of the taxes to be paid; usually they lease it on the sole condition that the tenants put it to use, the owner himself paying all the taxes” (D. Zhbankov, Women’s Country, Kostroma, 1891, p. 21). In the Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia (Vol. II, Yaroslavl, 1896), we also find repeated references to migratory industrial workers having to purchase their release from their villages and allotments (pp. 28, 48, 149, 150, 166 and others).*

How many migratory non-agricultural workers are there? The number of people engaged in all kinds of industries employing migratory workers is not less than from 5 to 6 millions. In fact, in 1884, about 4.67 million passports and identity cards were issued in European Russia,* and passport revenue grew between 1884 and 1894 by more than one-third (from 3.3 to 4.5 million rubles). In 1897 the total number of passports and cards issued in Russia was 9,495,700 (of which 9,333,200 were issued in the 50 gubernias of European Russia). In 1898 the number was 8,259,900 (European Russia, 7,809,600).** The number of workers superfluous (as compared with local demand) in European Russia has been estimated by Mr. S. Korolenko at 6.3 million. Above we have seen (Chapter III, §IX, p. 239) that in 11 agricultural gubernias the number of passports issued exceeded Mr. Korolenko’s estimate (2 million as against 1.7 million). Now we can add the data for 6 non-agricultural gubernias: Mr. Korolenko sets the number of superfluous workers in these at 1,287,800, while the number of passports issued was 1,298,600.*** Thus, in 17 gubernias of European Russia (11 black-earth, plus 6 non-black-earth) there are, according to Mr. Korolenko, 3 million workers who are superfluous (as against the local demand). In the 90s, however, the number of passports and cards issued in these 17 gubernias was 3.3 million. In 1891, these gubernias provided 52.2% of the total passport revenue. Hence, the number of migratory workers in all probability exceeds 6 million. Finally, Zemstvo statistical data (most of which are obsolete) led Mr. Uvarov to the conclusion that Mr. Korolenko’s figure was close to the truth, and that the figure of 5 million migratory workers was “very highly probable.”****

The question now arises: how large is the number of non-agricultural and of agricultural migratory workers? Mr. N. —on very boldly and quite mistakenly asserts that “the overwhelming majority of peasant outside employments are agricultural” (Sketches, p. 16). Chaslavsky, whom Mr. N. —on cites, expresses himself much more cautiously; he cites no data and limits himself to general remarks about the size of the areas which provide workers of one type or another. On the other hand, Mr. N. —on’s railway passenger traffic data prove absolutely nothing, for non-agricultural workers also leave their homes mainly in spring and, moreover, use the railways much more than agricultural workers do.* We presume, on the contrary, that the majority (although not the “overwhelming” majority) of the migratory workers are probably non-agricultural workers. This view is based, firstly, on data concerning the distribution of passport revenue, and, secondly, on Mr. Vesin’s data. Years ago Flerovsky, on the basis of the returns for 1862-63 showing the distribution of revenue from “miscellaneous duties” (more than one-third of which was obtained from the issue of passports), drew the conclusion that the greatest movement of peasants in search of work was from the metropolitan and the non-agricultural gubernias.** If we take the 11 non-agricultural gubernias which we combined above (part 2 of this section) into a single area, and which non-agricultural workers leave in large numbers, we shall see that these gubernias in 1885 contained only 18.7% of the population of all European Russia (in 1897—18.3%), whereas they accounted for 42.9% of the passport revenue in 1885 (in 1891—40.7%).*** Non-agricultural workers are provided by very many other gubernias, and we must therefore conclude that agricultural workers constitute less than half of the migrants. Mr. Vesin divides 38 gubernias of European Russia (which account for 90% of the departure permits) into groups according to the different types of migration that predominate, and obtains the following results.*

Groups of gubernias

No. of departure permits issued in 1884 (thousands)

Population in 1885 (thousands)

Population in 1885 (thousands)

Passports

Cards

Total

  I.

12 gubernias with predominance of non-agricultural migration

967.8

794.5

1,762.3

18,643.8

94

 II.

5 gubernias–intermediate.

423.9

299.5

723.4

8,007.2

90

III.

21 gubernias with predominance of agricultural migration

700.4

1,046.1

1,746.5

42,518.5

41

38 gubernias

2,092.1

2,140.1

4,232.2

69,169.5

61

“These figures show that industries employing migratory workers are more prevalent in the first group than in the third…. These figures also show that there is a diversity in the duration of absence to secure employment corresponding to the difference in the groups. Where non-agricultural industries employing migratory workers predominate, the length of absence is much greater” (Dyelo, 1886, No. 7, p. 134).

Finally, the statistics given above for excise-paying trades, etc., enable us to classify the residential permits issued in all the 50 gubernias of European Russia. Making the indicated corrections to Mr. Vesin’s classification, and distributing among these same groups the 12 gubernias for which figures are lacking for 1884 (Olonets and Pskov gubernias to group I; the 9 Baltic and North-West gubernias to group II; and Astrakhan Gubernia to group III), we get the following picture:

Total residential permits issued

Groups of gubernias

1897

1898*

   I.

17 gubernias with predominance of non-agricultural migration

4,437,392

3,369,597

  II.

12 gubernias-intermediate

1,886,733

1,674,231

III.

21 gubernias with predominance of agricultural migration

3,009,070

2,765,762

Total for 50 gubernias

9,333,195

7,809,590

Migration for work away from home, according to these data, is much more prevalent in group I than in group III.

Thus, there can be no doubt that the mobility of the population is far greater in Russia’s non-agricultural zone than in the agricultural. The number of non-agricultural migratory workers must be greater than that of the agricultural, and must be not less than three million.

The enormous and ever-increasing growth of migration is confirmed by all sources. Passport revenue increased from 2.1 million rubles in 1868 (1.75 million rubles in 1866) to 4.5 million rubles in 1893-94, i.e., it more than doubled. The number of passports and identity cards issued increased in Moscow Gubernia between 1877 and 1885 by 20% (males) and 53% (females); in Tver Gubernia, between 1893 and 1896 by 5.6%, in Kaluga Gubernia, between 1885 and 1895 by 23% (and the number of months of absence by 26%); in Smolensk Gubernia, from 100,000 in 1875 to 117,000 in 1885 and 140,000 in 1895; in Pskov Gubernia, from 11,716 in 1865-1875 to 14,944 in 1876 and to 43,765 in 1896 (males). In Kostroma Gubernia, in 1868, 23.8 passports and cards per 100 males were issued and 0.85 per 100 females, and in 1880—33.1 and 2.2. And so on and so forth.

Like the diversion of the population from agriculture to the towns, non-agricultural migration is a progressive phenomenon. It tears the population out of the neglected, backward, history-forgotten remote spots and draws them into the whirlpool of modern social life. It increases literacy among the population,* heightens their understanding,** and gives them civilised habits and requirements.*** The peasants are induced to migrate by “motives of a higher order,” i.e., by the greater smartness and polish of the Petersburger; they look for places where “things are better.” “Life and work in Petersburg are considered to be easier than in the country.”* “All country-folk are called raw, and the strange thing is that they are not in the least offended at this, but refer to themselves as such and complain that their parents did not send them to St. Petersburg to study. It should be stated, however, that these raw country people are not nearly so raw as those in the purely agricultural districts; they unconsciously copy the outward appearance and the habits of the Petersburgers; the light of the metropolis falls indirectly on them.”** In Yaroslavl Gubernia (apart from examples of people growing rich) “there is still another cause which drives everyone from his home. That is—public opinion, which dubs a bumpkin to the end of his days anybody who has not lived in Petersburg, or somewhere else, but engages in agriculture or some handicraft, and such a man finds it hard to get a wife” (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, II, 118). Migration to the town elevates the peasant as a citizen, releasing him from the host of patriarchal and personal relationships of dependence and social-estate divisions so strongly entrenched in the rural districts….*** “A prime factor that fosters migration is the growing sense of human dignity among the people. Liberation from serf dependence, and the long-standing association of the more active section of the rural population with town life, have long since roused the desire in the Yaroslavl peasant to uphold his ‘ego,’ to get away from the state of poverty and dependence to which rural life has doomed him, to a state of sufficiency, independence and respect…. The peasant who lives on outside earnings feels freer and more on a level of equality with people belonging to other social estates, which is why the rural youth are so eager to go to the town” (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, II, 189-190).

Migration to the towns loosens the old patriarchal family ties and places women in a more independent position, on an equal footing with men. “Compared with those in the localities of no migration, the families of Soligalich and Chukhloma” (the uyezds of Kostroma Gubernia where migration is greatest) “are much less closely knit, not only in the sense of the patriarchal authority of the older, but even in the relations between parents and children, husband and wife. One cannot, of course, expect strong affection for their parents and attachment to the parental home from sons who are sent to Petersburg from the age of 12; unconsciously they become cosmopolitans: ‘where it is well, there is my country.’ ”* “Accustomed to dispense with the authority and assistance of her husband, the Soligalich woman is quite unlike the downtrodden peasant woman of the agricultural zone: she is independent and self-reliant…. Wife-beating is a rare exception here…. Generally speaking, equality between women and men is to be observed almost everywhere and in all things.”**

Last but not least,*** non-agricultural migration raises the wages not only of the wage-workers who migrate but also of those who stay behind.

This fact is most strikingly reflected in the general circumstance that the non-agricultural gubernias where wages are higher than in the agricultural gubernias, attract agricultural workers from the latter.**** Here are some interesting data for Kaluga Gubernia:

Monthly earnings in rubles

Groups of uyezds according to scale of migration

% of migratory male workers to total male population

of migratory industrialist

of rural worker employed by the year

I.

38.7

9

  5.9

II.

36.3

  8.8

  5.3

III.

32.7

  8.4

  4.9

“These figures fully illustrate the phenomena … 1) that migration for work in industry helps to raise wages in agriculture, and 2) that it attracts the best forces of the population.”* Not only money wages, but real wages also rise. In the group of uyezds from which not fewer than 60 out of every 100 working people migrate the average wage of the farm labourer employed by the year is 69 rubles, or 123 poods of rye; in the uyezds where from 40 to 60% migrate, it is 64 rubles, or 125 poods of rye; in the uyezds which supply less than 40% of the migrants, it is 59 rubles, or 116 poods of rye.** In these same groups of uyezds the percentage of letters of complaint about a shortage of labour steadily drops: 58%, 42% and 35%. In manufacturing industry wages are higher than in agriculture, and “the industries, according to the statements of numerous correspondents, help to develop new requirements (tea, calico, boots, clocks, etc.) among the peasant population, raise their general standard of living, and in this way bring about a rise in wages.”*** Here is a typical view by a correspondent: “The shortage [of labour] is always acute, and the reason is that the suburban population is spoilt, it works in the railway workshops and serves on the railways. The nearness of Kaluga and its markets always attract the surrounding inhabitants, who come to sell eggs, milk, etc., and then engage in orgies of drunkenness in the taverns; the reason is that everybody wants to get the highest pay for the least work. To be an agricultural labourer is considered a disgrace: all strive to get to the town, where they swell the ranks of the proletariat and the riff-raff; the countryside, on the other hand, suffers from a shortage of capable and healthy labourers.”**** We would be quite justified in describing this appraisal of industries employing migratory workers as Narodist. Mr. Zhbankov, for instance, while pointing out that those who migrate are not superfluous but “necessary” workers whose places are taken by entering peasants, considers it “obvious” that “such mutual replacements are very disadvantageous.”* For whom, dear Mr. Zhbankov? “Life in the capitals cultivates many civilised habits of the lower order and an inclination to luxury and showiness, and this results in a useless (sic!!) waste of money”**, the expenditure on this showiness, etc., is largely “unproductive” (!!)*** Mr. Hertzenstein positively howls about the “sham culture,” “the riotous living,” “wild carousing,” “orgies of drunkenness and filthy debauchery,” etc.**** From the fact of wholesale migration the Moscow statisticians draw the outright conclusion that it is necessary to take “measures that would diminish the need for migratory labour.”(*) Mr. Karyshev argues about migratory labour as follows: “Only an increase in the peasants’ holdings to a size sufficient to provide the main (!) requirements of their families can solve this most serious problem of our national economy.(**)

And it does not occur to any of these serene-spirited gentlemen that before talking about “solving most serious problems,” one must see to it that the peasants obtain complete freedom of movement, freedom to give up their land and leave the community, freedom to settle (without having to pay “riddance” money) in any community, urban or rural, whatsoever!

__________

And so the diversion of the population from agriculture is expressed, in Russia, in the growth of the towns (a growth partly obscured by home colonisation), suburbs, factory and commercial and industrial villages and townships, as well as in non-agricultural migration. All these processes, which have been and are rapidly developing in breadth and depth in the post-Reform period, are necessary components of capitalist development and are profoundly progressive as compared with the old forms of life.

III. THE GROWTH OF THE EMPLOYMENT OF WAGE-LABOUR

In considering the development of capitalism, perhaps the greatest importance attaches to the extent to which wage-labour is employed. Capitalism is that stage in the development of commodity-production in which labour-power, too, becomes a commodity. The main tendency of capitalism is to apply the sum-total of labour-power in the national economy to production only after it has been sold and has been purchased by the employers. Above, we made an attempt to show in detail how this tendency has manifested itself in post-Reform Russia; now, we must draw the necessary conclusions. Firstly, let us compute the data on the number of sellers of labour-power given in the preceding chapters and then (in the next section) describe the purchasers of labour-power.

The sellers of labour-power are provided by the country’s working population engaged in the production of material values. It is estimated that this population numbers about 15.5 million adult male workers.* In Chapter II we showed that the bottom group of the peasantry is nothing else than a rural proletariat; and we stated (p. 177, footnote) that the forms in which this proletariat sells its labour-power would be examined later. Let us now combine the categories of wage-workers previously enumerated: 1) agricultural wage-workers. These number about 3½ million (in European Russia). 2) Factory, mining and railway workers—about 1½ million. Total, five million professional wage-workers. Further: 3) building workers—about 1 million. 4) Lumber workers (tree-fellers, log trimmers, rafters, etc.), navvies, railway builders, goods loaders and unloaders, and in general all kinds of “unskilled” labourers in industrial centres. These number about 2 million.* 5) Workers occupied at home for capitalists, and also those working for wages in the manufacturing industries not included in “factory industry.” These number about 2 million.

Total—about ten million wage-workers. If we deduct the women and children, say one-fourth,** we get 7½ million adult male wage-workers, i.e., about half the total adult male population that is engaged in the production of material values*** in the country. Part of this vast mass of wage-workers have completely broken with the land, and live entirely by the sale of their labour-power. They include the great majority of factory (undoubtedly also of mining and railway) workers, then a section of the building and shipbuilding workers, and unskilled labourers; finally, a fairly large section of the workers employed in capitalist manufactories and the inhabitants of non-agricultural centres engaged in home work for capitalists. The other, and larger, section has not yet broken with the land, covers its expenditures in part with the produce that comes from farming tiny plots of land, and, consequently, forms the type of allotment-holding wage-worker which we attempted to describe in detail in Chapter II. In earlier remarks it was shown that this vast mass of wage-workers has been formed mainly in the post-Reform period and that it continues to grow rapidly.

It is important to note the significance of our conclusion regarding the relative surplus-population (or reserve army of unemployed) created by capitalism. The data regarding the total number of wage-workers in all branches of the national economy bring out very clearly the basic error committed by the Narodnik economists on this point. As we have had occasion to observe elsewhere (Studies, pp. 38-42),* this error lies in the fact that the Narodnik economists (Messrs. V. V., N. —on and others), who have talked a great deal about capitalism “freeing” the workers, have not thought of investigating the concrete forms of capitalist over-population in Russia; as well as in the fact that they failed completely to understand that the very existence and development of capitalism in this country require an enormous mass of reserve workers. By means of paltry phrases and curious calculations as to the number of “factory” workers,** they have transformed one of the basic conditions for the development of capitalism into proof that capitalism is impossible, is an error, is devoid of foundation, etc. Actually, however, Russian capitalism could never have developed to its present level, could not have survived a single year, had the expropriation of the small producers not created an army of many millions of wage-workers ready at the first call to satisfy the maximum demand of the employers in agriculture, lumbering, building, commerce and in the manufacturing, mining, and transport industries, etc. We say the maximum demand, because capitalism can only develop spasmodically, and consequently, the number of producers who need to sell their labour-power must always exceed capitalism’s average demand for workers. We have now estimated the total number of the various categories of wage-workers, but in doing so do not wish to say that capitalism is in a position to give regular employment to them all. There is not, nor can there be, such regularity of employment in capitalist society, whichever category of wage-worker we take. Of the millions of migratory and resident workers a certain section is constantly in the reserve army of unemployed, and this reserve army now swells to enormous dimensions—in years of crisis, or if there is a slump in some industry in a particular district, or if there is a particularly rapid extension of machine production, which displaces workers—and now shrinks to a minimum, even causing that “shortage” of labour which is often the subject of complaint by employers in some industries, in some years, in some parts of the country. It is impossible to determine even approximately the number of unemployed in an average year, owing to the complete absence of anything like reliable statistics; but there is no doubt that the number must be a very large one, as is evidenced by both the tremendous fluctuations in capitalist industry, trade and agriculture, to which repeated reference was made above, and by the usual deficits in the budgets of the bottom-group peasants recorded by Zemstvo statistics. The increase in the number of peasants thrown into the ranks of the industrial and rural proletariat, and the increase in the demand for wage-labour, are two sides of one medal. As for the forms of wage-labour, they are extremely diverse in n capitalist society still everywhere enmeshed in survivals and institutions of the pre-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 large-scale 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.** Therefore, only by examining the whole of the present economic system from the angle of the relationships that have grown up in this “corner” can one become clear about the main relations between the various groups of persons taking part in production, and, consequently, trace the system’s main trend of development. On the other hand, whoever turns his back on this “corner” and examines economic phenomena from the angle of petty patriarchal production, is turned by the march of history into either an innocent dreamer or an ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie and the agrarians.

IV. THE FORMATION OF A HOME MARKET FOR LABOUR-POWER

To sum up the data given earlier on this problem we shall confine ourselves to the picture of the movement of workers over the territory of European Russia. Such a picture is supplied by the Department of Agriculture’s publication* based on statements by employers. The picture of the movement of workers will give a general idea of how the home market for labour-power is being formed; using the material of the publication mentioned, we have only tried to draw a distinction between the movement of agricultural and non-agricultural workers, although the map appended to the publication and illustrating the movement of the workers does not show this distinction.

The main movements of agricultural workers are the following: 1) From the central agricultural gubernias to the southern and eastern outer regions. 2) From the northern black-earth gubernias to the southern black-earth gubernias, from which, in turn, the workers go to the border regions (cf. Chapter III, §IX, pp. 237-238 and §X, pp. 242-243). 3) From the central agricultural gubernias to the industrial gubernias (cf. Chapter IV, §IV, pp. 270-271). 4) From the central and the south-western agricultural gubernias to the area of sugar-beet plantations (workers come in part to these places even from Galicia).

The main movements of non-agricultural workers are: 1) To the metropolitan cities and the large towns, chiefly from the non-agricultural gubernias, but to a considerable degree also from the agricultural gubernias. 2) To the industrial area, to the factories of Vladimir, Yaroslavl and other gubernias from the same localities. 3) To new centres of industry or to new branches of industry, to centres of non-factory industry, etc. These include the movement: a) to the beet-sugar refineries of the south-western gubernias; b) to the southern mining area; c) to jobs at the docks (Odessa, Rostov-on-Don, Riga, etc.); d) to the peat beds in Vladimir and other gubernias; e) to the mining and metallurgical area of the Urals; f) to the fisheries (Astrakhan, the Black Sea, Azov Sea, etc.); g) to shipbuilding, sailoring, lumbering and rafting jobs, etc.; h) to jobs on the railways, etc.

These are the main movements of the workers which, according to the evidence of employers, more or less materially affect the conditions of labour hire in the various localities. To appreciate more clearly the significance of these movements, let us compare them with the data on wages in the various districts from and to which the workers migrate. Confining ourselves to 28 gubernias in European Russia, we divide these into 6 groups according to the character of the movement of workers, and get the following data:*

This table clearly shows us the basis of the process that creates the home market for labour-power and, consequently, the home market for capitalism. Two main areas, those most developed capitalistically, attract vast numbers of workers: the area of agricultural capitalism (the southern and the eastern outer regions), and the area of industrial capitalism (the metropolitan and the industrial gubernias). Wages are lowest in the area of departure, the central agricultural gubernias, where capitalism, both in agriculture and in industry, is least developed*; in the influx areas, on the other hand, wages rise for all types of work, as does also the percentage of money wage to total wage, i.e., money economy gains ground at the expense of natural economy. The intermediary areas, those between the areas of the greatest influx (and of the highest wages) and the area of departure (and of the lowest wages) reveal the mutual replacement of workers to which reference was made above: workers leave in such numbers that in the places of departure a shortage of labour is created which attracts workers from the more “poorly paid” gubernias.

In essence, the two-sided process shown in our table—that of the diversion of population from agriculture to industry (industrialisation of the population) and of the development of commercial-industrial, capitalist agriculture (industrialisation of agriculture)—epitomises all that has been said above on the formation of a home market for capitalist society. The home market for capitalism is created by the parallel development of capitalism in agriculture and in industry,* by the formation of a class of rural and industrial employers, on the one hand, and of a class of rural and industrial wage-workers, on the other. The main streams of the movement of workers show the main forms of this process, but by far not all the forms; in what has gone before we have shown that the forms of this process differ in peasant and in landlord farming, in the different areas of commercial agriculture, in the different stages of the capitalist development of industry, etc.

How far this process is distorted and confused by the representatives of Narodnik economics is seen most clearly in §VI of Part 2 of Mr. N.—on’s Sketches, which bears the significant heading: “The Influence of the Redistribution of the Social Productive Forces upon the Economic Position of the Agricultural Population.” Here is how Mr. N. —on pictures this “redistribution”: “… In capitalist … society, every increase in the productive power of labour entails the ‘freeing’ of a corresponding number of workers, who are compelled to seek some other employment; and since this occurs in all branches of production, and this ‘freeing’ takes place over the whole of capitalist society, the only thing left open to them is to turn to the means of production of which they have not yet been deprived, namely, the land” (p. 126)…. “Our peasants have not been deprived of the land, and that is why they turn their efforts towards it. When they lose their employment in the factory, or are obliged to abandon their subsidiary domestic occupations, they see no other course but to set about the increased exploitation of the soil. All Zemstvo statistical returns note the fact that the area under cultivation is growing…” (128).

As you see, Mr. N. —on knows of quite a special sort of capitalism that has never existed anywhere and that no economist could conceive of. Mr. N. —on’s capitalism does not divert the population from agriculture to industry, does not divide the agriculturists into opposite classes. Quite the contrary. Capitalism “frees” the workers from industry and there is nothing left for “them” to do but to turn to the land, for “our peasants have not been deprived of the land”!! At the bottom of this “theory,” which originally “redistributes” in poetic disorder all the processes of capitalist development, lie the ingenious tricks of all Narodniks which we have examined in detail previously: they lump together the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat; they ignore the growth of commercial farming; they concoct stories about “people’s” “handicraft industries” being isolated from “capitalist” “factory industry,” instead of analysing the consecutive forms and diverse manifestations of capitalism in industry.

V. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BORDER REGIONS.
HOME OR FOREIGN MARKET?

In Chapter I we pointed to the erroneous character of the theory that links the problem of a foreign market for capitalism with that of the realisation of the product (pp. 64-65 and foll.). Capitalism’s need of a foreign market is by no means to be explained by the impossibility of realising the product on the home market, but by the circumstance that capitalism is in no position to go on repeating the same processes of production on the former scale, under unchanging conditions (as was the case under pre-capitalist regimes), and that it inevitably leads to an unlimited growth of production which overflows the old, narrow limits of earlier economic units. With the unevenness of development inherent in capitalism, one branch of production outstrips the others and strives to transcend the bounds of the old field of economic relations. Let us take, for example, the textile industry at the beginning of the post-Reform period. Being fairly well developed capitalistically (manufacture beginning to pass into factory industry), it had gained complete command of the market of Central Russia. But the big factories, growing so rapidly, could no longer be satisfied with the former dimensions of the market; they began to seek a market further afield, among the new population colonising Novorossia, the south-east Transvolga region, North Caucasus, then Siberia, etc. The efforts of the big factories to reach out beyond the old markets are undoubted. Does it mean that the areas which served as these old markets could not, in general, consume a larger quantity of the products of the textile industry? Does it mean, for example, that the industrial and central agricultural gubernias cannot, in general, absorb a larger quantity of wares? No, it does not. We know that the differentiation of the peasantry, the growth of commercial agriculture and the increase in the industrial population have also expanded, and continue to expand, the home market of this old area. But this expansion of the home market is retarded by many factors (chief among them the retention of obsolete institutions which hinder the development of agricultural capitalism); and the factory owners will not, of course, wait until the capitalist development of other branches of the national economy catches up with that of the textile industry. The mill owners need a market at once, and if the backwardness of other branches of the national economy restricts the market in the old area, they will seek for a market in another area, or in other countries, or in the colonies of the old country.

What is a colony in the politico-economic sense? It was stated above that, according to Marx, the main features of this concept are the following: 1) the existence of unoccupied, free lands, easily accessible to settlers; 2) the existence of an established world division of labour, of a world market, thanks to which the colonies can specialise in the mass production of agricultural produce, receiving in exchange finished industrial goods “which they would have to produce themselves under other circumstances” (see above, p. 258, footnote, Chapter IV, §II). Reference has been made elsewhere to the fact that the southern and the eastern border regions of European Russia, which have been settled in the post-Reform period, bear the distinctive features mentioned and constitute, in the economic sense, colonies of Central European Russia.* The term colony is still more applicable to the other outer regions, for example, the Caucasus. Its economic “conquest” by Russia took place much later than the political conquest; and to this day this economic conquest has not been completed to the full. In the post-Reform period there has been, on the one hand, an intensive colonisation of the Caucasus,** an extensive ploughing up of the land (particularly in the North Caucasus) by colonists producing wheat, tobacco, etc., for sale, and attracting masses of rural wage-workers from Russia. On the other hand, native age-old “handicraft” industries, which are declining due to the competition of wares from Moscow, are being eliminated. There has been a decline in the ancient gunsmith’s craft due to the competition of imported Tula and Belgian wares, a decline in handicraft iron-work due to the competition of the imported Russian products, as well as in the handicraft processing of copper, gold and silver, clay, fats and soda, leather, etc.*** These products are turned out more cheaply in Russian factories, which supply the Caucasus with their wares. There has been a decline in the making of drinking-horns because of the decay of the feudal system in Georgia and of the steady disappearance of her memorable feasts; there has been a decline in the headgear industry due to the replacement of Asiatic dress by European; there has been a decline in the production of wine-skins and pitchers for local wine, which for the first time is now being sold (giving rise to the barrel-making trade) and has in turn captured the Russian market. Russian capitalism has thus been drawing the Caucasus into the sphere of world commodity circulation, obliterating its local peculiarities—the remnants of ancient patriarchal isolation—and providing itself with a market for its factories. A country thinly populated at the beginning of the post-Reform period, or populated by mountaineers living outside world economy and even outside history, has been turning into a land of oil industrialists, wine merchants, big wheat and tobacco growers, and Mr. Coupon¹⁶⁵ has been ruthlessly divesting the proud mountaineer of his picturesque national costume and dressing him in the livery of a European flunkey (Gleb Uspensky).¹⁶⁶ The process of rapid colonisation in the Caucasus and of the rapid growth of its agricultural population has been accompanied by a process (obscured by this growth) of the diversion of the population from agriculture to industry. The urban population of the Caucasus increased from 350,000 in 1863 to about 900,000 in 1897 (the total population increased between 1851 and 1897 by 95%). There is no need to add that the same thing has taken place and continues in both Central Asia and Siberia, etc.

Thus, the question naturally arises, where is the borderline between the home and the foreign market? To take the political boundaries of the state would be too mechanical a solution—and would it be a solution? If Central Asia is the home market and Persia the foreign market, to which category do Khiva and Bokhara belong? If Siberia is the home market and China the foreign market, to which category does Manchuria belong? Such questions are not of great importance. What is important is that capitalism cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool of world economy. And this feature of capitalism has been and continues to be manifested with tremendous force in post-Reform Russia.

Hence, the process of the formation of a market for capitalism has two aspects, namely, the development of capitalism in depth, i.e., the further growth of capitalist agriculture and industry in the given, definite and enclosed territory—and the development of capitalism in breadth, i.e., the extension of the sphere of the capitalist domination to new territory. In accordance with the plan of the present work, we have confined ourselves almost exclusively to the first aspect of the process, and for this reason we consider it particularly necessary to stress the point here that its other aspect is of exceptionally great importance. Anything like a complete study of the process of colonisation of the border regions and of the expansion of Russian territory, from the point of view of capitalist development, would require a special work. Suffice it to mention here that Russia is in a particularly favoured position as compared with other capitalist countries, due to the abundance of free land accessible for colonisation in her border regions.* To say nothing of Asiatic Russia we have also in European Russia border regions which, because of their exceeding remoteness and bad means of communication, are still very poorly connected economically with central Russia. Let us take, for instance, the “Far North”—Archangel Gubernia; the boundless stretches of territory and their natural resources are still exploited very slightly. One of the principal local products, timber, was until recently exported mainly to England. In this respect, therefore, that part of European Russia was a foreign market for Britain without being a home market for Russia. The Russian entrepreneurs naturally envied the British, and now, with the extension of the railway line to Archangel, they are jubilant at the prospect of “elevated moods and business activity in various branches of industry in the region.”*

VI. THE “MISSION” OF CAPITALISM

We still have, in conclusion, to sum up on the question which in literature has come to be known as that of the “mission” of capitalism, i.e., of its historical role in the economic development of Russia. Recognition of the progressiveness of this role is quite compatible (as we have tried to show in detail at every stage in our exposition of the facts) with the full recognition of the negative and dark sides of capitalism, with the full recognition of the profound and all-round social contradictions which are inevitably inherent in capitalism, and which reveal the historically transient character of this economic regime. It is the Narodniks—who exert every effort to show that an admission of the historically progressive nature of capitalism means an apology for capitalism—who are at fault in underrating (and sometimes in even ignoring) the most profound contradictions of Russian capitalism, by glossing over the differentiation of the peasantry, the capitalist character of the evolution of our agriculture, and the rise of a class of rural and industrial allotment-holding wage-labourers, by glossing over the complete predominance of the lowest and worst forms of capitalism in the celebrated “handicraft” industries.

The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.

The development of the productive forces of social labour is to be observed in full relief only in the epoch of large-scale machine industry. Until that highest stage of capitalism was reached, there still remained hand production and primitive technique, which developed quite spontaneously and exceedingly slowly. The post-Reform epoch differs radically in this respect from previous epochs in Russian history. The Russia of the wooden plough and the flail, of the water-mill and the hand-loom, began rapidly to be transformed into the Russia of the iron plough and the threshing machine, of the steam-mill and the power-loom. An equally thorough transformation of technique is seen in every branch of the national economy where capitalist production predominates. This process of transformation must, by the very nature of capitalism, take place in the midst of much that is uneven and disproportionate: periods of prosperity alternate with periods of crisis, the development of one industry leads to the decline of another, there is progress in one aspect of agriculture in one area and in another aspect in another area, the growth of trade and industry outstrips the growth of agriculture, etc. A large number of errors made by Narodnik writers spring from their efforts to prove that this disproportionate, spasmodic, feverish development is not development.*

Another feature of the development by capitalism of the social productive forces is that the growth of the means of production (productive consumption) outstrips by far the growth of personal consumption: we have indicated on more than one occasion how this is manifested in agriculture and in industry. This feature springs from the general laws of the realisation of the product in capitalist society, and fully conforms to the antagonistic nature of this society.*

The socialisation of labour by capitalism is manifested in the following processes. Firstly, the very growth of commodity-production destroys the scattered condition of small economic units that is characteristic of natural economy and draws together the small local markets into an enormous national (and then world) market. Production for oneself is transformed into production for the whole of society; and the greater the development of capitalism, the stronger becomes the contradiction between this collective character of production and the individual character of appropriation. Secondly, capitalism replaces the former scattered production by an unprecedented concentration both in agriculture and in industry. That is the most striking and outstanding, but not the only, manifestation of the feature of capitalism under review. Thirdly, capitalism eliminates the forms of personal dependence that constituted an inalienable component of preceding systems of economy. In Russia, the progressive character of capitalism in this respect is particularly marked, since the personal dependence of the producer existed in our country (and partly continues to exist to this day), not only in agriculture, but in manufacturing industry (“factories” employing serf labour), in the mining and metallurgical industries, in the fishing industry, etc.* Compared with the labour of the dependent or bonded peasant, the labour of the hired worker is progressive in all branches of the national economy. Fourthly, capitalism necessarily creates mobility of the population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale. Fifthly, capitalism constantly reduces the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture (where the most backward forms of social and economic relationships always prevail), and increases the number of large industrial centres. Sixthly, capitalist society increases the population’s need for association, for organisation, and lends these organisations a character distinct from those of former times. While breaking down the narrow, local, social-estate associations of medieval society and creating fierce competition, capitalism at the same time splits the whole of society into large groups of persons occupying different positions in production, and gives a tremendous impetus to organisation within each such group.** Seventhly, all the above-mentioned changes effected in the old economic system by capitalism inevitably lead also to a change in the mentality of the population. The spasmodic character of economic development, the rapid transformation of the methods of production and the enormous concentration of production, the disappearance of all forms of personal dependence and patriarchalism in relationships, the mobility of the population, the influence of the big industrial centres, etc.—all this cannot but lead to a profound change in the very character of the producers, and we have had occasion to note the corresponding observations of Russian investigators.

Turning now to Narodnik economics, with whose representatives we have constantly had to polemise, we may sum up the causes of our differences with them as follows. First, we cannot but regard as absolutely wrong the Narodniks’ very conception of the process of capitalist development in Russia, and their notion of the system of economic relationships that preceded capitalism in Russia; and what is particularly important, from our point of view, is their ignoring of the capitalist contradictions in the structure of peasant economy (both agricultural and industrial). Furthermore, whether the development of capitalism in Russia is slow or rapid, depends entirely on what we compare this development with. If we compare the pre-capitalist epoch in Russia with the capitalist (and that is the comparison which is needed for arriving at a correct solution of the problem), the development of social economy under capitalism must be considered as extremely rapid. If, however, we compare the present rapidity of development with that which could be achieved with the general level of technique and culture as it is today, the present rate of development of capitalism in Russia really must be considered as slow. And it cannot but be slow, for in no single capitalist country has there been such an abundant survival of ancient institutions that are incompatible with capitalism, retard its development, and immeasurably worsen the condition of the producers, who “suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development.¹⁶⁸ Finally, perhaps the profoundest cause of disagreement with the Narodniks is the difference in our fundamental views on social and economic processes. When studying the latter, the Narodnik usually draws conclusions that point to some moral; he does not regard the diverse groups of persons taking part in production as creators of various forms of life; he does not set out to present the sum-total of social and economic relationships as the result of the mutual relations between these groups, which have different interests and different historical roles…. If the writer of these lines has succeeded in providing some material for clarifying these problems, he may regard his labours as not having been fruitless.

Notes

1. Here are the data on the factory industry of European Russia in the post-Reform era that we have been able to find in official publications such as: Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, 1866. I.—Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance, 1866, No. 4, April, and 1867, No. 6, June.—The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Vols. I, VIII, X and XII.—Collection of Data on Factory Industry in Russia, published by Department of Commerce and Manufacture for 1885-1891. All these data are drawn from one and the same source, namely, the reports supplied by owners of factories and works to the Ministry of Finance. The significance of these data and their values are dealt with in detail in the text.

2. The 34 trades for which data are given lor 1864-1879 and 1885-1890 are the following: cotton-spinning; cotton-weaving; flax-spinning; calico-printing; hemp-spinning and rope-making; wool-spinning; cloth; wool-weaving; silk-weaving and ribbon; brocade, galloon; gold-spinning and metal-beating; knitted wear; dyeing; finishing; oil-proofing and varnishing; stationery; wall-paper; rubber; chemical and dye; cosmetic; vinegar; mineral-water; match; sealing-wax and varnish; leather, suede and morocco; glue; stearin; soap and tallow-candle; wax-candle; glass, crystal and mirror; porcelain and faience; machine-building; iron-founding; copper and bronze; wire, nail, and some small metal wares.

APPENDIX I (to Chap. V, p. 345)

Combined table of statistics on small peasant industries of Moscow Gubernia

1) A dash signifies zero. Empty space signifies “no information”.

2) The industries are given in the order of successive increase in the average number of workers (family and hired combined) for the whole industry, per establishment.

3) For industries No. 31 and No. 33 the value of processed raw material is given, and constitutes 50-57% of the value of the wares, i.e., of the aggregate output.

4) The average number of horses per owner, according to the data for 19 industries, is 1.4 and by grades: I) 1.1; II) 1.5; III) 2.0.

5) The percentage of peasants who cultivate their land with hired labour, according to the data for 16 industries, is 12% and by grades: I) 4.5%; II) 16.7%; III) 27.3%.

APPENDIX II (to Chapter VII, p. 456)

Table of statistics on the factory industry of European Russia

Years

Data on the different numbers of trades regarding which there has been information at various times

Data on 34 trades

No. of factories

Aggregate output (thousand rubles)

No. of workers

No. of factories

Aggregate output (thousand rubles)

No. of workers

1863

11,810

  247,614

357,835

—

—

—

1864

11,984

  274,519

353,968

5,792

201,458

272,385

1865

13,686

  286,842

380,638

6,175

210,825

290,222

1866

  6,891

  276,211

342,473

5,775

239,453

310,918

1867

  7,082

  239,350

315,759

6,934

235,757

313,759

1868

  7,238

  253,229

331,027

7,091

249,310

329,219

1869

  7,488

  287,565

343,308

7,325

283,452

341,425

1870

  7,853

  318,525

356,184

7,691

313,517

354,063

1871

  8,149

  334,605

374,769

8,005

329,051

372,608

1872

  8,194

  357,145

402,365

8,047

352,087

400,325

1873

  8,245

  351,530

406,964

8,103

346,434

405,050

1874

  7,612

  357,699

411,057

7,465

352,036

399,376

1875

  7,555

  368,767

424,131

7,408

362,931

412,291

1876

  7,419

  361,616

412,181

7,270

354,376

400,749

1877

  7,671

  379,451

419,414

7,523

371,077

405,799

1878

  8,261

   461,558

447,858

8,122

450,520

432,728

1879

  8,628

  541,602

482,276

8,471

530,287

466,515

1885

17,014

  864,736

615,598

6,232

479,028

436,775

1886

16,590

  866,804

634,822

6,088

464,103

442,241

1887

16,723

  910,472

656,932

6,103

514,498

472,575

1888

17,156

  999,109

706,820

6,089

580,451

505,157

1889

17,382

1,025,056

716,396

6,148

574,471

481,527

1890

17,946

1,033,296

719,634

5,969

577,861

493,407

1891

16,770

1,108,770

738,146

—

—

—

APPENDIX III (to Chapter VII, p. 519)

The chief centers of factory industry in European Russia

Note. Totals “for gubernia” mean totals for enumerated centres in gubernias.

Note to 2nd edition. We add for purposes of comparison, figures of 1897 census on number of inhabitants. Unfortunately, the Central Statistical Committee publication Towns and Centres of Habitation in Uyezds Having 2,000 and More Inhabitants gives no detailed data.

*Here and further, v. = village; t. = township; h. = hamlet; st. = station; env. = environs; s. = settlement.—Ed.

Note. Asterisk indicates that outside workers are not included in the number of factory workers

* Partly included here is Esthland Gubernia (Krenholm Textile Mill).

UNCRITICAL CRITICISM

(REGARDING MR. P. SKVORTSOVS
ARTICLE “COMMODITY FETISHISM”
IN NAUCHNOYE OBOZRENIYE,
No. 12, 1899.)

Written in January-March, 1900
Published in May and June, 1900
in the magazine Nauchnoye Obozreniye,
Nos. 5 and 6 ¹⁶⁹
Signed: Vladimir Ilyin

Published according
to the text of
Nauchnoye Obozreniye

“Jove is wrathful” …. This has long been known as a very amusing sort of spectacle, and actually the anger of the stern Thunderer merely calls forth laughter. Further confirmation of this old truth has been supplied by Mr. P. Skvor-tsov, who has let loose a host of the choicest “wrathful” remarks against my book on the process of the formation of a home market for Russian capitalism.

I

“To depict the process as a whole,” Mr. Skvortsov grandly instructs me, “one must set forth one’s understanding of the capitalist mode of production; to confine oneself to mere references to the theory of realisation is quite superfluous.” Why references to the theory of the home market are “superfluous” in a book devoted to an analysis of data on the home market, remains the secret of our stern Jove, who by “setting forth one’s understanding,” “understands” … giving extracts from Capital, half of which are irrelevant. “The author may be reproached for the dialectical (a specimen of Mr. Skvortsov’s wit!) “contradiction that, having set himself the aim of examining a problem” (of how the home market is being formed for Russian capitalism), “he comes, at the end of his references to theory, to the conclusion that no such problem exists at all.” Mr. Skvortsov is so pleased with this remark of his that he repeats it several times, not seeing, or not wishing to see, that it is based on a gross error. At the end of the first chapter of my book I say that “the problem of the home market as a separate, self-sufficient problem not depending on that of the degree of capitalist development does not exist at all” (69).¹⁷⁰ Well, does the critic disagree with that? No, he agrees with it, for on the preceding page he says that my remarks are “fair.” That being the case, what has occasioned his clamour and attempt to divest my conclusion of its most important part? That also remains a secret. At the end of the introductory, theoretical chapter, I definitely indicate the theme of interest to me: “the question of how a home market is being formed for Russian capitalism reduces itself to the following: How and in what direction are the diverse aspects of the Russian national economy developing? What constitutes the connection between and interdependence of these diverse aspects?” (69). Does the critic consider these questions unworthy of examination? No, he prefers to avoid the issue of the theme I set myself and to point to other themes with which, at Jove’s behest, I should have occupied myself. I should, in his opinion, have “described the reproduction and circulation both of that part of the product which is produced in agriculture and in industry capitalistically, and of that part which is produced by independent peasant producers … and shown the relation between them, i.e., the magnitudes of constant and variable capital and of surplus-value in each of the indicated departments of social labour” (2278). Now that is simply a high-sounding and totally meaningless phrase! Before attempting to describe the reproduction and circulation of the product which is produced in agriculture capitalistically, one must first ascertain exactly how and to what extent agriculture becomes capitalist, among peasants or among landlords, in one district or in another, etc. Unless this is done (and that is what I have done in my book), the description suggested by Mr. Skvortsov will remain a series of commonplaces. Before we can speak of the part of the product which is produced in industry capitalistically, we must first ascertain exactly which industry in Russia is becoming capitalist and to what extent it is doing so. That is precisely what I tried to do by processing the data on the handicraft industry, for example; our stern critic grandly passes all this by in silence and with a supremely serious air invites me to mark time and to dispose of the matter with empty commonplaces about capitalist industry! The question as to exactly which peasants in Russia are “independent producers” also requires a study of the facts, and that is what I tried to undertake in my book; had Mr. Skvortsov pondered over this question, he would not have made the nonsensical assertion that the categories of constant capital, variable capital and surplus-value may, without further ado, be applied to the economy of “independent peasant producers.” In a word, the elaboration of the theme proposed by Mr. Skvortsov is possible only after clearing up the questions I have indicated. Under the guise of amending my formulation of the problem, our stern critic beats a retreat from an analysis of concrete and historically specific reality to simply copying Marx.

Incidentally, we cannot pass by in silence the following trick by Mr. P. Skvortsov, one that splendidly characterises our critic’s methods. Prof. Sombart (says Mr. P. Skvortsov) shows that German exports lag behind the development of German industry. “These data,” Mr. P. Skvortsov explains, “go to confirm my conception of markets.” Good, isn’t it? Mr. Skvortsov’s arguments illustrate the meaning of the well-known saying: there’s a bush in the garden, and my uncle’s in Kiev…. We are discussing the theory of realisation, and he tells us: capitalism, like feudalism, lives on surplus-labour! If we add to such inimitable tricks a number of stern rebukes, we shall get the sum-total of Mr. Skvortsov’s “criticism.”

But let the reader judge for himself: to show my “failure to understand,” Mr. P. Skvortsov cites, on pages 2279 and 2280, extracts from various parts of the first chapter, picks out isolated words from isolated sentences and exclaims: “The finding, the exchange, the theory of the home market, the finding of the replacing, and finally, the compensating! I do not think such precision of terms can be taken as evidence that Mr. Ilyin clearly understands Marx’s ‘remarkable’ theory of realisation!?” Now that is precisely the sort of “criticism” that was once ridiculed by Chernyshevsky; a man takes up The Adventures of Chichikov and begins to “criticise”: “Chi-chi-kov, tchi-tchi… Oh how funny! The finding, the exchange…. I do not think that is clear….”¹⁷¹ Oh, what destructive criticism!

On page 52 of my book I say that it was not necessary to divide the product according to its natural form in analysing the production of individual capital, but that it was absolutely necessary in analysing the reproduction of social capital, for in the latter case (and only in the latter case) are we dealing with the replacement of the natural form of the product. Mr. Skvortsov asserts that I “failed to understand” Marx, severely reprimands me for “translating freely,” considers it “necessary to quote Capital at length” (the passages quoted stating exactly what I said), and pounces upon the following words of mine: “Now, however, the question,” i.e., in analysing the reproduction of social, and not of individual, capital, “is: where will the workers and the capitalists obtain their articles of consumption, where will the capitalists obtain their means of production, how will the finished product meet all these demands and enable production to expand?” Underlining this passage, Mr. Skvortsov goes on to say: “The passages I have underlined do indeed contain a theory of realisation, only not Marx’s, but Mr. Ilyin’s, a theory which has nothing in common with Marx’s theory” (2282). Strongly put! But let us see what sort of proof is advanced. The proofs, of course, are quotations from Marx, including the following: “The question as it immediately forelies (sic!)* is this: How is the capital consumed in production replaced in value out of the annual product, and how is the movement of this replacement intertwined with the consumption of surplus-value by the capitalists, and of wages by the workers?” Conclusion: “I believe that I have shown sufficiently that the theory of realisation which Mr. Ilyin presents as Marx’s has nothing in common with the analysis given by Marx,” etc. All I can do is to ask once again: Good, isn’t it? What the difference is between what I say and what is said in the quotations from Marx remains the secret of our stern critic. All that is clear is that my mortal sin lies in “translating freely,” or perhaps in that I explain Marx in my “own words,” as Mr. Skvortsov expresses it in another part of his article (2287). Just think of it! To expound Marx in one’s “own words”! “Genuine” Marxism consists in learning Capital by heart and quoting passages from it, in season and out … à la Mr. Nikolai —on.

Here is an illustration confirming this last remark. In my book I say that capitalism “makes its appearance only as a result of widely developed commodity circulation,” and, in another place, that “capitalism is that stage in the development of commodity-production in which labour-power, too, becomes a commodity.” Midst thunder and lightning our stern Jove announces: “under what conditions capitalism makes its appearance … is known to every more or less educated reader” (sic!), “Mr. Ilyin’s bourgeois horizon,” and other pearls adorning the polemics of the wrathful Mr. Skvortsov. Then follow quotations from Marx: the first says exactly what I said (the purchase and sale of labour-power is the basic condition of capitalist production); the second says that the mode of circulation derives from the social character of production and not vice versa (Das Kapital, II. B., 93).¹⁷² Mr. Skvortsov imagines he has utterly confuted his opponent with this last quotation. Actually, however, he has replaced the question I raised by another one and given proof of his ability to offer irrelevant quotations. What did I speak of in the incriminating passage? Of the fact that capitalism is the result of commodity circulation, i.e., of the historical relation between capitalist production and commodity circulation. And what is spoken of in the passage quoted from Volume II of Capital (the volume devoted to the circulation of capital)? The relation between capitalist production and capitalist circulation; Marx is polemising in this passage (S. 92. II. B.)¹⁷³ against the economists who contrasted natural economy, money economy and credit economy as three characteristic economic forms of movement in social production; Marx says that that is wrong, because money and credit economy are merely modes of circulation peculiar to different stages in the development of capitalist production, and he concludes with a remark about the “bourgeois horizon” of these economists. Mr Skvortsov thinks that “genuine” Marxism consists in clutching at the last word of Marx and repeating it, even against an opponent who did not dream of discussing the relation between natural, money and credit economy. We leave it to the reader to determine which party displays “failure to understand,” and among what sort of literature such tricks are classified. Behind the clamour of his stern rebukes Mr. Skvortsov not only resorted to the “point of replacing” but also completely evaded the problem of the relation between capitalist production and commodity circulation. That is a very important problem, to which I revert many times in my book, emphasising the historical role of merchant’s capital as the predecessor of capitalist production. Mr. Skvortsov would seem to have no objection to this (judging by the fact that he says nothing about it). That being the case, what sense is there in the noise he makes about my statement that capitalism is a result of commodity circulation? Does not merchant’s capital express the development of commerce, i.e., commodity circulation without capitalist production? These questions too, once again, remain the secret of the wrathful Jove.

To finish with the “criticism” Mr. Skvortsov directs against the theoretical part of my book, I have to examine a few more of the stern rebukes and gross errors which abound in the article “Commodity Fetishism.”

In my book I say: “The need for a capitalist country to have a foreign market is … determined … by the fact that capitalism makes its appearance only as a result of widely developed commodity circulation, which transcends the limits of the state. It is therefore impossible to conceive a capitalist nation without foreign trade, nor is there any such nation. As the reader sees, this reason is of a historical order” (65). The stern Jove “criticises”: “I, as a reader, do not see that this reason is of a historical order. A totally unfounded assertion” (2284), etc. If commodity circulation is the necessary historical predecessor of capitalism, is there any need to explain in addition why “this reason is of a historical order”?

For the abstract theory of capitalism all that exists is developed and fully established capitalism, and the question of its origin is eliminated.

“Mr. Ilyin … for the realisation of the product in capitalist society … turns to the aid of the foreign market” (2286). To the reader who is familiar with my Studies and The Development of Capitalism in Russia I need scarcely explain that this, too, is a trick performed by the same method as the preceding ones. A quotation from Marx: “… foreign commerce only replaces home products by articles of other use or bodily form….”¹⁷⁴ Conclusion: “Every literate person, with the exception of critically-minded individuals, will understand that Marx says the very opposite of Mr. Ilyin’s theory that there is no need to go to the foreign market to find ‘an equivalent for that part of the product which is being sold,’ to find ‘another part of the capitalist product that can replace the first”’ (2284). Oh, splendid Mr. Skvortsov!

“Mr. Ilyin … by ignoring the essential features of capitalist society and thus converting it into planned production—proportion in the development of different trades undoubtedly means planned production—nicely realises, in the end, the same quantity of products within the country” (2286). Our “critic’s” new trick consists in attributing to me the notion that capitalism ensures regular proportion. Constant, deliberately maintained proportion would, indeed, signify the existence of planning; but this is not the proportion which is “established only as the average magnitude of a number of continual fluctuations” (that is what I say in the passage quoted by Mr. Skvortsov). I definitely say that proportion (or conformity) is “assumed” by theory, but in fact it is “constantly disturbed,” that to replace one distribution of capital by another and so create proportion “there must be a crisis” (all the words underlined are to be found on that very page 66, which is quoted by Mr. Skvortsov). The question arises, what can one think of a critic who ascribes to his opponent the transformation of capitalism into planned production, while making reference to the very page and the very paragraph where that opponent says that for capitalism there must be a crisis so as to create a constantly disturbed proportion??

II

Let us pass to the second part of Mr. Skvortsov’s article, which is devoted to a criticism of the factual data quoted and analysed in my book. Maybe here, at least, we shall find some serious criticism relating to problems of which a special study has been made by Mr. Skvortsov.

The social division of labour is the basis of commodity economy and is the basic process of the formation of a home market—says Mr. Skvortsov, quoting my words—“while plain ‘division of labour’—not social, we must assume—is the basis of manufacture….” In this “attempt at irony” the critic reveals his failure to understand the elementary difference between division of labour in society and division of labour in the workshop: the former creates (under commodity production—a condition which I definitely specified, so that Mr. Skvortsov’s reminder about the division of labour in the Indian village community relates to that author’s deplorable weakness for quoting irrelevant passages from Marx) isolated commodity-producers, who, independently and separately from one another, produce different products which enter into exchange; the latter does not alter the relation of the producers to society, but merely transforms their position in the workshop. That is the reason, so far as I can judge, why Marx sometimes speaks of “social division of labour”* and at others simply 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 does not say a word about this), it must refer to the chapter on manufacture, the greater part of which consists of factual data. How they might have been dispensed with is a secret that our stern critic does not reveal, and I continue to hold to the opinion that it is better to incur the charge of my exposition being dry than to give the reader cause to think that my opinion is based on “quotations” from Capital, and not on a study of Russian data. If Mr. Skvortsov thinks my enumeration is “mechanical,” are we to take it that he considers as wrong the conclusions which I have drawn from these data in the second half of Chapter VI, and repeated in Chapter VII, §XII?—Are we to take it that he does not agree that these data show a specific structure of industry characterised by aspecific system of: 1) technique, 2) economy and 3) culture? The stern Jove had not a single word to say about this in his “criticism,” which, if we discount the wrathful rebukes, is left without any content whatsoever. That’s rather little, most respected Mr. Skvortsov!

Let us pass to the part played by peasant taxes in developing commodity economy. I asserted that at one time poll-taxes had been an important factor in the development of exchange, but that now commodity-production had become so firmly established that the importance of taxes “is becoming altogether secondary.” Against this Mr. Skvortsov launches a host of paltry and fearful words such as, “fetishism of commodities,” unite everything, “omnipotence,” potency of commodity-production, etc.; but alas, these potent words merely cover up the stern critic’s impotence to refute the conclusion I drew. “Even Mr. Kautsky,” writes Mr. Skvortsov, “to whom Mr. Ilyin bears resemblance in many respects” … (poor “Mr. Kautsky,” who “bears resemblance” to the “commodity fetishist,” completely fails to understand Capital, and resembles that man who is weighed down by a “bourgeois horizon,” Mr. Ilyin! Will he recover from the blow struck by a “genuine” Marxist?) … “says that the conversion of peasant dues in kind into dues in cash increases the peasants’ demand for money” (2288). Very well, stern Mr. Critic, but surely that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem of the part played by taxes in the peasants’ cash expenditure as compared with outlays on the rest of their needs and requirements. This problem is not even touched upon by Kautsky. Mr. Skvortsov over and over again reveals his remarkable talent for offering irrelevant quotations. “The main question,” says Mr. Skvortsov, advancing his second objection, “which is not explained even by the budget data, is as follows: where is the horseless peasant to obtain 25 rubles to pay his taxes” (25 per cent of his cash espenditure, 25 rubles out of 100 rubles has been turned by Mr. Skvortsov simply into 25 rubles!) “and the horse-owning peasant 10 rubles? The question is not what part of the income (?) taxes constitute in the peasants’ total cash expenditure” (2290). I advise Mr. Skvortsov to take out a patent for a remarkable invention: the very latest and very easiest method of “scientific criticism” that radically destroys an opponent. On one out of several hundred pages of his book your opponent incidentally raises the question of the share of tax expenditure in the total cash expenditure; all you have to do is to quote this passage, foist another question on your opponent, and you brilliantly prove that he is a “commodity fetishist,” who, monster that he is, does not give a thought to where the poor horseless peasant is to get 25 rubles! And then, as to other pages in the book, which deal with the ratio of taxes to income, with the items and with the source of income, you can omit them and thus prove that your opponent has a “bourgeois horizon.” Really, take out a patent, Mr. Skvortsov!

Here is another example of how Mr. Skvortsov utilises his invention. I ask the reader’s attention: such gems of “scientific criticism” are the only ones of their kind.

We refer to the same page 156, which deals with the budget figures for peasant taxes. After showing the role of taxes in the peasants’ total cash expenditure, I continue: “If, however, we do not take the role of taxes in the development of exchange, but take them relative to income, we shall see that it is an excessively high one. How heavily the traditions of the pre-Reform epoch weigh down upon the peasant of today is seen most strikingly in the existence of taxes which absorb one-seventh of the gross expenditure of the small farmer, or even of the allotment-holding farm labourer. Moreover, the distribution of taxes within the village community is astonishingly uneven: the better off the peasant, the smaller the part of his total expenditure that goes in taxes. The horseless peasant pays in proportion to his income nearly three times as much as the peasant owning many horses (see above, table on distribution of expenditure)….” Any reader who is at all attentive in his approach to what he reads must naturally ask: Why do I speak of the distribution of taxes within the village community, when the budgets relate to the farms of peasants not only of different communities, but even of different uyezds? Perhaps the uneven distribution is here fortuitous—perhaps it depends on the different assessment of one dessiatine of allotment land in the different uyezds or in the different village communities from which the farms were taken for compiling the typical budgets? And so, in order to eliminate this inevitable objection, I immediately went on, after what I had said, to explain: “… We speak of the distribution of taxes within the village community, because if we calculate the amount of taxes and duties per dessiatine of allotment land, it will be found to be nearly uniform….” Had the critic wanted to verify these words, all he needed to do was to compare the table on page 151 (amount of taxes and dues per farm) with the table on p. 157 (quantity of allotment land per household) to convince himself with ease that, judging by the budget data, although the budgeted farms belong to different communities, and even to different uyezds, the amounts of taxes and dues per dessiatine of allotment land are nearly uniform.

And now, observe what methods Mr. Critic uses to destroy his opponent! He picks out the words I underlined about the amount of taxes per dessiatine of allotment land; fails to notice (sic!) that these words relate only to the budget data; ascribes to these words the meaning that the amount of taxes per dessiatine of allotment land is nearly uniform for the whole of the Russian peasantry; triumphantly accuses me, because of this latter conclusion, of not being acquainted with Zemstvo statistical publications, and cites two tables to confirm the (generally known) fact that in different village communities, volosts and uyezds, the amounts of taxes per dessiatine of allotment land are far from being uniform. Having performed this trick, the critic goes on to add: “Indeed, within a village community where one and the same size of allotment is received, the payments will be not nearly but actually uniform in size. The whole point is that Mr. Ilyin does not know which village community he is talking about. To finish with Mr. Ilyin’s abuse of the Zemstvo statistics,” etc… (2292). I would like very much to know whether another example could be found in scientific literature of this sort of criticism.

Having acquainted ourselves with the methods by which Mr. Skvortsov “has proved” the utter “worthlessness” of the budget data I have given, we may presumably ignore the potent (and impotent) terms in which the critic expresses his dissatisfaction with the very use of budget data. In demanding mass data on budgets, Mr. Skvortsov is evidently talking again about something that has nothing to do with the case, for descriptions of specific farms, such as I made use of, never are and never can be of a mass nature. The literature relating to the budgets of specific farms is indicated by me at the beginning of the section criticised, and I would, of course, only be grateful to the critic if he supplemented or corrected me. But Mr. Skvortsov knows how to “criticise” without touching on the substance of the point at issue! I attempted to prove that the budgets were typical by comparing the average sizes of family, crop area, land rented and number of animals per horseless and one-horse households, according to the budget data and the “mass data” (p. 158 of my book); but our stern critic simply calls this a “curiosity”—on what grounds, nobody knows. Perhaps for the same reason that a certain “critic” found the name Chichikov so funny? The budgets “are not typical … if only because the disposal of … grain … from the autumn onwards and its acquisition in the spring are very rarely met with in Voronezh Gubernia, whereas for the whole of Russia” such disposal has been proved to be the case, supposedly, by Mr. Nik. —on (2291). It is a true proverb which says that les beaux esprits se rencontrent*: That “genuine” Marxist, Mr. Pavel Skvortsov, coming up against a contradiction between the assertions of the “genuine” Marxist, Mr. Nikolai —on, and Zemstvo statistical data, unhesitatingly settles the problem along the lines that the data are not typical, and not that Mr. Nik. —on’s statements are wrong, or too general. Besides, what has the question of selling grain in autumn and buying grain in spring to do with the controversy over whether or not certain budgets are typical, budgets which, in examining the problem, I do not use at all?

III

After the thankless job of explaining the things imputed to me, it is a pleasure to meet, at last, with an objection on fundamentals, even if formulated in terms of the stern rebukes (“fetishism,” “utter failure to understand”) which Mr. Skvortsov evidently considers very convincing, and even if the critic’s own opinions have had to be surmised rather than seen plainly stated. Mr. Skvortsov is quite right when he says that my views “are the central theme of the entire book.”

In order to set off our points of disagreement more sharply, I will compare two extreme formulations of our opposite views: Mr. Skvortsov probably thinks (at all events, it follows from his objections) that the less the land the peasants received when they were emancipated, and the higher the price they paid for it, the faster would have been the development of capitalism in Russia. I think the opposite: the more the land the peasants received when they were emancipated, and the lower the price they paid for it, the faster, wider and freer would have been the development of capitalism in Russia, the higher would have been the standard of living of the population, the wider would have been the home market, the faster would have been the introduction of machinery into production; the more, in a word, would the economic development of Russia have resembled that of America. I shall confine myself to indicating two circumstances which, in my opinion, confirm the correctness of the latter view: 1) land-poverty and the burden of taxation have led to the development over a very considerable area of Russia of the labour-service system of private-landowner farming, i.e., a direct survival of serfdom,* and not at all to the development of capitalism; 2) it is in our border regions, where serfdom was either entirely unknown, or was feeblest, and where the peasants suffer least from land shortage, labour-service and the burden of taxation, that there has been the greatest development of capitalism in agriculture. This comparison is necessary precisely for an analysis of the conditions of the “transition from the one social formation to the other,” which I am so fiercely and so sweepingly accused of ignoring by Mr. Skvortsov.

The extremely stereotyped nature of Mr. Skvortsov’s views on the economic processes in peasant economy in this country is also revealed by his remarks on migration and on the way capitalism breaks down medieval barriers. Now, was I not right in drawing a comparison between Mr. Pavel Skvortsov and Mr. Nikolai —on? Both “solve” the problem of migration by an extremely simple and entirely negative criticism of those “who attach importance” to migration. But that conclusion is worthy only of the most primitive—to wit, “genuine”—Marxism, which contents itself with absolutely abstract … commonplaces. What does “attach importance” to migration mean? If we take these words in their literal sense, can there be a single economist of sound mind and good memory who does not attach importance to the annual migrations? If we take these words in the specific sense of capitalism, then, firstly, Mr. Skvortsov distorts my meaning, for I say the very opposite in the passage he quotes. Secondly, an economist who sets out to study the characteristics of the economic system and development of Russia (not only to bring lengthy, and often irrelevant, quotations from Marx) must necessarily ask: what influence is exerted by the migrations in Russia? Without making a special study of the question, I remarked in the passage indicated by Mr. Skvortsov that my conclusions on the differentiation of the peasantry fully correspond to those of Mr. Hourwich.* Moreover, I repeatedly touch on the subject of migration in other parts of my book. Maybe my views on this subject are wrong, but Mr. Skvortsov does absolutely nothing to correct or to supplement them; he tota]ly obscures the issue with his stern rebukes. Further, my remarks give Mr. Skvortsov grounds for concluding that the “commodity fetishist believes in the miraculous power of his fetish now” (sic!). Now, that is truly “crushing”! But do you deny that I am right, most respected Mr. Critic? Why not share your factual considerations with the public and examine the data of at least one uyezd? That would be so natural for a person who makes a special study of Zemstvo statistics! And I take the liberty of holding this view, in spite of Mr. Skvortsov’s terrible words (fetishism, miraculous power), which—does anyone doubt it?—are enough to frighten anybody.*

Finally, the last point on which one can discuss fundamentals with Mr. Skvortsov is that of the classification of Zemstvo statistics on the peasantry. Mr. Skvortsov has made a special study of Zemstvo statistics, and, if we are not mistaken, still continues to do so. One would, therefore, be justified in expecting him to say something based on facts and explaining this controversial and extremely interesting subject. I wrote: “we reject a limine any classification according to allotment and exclusively employ classification according to economic strength (draught animals, area under crops),” and I went on to say that classification according to allotment, which is far more common in our Zemstvo statistics, is absolutely unsuitable because life disturbs the equality (within the village community) of allotment land tenure: it is sufficient to recall such universally known and unchallenged facts as the leasing of allotments, their abandonment, the purchase and the renting of land and the supplementing of agriculture with commercial and industrial enterprises and with work for hire. “Economic statistics must necessarily take the scale and type of farm as the basis of classification” (105). Mr. Skvortsov’s “criticism” consists in the following: “Mr. Ilyin is displeased with the classification of statistics on the peasantry according to allotment. There are two (sic!) classifications of statistics. One is the historical classification, according to which village communities (!) having the same amount of allotment land per registered person are gathered into one group. The other is a factual classification, according to which peasant farms having allotments of equal size, regardless of the communities to which they belong, are gathered into one group. What makes the historical classification important is that it clearly shows what the conditions were under which the peasantry passed from feudal to capitalist society …” and so forth on this theme, also examined above…. “The classification Mr. llyin proposes … utterly confuses the historical conception of the conditions of our peasantry’s transition from the one social formation to the other. Mr. Ilyin’s proposal is more in the nature of an industrial census (sic!), such as is taken in Germany” (2289). This is a sample of Mr. Skvortsov’s criticism on a subject on which he specialises, and on a question on which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible to “quote” Marx. The question is: What is the point of this argument about the “historical” classification of village communities, when I am dealing with the classification of house-to-house data? By what miraculous means can the classification of present-day house-to-house data “utterly confuse” the long-established historical data on village communities? Mr. Skvortsov is entitled to use the word “historical” in this connection only to the extent that he turns his back on history: if the classification of village communities according to size of allotment per registered person relates to the history of what happened 40 years ago, then what is going on before our eyes with ever-increasing rapidity is also history. Further, it is altogether inexplicable how a man who studies Zemstvo statistics and talks of all things in nothing less than the tone of a prophet can write that “there are two classifications” (of village communities according to allotment and of households according to allotment), when everyone knows that there are very many classifications: according to area under crops, number of draught animals, number of working members, number of farm labourers, house ownership, and so forth? How can Mr. Skvortsov declare so categorically, and without a shadow of proof, that only classification according to allotment is “factual,” when the point at issue is precisely: is this classification a factual one? I show for a number of uyezds that the distribution of allotment land among the peasant farms continues to this day to be marked by an “equality” that is relatively very great (20% of well-to-do households, 26-30% of the population, account for 29-36% of the allotment land in various uyezds or groups of uyezds), whereas the distribution of the factual indices of farming, draught animals, area under crops, improved implements, etc., is everywhere, without exception, incomparably less equal. Mr. Skvortsov contrives to criticise, and even berate, my statements, without saying a word about fundamentals.

It goes without saying that, not being a professional statistician, I laid no claims to solving the problem of classification. I think, however, that the basic problems of Zemstvo statistics (and the problem of the methods of classifying information concerning households is a basic one, as I point out in the passage quoted by Mr. Skvortsov) are things which not merely Zemstvo statisticians, but all economists, have a right and even a duty to discuss. One cannot conceive of an economist who is studying the actual economic situation in Russia being able to dispense with Zemstvo statistics; and if the elaboration of Zemstvo statistics and the work of economists proceed independently, each in its own way, neither the one nor the other can achieve satisfactory results. That classification according to allotment is not a satisfactory factual classification has been admitted in part by the Zemstvo statisticians themselves, who have given a number of classifications according to draught animals and to area under crops of which I made use in my book. Just now, when the importance of the problem is particularly emphasised by practically all Marxists and is not denied even by economists of other trends, a re-examination of the problem should be particularly necessary. But Mr. Skvortsov, instead of offering criticism, presents us with pompous but quite vapid phrases like the following: “we need a summary of Zemstvo returns which gives a detailed account of the production and reproduction of peasant farming, so that anyone who desires may take up such an abstract and verify the ‘conclusions’ of Messrs. Ilyin, Postnikov and Hourwich” (2292). Yes, of course, “we need a summary”; but if these words are not to remain an empty sound, and if the summary is really to succeed in answering the main problems advanced by Russia’s present economic system and by that system’s evolution, what is needed is to raise and to discuss from all angles the fundamental problem of the methods to be employed in drawing up the summary, to discuss it without fail in general publications, and not merely among Zemstvo statisticians, and still less within the four walls of this or that Zemstvo statistical bureau. I raised this problem in my book and attempted to indicate its solution. It is not, of course, for me to judge whether the solution is a correct one. But I am justified in drawing the conclusion that Mr. Skvortsov, for all his sternness, has said nothing whatever about the problem, but has instead, without grounds for so doing, advocated routine methods, advocated a point of view that was already old in 1885 (see footnote on page 103 of The Development of Capitalism, where I quote from Mr. V. V.’s article “A New Type of Local Statistical Publication” his admission that “the statistical data must be adapted to the groups themselves and not to such a conglomeration of the most diverse economic groups of peasants as the village or the village community,” and where I raise the question as to why Mr. V. V. himself never once made use of the data on these most diverse groups).

__________

In conclusion, a few words about “orthodoxy,” which will not be superfluous, since Mr. Skvortsov’s appearance in the role of “genuine” Marxist renders particularly urgent the precisest possible definition of what, if it may be so expressed, is one’s position. While not in the least desiring to place Mr. B. Avilov on a par with Mr. Skvortsov, I nevertheless find it necessary to touch on a passage in the former’s article in the same issue of the Nauchnoye Obozreniye. At the end of a postscript to this article Mr. B. Avilov says: “Mr. Ilyin stands also for orthodoxy. But I think there is still plenty of room for ‘orthodoxy,’ i.e., the simple interpretation of Marx …” (p. 2308). I think that the words I have italicised are probably a slip of the pen, for I said quite definitely that by orthodoxy I do not at all mean the simple interpretation of Marx. In the article which Mr. B. Avilov has in mind, after the words: “No, let us better remain ‘under the sign of orthodoxy,’ ” I say: “Let us not believe that orthodoxy means taking things on trust, that orthodoxy precludes critical application and further development, that it permits historical problems to be obscured by abstract schemes. If there are orthodox disciples who are guilty of these truly grievous sins, the blame must rest entirely with those disciples and not by any means with orthodoxy, which is distinguisbed by diametrically opposite qualities” (Nauchnoye Obozreniye, 1899, No. 8, p. 1579).¹⁷⁶ Thus I definitely said that to accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin; and in order to apply and develop, “simple interpretation” is obviously not enough. The disagreement between those Marxists who stand for the so-called “new critical trend” and those who stand for so-called “orthodoxy” is that they want to apply and develop Marxism in different directions: the one group want to remain consistent Marxists, developing the basic tenets of Marxism in accordance with the changing conditions and with the local characteristics of the different countries, and further elaborating the theory of dialectical materialism and the political-economic teachings of Marx; the other group reject certain more or less important aspects of Marx’s teachings, and in philosophy, for instance, take the side, not of dialectical materialism, but of neo-Kantianism, and in political economy the side of those who label some of Marx’s teachings as “tendentious,” etc. The former on this account accuse the latter of eclecticism, and in my opinion have very good grounds for doing so. The latter call the former “orthodox,” and it should never be forgotten that use of this term has been made by opponents in controversy, that the “orthodox” do not reject criticism in general, but only “criticism” by eclectics (who would only be entitled to call themselves advocates of “criticism” to the extent that in the history of philosophy the teachings of Kant and of his followers are called “criticism,” “critical philosophy”). In the same article I named authors (p. 1569, footnote, and p. 1570, footnote*) who, in my opinion, are representatives of the consistent and integral, and not eclectic, development of Marxism, and who have done for this development—in the field of philosophy, in the field of political economy and in the field of history and politics—incomparably more than, for example, Sombart or Stammler,** the mere repetition of whose eclectic views is regarded by many today as a big step forward. It is scarcely necessary for me to add that latterly the representatives of the eclectic trend have grouped themselves around E. Bernstein. I shall limit myself to these brief remarks on the question of my “orthodoxy,” both because it is not immediately relevant to the subject of my article, and because I am unable here to elaborate in detail the views of the former, and must refer those who are interested to the German literature. On this subject the Russian controversies are merely echoes of the German, and unless one is familiar with the latter one cannot obtain a really precise idea of the point at issue.*

NOTES

¹Lenin’s book The Development of Capitalism in Russia was the result of tremendous research lasting more than three years. Lenin began intensive work on his book when in prison, soon after his arrest in connection with the case of the St. Petersburg “League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class,” and finished it in the village of Shushenskoye where he lived in exile. He had, however, been gathering material for his book long before he began writing it.

In his first letter from prison, dated January 2, 1896, Lenin wrote: “I have a plan that has occupied my mind considerably ever since I was arrested, increasingly so as time passes. I have long been engaged on an economic problem (that of the marketing of the products of manufacturing industry within the country), have selected some literature, drawn up a plan for its analysis and have even done some writing with a view to having my work published in book form, should its dimensions exceed those of a magazine article. I should be very unwilling to give up the job, and am now, apparently, faced with the alternative of either writing it here or of abandoning it altogether.” (See present edition Vol. 37.)

In the same letter, in addition to giving instructions about books to be obtained according to a list he had drawn up, Lenin unfolded his plan of work:

“The list of books,” he wrote, “is divided into the two parts into which my book is divided. A—The general theoretical part. This requires fewer books, so that, in any case, I hope to write it, although it needs more preparatory work. B—The application of the theoretical principles to Russian facts. This part requires very many books. The chief difficulty will be: 1) Zemstvo publications. Part of them, by the way, I already have, but another part (small monographs) may be ordered, and a part may be obtained through statisticians I know; 2) Government publications—the papers of commissions, reports and minutes of congresses, etc. These are important, but they are more difficult to obtain. Some of them, even the majority, I think, are in the library of the Free Economic Society.” (See present edition, Vol. 37.)

Lenin’s sister, A. I. Ulyanova-Elizarova, relates in her reminiscences that while Vladimir Ilyich was working on his book in prison “he decided to use the St. Petersburg libraries in order to obtain material needed for the work he had planned and that he knew he would not be able to get in exile. And so in prison he made an intense study of a mass of source material, and copied out numerous extracts. I dragged heaps of books to him from the Free Economic Society library, from the Academy of Sciences and from other scientific book repositories.”

Lenin also worked on the book while on his way to exile. In a letter dated March 15, 1897, he wrote that while on the way he had looked over some “books borrowed for a short while,” and that he intended to send them back from Krasnoyarsk. During a halt at Krasnoyarsk (en route for Shushenskoye village), Lenin made a study of books and magazines that he found in the rich private library of G. V. Yudin, a merchant, and also in the local city library.

While in exile Lenin continued to work hard on The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Since he did not possess the means to buy large numbers of books, he wrote to his relatives asking them to make arrangements to supply him from libraries in the capital. “… It would very likely be more profitable for me to spend money on postage and have many books than to spend much more money on buying a few books.” (See present edition, Vol. 37.) On Lenin’s instructions, his sister, M. I. Ulyanova, copied out numerous extracts from various books in the Rumyantsev Library in Moscow. Lenin received these extracts at the end of May 1897. From the autumn of the same year, he received the material he needed regularly and set to work on the new sources, particularly on the numerous statistical abstracts. In the spring of 1898, N. K. Krupskaya, who had secured a transfer from her place of exile in Ufa to Shushenskoye, brought Lenin many books.

During his three years’ work on The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin studied and made a critical analysis of everything that had been written on Russian economics. In this monograph mention is made of, and passages are quoted from, over 500 different books, abstracts, research papers, reviews and articles. The literature, however, actually studied and used by Lenin, but not included among the sources he mentions, was much more extensive. But even this list gives an idea of the colossal amount of work involved in his study of the development of Russian capitalism.

The draft of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was completed in August 1898. In a letter dated October 11, 1898 Lenin wrote: “I have finished drafting my markets, and I have begun to give them the finishing touches. The making of a fair copy will go on simultaneously, so that I have thought of sending it on in parts and of having it printed as it gets there in order to avoid delay (I expect to send off the first lot in a month’s time at the very latest); if they begin printing it in December, it might just be in time for this season.” (See present edition, Vol. 37.) Much time was needed to give the manuscript the finishing touches and the job was completed at the end of January 1899.

Lenin paid careful attention to the remarks of comrades and relatives who read The Development of Capitalism while it was still in manuscript. Each chapter was copied into a separate little notebook, and, apart from Krupskaya, was read and discussed by other Social-Democrats who were in exile at that time in the Minusinsk area. “We were the ‘first readers,’ so to speak, of The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” wrote G. M. Krzhizhanovsky in his reminiscences (he lived in exile not far from Shushenskoye village). “Whatever was sent to us, we read carefully and returned it to Lenin with our comments. He took our comments very much into consideration.”

The Development of Capitalism in Russia came off the press at the end of March, 1899, under the pseudonym of “Vladimir Ilyin.” The issue of 2,400 copies was sold out very quickly and circulated mainly among the Social-Democratic intelligentsia, the student youth, and also through the medium of propagandists in workers’ study circles.

The bourgeois press tried to pass over Lenin’s monograph in silence, and the first reviews did not appear until the autumn of 1899. One of them received a crushing retort from Lenin in his article “Uncritical Criticism,” which was printed in the magazine Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Scientific Review) for May-June 1900 (see pp. 609-32 in this volume).

A second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia appeared in 1908.

Since the establishment of Soviet power The Development of Capitalism in Russia has, according to data as of October 1, 1957, been published 75 times, in a total of 3,372,000 copies and in 20 of the languages of the Soviet peoples. In addition it has appeared in the English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Turkish and other foreign languages.

Part of the preparatory work for The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which shows the volume of the research done by Lenin, and the methods he employed, has been published in the Lenin Miscellany XXXIII.

The present volume follows the second, 1908, edition, which was published after the text had been corrected and supplemented by Lenin. In addition, account has been taken of all the author’s remarks concerning the first, 1899, edition.

p. 21

²V. V.—pseudonym of V. P. Vorontsov.

N.—on or Nikolai—on, pseudonym of N. F. Danielson. Vorontsov and Danielson were the most prominent ideologists of liberal Narodism in the 80s and 90s of the 19th century.

p. 25

³In February or at the beginning of March 1899, when in exile, Lenin received a copy of Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question) by Kautsky, then still a Marxist. By then, the greater part of The Development of Capitalism in Russia had been set up in type, and so Lenin decided to make reference to Kautsky’s work in the preface. On March 17 (29), 1899, Lenin sent a postscript to the preface. “If only it is not late,” he wrote, “I would very much like to have it printed…. Maybe even if the preface is already set, it will still be possible to add the postscript?” The addition to the preface got into the hands of the censor and was changed. In a letter dated April 27 (May 9), 1899, Lenin wrote of this: “Have heard that my P.S. to the preface was late, fell into the hands of the preliminary censor and ‘suffered,’ I think.”

p. 26

⁴In the second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia the numbering of the sections was changed through Lenin’s introduction of several additions. The item to which Lenin refers the reader is in Chapter II, §XII, C, p. 162 and p. 168.

p. 27

⁵On February 17, 1899, in the Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Trade, a discussion took place on a paper entitled “Is It Possible to Reconcile Narodism with Marxism?” Representatives of liberal Narodism as well as “Legal Marxists” took part in the discussion. V. P. Vorontsov (V. V.) said that those who represented the “modern trend of Marxism in the West” stood closer to Russian Narodism than to the Russian Marxists. A brief report of this meeting appeared on February 19 (March 3), 1899, in the reactionary St. Petersburg paper, Novoye Vremya (New Times).

p. 28

⁶The second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was published in 1908. An announcement of its publication appeared in March 1908, in Knizhnaya Letopis (Book Chronicle), Issue No. 10.

For the second edition Lenin went over the text, eliminated printer’s errors made numerous additions and wrote a new preface, dated July 1907. In the second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia Lenin replaced the expressions “disciples,” and “supporters of the working people,” which he had employed so as to pass the censorship, by the forthright terms Marxists, Socialists. He also replaced allusions to “the new theory” by references to Marx and Marxism.

Lenin made considerable additions, employing the very latest statistics. He introduced into the second chapter a new section (XI), devoted to an analysis of the results of the Army-Horse Censuses of 1896-1900. He cited new facts in confirmation of his previous conclusions about the development of capitalism in Russia, in particular new factory statistical material; gave an analysis of the results of the general population census of 1897, which provided a fuller picture of the class structure of Russia (see Chapter VII, §V, pp. 501-507, Addendum to second edition).

In the second edition the results of the struggle against the so-called “Legal Marxists” on the basic problems dealt with in The Development of Capitalism in Russia are also summed up. The experience of the first Russian Revolution of 1905-1907 fully confirmed Lenin’s description of the “Legal Marxists” as bourgeois liberals hiding behind the cloak of Marxism and attempting to use the working-class movement in the interests of the bourgeoisie.

He introduced 24 new footnotes into the second edition (pp. 27, 45, 57, 157, 159, 163, 183, 206, 221, 274, 281, 389, 449, 451, 467, 499, 509, 523, 526, 533, 535, 550, 552, 575), 2 new sections (pp. 146-148 and 501-507), a new table (p. 512), wrote 8 paragraphs of new text and 3 big additions to previous paragraphs (pp. 300-303, 223-224, 225, 293-294), and made about 75 additions and alterations.

Lenin did not cease working on his Development of Capitalism in Russia after the appearance of the second edition in 1908. This is shown by the additions, made by him in 1910 or 1911 to page 405 of a copy of the second edition, dealing with the division of factories and works into groups according to the number of workers employed in 1908 (see illustration on page 513 of the present volume).

In the preface to the second edition Lenin speaks of the possibility of his revising the work in the future and indicates that in that case it would have to be divided into two volumes:—volume 1 to be devoted to an analysis of Russian economy before the Revolution and volume 2 to a study of the results and achievements of the Revolution.

A number of Lenin’s other works, including The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907, which was written at the end of 1907, were devoted to a study of the results and achievements of the 1905-1907 Revolution.

p. 31

⁷Marx cites Heine’s expression relating to “yes-men”: “Ich habe Drachenzähne gesät und Flöhe geerntet” (I have sown dragon’s teeth and harvested fleas) in his book Karl Grün, “Die sozial Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien” (Darmstadt, 1845) oder Die Geschichtschreibung des wahren Sozialismus [Karl Grün, “The Social Movement in France and Belgium” (Darmstadt, 1845), or The Historiography of True Socialism] (Marx-Engles/Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteil, B. 5, S. 495).

p. 32

⁸Cadets—members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the chief party of the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie. The Cadet Party was founded in October 1905, its membership including representatives of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, Zemstvo functionaries and bourgeois intellectuals who used hypocritical phrases about “democracy” to hide their real views and to win over the peasantry. The Cadet agrarian programme envisaged the possibility of part of the landed estates being turned over to the peasants on the basis of redemption payments, but at an exorbitant price. The Cadets favoured the retention of the monarchy and tried to persuade the tsar and the feudal landlords to share power with them; their main task, however, they considered to be the fight against the revolutionary movement. During the First World War the Cadets actively supported the tsarist government’s foreign policy of conquest. During the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 they tried to save the monarchy. The Cadets in the bourgeois Provisional Government pursued a counter-revolutionary policy, opposed to the interests of the people but favourable to the U.S., British and French imperialists. Following the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution the Cadets became irreconcilable enemies of Soviet power and participated in all the armed counterrevolutionary actions and campaigns of the interventionists. When the interventionists and whiteguards were defeated, the Cadets fled abroad, where they continued their anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary activity.

p. 33

⁹The Party of Octobrists (or Union of October Seventeenth) represented the interests of the big industrial capitalists and of the big landlords who farmed their land on capitalist lines. The Octobrists claimed to stand by the tsar’s Manifesto of October 17, 1905, in which, scared by the revolution, he promised the people civil rights; actually, however, the Octobrists had no intention of limiting the powers of tsarism, and fully supported both the home and the foreign policies of the tsar’s government.

p. 33

¹⁰Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich—Chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1906-1911, an extreme reactionary. The suppression of the Revolution of 1905-1907 and the period of severe political reaction that followed are connected with his name.

In an effort to provide the tsarist autocracy with a firm support in the countryside in the shape of the kulaks, Stolypin secured the adoption of a new agrarian law. By an edict of November 9, 1906, each peasant became entitled to withdraw from the village community and to have his allotment made his private property, with the ensuing right to sell it, mortgage it, etc., which until then had been forbidden. It was made the duty of the community to supply the peasant leaving its ranks with land in a single tract. The kulaks made use of this legislation to buy up the lands of the economically weak peasants for next to nothing. The laws of June 14, 1910, and of May 29, 1911, provided for a compulsory arrangement of land distribution that favoured the kulaks.

p. 33

¹¹June 3, 1907, was the day on which the Second State Duma was disbanded and a new law was promulgated dealing with the elections to the Third State Duma, that ensured a majority for the landlords and capitalists in the Duma. The tsar’s government treacherously violated the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, did away with constitutional rights and had the Social-Democratic group in the Second Duma arraigned and sentenced to hard labour. The so-called coup d’état of June 3 marked a temporary victory of the counter-revolution.

p. 34

¹²Popular Socialists—members of the Popular Socialist Party, which separated from the right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (S.R.s) in 1906. They expressed the interests of the kulaks and stood for the partial nationalisation of landed estates on a redemption basis and the distribution of the land among the peasants according to the so-called labour norm. They favoured a bloc with the Cadets. Lenin called them “Social-Cadets,” “petty-bourgeois opportunists,” and “S.R. Mensheviks,” who vacillated between the Cadets and the S.R.s, and he emphasised that this party “differs very little from the Cadets, since it has withdrawn from its programme both the Republic and the demand for all the land.” The leading figures in the party were A. V. Peshekhonov, N. F. Annensky, V. A. Myakotin, and others. Following the February (1917) bourgeois-democratic revolution the Popular Socialist Party participated in the bourgeois Provisional Government. Following the October Socialist Revolution the Popular Socialists participated in counter-revolutionary plots and armed actions against the Soviets. The party went out of existence during the Civil War.

Trudoviks (from trud, “labour”)—a group of petty-bourgeois democrats in the Russian State Dumas, consisting of peasants and also of Narodnik-minded intellectuals. The Trudovik Group was constituted in April 1906 from the peasant deputies to the First State Duma.

The demands of the Trudoviks included the abolition of all restrictions based on the social estates and on nationality, the democratisation of the Zemstvos and urban local government bodies, and universal suffrage in the elections to the State Duma. The Trudovik agrarian programme proceeded from the Narodnik principle of the equalitarian use of the land: the formation of a national fund made up of lands belonging to the state, the royal family, the tsar himself and the monasteries, and also of private estates where they exceeded the established labour norm, with provision for compensation in the case of confiscated private estates. In the State Duma the Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the Bolsheviks, their vacillations being due to the very class nature of the peasants who are petty proprietors. In September 1906 Lenin pointed out that the Trudovik peasant “is not above trying to strike a deal with the monarchy and settling down on his patch of land within the framework of the bourgeois system. At the present time, however, his energies are mainly devoted to the struggle against the landlords for the land, to the struggle against the feudal state for democracy.” (See present edition, Vol. 11, An Attempt at a Classification of the Political Parties of Russia.) Since the Trudoviks represented the peasant masses, the tactics of the Bolsheviks in the Duma were to arrive at agreements with them on individual issues with a view to waging a joint struggle against the Cadets and the tsarist autocracy.

In 1917 the “Trudovik Group” merged with the “Popular Socialist” Party.

p. 34

¹³Molchalinism—a synonym for sycophancy, toadyism. Derived from the name Molchalin, a character in Griboyedov’s play Wit Works Woe.

p. 34

¹⁴In the first edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) this chapter was entitled “References to Theory.”

p. 37

¹⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow, 1959, Vol. III, p. 622.

Throughout this book, references to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital are to the following German editions: Vol. 1—2nd edition, 1872; Vol. 2—1885 edition; and Vol. 3—1894 edition. References to the “Russian translation” of Capital are to the one by N. F. Danielson (1896).

p. 38

¹⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 622.

p. 40

¹⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 745 and 747.

p. 42

¹⁸Here and elsewhere, footnotes indicated as Note to 2nd edition are those written by Lenin himself when he prepared the second, 1908 edition of this work.

p. 45

¹⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 470.

p. 47

²⁰Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 373.

p. 48

²¹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 590.

p. 48

²²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, Chapter XXIV, Section 2.

p. 49

²³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 199-202.

p. 49

²⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, pp. 363-64.

p. 50

²⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 394.

p. 52

²⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, pp. 351-523.

p. 54

²⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 299-300.

p. 55

²⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, pp. 438-39.

p. 56

²⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 316.

p. 57

³⁰Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 239-40.

p. 57

³¹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 245.

p. 57

³²E. Bernstein’s Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social-Democracy), which revised the principles of revolutionary Marxism in the spirit of bourgeois reformism, appeared in 1899. Lenin received a copy of it when the first edition of his The Development of Capitalism in Russia had appeared, so that it was only in the second edition that he was able to include his remarks on Bernstein’s opportunist views.

Lenin calls Bernstein “famous after the fashion of Herostratos.” Tradition has it that Herostratos, a Greek who lived in the 4th century B. C., set fire to the noted temple of Artemis in his native town of Ephesus for the sole purpose of becoming known to posterity. The name of Herostratos has become an epithet applied to individuals who are ready to commit crime for the sake of winning fame.

p. 57

³³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 472-73.

p. 58

³⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 299.

p. 58

³⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 822. Lenin’s remark on errors in the translation of Capital refers to the translation by N. —on (Danielson), 1896.

p. 60

³⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, Preface by Frederick Engels, p. 17.

p. 62

³⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 818-819.

p. 64

³⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 821-824.

p. 64

³⁹Volgin—pseudonym of G. V. Plekhanov. The work here cited is included in Vol. IX of his Works.

p. 65

⁴⁰Zemstvo house-to-house censuses were investigations of peasant farms undertaken by statistical agencies of the Zemstvos or rural government bodies. These censuses, which were conducted mainly for taxation purposes, became very common in the 1880s. The household censuses provided a wealth of factual material which was published in statistical abstracts covering the different gubernias and their uyezds or subdivisions. The Zemstvo statisticians, however, many of whom were Narodniks, were very often biased in the way they processed the statistical data and classified them incorrectly, thereby robbing them of much of their value. “Here is the weakest spot in our Zemstvo statistics, splendid as they are for the care and detail with which they are compiled,” wrote Lenin. (See present edition, Vol. 20.) Phenomena of the economic type were hidden under piles of figures in the Zemstvo returns and reviews, while the essential differences between, and features of, various peasant groups that took shape as capitalism developed were lost in the columns of average figures.

Lenin made a comprehensive analysis of Zemstvo statistical data, and carefully studied and processed them. He made calculations of his own, drew up tables and statistical summaries, gave a Marxist analysis of the peasant-farm data secured, and grouped them scientifically. Lenin used the wealth of Zemstvo statistical material to expose the artificiality of Narodnik schemes and to draw a true picture of Russia’s economic development. He made extensive use of Zemstvo statistical material in his writings and especially in The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

p. 70

⁴¹Novorossia—the name given to the Southern steppe area of European Russia.

p. 70

⁴²V. Y. Postnikov’s Peasant Farming in South Russia is examined in detail by Lenin in one of his first works, New Economic Trends in Peasant Life. (See present edition, Vol. 1.)

p. 70

⁴³Allotment land—land left for the use of the peasants after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861. Held by the peasant community, it was periodically redistributed among the peasants.

p. 73

⁴⁴The full title of this source is Statistical Returns for Taurida Gubernia. Statistical Tables Concerning Economic Conditions in the Villages of Melitopol Uyezd. Appendix to Vol. I, Simferopol, 1885.

p. 74

⁴⁵Yoking (supryaga)—cultivation of the land with draught animals belonging to different peasants yoked together in a team.

p. 79

⁴⁶Volost—the lowest administrative territorial unit of the uyezd in pre-revolutionary Russia.

p. 81

⁴⁷Sarpinka—a thin striped or check cotton cloth; originally made in Sarepta.

p. 95

⁴⁸The registered males were those members of the male population of feudal Russia subject to the poll-tax (the peasantry and urban middle class were chiefly affected) and to this end were recorded in special censuses (so-called “registrations”). Such “registrations” took place in Russia from 1718 onwards; the tenth and last “registration was made in 1857-1859.” In a number of districts redistribution of the land within the village communities took place on the basis of those recorded in the “registration” lists.

p. 102

⁴⁹Appropriated family land—land in Siberia appropriated mainly by rich peasants, who did what they pleased with it, making gifts of it, selling it, or handing it down in the family.

p. 125

⁵⁰For the notes containing preliminary calculations made by Lenin in the margins of these publications, see Lenin Miscellany XXXIII, pp. 144-150.

p. 125

⁵¹See A. N. Engelhardt, From the Countryside. 11 Letters. 1872-1882, St. Petersburg, 1885. In 1937 this book was republished by the Publishing House for Social and Economic Literature, Moscow.

p. 135

⁵²Army-horse censuses—a register of the number of horses fit for army service in case of mobilisation, was, as a rule, taken in tsarist Russia every six years. The first census was taken in 1876 in 33 gubernias in the west of Russia. The second census was taken in 1882 and covered the whole of European Russia, the results being published in 1884 under the title Horse Census of 1882. In 1888 a census was taken in 41 gubernias, and in 1891 in the remaining 18 gubernias and in the Caucasus. The examination of the data gathered was undertaken by the Central Statistical Committee, which published them in the abstracts: Statistics of the Russian Empire. XX. Army-Horse Census of 1888 (St. Petersburg, 1891) and Statistics of the Russian Empire. XXXI. Army-Horse Census of 1891 (St. Petersburg, 1894). The next census was taken in the years 1893-1894 and covered 38 gubernias of European Russia, the results being published under the title Statistics of the Russian Empire. XXXVII. Army-Horse Census of 1893 and 1894 (St. Petersburg, 1896). Data of the army-horse census for the years 1899-1901, covering 43 gubernias of European Russia, one Caucasian gubernia and the Kalmyk steppe of the Astrakhan Gubernia made up Vol. LV of the Statistics of the Russian Empire (St. Petersburg, 1902).

The army-horse censuses were investigations that covered all the peasant farms. In his book, Lenin utilised the census material when examining the process of the differentiation of the peasantry.

p. 141

⁵³Lenin made a detailed analysis of the material contained in Blagoveshchensky’s compilation in a special notebook and in the remarks he wrote in the margins. These have been published in Lenin Miscellany XXXIII, pp. 89-99.

p. 142

⁵⁴Lenin refers here to the title of the previously mentioned essay by the Liberal Narodnik, Vorontsov (V. V.), that appeared in 1892.

p. 145

⁵⁵The Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry in Russia mentioned here and further on constitute a series of 16 volumes, which appeared from time to time in the years 1879 to 1887. The “Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry in Russia” (called, for short, the “Handicraft Commission”) was set up in 1874 under the auspices of the Council of Trade and Manufactures, at the request of the First All-Russia Congress of Owners of Factories and Works, that took place in 1870. The Commission included representatives of the Ministries of Finance, Home Affairs, State Properties, and of the Russian Geographical Society, Free Economic Society, Moscow Agricultural Society, Russian Technical Society and Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Trade. The valuable material published by the “Handicraft Commission” in its Transactions were mainly the fruits of the work of local, often little-known, officials. Lenin, who made a detailed study of the Commission’s Transactions, drew from them numerous facts and figures showing the development of capitalist relations in Russia’s handicraft industry.

p. 149

⁵⁶In this column Lenin also includes incomes from fruit growing and stock raising.

p. 152

⁵⁷A paper by Prof. A. I. Chuprov on grain prices was discussed by the Free Economic Society in March 1897.

The Free Economic Society (F.E.S.) was a privileged scientific body, founded in 1765 with the aim, as its Statutes indicated of “disseminating information beneficial to agriculture and industry.” Scientists, from the ranks of liberal nobles or bourgeoisie, made up the membership of the F.E.S. The Society undertook investigations by questionnaire and sent out expeditions to study various branches of the national economy and parts of the country; it periodically issued Transactions of the F.E.S., containing the results of investigations conducted, and verbatim reports of papers read and of discussions held in the Society’s sections. The Transactions of the F.E.S. are frequently mentioned by Lenin in his works.

p. 155

⁵⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 791.

p. 156

⁵⁹Collective responsibility—the peasants of each village community were collectively responsible for making timely and full payments and for the fulfilment of all sorts of services to the state and the landlords (payment of taxes and of land redemption instalments, provision of recruits for the army, etc.). This form of bondage, which was retained even after serfdom was abolished in Russia, was done away with only in 1906.

p. 157

⁶⁰Drechsler’s data are analysed by Lenin in his The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx” (Chapter XI, “Stock Raising on Small and Large Farms”). See present edition, Vol. 13.

p. 159

⁶¹The expressions “quarter of a horse” and “living fraction” belong to the writer Gleb Uspensky. See his sketches Living Figures in the Selected Works of Uspensky, 1938 edition.

p. 159

⁶²See Y. E. Yanson, Comparative Statistics of Russia and West-European Countries. Vol. II. Industry and Trade. Section I. Agricultural Statistics. St. Petersburg, 1880, pp. 422-423, 326, etc.

p. 162

⁶³The famine of 1891 affected the east and south-east gubernias of European Russia with particular severity, its scale exceeding all similar calamities that had befallen the country. It ruined masses of peasants and at the same time hastened the process of the creation of a home market and the development of capitalism in Russia. This was dealt with by Engels in his article “Socialism in Germany.” He also referred to it in his letters to Nikolai —on dated October 29, 1891, March 15 and June 18, 1892.

p. 166

⁶⁴Lenin’s comments on F. A. Shcherbina’s article are published in the Lenin Miscellany XXXIII, pp. 70-84.

p. 170

⁶⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 504-505.

p. 173

⁶⁶The Valuyev Commission—the “Commission to Investigate the Condition of Russian Agriculture “which functioned under the chairmanship of the tsar’s minister P. A. Valuyev. In the years 1872-1873 the Commission collected a large amount of material dealing with the condition of agriculture in post-Reform Russia: Governors’ reports, statements and depositions of landlords, marshals of the nobility, Zemstvo administrations, volost boards, grain merchants, village priests, kulaks, statistical and agricultural societies and other bodies connected with agriculture. This material was published in Papers of the Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Russian Agriculture, St. Petersburg, 1873.

p. 173

⁶⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 770.

Lenin’s note on the wrong translation of the term “Arbeitsrente” as “trudovaya renta” refers to the translation by Nikolai —on (Danielson) of 1896.

p. 174

⁶⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 776.

p. 175

⁶⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 777-778.

p. 175

⁷⁰Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 779.

p. 176

⁷¹Gift-land peasants, those of the former landlords’ peasants, who, at the time of the Reform of 1861, by “agreement” with their landlords received their allotments as a gift (without having. to redeem them). The gilt-lander received a miserable strip, amounting altogether to a quarter of the so-called “top” or “statutory” allotment, i.e., of the allotment established by law for the given locality. All the rest of the lands that had constituted the peasants’ allotments before the Reform were seized by the landlord, who held his “gift-landers,” forcibly dispossessed of their land, in a state of economic bondage even after serfdom was abolished.

“Three-dayers,” a category of allotment-holding agricultural wage-workers. Farming the land he held on a poverty level, the “three-dayer” was a day labourer who, in return for grain or 20 to 30 rubles in cash, had to agree to conditions of bondage, or pay off the debt by working three days a week throughout the summer on the farm of the kulak or the landlord who made the loan. This type of allotment-holding agricultural labourer was met with on a particularly extensive scale in the northwestern gubernias of tsarist Russia.

p. 179

⁷²Ostsee region—the Baltic region of tsarist Russia, which included the gubernias of Esthland, Courland and Liflandia. This area is now the territory of the Latvian and Estonian Soviet Socialist Republics.

p. 179

⁷³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 163-165.

p. 183

⁷⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 322-327, 580-584, 595-596.

p. 184

⁷⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 581.

p. 184

⁷⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 326.

p. 184

⁷⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 323.

p. 184

⁷⁸The Narodnik theory of “people’s production” is criticised by Lenin in his earlier work What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. (See present edition, Vol. 1.)

p. 184

⁷⁹The first six sections of this chapter originally appeared as an article in the journal Nachalo (Beginning), Issue No. 3, March 1899 (pp. 96-117) under the title of “The Dislodgement of Corvée by Capitalist Economy in Contemporary Russian Agriculture.” The article was accompanied by the following editorial note: “This article is an extract from the author’s considerable investigation of the development of capitalism in Russia.”

p. 191

⁸⁰See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Britain, Moscow, 1953, p. 10.

p. 192

⁸¹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 771.

p. 193

⁸²“Cut-off-lands” (otrezki)—the pasture lands woods, etc., which the landlords “cut off,” i.e., of which they deprived the peasants when serfdom was abolished in Russia.

p. 194

⁸³Temporarily-bound peasants—serfs who, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, were obliged to perform certain services for the landlords, i.e., do corvée service or pay quit-rent. The “temporarily-bound status” continued until the peasants, by agreement with the landlords, had acquired their allotments by the payment of redemption money. The landlords were obliged to accept redemption payments only after the edict of 1881, by which the “obligatory relation” between the peasants and the landlords had to cease as from January 1, 1883.

p. 194

⁸⁴The two volumes of The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Certain Aspects of the Russian National Economy reached Lenin in the village of Shushenskoye in 1897. He made a careful study of them while working on The Development of Capitalism in Russia, as is proved by his numerous marginal comments in the volumes. While he exposed the method which the Narodniks were so fond of employing, the distortion of the actual situation by quoting “average” statistics which in fact obscured the differentiation of the peasantry, Lenin carefully checked and made use of the concrete material in the volumes. Thus, on page 153 of Vol. 1 Lenin drew up a table showing the distribution, in the different gubernias of Russia, of the various forms of economy (capitalist, labour-service, and mixed). This material, along with some additions from other sources, went to make up the table given in the text.

p. 196

⁸⁵Cultivation of cycles—an enslaving form of labour-service rendered to the landlord by the peasant as rental for land obtained from him in post-Reform Russia. The landlord lent the peasant land or made him a loan in cash or kind for which the peasant undertook to cultivate a “cycle,” using his own implements and draught animals; this meant cultivating one dessiatine of spring crops and one of winter crops, occasionally supplemented by reaping a dessiatine of crops.

p. 198

⁸⁶Skopshchina—the name given in the southern parts of Russia to the payment of land rent in kind, on terms of bondage, the tenant paying the landowner “s kopny” (from the corn-shock) a portion of the harvest (a half, and sometimes more), and usually fulfilling miscellaneous labour services in addition.

p. 201

⁸⁷Villeins—feudally dependent peasants in ancient Rus (9th-13th centuries) who performed corvée service for the princes and other temporal and clerical lords and also paid rent in kind. The feudal lords seized the land of the villeins and compelled them to work on the feudal estates.

Russkaya Pravda (Russian Law)—the first written codification of laws and princes’ decrees (11th-12th centuries). The statutes of the Russkaya Pravda protected the lives and property of the feudal lord and are indicative of the bitter class struggle between peasants in feudal bondage and their exploiters.

p. 204

⁸⁸The Verbatim Report of the Debates of March 1 and 2 appeared in the Transactions of the Free Economic Society, 1897, No. 4.

p. 212

⁸⁹Oblomov—a type of landlord who lacked will-power, did nothing and was extremely lazy. A character in Goncharov’s novel of that name.

p. 218

⁹⁰Pindar—ancient Greek lyrical poet. Of his numerous works, four volumes of poems have survived in which he extols the victors at the games. Pindar’s name has become an epithet used to designate those who “eulogise” beyond measure.

In speaking of the Pindar of the capitalist factory Lenin has in mind the term applied by Marx in Capital, Volume I, to that apologist of capitalism, Dr. Ure.

p. 233

⁹¹Zvegintsev Commission—was established in 1894 under the auspices of the Zemstvo Department of the Ministry of Home Affairs to draw up measures for “introducing order into employments outside the village and regulating the movement of agricultural labourers.”

p. 242

⁹²Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 546.

p. 245

⁹³In the first edition (1899) of The Development of Capitalism in Russia the table was given as follows:

p. 253

50 Gubernias of European Russia

⁹⁴Lenin’s notes on this publication and his preliminary calculations are published in Lenin Miscellany XXXIII, pp. 165-175.

p. 254

⁹⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 738-39.

p. 258

⁹⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 655.

p. 259

⁹⁷Res fungibilis—replaceable thing—an old juridical term. “Replaceable things” are those which in contracts are indicated by simple numerical quantity or measure (“so many bushels of rye,” “so many bricks”). They are distinguished from “irreplaceable things”—things that are specifically indicated (“such and such a thing,” “article number so and so”).

p. 270

⁹⁸Little Russia, i.e., Malorossia—as the territory of the Ukraine was officially called in tsarist Russia.

p. 272

⁹⁹N. A. Blagoveshchensky’s Peasant Farming. Combined Zemstvo House-to-House Census Economic Returns, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1893.

p. 275

¹⁰⁰See Y. M. Dementyev’s The Factory, What It Gives and What It Takes from the Population, Moscow, 1893, pp. 88-97.

p. 296

¹⁰¹“Metropolitan gubernias” here refers to the gubernias of St. Petersburg and Moscow.

p. 307

¹⁰²See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, p. 180.

p. 314

¹⁰³Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 334 (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

p. 315

¹⁰⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 663.

p. 320

¹⁰⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 316.

p. 321

¹⁰⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 693.

p. 321

¹⁰⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 642.

p. 321

¹⁰⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, pp. 242-243.

p. 322

¹⁰⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 241.

p. 322

¹¹⁰Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 603, 787.

p. 323

¹¹¹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 119.

p. 325

¹¹²This refers to the article by Engels entitled “The Peasant Question in France and Germany,” published in Die Neue Zeit, Issue No. 10 of the year 1894-95. (See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 420-440.) The French “disciples”—the name given, with an eye to censorship, to Marxists (in the article mentioned Engels calls them “French Socialists of the Marxist trend”).

p. 326

¹¹³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 787.

p. 327

¹¹⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 792-793.

p. 327

¹¹⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 603-604.

p. 327

¹¹⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 709.

p. 328

¹¹⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 709-710.

p. 329

¹¹⁸In the years 1894-1895 Count Kanitz, representative of the agrarians, introduced into the German Reichstag the proposal known as the “Antrag Kanitz” calling on the government to assume control of the purchase of grain abroad, and undertake the sale of all such imported grain at average prices. The proposal was rejected by the Reichstag.

p. 329

¹¹⁹Lenin gives an appreciation of the research done by Bücher, and of the latter’s classification of the stages and forms of industrial development, in Chapter VII of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in his footnote on page 550. The most important part of Bücher’s work, that devoted to the origin of the national economy, was translated into Russian by Lenin apparently when he was in exile, in the village of Shushenskoye. Lenin’s translation has not been published.

p. 332

¹²⁰In the middle of the 19th century, the knitting of slippers with designs in coloured wools was widespread in Arzamas and its outskirts. In the 1860s ten thousand and more pairs of knitted footwear were made annually in the town, the Nikolsky Convent and the village of Viyezdnaya Sloboda. The wares were sold at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair, and from there were dispatched to Siberia, the Caucasus and other parts of Russia.

p. 341

¹²¹Manilov—a character in Gogol’s Dead Souls, typifying the weak-willed, hollow dreamer and inert windbag.

p. 355

¹²²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 322.

p. 356

¹²³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 323.

p. 357

¹²⁴Metal-beaters—workers who beat gold, silver, tin, copper and other metals into the foil or leaf formerly used for decorative purposes; icons and other church property were among the articles so decorated.

p. 357

¹²⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 334-335.

p. 359

¹²⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 263-264, 270-271, 290, 319-320, 321-322.

p. 361

¹²⁷Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. III, an investigation by S. Kharizomenov, Moscow, 1882, pp. 20-21.

p. 374

¹²⁸State peasants with quarter holdings—the name given in tsarist Russia to the category of former state peasants, descendants of lower-rank servicemen who in the 16th to 17th centuries were settled in the border lands of the state of Muscovy. For their services in guarding the state frontiers the settlers (Cossacks musketeers, soldiers) were given the use of small plots of land either temporarily or in perpetuity. The area of such a plot amounted to a so-called quarter [1.35 acres]. From the year 1719 such settlers were called odnodvortsi [i.e., those possessing only their own farmsteads and no community land]. Formerly they enjoyed various kinds of privileges and had the right to own peasants, but during the 19th century were gradually deprived of these rights and reduced to the status of ordinary peasants. By a regulation of 1866 the quarter lots were recognised as the private property of the former quarter-lot peasants and their descendants.

p. 381

¹²⁹Free tillers—the category of peasants freed from serf dependence by the law of February 20, 1803. This law permitted landlords themselves to decide the terms on which they freed the peasants from the land.

p. 381

¹³⁰Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 329-331.

p. 385

¹³¹See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, p. 154.

p. 385

¹³²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 368.

p. 385

¹³³Workroom owners, middlemen—owners of premises who rented them to manufacturers for the installation of hand-looms, and themselves worked there. The middleman or workroom owner, by arrangement with the employer, undertook to heat or repair the premises, deliver raw materials to the weavers, send the finished product to the employer or act as overseer.

p. 386

¹³⁴Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire, II. Vol. III. Material for the Study of Handicraft Industry and Hand Labour in Russia. Part 1. Published by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Home Affairs. St. Petersburg, 1872.

p. 388

¹³⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 342-350.

p. 396

¹³⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 342-350.

p. 398

¹³⁷Cadastre—a public record of the extent, value and ownership of land, etc., for purposes of taxation. The cadastral surveys gave particulars of land held, incomes of inhabitants and descriptions of streets, monasteries, fortifications, etc. The oldest cadastre now extant dates back to the 15th century, but most of those that have been preserved relate to the 17th century. Surveys for the cadastre were made by special commissions appointed by the central government authorities.

p. 415

¹³⁸The Law of June 2, 1897 established a working day of 11½ hours for industrial enterprises and railway workshops. Prior to the adoption of this law the working day in Russia was unlimited and lasted as long as 14 and 15 hours and even more. The tsar’s government was forced to adopt this law due to the pressure of the working-class movement, which was led by the “League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class” headed by Lenin. A detailed analysis and criticism of the law is given by Lenin in his pamphlet: The New Factory Law. (See present edition, Vol. 2.)

p. 418

¹³⁹The table that follows is based on a similar but more detailed table published in the Vestnik Finansov, Issue No. 42, 1898.

p. 423

¹⁴⁰Prior to 1864 the gunsmiths of Tula were serfs of the state and lived in special suburbs (slobodas). (The state blacksmiths’ sloboda, etc.) They were divided into guilds: barrel, gun-stock, lock, instrumental, etc. For the carrying out of auxiliary work serf-peasants from a number of villages were attached to the Tula arms factories, their task being to prepare charcoal for the gunsmiths, guard the forests allocated to the factories, and do jobs in the factory yards.

In Tula at the time of their liberation from feudal dependence there were nearly 4,000 gunsmiths, of whom 1,276 were employed in factories and 2,362 worked at home. In all, the gunsmiths and their families numbered over 20,000.

p. 424

¹⁴¹Lenin refers here to the factory owned by the St. Petersburg Footwear Manufacturing Company, established in 1878. In 1894-95 the factory employed 845 workers and the value of its output was 1,287,912 rubles (figures taken from the List of Factories and Works, St. Petersburg, 1897, Issue No. 13450, pp. 548-549).

p. 430

¹⁴²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 747-749.

p. 434

¹⁴³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 323.

p. 440

¹⁴⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 342-343.

p. 442

¹⁴⁵The reference here is to M. K. Gorbunova’s Women’s Industries in Moscow Gubernia, Part IV (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia. Section covering economic statistics, Vol. VII, Part II, Moscow, 1882). Introduction, p. IX.

p. 444

¹⁴⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 478, etc., pp. 643, etc.; Chapter XXV, Section 4 particularly.

p. 447

¹⁴⁷Lenin refers to Y. N. Andreyev’s Handicraft Industry in Russia According to the Investigations of the “Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry in Russia” and Other Sources, St. Petersburg, 1885 (the estimate of the number of persons engaged in “subsidiary trades” as 7½ millions is given on p. 69 of the book). Lenin also refers to the pamphlet by the same author entitled Handicraft Industry in Russia, St. Petersburg, 1882, p. 12.

p. 451

¹⁴⁸To characterise the development of large-scale industry in tsarist Russia in the post-Reform period Lenin examined the material contained in numerous factory statistical sources of that period (statistical returns, monographs and works of research, official reference books, magazine and newspaper reports, papers, etc.). Lenin’s work of checking, processing, combining and scientifically grouping statistical data is shown in the notes he made in various books and from other material published in section 2 of Lenin Miscellany XXXIII. For Lenin’s estimation of the main sources of factory statistics see also his article “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.” (See present edition, Vol. 4.)

p. 454

¹⁴⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 474.

p. 454

¹⁵⁰The “landlord establishment of a manorial-possessional character” was a feudal manorial manufactory belonging to a landlord and employing his serf-peasants. By a decree of Peter I issued in 1721, merchant factory owners were permitted to purchase peasants for work in their factories. The feudal workers attached to such enterprises were called “possessional peasants.”

p. 470

¹⁵¹Lenin refers to Material for the Statistics of Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, Perm Gubernia, Vol. V, Pt. 1 (Zavodsky district), Kazan, 1894, on p. 65 of which there is a table headed “Information on a team of workers bound by debt to their jobs in the shops of the Arta works in 1892.”

p. 486

¹⁵²Lenin quotes here The Mining and Metallurgical Industry of Russia. Published by the Department of Mines. International Columbia Exhibition, 1893, in Chicago, St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 52.

p. 488

¹⁵³In the first edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia the table contained the figures for the years 1890 and 1896. In the second edition these figures were omitted. Furthermore, the figures for 1897 differed somewhat from those for the same year cited in the second edition. The corresponding part of the table as it appeared in the first edition was as follows:

1890

56,560

100

28,174

49.7

13,418

23.7

367.2

1896

98,414

100

35,457

36.6

39,169

39.7

547.2

1897

113,982

100

40,850

35.8

46,350

40.6

—

The figures for 1897 given in the first edition had a footnote, also omitted in the second edition, stating:—“In 1898 the pig-iron output in the Empire is estimated at 133 million poods, of which 60 million poods were produced in the South and 43 million poods in the Urals (Russkiye Vedomosti [Russian Gazette], 1899, No. 1).”

p. 489

¹⁵⁴Lenin supplemented this table later with the corresponding figures for 1908 (see illustration on p. 513). The data entered by Lenin were taken from Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports for 1908 (no. 50-51), published in 1910. Consequently. Lenin’s entries were made either in 1910 or in 1911.

p. 512

¹⁵⁵Boatmen—workers who towed river craft by rope, or rowed them.

p. 528

¹⁵⁶Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 642.

p. 529

¹⁵⁷While in exile in the village of Shushenskoye, Lenin, assisted by Krupskaya, translated volume one and edited the translation of volume two of The History of Trade Unionism, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Volume one of the Webbs’ book “translated from the English by Vladimir Ilyin” (i.e., Lenin) was published in St. Petersburg in 1900 by O. N. Popova. Volume two appeared in 1901.

p. 531

¹⁵⁸The “Khludov Factory,” the property of the brothers A. and G. Khludov was situated in the town of Yegoryevsk Ryazan Gubernia. The firm’s full title was: “Yegoryevsk Cotton-Spinning Factory Co., A. and G. Khludov.” The bracketed data (showing the number of workers and the value of output) given in Lenin’s footnote were taken from the List of Factories, St. Petersburg, 1897, Issue No. 763.

p. 534

¹⁵⁹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 747-749.

p. 536

¹⁶⁰Last—a term used on Russian merchant ships: equalled two tons.

p. 554

¹⁶¹Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 622.

p. 562

¹⁶²In the 1890s Russkaya Mysl was a liberal publication and Russky Vestnik, a magazine expressing the reactionary view.

p. 580

¹⁶³Sobakevich—a character in Gogol’s Dead Souls, the personification of the bullying, tight-fisted landlord.

p. 589

¹⁶⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, Chapter 30 (p. 745).

p. 590

¹⁶⁵Mr. Coupon—a term adopted in the 1880s and 1890s to indicate capital and capitalists. The expression “Mr. Coupon” was put in circulation by the writer Gleb Uspensky in his articles “Grave Sins.”

p. 594

¹⁶⁶See Gleb Uspensky’s article “In the Caucasus.” Works, Vol. II, 1918.

p. 594

¹⁶⁷Pokrut—the form of economic relations that existed among members of artels engaged in hunting sea animals or fishing in the north of Russia; the means of production in the artel belonged to an employer to whom the workers were in bondage. The employer usually received two-thirds of the catch, and the workers only one-third. The workers were compelled to sell part of their catch to the employer at a low price, payment being made in goods, which was very much to the disadvantage of the workers.

p. 599

¹⁶⁸Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 9.

p. 600

¹⁶⁹Lenin’s article “Uncritical Criticism” is an answer to a hostile review of The Development of Capitalism in Russia by P. N. Skvortsov, a “Legal Marxist.” Lenin began working on the article in January 1900, during his last weeks of exile at Shushenskoye. This information is contained in a letter written by N. K. Krupskaya to Lenin’s mother, M. A. Ulyanova, dated January 19, 1910. The article was finished in March 1900, after Lenin’s return from exile, and appeared in the magazine Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Scientific Review) in May and June, 1900. This was the last of Lenin’s articles to appear in the Russian legal press before he went abroad.

p. 609

¹⁷⁰In his references to The Development of Capitalism in Russia Lenin gives the page numbers of the 1899 edition. These have been changed to correspond to the pages of the present edition.

p. 612

¹⁷¹The words in inverted commas “Chi-chi-kov … etc.,” are a paraphrase of the following extract from Chernyshevsky’s Essays on the Gogol Period in Russian Literature. “… A witty examination of Dead Souls might be written as follows: After giving the book’s title: The Adventures [pokhozhdeniya] of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, begin directly in the following way: ‘The cooling down [prokhlazhdeniya] of Tchi! tchi! kov—don’t think reader, that I have sneezed … etc., etc.’ Some twenty years ago there were readers who thought that witty” (see N. G. Chernyshevsky, Essays on the Gogol Period in Russian Literature, St. Petersburg, 1892, p. 64).

p. 613

¹⁷²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, pp. 116-17.

p. 615

¹⁷³Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 115.

p. 616

¹⁷⁴Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Moscow, 1957, p. 470.

p. 617

¹⁷⁵Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 350-351.

p. 618

¹⁷⁶Lenin’s article “Once More on the Theory of Realisation,” signed V. Ilyin, appeared in Nauchnoye Obozreniye, Issue No. 8, August 1899. (See present edition, Vol. 4.)

p. 630

¹⁷⁷“An attempt to ‘open the eyes’ of the public to the mixture of Marxism and bourgeois science” is a reference to Lenin’s criticism of Struveism, “Legal Marxism,” in his essay The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book. This essay, contained in Volume 1 of the present edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, exposed the real nature of the “Legal Marxists,” and showed that they were bourgeois liberals who were attempting to use the Marxist banner and the working-class movement in the interests of the bourgeoisie.

p. 632

¹⁷⁸“A systematic analysis of this trend” was made by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. This supremely important philosophical work was written in 1908 and appeared in book form in Moscow in 1909. (See present edition, Vol. 14.)

p. 632

__________

Preface to the First Edition

* The Agrarian Question, Part I. “The Development of Agriculture in Capitalist Society.”—Ed.

** There is a Russian translation.

*** Preface.—Ed.

Preface to the Second Edition

* Such a revision will possibly require a sequel to the present work. In that case the first volume would have to be confined to an analysis of Russian economy before the revolution, and the second volume devoted to a study of the results and achievements of the revolution.

Chapter I: The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists

* For example, I. A. Stebut in his Principles of Crop Farming distinguishes farming systems according to the principal product marketed. There are three main farming systems: 1) crop growing (grain farming, as Mr. A. Skvortsov calls it); 2) livestock raising (the principal product marketed being livestock produce); and 3) industrial (technical farming, as Mr. A. Skvortsov calls it); the principal product marketed being agricultural produce that undergoes technical processing. See A. Skvortsov, The Influence of Steam Transport on Agriculture, Warsaw, 1890, p. 68 and foll.

* We have pointed to the identical attitude of the West-European romanticists and Russian Narodniks to the problem of the growth of industrial population in our article “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism. Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists,” (See present edition, Vol. 2.—Ed.)

* Particularly astonishing in this connection is Mr. V. V.’s audacity, which transcends all bounds of literary decency. After enunciating his theory, and betraying his utter unfamiliarity with Volume II of Capital, which deals specifically with realisation, he goes on to make the quite unfounded statement that “in building up my propositions I used” Marx’s theory!! (Essays on Theoretical Economics, Essay III. “The Capitalist Law (sic!?!) of Production, Distribution and Consumption,” p. 162.)

* It will not be superfluous to remind the contemporary reader that Mr. Bulgakov, and also Messrs. Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky, whom we shall quote rather often later on, tried to be Marxists in 1899. Now they have all safely turned from “critics of Marx” into plain bourgeois economists. (Note to 2nd edition.¹⁸)

* Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 4th ed., 1801, Vol. I, p. 75, Book I: “Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive Powers of Labor, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the different Ranks of the People,” Chapter VI, “Of the component Parts of the Price of Commodities,” Bibikov’s Russian translation (St. Petersburg, 1866), Vol. I, p. 171.

* Loc. cit., I, p. 78. Russ. trans., I, p. 174.

** Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 75-76. Russ. trans., I, p. 171.

*** Vol. I, 2nd ed., p, 612.—Ed.

* For example, Ricardo asserted that “the whole produce of the land and labour of every country is divided into three portions: of these, one portion is devoted to wages another to profits, and the other to rent” (Works, Sieber’s translation, St. Petersburg, 1882, p. 221.

* See Das Kapital, II. Band, III. Abschn.,²⁶ where a detailed investigation is made of accumulation, the division of articles of consumption into necessities and luxuries, the circulation of money, the wear and tear of fixed capital, etc. Readers who are unable to familiarise themselves with Volume II of Capital are recommended to read the exposition of Marx’s theory of realisation contained in Mr. S. Bulgakov’s book quoted above. Mr. Bulgakov’s exposition is more satisfactory than that of Mr. M. Tugan-Baranovsky (Industrial Crises, pp. 407-438), who in building up his schemes has made some very ill-judged departures from Marx and has inadequately explained Marx’s theory; it is also more satisfactory than the exposition given by Mr. A. Skvortsov (Fundamentals of Political Economy, St. Petersburg, 1898, pp 281-295), who holds wrong views on the very important questions of profit and rent.

* It is this passage that the famous Ed. Bernstein (famous after the fashion of Herostratos) quoted in his Premises of Socialism (Die Voraussetzungen, etc., Stuttgart, 1899, S. 67).³² Our opportunist, of course, turning away from Marxism towards the old bourgeois economics, hastened to announce that this is a contradiction in Marx’s theory of crises, that Marx’s view “does not differ very much from Rodbertus’s theory of crises.” Actually, however, the only “contradiction” here is between Bernstein’s pretentious claims, on the one hand, and his senseless eclecticism and refusal to delve into the meaning of Marx’s theory, on the other. How far Bernstein failed to understand the theory of realisation is evident from his truly strange argument that the enormous increase in the aggregate surplus product must necessarily imply an increase in the number of affluent people (or an improvement in the living standard of the workers), for the capitalists themselves, if you please, and their “servants” (sic! Seite 51-52) cannot “consume” the entire surplus product!! (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky is mistaken in thinking that in advancing this proposition Marx contradicts his own analysis of realisation (see article “Capitalism and the Market” in Mir Bozhy [God’s Earth] 1898, No. 6, p. 123). Marx does not contradict himself at all, for the connection between productive consumption and personal consumption is also indicated in the analysis of realization.

** Cf. “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism. Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists.” (See present edition, Vol. 2.—Ed.)

* Dictionary of Political Sciences.—Ed.

* Dr. Rodbertus-Jagetzow, Zur Beleuchtung der sozialen Frage, Berlin, 1875, S. 72 u. ff. (On the Elucidation of the Social Problem, Berlin, p. 72 and foll.—Ed.)

* —this new theory, which I set against those that have existed hitherto.—Ed.

** Ibid., S. 32: “…bin ich genötigt der vorstehenden Skizze einer besseren Methode auch noch eine voilständige, solcher besseren Methode entsprechende Theorie, wenigstens der Verteilung des Nationalprodukts, hinzuzufügen.” (Ibid., p. 32: “… I am obliged to add to the present outline of a better method, a full theory, corresponding to this better method, of at least the distribution of the national product.”—Ed.)

* That is why K. Diehl is absolutely wrong when he says that Rodbertus presented “a new theory of the distribution of income.” (Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, Art. “Rodbertus,” B. V., S. 448.)

* See Das Kapital, III, 2, VII. Abschnitt: “Die Revenuen,” Chapter 49: “Zur Analyse des Produktionsprozesses” (Russ. trans., pp. 688-706). Here Marx also points to the circumstances that prevented the earlier economists from understanding this process (pp. 379-382. Russ. trans., 698-700).³⁸

* Mr. Bulgakov very correctly observes in the above-quoted book: “Till now the cotton industry, which supplies the peasant market, has been growing steadily, so that the absolute diminution of popular consumption…” (which Mr. N.—on talks about) “…is conceivable only theoretically” (pp, 214-215).

** Volgin, The Substantiation of Narodism in the Works of Mr. Vorontsov, St. Petersburg, 1896, pp. 71-76.³⁹

Chapter II: The Differentiation of the Peasantry

* The following data relate mostly to the three northern mainland uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, namely the Berdyansk, Melitopol and Dnieper, or to the latter one alone.

* Mr. Postnikov rightly observes that in reality the differences between the groups as to size of money income from the land are much more considerable, for the computations assume 1) equal yield, and 2) equal price for grain sold, actually, however, the well-to-do peasants secure better yields and sell their grain to greater advantage.

* We would point out that the relatively considerable amount of purchased land held by those who cultivate no land is due to the fact that this group includes shopkeepers, owners of industrial establishments, and so forth. The mixing of such “peasants” with real cultivators is a common defect of Zemstvo statistics. We shall refer again to this defect later on.

** Carting: carts, covered and open waggons, etc. Ploughing: iron ploughs, scarifiers (cultivators), etc.

* Statistical Returns for Melitopol Uyezd, Simferopol, 1885 (Statistical Returns for Taurida Gubernia, Vol. I),⁴⁴—Statistical Returns for Dnieper Uyezd, Vol. II, Simferopol, 1886.

* “Zemstvo statistics prove incontrovertibly that the larger the scale of the peasant farm, the smaller the number of implements, workers, and draught animals employed on a given tillage area” (op. cit., p. 162).

It is interesting to note how this law is reflected in Mr. V. V.’s arguments. In the above-quoted article (Vestnik Yevropy, 1884, No. 7) he makes the following comparison: In the central black-earth belt there are 5-7-8 dess. of arable per peasant horse, whereas “according to the rules of three-field crop rotation” there should be 7-10 dess. (Batalin’s Calendar). “Consequently, the decline in horse-ownership by part of the population of this area of Russia must to a certain extent be regarded as the restoration of the normal proportion between the number of draught animals and the area to be cultivated” (p. 346 in the article mentioned). Thus the ruin of the peasantry leads to progress in agriculture. Had Mr. V. V. paid attention not only to the agronomic but also to the social-economic aspect of this process he could have seen that this is the progress of capitalist agriculture, for “the restoration of the normal proportion” between draught animals and arable is achieved either by landlords who acquire their own implements, or by big peasant crop growers, i.e., by the peasant bourgeoisie.

* England is the classic land of agricultural capitalism. And in that country 40.8% of the farmers employ no hired labour; 68.1% employ not more than 2 workers; 82% employ not more than 4 workers (Yanson, Comparative Statistics, Vol. II, pp. 22-23; quoted from Kablukov, The Workers in Agriculture, p. 16). But he would be a fine economist, indeed, who forgot the mass of agricultural proletarians, both migratory and also resident (i.e., such as get “employments” in their own villages), who hire themselves out by the day.

* And itself resorts to the “very numerous” village banks and loan-and-savings societies, which render “substantial assistance” to “prosperous peasants.” “The economically weak peasants cannot find guarantors and do not get loans” (p. 368, op. cit.).

* In Melitopol Uyezd, out of 13,789 households in this group only 4,218 till their land with their own animals; 9,201 “yoke.” In Dnieper Uyezd, out of 8,234 households, 4,029 till the land with their own animals, and 3,835 “yoke.” See Zemstvo statistical returns for Melitopol Uyezd (p. B. 195) and for Dnieper Uyezd (p. B. 123).

** In the above-mentioned article Mr. V. V. argues a great deal about yoking being the “principle of co-operation,” etc. It is really so simple to hush up the fact that the peasantry are breaking up into sharply distinct groups, that yoking is the co-operation of tottering farms which are being ousted by the peasant bourgeoisie, and then to talk in general about the “principle of co-operation”—probably co-operation between the rural proletariat and the rural bourgeoisie!

* The data for the Melitopol and Berdyansk uyezds are analogous.

** Mr. Postnikov cites an interesting example of a similar mistake made by Zemstvo statisticians. Noting the fact of commercial farming by the well-to-do peasants and their demand for land, he points out that “the Zemstvo statisticians, evidently regarding such manifestations in peasant life as something illegitimate, try to belittle their importance” and to prove that the renting of land is determined not by the competition of rich peasants but by the peasants’ need for land. To prove this, Mr. Werner, the compiler of Taurida Gubernia Handbook (1889), classified the peasants of the entire Taurida Gubernia according to size of allotment, taking the group of peasants with 1 or 2 people working and 2 or 3 draught animals. It turned out that, within the bounds of this group, as the size of the allotment increases the number of renting households and the amount of rented land decrease. Obviously, such a method of calculation proves nothing at all, since only peasants with an equal number of draught animals are taken, and it is the extreme groups that are omitted. It is quite natural that where the number of draught animals is equal the amount of cultivated land must also be equal, and consequently, the smaller the allotment, the larger the amount of rented land. The question is how the rented land is distributed among households with unequal numbers of draught animals, implements, etc.

* It is usually said that the data for Novorossia do not permit the drawing of general conclusions, because of the specific features of that locality. We do not deny that the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry is more marked here than in the rest of Russia; but it will be seen from what follows that the specific nature of Novorossia is by no means so great as is sometimes imagined.

* “It is interesting,” wrote Mr. N. —on, that Mr. Postnikov “has projects for 60-dessiatine peasant farms.” But “since agriculture has fallen into the hands of capitalists,” productivity of labour may grow still more “tomorrow,” “and it will be necessary (!) to convert the 60-dessiatine into 200- or 300-dessiatine farms.” You see how simple it is: because the petty bourgeoisie of today in our countryside will be threatened tomorrow by the big bourgeoisie, therefore Mr. N. —on refuses to recognise either today’s petty or tomorrow’s big bourgeoisie!

** Statistical Returns for Samara Gubernia, Vol. VII, Novouzensk Uyezd, Samara, 1890. An analogous classification is also given for Nikolayevsk Uyezd (Vol. VI, Samara, 1889), but the data are much less detailed. The Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia (Vol. VIII, Pt. 1, Samara, 1892) contains only a classification according to size of allotment, the unsatisfactory nature of which we shall deal with later on.

* It is interesting to note that from these very data Mr. V. V. (Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming, St. Petersburg, 1892, p. 225) concluded that there was a movement by the “peasant masses” to replace obsolete implements by improved ones (p. 254). The method by which this absolutely false conclusion was reached is very simple: Mr. V. V. took the total figures from the Zemstvo returns, without troubling to look at the tables showing how the implements were distributed! The progress of the capitalist farmers (community members), who employ machines to cheapen the cost of producing commodity grain, is transformed by a stroke of the pen into the progress of the “peasant masses.” And Mr. V. V. did not hesitate to write “Although the machines are acquired by the well-to-do peasants; they are used by all (sic!!) the peasants” (221). Comment is superfluous

* We identify with the sale of labour-power what the statisticians call “agricultural industries” (local and away from the village). That by these “industries is meant employment as regular and day labourers is clear from the table of industries (Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia, Vol. VIII): of 14,063 males engaged in “agricultural industries,” 13,297 are farm labourers and day labourers (including shepherds and ploughmen).

* Novouzensk Uyezd, which we have taken as an illustration, reveals a particular “tenacity of the village community” (to use the terminology of Messrs. V. V. & Co.): from the table in the Combined Returns (p. 26) we find that in this uyezd 60% of the communities have redivided the land, whereas in the other uyezds only 11 to 23% have done so (for the gubernia 13.8% of the communities).

* For the other four uyezds of this gubernia the classification according to draught animals held merges the middle and well-to-do peasantry. See Combined Statistical Returns for Saratov Gubernia, Part I, Saratov, 1888. B. Combined Tables for Saratov Gubernia according to categories of peasants.—The Saratov statisticians compiled their combined tables as follows: all the householders are divided into six categories according to size of allotment, each category is divided into six groups according to the number of draught animals, and each group is divided into four subdivisions according to the number of working males in the family. Summarised data are given only for the categories, so that we have to calculate those for the groups ourselves. We shall deal with the significance of this table later on.

* Let us note that when classifying households according to economic strength, or to size of farm, we always get larger families among the well-to-do strata of the peasantry. This phenomenon points to the connection between the peasant bourgeoisie and large families, which receive a larger number of allotments; partly it shows the opposite: it indicates the lesser desire of the well-to-do peasantry to divide up the land. One should not, however, exaggerate the significance of large families among the well-to-do peasants, who, as our figures show, resort in the greatest measure to the employment of hired labour. The “family co-operation” of which our Narodniks are so fond of talking is thus the basis of capitalist co-operation.

* We say “processing” because the data on peasant industries collected in the house-to-house censuses are very comprehensive and detailed.

* The total amount of arable leased out in the uyezd is 61,639 dess., i.e., about ⅙, of the aggregate allotment arable (377,305 dess.).

* An exactly similar table is given by the statisticians for Kamyshin Uyezd. Statistical Returns for Saratov Gubernia, Vol. XI Kamyshin Uyezd, p. 249 and foll. We can just as well, therefore, make use of the data for the uyezd we have taken.

** That the data quoted by Mr. N. —on refute his conclusions has already been pointed to by Mr. P. Struve in his Critical Remarks.

* At once.—Ed.

* See, for example, the introductions to the Combined Returns for Saratov Gubernia, to the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia, and to Evaluation Returns for four uyezds of Voronezh Gubernia, and other Zemstvo statistical publications.

** We take this rare opportunity of expressing our agreement with Mr. V. V., who in his magazine articles of 1885 and subsequent years welcomed “the new type of Zemstvo statistical publications,” namely, the combined tables, which make it possible to classify household data not only according to allotment, but also according to economic strength. “The statistical data,” wrote Mr. V. V. at that time, “must be adapted to the groups themselves and not to such a conglomeration of the most diverse economic groups of peasants as the village or the village community.” (V. V., “A New Type of Local Statistical Publication,” pp. 189 and 190 in Severny Vestnik [Northern Herald], 1885, No. 3. Quoted in the “Introduction” to the Combined Returns for Saratov Gubernia, p. 36). To our extreme regret in none of his later works has Mr. V. V. made any effort to glance at the data on the various groups of the peasantry, and, as we have seen, he has even ignored the factual part of the book by Mr. V. Postnikov, who was probably the first to attempt the arrangement of the data according to the various groups of the peasantry and not according to “conglomerations of the most diverse groups”. Why is this?

* About the technique of Zemstvo censuses see, in addition to the above-mentioned publications, the article by Mr. Fortunatov in Vol. I of Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigation. Specimens of household registration cards are reproduced in the “Introduction” to the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia and to the Combined Returns for Saratov Gubernia, in the Statistical Returns for Orel Gubernia (Vol. II, Yelets Uyezd) and in Material for the Statistical Survey of Perm Gubernia, Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, Vol. IV. The Perm registration card is particularly comprehensive.

* Material for the Statistical Survey of Perm Gubernia, Krasnoufimsk Uyezd, Vol. III: Tables, Kazan, 1894. For purposes of comparison we shall quote later the main data for Ekaterinburg Uyezd, for which the same classification is given. Statistical Returns for Ekaterinburg Uyezd, Perm Gubernia. Published by the Zemstvo of Ekaterinburg Uyezd, Ekaterinburg, 1891.

** The total allotment land held by these peasants (all groups) is 410,428 dess., i.e., an “average” of 17.5 dess. per household. Then the peasants rent 53,882 dess. of arable and 597,180 dess. of meadow land, making a total of 651,062 dess. (households renting arable—8,903, and renting meadow land—9,167) and they lease out allotment land—arable—50,548 dess. (8,553 peasants) and meadow land—7,186 dess. (2,180 peasants), making a total of 57,734 dess.

* “Agricultural industries” are also singled out only for the last three districts. The commercial and industrial establishments total 692, namely 132 watermills, 16 oilmills, 97 pitch and tar works, 283 “smithies, etc.” and 164 “shops, taverns, etc.”

* Statistical Returns for Orel Gubernia, Vol. II, Moscow, 1887. Yelets Uyezd, and Vol. III, Orel, 1887. Trubchevsk Uyezd. For the latter uyezd the data do not include those for the suburban village communities. We take joint data for the renting of land, combining the allotment and non-allotment rented land. We have determined the amount of leased land approximately, from the number of households leasing out the whole of their allotments. The figures obtained constitute the basis for determining the amount of land in use by each group (allotment+purchased land+rented land—land leased out).

* The compiler of the returns for Orel Uyezd states (Table No. 57) that the well-to-do peasants obtain nearly twice as much manure per head of cattle as do the poor (391 poods per head where there are 7.4 animals per household, as against 208 poods per head where there are 2.8 animals per household. And this conclusion was reached by classifying according to allotment, which obscures the real depth of differentiation). This is due to the fact that the poor are compelled to use straw and dung as fuel, to sell it, etc. Consequently, only the peasant bourgeoisie secure the “normal” quantity of manure (400 poods) per head of cattle. In this connection, too, Mr. V. V. might argue (as he does about the decline in horse possession) about “the restoration of the normal proportion” between the number of animals and the quantity of manure.

* In the numerically small top group of the peasantry we see the opposite: the preponderance of grain sales over purchase, the receipt of money income mainly from the land, and a high percentage of peasants employing farm labourers, possessing improved implements, and owning commercial and industrial establishments. All the typical features of the peasant bourgeoisie are clearly visible here too (despite its small numbers); they are visible in the shape of the growth of commercial and capitalist agriculture.

* To supplement what has been said above about the term “industries” as used in Zemstvo statistics, let us quote more detailed data on peasant industries in this locality. The Zemstvo statisticians have divided them into six categories: 1) Agricultural industries (59,277 persons out of a total of 92,889 “industrialists” in the 4 uyezds). The overwhelming majority are wage-workers, but among them we also find proprietors (melon growers, vegetable growers, bee-keepers, perhaps some coachmen, etc.). 2) Artisans and handicraftsmen (20,784 persons) Among the genuine artisans (= those who work on orders for customers) are included very many wage-workers, particularly building workers, etc. Of the latter we have counted over 8,000 (the figure probably includes some proprietors: bakers, etc.). 3) Servants—1,737 persons. 4) Merchants and master-industrialists—7,104 persons. As we have said, it is particularly necessary to single out this category from the general mass of “industrialists.” 5) Liberal professions—2,881 persons, including 1,090 beggars; in addition to these there are tramps, gendarmes, prostitutes, policemen, etc. 6) Town, factory and other workers—1,106 persons, local industrialists—71,112, migratory industrialists—21,777, males—85,255, females—7,634. The earnings are the most varied: for example, in Zadonsk Uyezd 8,580 unskilled labourers earn 234,677 rubles, while 647 merchants and master-industrialists earn 71,799 rubles. One can imagine the confusion that results when all these most diverse “industries” are lumped together—but that is what is usually done by our Zemstvo statisticians and our Narodniks.

* If we take the size of the allotment of the horseless peasants (per household) as 100, the allotments of the higher groups will be expressed by the figures: 159, 206, 259, 321. The corresponding figures for land actually held by each group will be as follows: 100, 214, 314, 477, 786; and for area under crops the figures for the groups will be: 100, 231, 378, 568, 873.

** On the “industries” of the Nizhni-Novgorod peasantry, see Mr. Plotnikov’s Handicraft Industries of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia (Nizhni-Novgorod, 1894), tables at the end of the book, also Zemstvo statistical returns, particularly for the Gorbatov and Semyonov uyezds.

* 1 mera=204 pounds—Ed.

* “The locally collected material giving facts on the leasing and renting of farmland was considered to be unworthy of especial treatment, because the phenomenon exists only in a rudimentary form; isolated cases of leasing out and renting occur now and again, but are of an utterly fortuitous character and exercise no influence yet on the economic life of Yenisei Gubernia” (Material, Vol. IV, Part 1, p. V, Introduction). Of 424,624 dess. of soft arable land belonging to the peasant old-timers of Yenisei Gubernia, 417,086 dess. are “appropriated family” land.⁴⁹ Renting (2,686 dess.) nearly equals leasing 2,639 dess.) and represents not even one per cent of the total land appropriated.

* Abstract, p. 142.

* Statistical Survey of Kaluga Gubernia for 1896, Kaluga, 1897, p. 43 and foll., 83, 113 of appendices.

* As a curiosity, let us quote one sample, Mr. Vikhlyayev’s “general conclusion” reads: “The purchase of land by the peasants of Tver Gubernia tends to equalise the size of holdings” (p. 11). Proof?—If we take the groups of village communities according to size of allotment, we shall find that the small-allotment communities have a larger percentage of households with purchased land. Mr. Vikhlyayev does not even suspect that it is the well-to-do members of the small-allotment communities who buy land! Of course, there is no need to examine such “conclusions” of an out-and-out Narodnik, the more so that Mr. Vikhlyayev’s boldness has embarrassed even the economists in his own camp. Mr. Karyshev, in Russkoye Bogatstvo [Russian Wealth] (1898, No. 8), although expressing his profound sympathy with the way Mr. Vikhlyayev “orientates himself well among the problems with which the economy of the country is faced at the present time,” is yet compelled to admit that Mr. Vikhlyayev is too great an “optimist,” that his conclusions about the drive towards equality are “not very convincing,” that his data “tell us nothing,” and that his conclusions “are groundless.”

* This method involves a slight error, as a consequence of which the differentiation appears to be less than it really is. Namely: to the top group are added average, and not the top members of the next group; to the bottom group are added average, and not the bottom members of the next group. Clearly the error becomes greater as the groups become larger and the number of groups smaller.

** In the next section we shall see that the proportions of the groups we have taken come very close to those of the groups of the Russian peasantry as a whole, divided according to the number of horses per household.

* We beg the reader not to forget that now we are dealing not with absolute figures, but with relationships between the top and the bottom strata of the peasantry. Therefore, for example, we now take the number of households employing farm labourers (or with “employments”) as percentages, not of the number of households in the given group, but of the total number of households employing farm labourers (or with “employments”) in the uyezd. In other words, what we now ascertain is not the extent to which each group employs wage-labour (or resorts to the sale of labour-power) but merely the relationships between the top and bottom groups as to the employment of wage-labour (or to participation in “employments,” in the sale of labour-power).

* For notes to table, see p. 134

* For notes to table, see p. 134.

* A single glance at the chart is sufficient to see how useless is classification according to allotment for a study of the differentiation of the peasantry.

** Very curious in Mr. Karyshev’s book on the subject of rentings is the Conclusion (Chapter VI). After all his assertions about the absence of an industrial character in peasant renting, assertions devoid of foundation and contradicting Zemstvo statistics, Mr. Karyshev advances a “theory of rent” (borrowed from W. Roscher, etc.), in other words, serves up with a scientific sauce the desiderata of West-European capitalist farmers: “long leases” (“what is needed is … ‘efficient’ use of the land by … the peasant,” p. 371) and moderate rents that leave the tenant enough to cover wages, interest and the repayment of invested capital, and employer’s profit (373). And Mr. Karyshev is not in the least disturbed by the fact that this sort of theory” appears side by side with the usual Narodnik recipe: “avert” (398). In order to “avert” capitalist farming Mr. Karyshev advances the “theory” of capitalist farming! This sort of “conclusion” naturally crowned the basic contradiction in the book by Mr. Karyshev who, on the one hand, shares all the Narodnik prejudices and wholeheartedly sympathises with such classical theoreticians of the petty bourgeoisie as Sismondi (see Karyshev, Perpetual Hereditary Land-Hire on the European Continent, Moscow, 1885), but on the other hand, cannot avoid the admission that land renting gives an “impetus” (p. 396) to the differentiation of the peasantry, that the “better-off strata” oust the poorer, and that the development of agrarian relations leads precisely to agricultural wage-labour (p. 397)

* Even this figure (about ⅕ of all the establishments) is, of course, an exaggeration, for the category of non-sowing and horseless and one-horse peasants lumps agricultural labourers, unskilled labourers, etc., together with non-cultivators (shopkeepers, artisans, etc.).

* It is quite possible that in the central black-earth gubernias, like Orel, Voronezh and others, the differentiation of the peasantry is indeed much feebler, because of land-poverty, heavy taxation and the wide prevalence of the labour-service system: all these are circumstances retarding differentiation.

* 5 uyezds in Saratov Gubernia, 5 in Samara Gubernia, and 1 in Bessarabia Gubernia.

* The way the distribution of horses among the peasantry has been changing latterly can be judged from the following data of the army-horse census of 1893-1894 (Statistics of the Russian Empire, XXXVII). In 38 gubernias of European Russia there were in 1893-1894: 8,288,987 peasant households; of these, horseless were 2,641,754, or 31.9%; one-horse—31.4%; 2-horse—20.2%; 3-horse—8.7%; 4-horse and over—7.8%. The horses owned by the peasants numbered 11,560,358, of which 22.5% belonged to the one-horse peasants, 28.9% to the 2-horse; 18.8% to the 3-horse and 29.8% to those with many horses. Thus, 16.5% of the peasants, the well-to-do, owned 48.6% of the total number of horses.

* It is quite possible, for example, that in dairy-farming districts it would be much more correct to classify according to the number of cows held and not according to the number of horses. Where market gardening prevails, neither index can be satisfactory, etc.

* A big defect of these data is, firstly, lack of classification according to different indices; secondly, lack of text giving that information about the farms selected which could not be included in the tables (that sort of text is supplied, for example, to the data on the budgets for Ostrogozhsk Uyezd). Thirdly, extremely inadequate treatment of data on all non-agricultural occupations and all sorts of “employments” (all “industries” are given only 4 columns, whereas the description of clothing and footwear alone takes up 152 columns!).

* “Averages” of exclusively this kind are used, for example, by Mr. Shcherbina both in the publications of the Voronezh Zemstvo and in his article on peasant budgets in the book The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, etc.

** This applies, for example, to the budget data for Moscow Gubernia (Returns, Vols. VI and VII), Vladimir Gubernia (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia), Ostrogozhsk Uyezd of Voronezh Gubernia (Returns, Vol. II, Part 2), and particularly to the budgets cited in the Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry⁵⁵ (of Vyatka, Kherson, Nizhni-Novgorod, Perm and other gubernias). The budgets given by Messrs. Karpov and Manokhin in the Transactions and also by Mr. P. Semyonov (in Material for a Study of the Village Community, St. Petersburg, 1880) and by Mr. Osadchy (Shcherbani Volost, Elisavetgrad Uyezd, Kherson Gubernia) compare favourably with the others in that they describe the various groups of peasants.

* The Returns separate all “expenditure on personal and farm needs other than food” from expenditure on the maintenance of animals, and under the first heading, expenditures on lighting and on rent, for example, are put side by side. This is obviously wrong. We have separated personal from farm (“productive”) consumption, and under the latter heading we have included expenditure on tar, rope, horse-shoeing, building repairs, implements, harness; on labourers and job workers, on herdsman, on the renting of land, and on the maintenance of animals and poultry.

* The item “balances from previous years” consists of grain (in kind) and cash; here the total figures are given, as we are dealing with gross expenditure and income, in cash and kind.

The four columns relating to “industries” are copied from the Returns, which give no other information about the “industries.” Let us observe that in group e, carting should obviously be put under the heading of industrial establishments; it furnishes two members of this group with 250 rubles income each, and one of them employs a farm labourer.

* An apparent exception is provided by category e with its big deficit (41 rubles), which, however, is covered by a loan. This is explained by the fact that in three of the households (out of the 5 in this category) they celebrated weddings that cost 200 rubles. (The total deficit of these 5 households amounted to 206 rubles 90 kopeks.) As a result, this group’s expenditure on personal consumption, other than food, rose to the very high figure of 10 rubles 41 kopeks per person of both sexes, whereas in no other group, not excepting the rich group (f), does this expenditure amount to even 6 rubles. Consequently, this deficit is quite opposite in character to that of the poor peasants. It is a deficit resulting not from inability to satisfy minimum requirements, but from increased requirements out of proportion to the income of the given year.

* Expenditure on the maintenance of cattle is almost entirely in kind: of a total expenditure of 6,316.21 rubles on this item by the 66 households, only 1,535.2 rubles were spent in cash, and of this sum 1,102.5 rubles were spent by one farmer-entrepreneur who kept 20 horses, evidently for industrial use.

** This error was particularly often met with in the debates (of 1897) on the significance of low grain prices.⁵⁷

* See V. Orlov, Peasant Farming, Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. IV, Pt. I.—Trirogov, The Village Community and the Poll Tax.—Keussler, Zur Geschichte und Kritik des bäuerlichen Gemeindebesitzes in Russland (A Contribution to the History and Critique of Peasant Communal Landownership in Russia.—Ed.).— V. V., The Peasant Community (Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigation, Vol. I).

* It goes without saying that still greater harm will be done to the peasant poor by Stolypin’s (November 1906) breaking up of the village community. This is the Russian “enrichissez-vous” (“enrich yourselves”.—Ed.). Black Hundreds—rich peasants! Loot all you can, so long as you bolster up tottering absolutism! (Note to 2nd edition.)

* German agricultural literature includes several monographs by Drechsler containing data on the weight of the cattle owned by farmers of various groups, classified according to amount of land held.⁶⁰ These data show even more strikingly than the figures we have cited from Russian Zemstvo statistics the immeasurably inferior quality of the cattle owned by the small peasants as compared with those owned by the big peasants, particularly by the landlords. I hope to analyse these data for the press in the near future. (Note to 2nd edition.)

** If these budget standards of the value of buildings, implements and animals to be found in the various groups of peasants were applied to the summary data for 49 gubernias of European Russia that were cited above, it would be seen that one-fifth of the peasant households owns a considerably larger quantity of means of production than all the rest of the peasantry.

* Expenditure on the maintenance of livestock is mostly in kind, the rest of the farm expenditure is mostly in money.

** How dear to the heart of such an “enterprising muzhik” must be Mr. Karyshev’s “theory of rent” which advocates long leases, lower rents, compensation for improvements, etc. That is just what he needs.

* Of the 12 horseless peasants not one obtains any income from industrial establishments and undertakings; of the 18 with one horse each, one does; of the 17 with two horses two do; of the 9 with three horses three do; of the 5 with four horses two do; of the 5 owning more than 4 horses four do.

** Under this head we combine the following items in the Returns: beef, mutton, pork and lard. Where other cereals are calculated in terms of rye it is according to the standards in Yanson’s Comparative Statistics adopted by the Nizhni-Novgorod statisticians (see Material for Gorbatov Uyezd. Basis of calculation: percentage of absorbable protein).⁶²

* The extent to which the meat consumption of the village peasants is smaller than that of town dwellers is seen from even the following fragmentary data. In Moscow in 1900, cattle weighing about 4 million poods and of a total value of 18,986,714 rubles 59 kopeks were slaughtered in the city abattoirs (Moskovskiye Vedomosti [Moscow Recorder], 1901, No. 55). This works out per head, both sexes, at about 4 poods or nearly 18 rubles per annum. (Note to 2nd edition.)

*** Of the money expenditure on agricultural produce first place goes to the purchase of rye, mainly by the poor, then the purchase of vegetables Expenditure on vegetables is valued at 85 kopeks per head of both sexes (ranging from 56 kopeks in group b to 1 ruble 31 kopeks in group e), including 47 kopeks in money. This interesting fact shows us that even among the rural population, not to speak of the urban, a market is created for the produce of one of the forms of commercial agriculture, namely, market gardening. Expenditure on vegetable oil is ⅔ in kind; that is to say, in this sphere domestic production and primitive handicraft still prevail.

* This fact, which at first sight seems a paradox, is actually fully in keeping with the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, which are met with at every step in real life. That is why close observers of rural life have been able to note this fact quite independently of theory. “For the development of his activities,” says Engelhardt about the kulak, the huckster, etc., “it is important that the peasants should be poor… that the peasants should receive much money” (Letters from the Countryside, p. 493). Engelhardt’s sympathy for a substantial (sic!!) agricultural life” (ibid.) did not prevent him at times from disclosing the most profound contradictions within the celebrated village community.

* Agricultural and Statistical Information Obtained from Farmers. Published by the Department of Agriculture. Vol. V, St. Petersburg, 1892, S. A. Korolenko, Hired Labour on Farms, etc.

* The difference between the conditions in Orel and Voronezh gubernias is slight, and, as we shall see, the data given are of the usual kind. We do not take the data in the above-mentioned work of S. A. Korolenko (see the juxtaposition of those data in Mr. Maress’s article in The Influence of Harvests, etc., I, 11), for even the author himself admits that Messrs. the landowners from whom these data were obtained sometimes “were carried away”….

* The Narodniks will probably draw from our comparison between the standard of living of farm labourers and that of the bottom group of the peasantry, the conclusion that we “stand for” dispossessing the peasantry of the land, etc. Such a conclusion will be a wrong one. All that follows from what has been said is that we “stand for” abolishing all restrictions on the peasants’ right freely to dispose of their land, to give up their allotments, and to leave the village community. Only the peasant himself can be the judge of whether it is more advantageous to be a farm labourer with an allotment or without one. Hence such restrictions can on no account and in no way be justified. The defence of these restrictions by the Narodniks, on the other hand, turns the latter into servants of the interests of our agrarians.

* Extensively.—Ed.

* Cf. Das Kapital, I², S. 527.⁶⁵

** Agricultural Survey of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia for 1892.

* In the Russian translation (p. 651 and foll.) this term is given as “trudovaya renta” (“trudovaya” is the adjectival form of “trud”—labour.—Ed.). We think that our translation (“otrabotochnaya renta” —from “otrabotat,” to work off, to pay off by labour.—Ed.) is more correct, for the Russian language contains the specific term “otrabotki” (labour-service) which means precisely the work of the dependent peasant for the landowner.⁶⁷

* A strict distinction must be drawn between money rent and capitalist ground-rent the latter presupposes the existence in agriculture of capitalists and wage-workers; the former the existence of dependent peasants. Capitalist rent is that part of surplus-value which remains after the deduction of the employer’s profit, whereas money rent is the price of the entire surplus product paid by the peasant to the landowner. An example of money rent in Russia is the quitrent paid by the peasant to the landlord. Undoubtedly, the taxes which our peasants now have to pay represent, in part, money rent. Sometimes peasant renting of land also approximates to the paying of money rent; that is when the high rent the peasant has to pay for the land leaves him no more than a meagre wage.

* Let us note that the employment of wage-labour is not an essential feature of the concept “petty bourgeoisie.” This concept covers all independent production for the market, where the social system of economy contains the contradictions described by us above (Sec. 2), particularly where the mass of producers are transformed into wage-workers.

** To prove that it is correct to assign the indigent peasants to the class of allotment-holding wage-workers, one must show not only how, and what sort of, peasants sell labour-power, but also how and what sort of, employers buy labour-power. This will be shown in subsequent chapters.

* Prof. Conrad considers the criterion for the real peasant in Germany to be ownership of a pair of draught animals (Gespannbauerngüter), see Landownership and Agriculture (Moscow, 1896, pp. 84-85). For Russia the criterion should rather be put higher. In defining the concept “peasant,” what Conrad takes is the percentage of persons or households engaged in “hired labour” or “subsidiary industries” generally (ibid.),—Prof Stebut, who cannot be denied authority on questions of fact, wrote in 1882: “Since the fall of serfdom, the peasant with his small economic unit, engaged exclusively in growing grain, that is to say, principally in the central black-earth belt of Russia, has in the majority of cases become an artisan, a farm labourer or a day labourer, for whom agriculture is only a subsidiary occupation” (“Articles on Russian Agriculture, Its Defects and the Measures for Its Improvement,” Moscow, 1883, p. 11) Evidently the artisans here also include wage-workers in industry (building, etc.) However incorrect this use of terms, it is very widespread in our literature, even in specifically economic literature.

* Lord of the manor.—Ed.

** Let us quote examples of the various European forms of wage-labour in agriculture from the Handwört der Staatswiss. (Land-ownership and Agriculture, Moscow, 1896). “The peasants’ holding,” says J. Conrad, “must be distinguished from the parcel, from the patch of the ‘landless peasant’ or the ‘market gardener,’ the owner of which is obliged to seek additionally outside occupation and employment” (pp. 83-84). “In France, according to the 1881 census, 18 million persons, i.e., somewhat less than half the population, obtained their livelihood in agriculture about 9 million owners of land, 5 million tenant farmers and half-croppers, 4 million day labourers and owners of small plots, or tenants obtaining their livelihood mainly by wage-labour…. It is assumed that at least 75% of the agricultural labourers in France have their own land” (p. 233, Goltz). In Germany, the rural workers include the following categories who possess land: 1) cottars, cottagers, gardeners [something like our gift-land peasants]; 2) contract day labourers; they possess land, and hire themselves out for a definite part of the year [cf. our “three-dayers”].⁷¹ “Contract day labourers constitute the bulk of the agricultural labourers in those parts of Germany where big landed property predominates” (p. 236); 3) agricultural labourers who do their farming on rented land (p. 237).

* Only this fact that a home market is created by the differentiation of the peasantry can explain, for example, the enormous growth of the home market for cotton goods, the manufacture of which has grown so rapidly in the post-Reform period along with the wholesale ruin of the peasantry. Mr. N. —on, who illustrates his theories about the home market with this very example of our textile industry, was totally unable to explain the existence of this contradictory phenomenon.

* The sole exception is I. Hourwich’s splendid work The Economics of the Russian Village, New York, 1892. Russ. trans. «Экономическое положение русской деревни.» Moscow, 1896. One must marvel at the skill with which Mr. Hourwich processed the Zemstvo statistical returns, which furnish no combined tables of groups of peasants according to economic strength.

* Restriction of migration thus has an enormously retarding effect upon the differentiation of the peasantry.

** See also Mr. Preemak’s Material in Figures for a Study of Migration to Siberia. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Mr. V. V. touched upon this question on the very first page of The Destiny of Capitalism, but neither in this nor in any other of his works did he attempt to examine the facts about the relation between merchant’s and industrial capital in Russia. Mr. N. —on, although claiming to be a faithful follower of Marx’s theory, preferred, however, to replace the precise and clear category “merchant’s capital” by the vague and diffuse term of his own coinage—“capital-isation” or “the capitalisation of income”; and under cover of this hazy term successfully evaded, positively evaded, this question. The predecessor of capitalist production in Russia, according to him, is not merchant’s capital, but… “people’s production.”⁷⁸

* Incidentally. In speaking of Mr. V. V.’s The Destiny of Capitalism, and particularly of Chapter VI, from which the quotation is taken, one cannot but indicate that it contains very good and quite fair pages. These are the pages where the author does not deal with the “destiny of capitalism” and not even with capitalism at all, but with the methods of exacting taxes. It is characteristic that Mr. V. V. does not notice the inseparable connection between these methods and the survivals of corvée economy, which latter (as we shall see below) he is capable of idealising!

Chapter III: The Landowners’ Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy

* An extremely vivid description of this system of economy is given by A. Engelhardt in his Letters from the Countryside (St. Petersburg 1885, pp. 556-557). The author quite rightly points out that feudal economy was a definite, regular and complete system, the director of which was the landlord, who allotted land to the peasants and assigned them to various jobs.

** In opposing the view of Henry George, who said that the expropriation of the mass of the population is the great and universal cause of poverty and oppression, Engels wrote in 1887: “This is not quite correct historically…. In the Middle Ages, it was not the expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. The peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein, and made liable to tribute to the lord in labour and in produce” (The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, New York, 1887, Preface, p. III).⁸⁰

* We are now replacing the term “corvée” by the term “labour-service” since the latter expression corresponds in greater measure to post-Reform relations and is by now generally accepted in our literature.

** Here is a particularly striking example: “In the south of Yelets Uyezd (Orel Gubernia),” writes a correspondent of the Department of Agriculture, “on the big landlords’ farms, side by side with cultivation with the aid of annual labourers, a considerable part of the land is tilled by peasants in return for land leased to them. The exserfs continue to rent land from their former landlords, and in return till their land Such villages continue to bear the name of ‘corvée’ of such-and-such a landlord” (S. A. Korolenko, Hired Labour, etc., p. 118) Here is one more example: “On my farm,” writes another landlord, “all the work is done by my former peasants (8 villages with approximately 600 persons); in return for this they get the use of pastures for their cattle (from 2,000 to 2,500 dess.); except that seasonal workers do the first ploughing and sow with seed drills” (ibid., p. 325. From Kaluga Uyezd).

* “Most of the estates are managed in the following way: part, although a very small part, of the land is cultivated by the owners with their own implements, with the aid of labourers hired by the year” and other “workers, but all the rest of the land is leased to peasants for cultivation either on a half-crop basis” or in return for land, or for money (Hired Labour, ibid., 96)…. “On the majority of estates simultaneous resort is made to nearly all, or at any rate many, forms of hire” (i.e., methods of “providing the farm with man power”). Agriculture and Forestry in Russia published by the Department of Agriculture for the Chicago Exhibition, St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 79.

* Of the 50 gubernias of European Russia the following are excluded: Archangel, Vologda, Olonets, Vyatka, Perm, Orenburg and Astrakhan. In these gubernias the area cultivated in 1883-1887 amounted to 562,000 dess. on private owners’ estates out of a total of 16,472,000 dess. cultivated on such land in the whole of European Russia. — Group I includes the following: the 3 Baltic gubernias, the 4 Western (Kovno, Vilna, Grodno and Minsk), the 3 South-Western (Kiev, Volhynia, Podolsk), the 5 Southern (Kherson, Taurida, Bessarabia, Ekaterinoslav, Don), and 1 South-Eastern (Saratov); then follow the St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yaroslavl gubernias. Group II includes: Vitebsk, Mogilev, Smolensk, Kaluga, Voronezh, Poltava and Kharkov. Group III includes the rest of the gubernias.—To be more exact one should deduct from the total area cultivated on private owners’ land the gown area belonging to tenants, but no such statistics are available. We would add that such a correction would hardly alter our conclusion as to the predominance of the capitalist system, since a large part of the landowners’ fields in the black-earth belt is rented, and the labour-service system predominates in the gubernias of this belt.

* Statistical Returns for Ryazan Gubernia.

** Engelhardt, loc. cit.

*** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. V, Pt. I, Moscow, 1879, pp, 186-189. We give these references only as an illustration. A mass of similar information is to be found in all the literature on peasant and private-landowner farming.

* It is noteworthy that the enormous variety of forms of labour-service in Russia, and of forms of land renting with all sorts of supplementary payments, etc., are covered in their entirety by the main forms of pre-capitalist relations in agriculture indicated by Marx in Chapter 47, Vol. III of Capital. In the preceding chapter, we have indicated that there are three main forms: 1) labour-rent, 2) rent in kind, and 3) money rent. It is, therefore quite natural that Marx should want specifically Russian data as illustrations for the section dealing with ground-rent.

** According to Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigations (Vol II), of all the land rented by peasants, 76% is paid for in money; 3 to 7% by labour-service, 13 to 17% with part of the product and, finally, 2 to 3% by a combination of methods.

* Cf. examples given in footnote to pp. 194-195. When corvée economy existed, the landlord gave the peasant land so that the peasant might work for him. When land is leased on the labour-service basis, the economic aspect of the matter is obviously the same.

* The summary of the latest data on land renting (Mr. Karyshev in the book: The Influence of Harvests, etc., Vol 1) has fully confirmed the fact that it is only want that compels peasants to rent land on a half-crop or a labour-service basis, and that the well-to-do peasants prefer to rent land for money (pp. 317-320), as rent in kind is everywhere incomparably more costly for the peasant than in cash (pp. 342-346). All these facts, however, have not prevented Mr. Karyshev from presenting the situation as though “the poor peasant … is better able to satisfy his need for food by slightly extending his crop area to other people’s land on a half-crop basis” (321). Such are the fantastic ideas to which a bias in favour of “natural economy” can lead one! It has been proved that the payment of rent in kind is more costly than payment in cash, that it constitutes a sort of truck-system in agriculture, that the peasant is completely ruined and turned into a farm labourer—and yet our economist talks of improving “food”! Half-crop payment for rent, if you please, “helps … the needy section of the rural population to obtain” land by renting it (320). Our economist here calls it “help” to obtain land on the worst conditions, on the condition that the peasant is turned into a farm labourer. The question arises: what is the difference between the Russian Narodniks and the Russian agrarians, who always have been and always are ready to render the “needy section of the rural population” this kind of “help”? By the way, here is an interesting example. In Khotin Uyezd, Bessarabia Gubernia, the average daily earnings of a half-cropper are estimated at 60 kopeks, and a day labourer in the summer at 35 to 50 kopeks. “It seems that the earnings of a half-cropper are, after all, higher than the wages of a farm labourer” (344; Mr. Karyshev’s italics). This “after all” is very characteristic. But, unlike the farm labourer, the half-cropper has his farm expenses, has he not? He has to have a horse and harness, has he not? Why was no account taken of these expenses? Whereas the average daily wage in the summer in Bessarabia Gubernia is 40 to 77 kopeks (1883-1887 and 1888-1892), the average wage of a labourer with horse and harness is 124 to 180 kopeks (1883-1887 and 1888-1892). Does it not rather “seem” that the farm labourer “after all” earns more than the half-cropper? The average daily wage of a labourer working without a horse of his own (average for a whole year) is estimated at 67 kopeks for Bessarabia Gubernia in the period 1882-1891 (ibid., 178).

* After this, what can one do but describe as reactionary the criticism of capitalism made, for instance, by a Narodnik like Prince Vasilchikov? The very word “hired,” he exclaims pathetically, is contradictory, for hire presupposes non-independence, and non-independence rules out “freedom.” This Narodnik-minded landlord forgets, of course, that capitalism substitutes free non-independence for bonded non-independence.

* An expression employed by Mr. Karyshev, loc. cit. It is a pity Mr. Karyshev did not draw the conclusion that half-crop renting “helps” the survival of “semi-free” labour!

* The horse census of 1893-1894 in 48 gubernias revealed a drop of 9.6% in the number of horses possessed by all horse owners, and a drop of 28,321 in the number of horse owners. In Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Ryazan, Orel, Tula and Nizhni-Novgorod gubernias, the decline in the number of horses between 1888 and 1893 was 21.2%. In seven other gubernias of the black-earth belt the decline between 1891 and 1893 was 17%. In 38 gubernias of European Russia in 1888-1891 there were 7,922 260 peasant households, of which 5,736,436 owned horses; in 1893-1894, there were in these gubernias 8,288,987 households, of which 5,647,233 owned horses. Consequently, the number of horse-owning households dropped by 89,000, while the number of horseless increased by 456,000 The percentage of horseless households rose from 27.6% to 31.9% (Statistics of the Russian Empire, XXXVII. St. Petersburg, 1896.) Above we have shown that in 48 gubernias of European Russia the number of horseless households rose from 2.8 million in 1888-1891 to 3.2 million in 1896-1900 — i.e., from 27.3% to 29.2%. In four southern gubernias (Bessarabia, Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, Kherson), the number of horseless households rose from 305,800 in 1896 to 341,600 in 1904, i.e., from 34.7% to 36.4%. (Note to 2nd edition.)

** Cf. also S. A. Korolenko, Hired Labour, etc., pp. 46-47, where, on the basis of the horse censuses of 1882 and 1888, examples are cited of how the drop in the number of horses possessed by peasants is accompanied by an increase in the number of horses possessed by private landowners.

* Here is a particularly striking example. Zemstvo statisticians explain the comparative incidence of money renting and renting in kind in various parts of Bakhmut Uyezd, Ekaterinoslav Gubernia, in the following way:

“Money renting is most widespread … in the coal and salt-mining districts, and least widespread in the steppe and purely agricultural area The peasants, in general, are not eager to go out to work for others, and are particularly reluctant to accept irksome and badly-paid work on private estates. Work in the coal mines, in ore-mining and in metallurgy generally, is arduous and injurious to the worker’s health, but, generally speaking, it is better paid, and attracts the worker with the prospect of monthly or weekly wages in cash, as he does not usually get money when he works on the landlord’s estate, for the reason that there he is either working in payment of the ‘bit’ of land he has rented, or of straw or grain he has borrowed, or has managed to get his pay in advance to cover his ordinary needs, etc.

“All this induces the worker to avoid working on estates, and he does avoid doing so when there is an opportunity of earning money in some place other than the landlord’s ‘estate.’ And this opportunity occurs mostly where there are many mines, at which the workers are paid ‘good’ money. With the ‘pence’ the peasant earns in the mines, he can rent land, without having to pledge himself to work on an estate, and in this way renting for money establishes its sway” (quoted from Results of Zemstvo Statistical Investigations, Vol. II, p. 265). In the steppe, non-industrial divisions of the uyezd, on the other hand, land renting on a skopshchina and a labour-service basis establishes its sway.

Thus, to escape labour-service the peasant is ready to flee even to the mines! Prompt payment in cash, the impersonal form of hire and regular working hours “attract” the worker to such an extent that he even prefers the mines underground to agriculture, the agriculture about which our Narodniks wax so idyllic. The whole point is that the peasant knows from bitter experience the real value of the labour-service idealised by the agrarians and the Narodniks, and he knows how much better are purely capitalist relations.

* Cf. Volgin, op. cit., pp. 280-281.

** “It is said that the spread of labour-service renting in place of money renting … is a retrogressive fact. But do we say that it is desirable or beneficial? We … have never asserted that it is progressive,” stated Mr. Chuprov on behalf of all the authors of The Influence of Harvests, etc. (see Verbatim Report of the Debates in the F. E. S. of March 1 and 2, 1897,⁸⁸ p. 38) This statement is untrue even formally, for Mr. Karyshev (see above) described labour-service as “help” to the rural population. And in substance this statement absolutely contradicts the actual content of all the Narodnik theories with their idealisation of labour-service. It is to the great credit of Messrs. T.-Baranovsky and Struve that they have correctly presented the question (1897) of the significance of low grain prices: the criterion for appraising them must be whether such prices promote the elimination of labour-service by capitalism or not. Such a question is obviously one of fact, and in answering it we differ somewhat from the writers mentioned. On the basis of the data given in the text (see particularly §VII of this chapter and also Chapter IV), we consider it possible and even probable that the period of low grain prices will be marked by a no less, if not more, rapid elimination of labour-service by capitalism than was the preceding historical period of high grain prices.

* This fact that the competition of cheap grain serves as the motive for change in technique and, consequently, for replacing labour-service by free hire, deserves special attention. The competition of grain from the steppe regions was also felt even in the years of high grain prices; the period of low prices, however, lends this competition particular force.

* See Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1883 (published for 1882 exhibition), article by V. Chernyayev: “Agricultural Machinery Production.”—Ditto, Vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1886, in group IX.—Agriculture and Forestry in Russia (St. Petersburg, 1893, published for Chicago Exhibition), article by V. Chernyayev: “Agricultural Implements and Machines.”—Productive Forces of Russia (St. Petersburg, 1896, published for 1896 exhibition), article by Mr. Lenin: “Agricultural Implements and Machines” (sect. 1).—Vestnik Finansov [Financial Messenger], 1896, No. 51 and 1897 No. 21.—V. Raspopin, article cited. Only the last-mentioned article puts the question on a political-economic basis; all the previous ones were written by agricultural experts.

* To make possible a judgement of the way the situation has changed in recent years, we quote data from the Yearbook of Russia (published by Central Statistical Committee, St. Petersburg, 1906), for 1900-1903. The value of the output of agricultural machinery in the Empire is estimated at 12,058,000 rubles, and of imports in 1902 at 15,240,000 rubles, and in 1903 at 20,615,000 rubles. (Note to 2nd edition)

* In the Vestnik Finansov, No. 21, for 1897, comparative data are given for 1888-1894, but their source is not given specifically.

** The total number of workshops engaged in the manufacture and repair of agricultural implements was given for 1864 as 64; for 1871 as 112; for 1874 as 203; for 1879 as 340; for 1885 as 435; for 1892 as 400; and for 1895 as approximately 400 (Agriculture and Forestry in Russia, p. 358, and Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 51). The Collections, on the other hand, estimated that in 1888-1894 there were only from 157 to 217 factories of this kind (average of 183 for the 7 years). Here is an example illustrating the ratio of “factory” production of agricultural machinery to “handicraft” production: it was estimated that in Perm Gubernia in 1894 there were only 4 “factories,” with a combined output of 28,000 rubles, whereas for this branch of industry the 1894-95 census showed 94 “handicraft establishments,” with a combined output of 50,000 rubles, and what is more, the number of “handicraft” establishments included such as employed 6 wage-workers and had an output of over 8,000 rubles. (A Sketch of the Condition of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia, Perm, 1896.)

* Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry in Russia. Published by Ministry of State Properties, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1892, p. 202. The production of ploughs by peasants is simultaneously declining, being forced out by factory production.

** Agriculture and Forestry in Russia, p. 360.

* 7.8 to 8.7 inches.—Ed.

** In 1879 about 4,500 threshing machines were produced, and in 1894-1895 about 3,500. The latter figure, however, does not include output by handicraft industry.

* In 1893, for example, “700 peasants gathered with their machines on the Uspensky estate belonging to Falz-Fein (who owned 200,000 dessiatines) and offered their services, but half of them went away empty-handed, as only 350 were engaged” (Shakhovskoi, Agricultural Outside Employments, Moscow, 1896, p. 161). In the other steppe gubernias, however, especially the Transvolga gubernias, reaping machines are not widely used as yet. Still, in recent years these gubernias too have been trying very hard to overtake Novorossia. Thus, the Syzran-Vyazma railway carried agricultural machinery, tractionengines and parts weighing 75,000 poods in 1890, 62,000 poods in 1891, 88,000 poods in 1892, 120,000 poods in 1893, and 212,000 poods in 1894; in other words, in a matter of five years the quantities carried almost trebled. Ukholovo railway station dispatched agricultural machinery of local manufacture to the extent of about 30,000 poods in 1893, and about 82,000 poods in 1894, whereas up to and including 1892 the weight of agricultural machinery dispatched from that station was even less than 10,000 poods per annum. “Ukholovo station dispatches mainly threshing machines produced in the villages of Kanino and Smykovo, and partly in the uyezd town of Sapozhok, Ryazan Gubernia. In the village of Kanino there are three foundries, belonging to Yermakov, Karev and Golikov, mainly engaged on agricultural-machinery parts. The work of finishing and assembling the machines is done in the above-mentioned two villages (Kanino and Smykovo), of which almost the entire populations are thus employed” (Brief Review of the Commercial Activity of the Syzran-Vyazma Railway in 1894, Pt. IV, Kaluga, 1896, pp. 62-63). Interesting in this example are, first, the fact of the enormous increase in production precisely in recent years, which have been years of low grain prices; and, second, the fact of the connection between “factory” and so-called “handicraft” production. The latter is nothing more nor less than an “annex” to the factory.

* Cf. an item from Perekop Uyezd, Taurida Gubernia, in Russkiye Vedomosti [Russian Gazette] of August 19, 1898 (No. 167). “Owing to the widespread use of reaping machines and steam- and horse-threshing machines among our farmers … field-work is proceeding very rapidly. The old-fashioned method of the threshing with ‘rollers’ is a thing of the past…. Every year the Crimean farmer increases his crop area and therefore has willy-nilly to resort to the aid of improved agricultural implements and machines. While it is not possible with rollers to thresh more than 150 to 200 poods of grain per day, a 10-h.p. steam-thresher will do from 2,000 to 2,500 poods, and a horse-thresher from 700 to 800 poods. That is why the demand for agricultural implements, reapers and threshers is growing so rapidly from year to year that the factories and works producing agricultural implements exhaust their stocks, as has happened this year, and are unable to satisfy the farmers’ demand.” The drop in grain prices, which compels farmers to reduce production costs, must be regarded as one of the most important causes of the increased use of improved implements.

* “In the past two years, under the influence of low grain prices and of the need to cheapen agricultural jobs at all costs, reaping machines have also … begun to be so widely employed that depots are unable to meet all requirements on time” (Tezyakov, loc cit., p. 71). The present agricultural crisis is a capitalist crisis. Like all capitalist crises, it ruins capitalist farmers and peasants in one locality, in one country, in one branch of agriculture, and at the same time gives a tremendous impulse to the development of capitalism in another locality, in another country, in other branches of agriculture. It is the failure to understand this fundamental feature of the present crisis and of its economic nature that constitutes the main error in the reasoning on this theme of Messrs. N. —on, Kablukov, etc., etc.

* Mr. V. V. expresses this truth (that the existence of the middle peasant is largely conditioned by the existence of the labour-service system of farming among the landlords) in the following original way: “the owner shares, so to speak, the cost of maintaining his (the peasant’s) implements.” “It appears,” says Mr. Sanin, in a just comment on this, “that it is not the labourer who works for the landowner, but the landowner who works for the labourer.” A. Sanin, Some Remarks on the Theory of People’s Production, in the appendix to the Russian translation of Hourwich’s Economics of the Russian Village, Moscow, 1896, p. 47.

* Cf. also next chapter, §2, where more detailed data are given on the size of capitalist farms in this part of Russia.

** It hardly needs to be explained that in a country with a mass of peasantry, an absolute increase in the number of agricultural wage-workers is quite compatible not only with a relative, but also with an absolute, decrease of the rural population.

* Mr. Ponomaryov expresses himself on this score thus. “Machines, by regulating the harvesting price, in all probability discipline the workers at the same time” (article in Selskoye Khozyaistvo i Lesovodstvo [Agriculture and Forestry], quoted in Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 14). It will be remembered that the “Pindar of the capitalist factory,”⁹⁰ Dr. Andrew Ure, welcomed machines as creating “order” and “discipline” among the workers. Agricultural capitalism in Russia has already managed to create not only “agricultural factories,” but also the “Pindars” of these factories.

* Tezyakov, loc. cit., 72.

* Literally “brow-heater” or “forelock-heater.”—Ed.

* In Chapter VIII, where we examine the movement of wage-workers in Russia as an entire process, we shall describe in greater detail the character and direction of migration from the various localities.

** In his day Chaslavsky pointed out that in the localities in which workers arrived, serfs constituted from 4 to 15% of the total, and in the localities which workers left, from 40 to 60%.

* See table of data for 10 years in Chapter VIII, §IV: the formation of a home market for labour-power.

** There is another way of checking Mr. S. Korolenko’s figure. We learn from the above-quoted books of Messrs. Tezyakov and Kudryavtsev that the number of agricultural workers who in their search for “employments” use the railways at least in part, is about of the total workers (combining the figures of both authors, we get the result that out of 72,635 workers interrogated, only 7,827 travelled at least part of the journey by rail). Yet the number of workers carried in 1891 by the three principal railways in the direction examined does not exceed 200,000 (170,000 to 189,000)—as we are told by Mr. Shakhovskoi (loc. cit., p. 71, according to railway returns). Consequently, the total number of workers leaving for the South must be about 2 million. Incidentally, the very small proportion of agricultural workers who travel by rail points to the incorrectness of Mr. N. —on’s view when he assumed that the passenger traffic on our railways is in the main that of agricultural workers. Mr. N. —on lost sight of the fact that non-agricultural workers receive higher wages and therefore make greater use of the railways and that the migration season of these workers (for example, builders, navvies, stevedores and many others) is also spring and summer.

* By “industries,” as Mr. Rudnev also points out, are meant all sorts ot occupations by peasants except cultivation on their own, purchased or rented land. Undoubtedly, the majority of these “industrialists” are wage-workers in agriculture or in industry. We therefore call the reader’s attention to the closeness of these figures to our estimate of the number of rural proletarians: in Chapter II, it was assumed that the latter constitute about 40% of the peasants. Here we see that “industrialists” constitute 55%, and of these, in all probability, over 40% are engaged in all sorts of hired labour.

* This figure does not include, therefore, the mass of peasants for whom hired agricultural labour is not the chief occupation, but one of equal importance with their own farms.

* Money for the journey is obtained by the sale of property, even household goods, by mortgaging the allotment, by pawning things, clothes, etc., and even by borrowing money, to be repaid in labour, from priests, landlords and local kulaks” (Shakhovskoi, 55).

* Mr. Shakhovskoi refers to another form of the combination of agricultural and non-agricultural labour. Thousands of rafts are floated down the Dnieper to the towns in the lower reaches of the river. On every raft there are from 15 to 20 workers (raftsmen), mostly Byelorussians and Great-Russians from Orel Gubernia. “For the whole voyage they get practically nothing”; they count chiefly on getting employment at reaping and threshing. These hopes are rewarded only in “good” years.

* “At harvest time in a good year the worker triumphs, and it is a hard job to get him to give way. He is offered a price, but he won’t consider it; he keeps repeating: give me what I ask and it’s a go. And that is not because labour is scarce, but because, as the workers say, ‘it’s our turn now.’ ” (Reported by a volost clerk; Shakhovskoi, 125.)

“If the crop is a bad one and the price of labour has dropped, the kulak employer takes advantage of this condition to discharge the worker before the contract has expired, and the worker loses the season either in seeking work in the same district or in tramping the country,” a landlord correspondent confesses (ibid., 132).

** Cf. Fr. Engels, Zur Wohnungsfrage. Vorwort. (F. Engels, The Housing Question. Preface.—Ed.)⁹²

* The same characteristics are displayed by the “Cossacks” of the Kuban Region: “The Cossack resorts to every possible method to force down the price of labour, acting either individually or through the community” (sic! What a pity we lack more detailed information about this latest function of the “community”!): “cutting down the food, increasing the work quota, docking the pay, retaining the workers’ passports, adopting public resolutions prohibiting specific farmers from employing workers, on pain of a fine, at above a definite rate, etc.” (“Migrant Workers in the Kuban Region” by A. Beloborodov, in Severny Vestnik, February 1896, p. 5.)

* Let us observe, in passing, that this operation, threshing, is most frequently done by hired labourers. One can judge, therefore how large must be the number employed on threshing all over Russia!

* Of the six uyezd Zemstvo assemblies in Kherson Gubernia, whose views on the question of organising supervision over workers are reported by Mr. Tezyakov, four declared against this system. The local landowners accused the gubernia Zemstvo board of “turning the workers into absolute idlers,” etc.

* Shakhovskoi, loc. cit., 98 and foll. The author cites even the list of “fees” paid to clerks and village elders for the hire of peasants on advantageous terms.—Tezyakov: loc. cit., 65.—Trirogov The Village Community and the Poll Tax; article entitled “Bondage in the National Economy.”

* Here is another example of the pernicious influence of Narodnik prejudices. Mr. Tezyakov, whose splendid work we have frequently quoted, notes the fact that from Kherson Gubernia many local workers go to that of Taurida, although there is a great shortage of labour in the former gubernia. He calls this “an extremely queer phenomenon”: it means a loss to the employers and a loss to the workers, who abandon jobs at home and risk finding none in Taurida” (33). We, on the contrary, think that Mr. Tezyakov’s statement is extremely queer. Do the workers really not understand what is to their advantage, and have they not the right to seek the most advantageous conditions of employment they can get? (In Taurida Gubernia the wages of agricultural workers are higher than in Kherson Gubernia.) Are we really to think that it is obligatory for the muzhik to live and work where he is registered and “provided with an allotment”?

Chapter IV: The Growth of Commercial Agriculture

* If only for this reason, Mr. N. —on is absolutely wrong in drawing the boldest conclusions from the returns for 8 years of one decade (1871-1878)!

* For the period 1883-1887 we have taken the population of 1885; the increase is taken at 1.2%. The difference between the data of the gubernatorial reports and those of the Department of Agriculture is, as we know, inconsiderable. The figures for 1905 have been arrived at by converting poods into chetverts (about six bushels each.—Ed.)

** Mr. N. —on is quite wrong when he asserts that “there are no grounds whatever for assuming a decline in their number” (the number of persons engaged in agricultural production), “quite the contrary” (Sketches, 33, note). See Chapter VIII, §II.

* The net per-capita potato crop increased between 1864-1866 and 1870-1879 in all areas of European Russia without exception. Between 1870-1879 and 1883-1887 the increase took place in 7 areas out of 11 (the Baltic, Western, Industrial, North-Western, Northern, Southern, Steppe, Lower- and Transvolga areas).

Cf. Agricultural Statistical Information Based on Material Obtained from Farmers, Vol. VII, St. Petersburg, 1897 (published by Ministry of Agriculture).⁹⁴ In 1871, in the 50 gubernias of European Russia, the area under potatoes was 790,000 dess. in 1881—1,375,000 dess. and in 1895—2,154,000 dess, i.e., an increase during the 15 years of 55%. Taking the potato crop in 1841 as 100, we get the following figures for the later years: 1861—120; 1871—162; 1881—297; 1895—530.

* Cf. also Agriculture and Forestry in Russia, pp. 84-88; here a tobacco area is added. The maps drawn by Messrs. D. Semyonov and A. Fortunatov show the areas according to the particular crops predominating in them; for example the rye, oat and flax area, Pskov and Yaroslavl gubernias; the rye, oat and potato area, Grodno and Moscow gubernias, and so on.

* Except for Saratov Gubernia, with 14.3% under wheat, in the rest of the gubernias mentioned we find 37.6% to 57.8% under wheat.

** Sources given above. Areas of gubernias according to Historico-Statistical Survey. The “Lower Volga and Transvolga area is badly constituted, for to the steppe gubernias, with their enormous production of grain, have been added that of Astrakhan (lacking grain for its food requirements) and of Kazan and of Simbirsk, which should more appropriately be included in the central black-earth belt.

* See Mr. V. Mikhailovsky’s material (Novoye Slovo, [New Word], June 1897) on the enormous increase in the population of the outer regions and on the migration to these parts, from 1885 to 1897, of hundreds of thousands of peasants from the interior gubernias. On the increase in the area under crops, see the above-mentioned work by V. Postnikov, the Zemstvo statistical returns for Samara Gubernia; Grigoryev’s Peasant Migration from Ryazan Gubernia. On Ufa Gubernia, see Remezov’s Sketches of the Life of Wild Bashkiria—a vivid description of how the “colonisers” felled timber for shipbuilding and transformed the fields “cleared” of “wild” Bashkirs into “wheat factories.” This is a sample of colonial policy that bears comparison with any of the Germans’ exploits in a place like Africa.

** Cf. Marx, Das Kapital, III, 2, 289,—one of the basic features of the capitalist colony is abundance of free land easily accessible to settlers (the Russian translation of this passage, p. 623, is quite wrong).⁹⁵ Also see III, 2, 210. Russ. trans., p. 553,—the enormous grain surplus in the agricultural colonies is to be explained by the fact that their entire population is at first “almost exclusively engaged in farming, and particularly in producing agricultural mass products,” which are exchanged for industrial products “They [the colonial states] receive through the world market finished products … which they would have to produce themselves under other circumstances.”⁹⁶

* Tezyakov, loc. cit.

** Material for Evaluating the Lands of Kherson Gubernia, Vol. II, Kherson 1886. The number of dessiatines cultivated by each group was determined by multiplying the average area under crops by the number of farms. The number of groups has been reduced.

*** Returns for Novouzensk Uyezd.—All rented land, state, privately-owned and allotment, has been taken. Here is a list of the improved implements owned by the Russian farmstead peasants: 609 iron ploughs, 16 steam threshers, 89 horse-threshers, 110 mowers, 64 horse-drawn rakes, 61 winnowers and 64 reaping machines. The number of employed workers did not include day labourers.

* In other parts of Russia stock farming is of a different kind. For example, in the extreme South and South-East, the most extensive form of stock farming has become established, namely, cattle-fattening for beef. Further north, horned cattle are used as draught animals. Lastly, in the central black-earth belt cattle are used as “manure-making machines.” V. Kovalevsky and I. Levitsky, Statistical Sketch of Dairy Farming in the Northern and Central Belts of European Russia (St. Petersburg, 1879). The authors of this work, like the majority of agricultural experts, display very little interest in the social-economic aspect of the matter or understanding of this aspect It is quite wrong, for example, to draw from the fact of farms becoming more profitable the direct conclusion that they ensure “the people’s well-being and nutriment” (p. 2).

** W. Roscher, Economics of Agriculture, 7th edition, Stuttgart 1873, pp. 563-564.—Ed.

* Data from Military Statistical Abstract and Mr. Orlov’s Directory (1st and 3rd eds.). Concerning these sources, see Chapter VII. Let us merely observe that the figures quoted minimise the actual rapidity of development, since the term “factory” or “works” was employed in a narrower sense in 1879 than in 1866; and in 1890 in a still narrower sense than in 1879. The 3rd ed of the Directory contains information on the date of establishment of 230 factories; it appears that only 26 were established before 1870, 68 in the 70s, 122 in the 80s and 14 in 1890. This speaks of a rapid increase in production. As for the latest List of Factories and Works (St. Petersburg, 1897), utter chaos reigns there: cheese making is registered for two or three gubernias and for the rest omitted altogether.

* Nedelya [Week], 1896, No. 13. Dairy farming is so profitable that urban traders have rushed into the business and, incidentally, have introduced such methods as the settlement of accounts in goods. One local landowner, who has a large factory, organised an artel “with prompt cash payment for milk” in order to release the peasants from bondage to buyers-up and to “capture new markets.” A characteristic example, showing the real significance of artels and of the celebrated “organisation of sales,” namely, “emancipation” from merchant’s capital through the development of industrial capital.

* Until 1882 there were hardly any separators in Russia. From 1886 onward they spread so rapidly as to displace the old method utterly. In the 1890s even butter-extractor separators appeared.

* This problem also has been raised by Mr. Raspopin (perhaps for the first time in our literature) from the correct, theoretically sound point of view. At the very outset he observes that “the enhancement of the productivity of stock farming—in particular, the development of dairy farming—is proceeding in this country along capitalist lines and serves as one of the most important indices of the penetration of capital into agriculture.

** Dr. Zhbankov says in his Sanitary Investigation of Factories and Works of Smolensk Gubernia (Smolensk, 1894, Vol. I, p. 7) that “the number of workers engaged in cheese making proper … is very inconsiderable…. There are far more auxiliary workers, needed both for cheese making and for agriculture; these are herdsmen, milkmaids, etc.; in all the [cheese] factories these workers outnumber the cheese makers proper, two, three and even four times over.” Let us note in passing that according to Dr. Zhbankov’s description, the conditions of labour here are very insanitary, and the working day is excessively long (16 to 17 hours), etc. Thus, in the case of this area of commercial agriculture, too, the traditional notion of the idyllic occupation of the agriculturist is a false one.

* The market for commercial stock farming is created chiefly by the growth of the industrial population, with which we shall deal in detail later on (Chapter VIII, §II). As regards foreign trade, let us confine ourselves to the following remarks: cheese exports in the early part of the post-Reform period were much below imports; but in the 90s they almost equalled them (for the 4 years 1891-1894, the annual average imports amounted to 41,800 poods, and exports to 40,600 poods; in the five years 1886-1890, exports even exceeded imports). The exports of cow and ewe butter have always greatly exceeded imports; these exports are rapidly increasing: in 1866-1870 the average annual exports amounted to 190,000 poods and in 1891-1894 to 370,000 poods (Productive Forces, III, 37).

* Group I (the area of capitalist grain farming) consists of 8 gubernias: Bessarabia, Kherson, Taurida, Ekaterinoslav, Don, Samara, Saratov and Orenburg. Group II (the area where capitalism is least developed) consists of 12 gubernias: Kazan, Simbirsk, Penza, Tambov, Ryazan, Tula, Orel, Kursk, Voronezh, Kharkov, Poltava and Chernigov. Group III (the area of capitalist dairy farming and industrial capitalism) consists of 10 gubernias: Moscow, Tver, Kaluga, Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Nizhni-Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Pskov. The figures showing wages are average gubernia figures. Source: Department of Agriculture publication Hired Labour, etc.

* A similar conclusion is drawn by Mr. Rudnev: “In those localities where the work of labourers hired by the year is given a relatively high valuation the wages of the summer worker approximate more closely to half the yearly pay. Hence, on the contrary, in the western gubernias, and in nearly all the densely-populated central black-earth gubernias, the worker’s labour in the summer is given a very low valuation” (loc. cit., 455).

* Here are two descriptions of the living standard and living conditions of the Russian peasant in general. M. Y. Saltykov, in Petty Things of Life, writes about the “enterprising muzhik” as follows: “The muzhik needs everything, but what he needs most of all … is the ability to exhaust himself, not to stint his own labour…. The enterprising muzhik simply expires at it” (work). “His wife and grown up children, too, all toil worse than galley-slaves.”

V. Veresayev, in a story entitled “Lizar” (Severny Kurier [Northern Courier], 1899, No. 1), tells the story of a muzhik in the Pskov Gubernia named Lizar, who advocates the use of drops, etc., “to prevent an increase.” “Subsequently,” observes the author, “I heard from many Zemstvo doctors, and particularly from midwives, that they frequently have similar requests from village husbands and wives.” “Moving in a certain direction, life has tried all roads and at last has reached a blind alley. There is no escape from it. And so a new solution of the problem is naturally arising and increasingly maturing.”

The position of the peasant in capitalist society is indeed hopeless, and in Russia with its village communities, as in France with its smallholders, leads “naturally” not to an unnatural … solution of the problem,” of course, but to an unnatural means of postponing the doom of small economy. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Zemstvo statistics taken from Mr. Blagoveshchensky’s Combined Returns.⁹⁹ About 14,000 households in these 18 uyezds are not classified according to the number of cows owned: the total is not 289,079 households, but 303,262. Mr. Blagoveshchensky cites similar data for two other uyezds in the black-earth gubernias, but these uyezds are evidently not typical. In 11 uyezds of Tver Gubernia (Statistical Returns, XIII, 2) the percentage of allotment households owning no cows is not high (9.8), but 21.9% of the households, having 3 and more cows, concentrate in their hands 48.4% of the total number of cows. Horseless households constitute 12.2%; households with 3 and more horses constitute only 5.1% and they own only 13.9% of the total number of horses. Let us note, in passing, that a smaller concentration of horses (as compared with that of cows) is also to be observed in other non-black-earth gubernias.

* These data regarding the opposite groups of peasants should be borne in mind when one meets sweeping statements like the following: “An annual income from dairy stock farming ranging from 20 to 200 rubles per household is, over the enormous area of the northern gubernias, not only a most considerable means of extending and improving stock farming, but has also had the effect of improving field cultivation and even of reducing migration in search of employment, by providing the population with work at home—both in tending cattle and in bringing hitherto neglected land into a properly cultivated condition” (Productive Forces, III, 18). On the whole, migration is not decreasing, but increasing. In some localities, however, the decrease may be due either to the increase in the percentage of well-to-do peasants, or to the development of “work at home,” i.e., work for local rural entrepreneurs.

** Material for Statistics on the Economy in St. Petersburg Gubernia, Vol. V, Pt. II, St. Petersburg, 1887.

* A substantial improvement in the maintenance of cattle is observed only where there has been a development in the production of milk for sale (pp. 219, 224).

** Pp. 39, 65, 136, 150, 154, 167, 170, 177 and others. Our pre-Reform system of taxation retards the progress of agriculture here too. “Owing to the congestion of the farmsteads,” writes a correspondent, “grass cultivation has been introduced all over the volost; the clover, however, is sold to cover tax arrears (91). The taxes in this gubernia are sometimes to high that the peasant who leases his land has himself to pay a sum to the new holder of the allotment.

* Let us note, by the way, that the variety of “industries” of the local peasantry prompted Mr. Bychkov to distinguish two types of industrialists, according to the amount of earnings. It appeared that less than 100 rubles was earned by 3,251 persons (27.4% of the population); their earnings totalled 102,000 rubles, or an average of 31 rubles per person. Over 100 rubles was obtained by 454 (3.8% of the population): their earnings totalled 107,000 rubles, or an average of 236 rubles per person The first group consisted mainly of wage-workers of every kind, the second of traders, hay merchants, timber dealers, etc.

** The “cheese-making artels” of Koprin Volost are mentioned in the Directory of Factories and Works, and the Blandovs are the largest firm in the cheese-making industry: in 1890 they owned 25 factories in six gubernias.

* Here is the characteristic view of Mr. Stary Maslodel [Old Butter Maker]: “Whoever has seen and knows the countryside today and remembers what it was 40 or 50 years ago will be amazed at the difference. In the old villages all the houses were the same both outside and inside; today, however side by side with hovels stand fine houses, side by side with the indigent live the rich, side by side with the downtrodden and despised live those who feast and make merry. In former times one often came across villages in which there was not a single landless peasant; now in every village there are no less than five and sometimes a full dozen. And to tell the truth, butter making is much to blame for this transformation of the villages. In 30 years butter making has enriched many, has beautified their homes; many peasants who supplied milk during the period of development of the butter industry have become prosperous, acquired more cattle, and purchased land on a community or individual basis; but many more have fallen into poverty; landless peasants and beggars have appeared in the villages” (Zhizn [Life], 1899, No. 8 quoted from Severny Krai [Northern Region], 1899, No. 223). (Note to 2nd edition.)

* The average for 1893-1897 was 26,291,000 poods, according to the figures of the Central Statistical Committee. See Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 9, and 1898, No. 6. Formerly the statistics for flax production were very inexact; that is why we have preferred to take approximate estimates based on comparisons of the most varied sources made by experts. The amount of flax produced fluctuates considerably year by year. For that reason Mr. N. —on, for example, who set out to draw the boldest conclusions about the “diminution” of flax production and “the reduction of the area under flax” (Sketches, p. 236 and foll.) from figures for some six years, slipped into the most curious errors (see P. B. Struve’s examination of them in Critical Remarks, p. 233 and foll.). Let us add to what has been said in the text that according to the data cited by Mr. N. —on, the maximum area under flax in the 1880s was 1,372,000 dess. and the weight of gathered fibre 19,245,000 poods, whereas in 1896-1897 the area was 1,617,000-1,669,000 dess., and the weight of gathered fibre 31,713,000-30,139,000 poods.

* The figures are for the exports of flax, flax-combings and tow. See Historico-Statistical Survey, P. Struve, Critical Remarks and Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 26, and 1898, No. 36.

** See N. Strokin, Flax Growing in Pskov Gubernia, St. Petersburg, 1882. The author borrowed these data from the Proceedings of the Commission on Taxation.

* Of 1,399,000 dess. under flax, 745,400 dess. are in the non-black-earth belt, where only 13% belongs to private landowners. In the black-earth belt, of 609,600 dess. under flax 44.4% belongs to private owners (Productive Forces, 1, 36).

** The Military Statistical Abstract in its day pointed to the fact that the “flax sown by the peasants very often really belongs to the bulinyas” (local name for small buyers-up), “while the peasant is merely a labourer on his field” (595). Cf. Historico-Statistical Survey, p. 88.

* Strokin, 12.

** At the present time renting prices of flax land are falling due to the drop in the price of flax, but the area of land under flax, in the Pskov flax area in 1896, for example, has not diminished (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 29).

* Pskov Gubernia is one of the foremost in Russia in the development of the purchase of land by peasants. According to the Combined Statistical Material on the Economic Position of the Rural Population (published by Chancellery of the Committee of Ministers), the lands purchased by peasants amount here to 23% of the total allotment arable, this is the maximum for all the 50 gubernias. It works out at an average of 0.7 dess. of purchased land per head of the male peasant population as of January 1, 1892. In this respect only Novgorod and Taurida gubernias exceed Pskov Gubernia.

** The number of males leaving Pskov Gubernia in search of employment increased, statistics show from 1865-1875 to 1896 nearly fourfold (Industries of the Peasant Population of Pskov Gubernia, Pskov, 1898, p. 3).

* The law of June 4, 1890, laid down the following criteria of agricultural distilling: 1) distilling season, from September 1 to June 1, when no field-work is done; 2) proportion between the quantity of spirits distilled and the number of dessiatines of arable land on the estate. Plants carrying on partly agricultural and partly industrial distilling are called mixed distilleries (cf. Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 25, and 1898, No. 10).

* Sources: Military Statistical Abstract, 427; Productive Forces, IX, 49, and Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 14.

* Cf. Raspopin, loc. cit.,—Historico-Statistical Survey, loc. cit., p. 14. The by-products of distilling (wash) are often used (even by commercial and not only agricultural establishments) in commercial beef-cattle raising. — Cf. Agricultural Statistical Information, Vol. VII, p. 122 and passim.

** The great rapidity with which the use of potatoes for distilling has increased in the central agricultural gubernias can be seen from the following data. In six gubernias: Kursk, Orel, Tula, Ryazan, Tambov and Voronezh, during the period 1864-65 to 1873-74 an average of 407,000 poods of potatoes was distilled per annum; during 1874-75 to 1883-84—7,482,000 poods; during 1884-85 to 1893-94, 20,077,000 poods. For the whole of European Russia the corresponding figures are: 10,633,000 poods, 30,599,000 poods and 69,620,000 poods. The number of distilleries using potatoes in the above gubernias averaged 29 per annum in the period 1867-68 to 1875-76; in the period 1876-77 to 1884-85, 130; and in the period 1885-86 to 1893-94, 163. For the whole of European Russia the corresponding figures are: 739, 979, 1,195 (see Agricultural Statistical Information, Vol. VII).

*** For example, according to the Zemstvo statistical returns for Balakhna Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, the cultivation of one dess. of potatoes requires 77.2 working days, including 59.2 working days of a woman occupied in planting, hoeing, weeding and digging. The greatest increase, therefore, is in the demand for the day labour of local peasant women.

* In 1867 the number of workers in European Russia employed in distilleries was estimated at 52,660 (Military Statistical Abstract. In Chapter VII we shall show that this source tremendously overstates the number of factory workers), and in 1890 at 26,102 (according to Orlov’s Directory). The workers engaged in distilling proper are few in number and, moreover, differ but little from rural workers. “All the workers employed in the village distilleries,” says Dr. Zhbankov, for example, “which, moreover, do not operate regularly, since the workers leave for field-work in the summer, differ very distinctly from regular factory workers they wear peasant clothes, retain their rural habits, and do not acquire the particular polish characteristic of factory workers” (loc. cit., II, 121).

** The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Vol. I.—Military Statistical Abstract.—Historico-Statistical Survey, Vol. II.

*** Historico-Statistical Survey, I.

**** Productive Forces, I, 41.

(*) Vestnik Finansov [Financial Messenger], 1897, No. 27, and 1898, No 36. In European Russia, without the Kingdom of Poland, there was in 1896-1898 an area of 327,000 dess, under sugar-beet.

* Berkovets—360 lbs.—Ed.

** In addition to above sources see Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 32.

*** Taking the average for the period 1890-1894, out of 285,000 dess. under beet in the Empire, 118,000 dess. belonged to refineries and 167,000 dess. to planters (Productive Forces, IX, 44).

**** 1.8 acres.—Ed.

* Medical Chronicle of Kharkov Gubernia.—Ed.

* In European Russia 80,919 workers were employed in 1867 at beet-sugar factories and refineries (The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I. The Military Statistical Abstract overstated the figure here too, giving it as 92,000, evidently counting the same workers twice). The figure for 1890 is 77,875 workers (Orlov’s Directory).

** We take the data given in the Historico-Statistical Survey as being the most uniform and comparable. The Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance (1866, No. 4, April), on the basis of official data of the Department of Commerce and Manufacture, estimated that in 1864 there were in Russia 55 starch-making establishments whose output was valued at 231,000 rubles. The Military Statistical Abstract estimates that in 1866 there were 198 establishments with an output valued at 563,000 rubles, but this undoubtedly included small establishments, not now reckoned as factories. Generally speaking, the statistics of this trade are very unsatisfactory: small factories are some times counted, and at others (much more often) are not. Thus, Orlov’s Directory gives the number of establishments in Yaroslavl Gubernia in 1890 as 25 (the List for 1894-95 gives 20), while according to the Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia (Vol. II, 1896), in Rostov Uyezd alone there were 810 starch and treacle establishments. Hence, the figures given in the text can indicate only the dynamics of the phenomenon, but not the actual development of the industry.

* Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. 1, Moscow, 1882.

** Loc. cit., p. 32. The working day in the peasant workshops is 13 to 14 hours, while in the big works in the same industry (according to Dementyev¹⁰⁰) a 12-hour working day prevails.

* Compare with this statement the general view of V. Orlov on Moscow Gubernia as a whole (Returns, Vol. IV, Pt. 1, p. 14): the prosperous peasants frequently rent the allotments of the peasant poor, and sometimes hold from 5 to 10 rented allotments.

* As a matter of interest, let us mention that both Mr. Prugavin (loc. cit., 107), the author of the description of the Moscow industry (loc. cit., 45), and Mr. V. V. (Essays on Handicraft Industry, 127), have discerned the “artel principle” in the fact that some grating establishments belong to several owners. Our sharp-eyed Narodniks have contrived to observe a special “principle” in the association of rural entrepreneurs, and have failed to see any new social-economic “principles” in the very existence and development of a class of rural entrepreneurs.

** Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance, 1866, no. 4, Orlov’s Directory, 1st and 3rd editions. We do not give figures for the number of establishments because our factory statistics confuse small agricultural oil-pressing establishments with big industrial ones, at times including the former, and at others not including them for different gubernias at different times. In the 1860s, for example, a host of small oil presses were included in the category of “works.”

*** For example, in 1890, 11 works out of 383 had an output valued at 7,170,000 rubles out of 12,232,000 rubles. This victory of the industrial over the rural entrepreneurs is causing profound dissatisfaction among our agrarians (e.g., Mr. S. Korolenko, loc. cit.) and our Narodniks (e.g., Mr. N. —on’s Sketches, pp. 241-242). We do not share their views. The big works will raise the productivity of labour and socialise production. That is one point. Another is that the workers conditions in the big works will probably be better, and not only from the material angle, than at the small agricultural oil presses.

* V. Ilyin, Economic Studies and Essays, St. Petersburg, 1899, pp. 139-140. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry.—Ed.

* Statistical Returns for Biryuch Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia.— The number of industrial establishments counted in the village was 153. According to Mr. Orlov’s Directory for 1890 there were in this village 6 oil presses employing 34 workers, with output valued at 17,000 rubles, and according to the List of Factories and Works for 1894-95 there were 8 oil presses employing 60 workers, with an output valued at 151,000 rubles.

** The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I.—Historico-Statistical Survey, Vol. I.—Productive Forces, IX, 62. The area under tobacco fluctuates considerably from year to year: for example, the average for 1889-1894 was 47,813 dess. (crop—4,180,000 poods), and for 1892-1894 was 52,516 dess. with a crop of 4,878,000 poods. See Returns for Russia, 1896, pp. 208-209.

* Beloborodov, above-mentioned article in Severny Vestnik, 1896, No. 2. Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897, No. 127 (May 10) reported a trial in which 20 working women sued the owner of a tobacco plantation in the Crimea, and stated that “numerous facts were revealed in court, depicting the impossible hard life of the plantation workers.”

* Historico-Statistical Survey, I, p. 2.

** Ibid.

*** For example, in Moscow Gubernia. See S. Korolenko, Hired Labour, etc., p. 262.

**** Ibid., pp. 335, 344, etc.

(*) Productive Forces, IV, 13.

(**) Ibid., p. 31, also Historico-Statistical Survey, p. 31 and foll.

(***) In the 60s imports amounted to nearly 1 million poods; in 1878-1880 to 3.8 million poods; in 1886-1890 to 2.6 million poods; in 1889-1893 to 2 million poods.

(****) Anticipating somewhat, let us note here that in 1863 there were in European Russia 13 towns with populations of 50,000 and over and in 1897 there were 44 (See Chapter VIII, §II).

* See examples of settlements of this type in Chapters VI and VII.

** See references to such villages of the Vyatka, Kostroma, Vladimir, Tver, Moscow, Kaluga, Penza, Nizhni-Novgorod and many other gubernias, to say nothing of Yaroslavl Gubernia, in Historico-Statistical Survey, 1, p. 13 and foll., and in Productive Forces, IV, 38 and foll. Cf. also Zemstvo statistical returns for Semyonov, Nizhni-Novgorod and Balakhna uyezds of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia.

*** Productive Forces, IV, 42.

**** Material for Statistics on the Economy in St. Petersburg Gubernia, Vol. V. Actually there are far more vegetable growers than stated in the text, for most of them have been classed under private-landowner farming, whereas the data cited refer only to peasant farming.

* Productive Forces, IV, 49 and foll. It is interesting to note that different villages specialise in producing particular kinds of vegetables.

** Historico-Statistical Survey, I—Mr. Orlov’s Directory of Factories.—Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry, Vol XIV, article by Mr. Stolpyansky.—Productive Forces, IV, 46 and foll.—Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Vol. 2, Yaroslavl, 1896. A comparison of the data given by Mr. Stolpyansky (1885) and by the Directory (1890) shows a considerable increase in the factory production of canned goods in this area.

*** Thus the publication mentioned has fully confirmed Mr. Volgin’s “doubt” as to whether “the land occupied by vegetable plots is often redivided” (op. cit., 172, footnote).

* Here, too, a characteristic specialisation of agriculture is to be observed: “It is noteworthy that in places where vegetable growing has become the special occupation of part of the peasant population, the others grow hardly any vegetables at all, but buy them at local markets and fairs” (S. Korolenko, loc. cit., 285).

** Productive Forces, IV, 50-51. S. Korolenko, loc. cit., 273.—Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol VII, Pt. 1.—Statistical Returns for Tver Gubernia, Vol. VIII, Pt. 1, Tver Uyezd: the census of 1886-1890 counted here something over 4,426 frames belonging to 174 peasants and 7 private landowners, i.e., an average of about 25 frames per owner. “In peasant farming it (the industry) is a big help, but only for the well-to-do peasants…. If there are more than 20 frames, workers are hired” (p. 167).

*** See data on this industry in appendix to Chapter V, Industry No. 9.

* Mr. N. —on’s term for the Russian peasant.

** Mr. V. Prugavin’s term.

*** Better tilth is required to raise water-melons and this renders the soil more fertile when sown later to cereals.

* Cf. Uspensky, A Village Diary.

** Let us refer, in illustration, to the above-quoted Material on peasant farming in Petersburg Uyezd. The most varied types of petty traffic have here assumed the form of “industries”; summer-letting, boarding, milk-selling, vegetable-selling, berry-selling, “horse employments,” baby-farming, crayfish-catching, fishing, etc. Exactly similar are the industries of the suburban peasants of Tula Uyezd: see article by Mr. Borisov in Vol. IX of Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry.

* “Good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town.” Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 228-229.

* The favourite proposition of the Narodnik economists that “Russian peasant farming is in the majority of cases purely natural economy” is, incidentally, built up by ignoring this fact. (The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, I, 52.) One has but to take “average” figures, which lump together both the rural bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat—and this proposition will pass as proved!

* It is to data of this kind that the authors of the book mentioned in the preceding note confine themselves when they speak of “the peasantry.” They assume that every peasant sows just those cereals that he consumes, that he sows all those types of cereals that he consumes, and that he sows them in just that proportion in which they are consumed. It does not require much effort to “deduce” from such “assumptions” (which contradict the facts and ignore the main feature of the post-Reform period) that natural economy predominates.

In Narodnik literature one may also encounter the following ingenious method of argument: each separate type of commercial agriculture is an “exception”—by comparison with agriculture as a whole. Hence, all commercial agriculture in general, it is averred, must be regarded as an exception, and natural economy must be considered the general rule! In college textbooks on logic, in the section on sophisms, numerous parallels of such lines of reasoning are to be found.

* Misère de la philosophie (Paris, 1896), p. 223; the author contemptuously describes as reactionary jeremiads, the longings of those who thirst for a return to the good old patriarchal life, simple manners, etc., and who condemn the “subjection of the soil to the laws which dominate all other industries.”¹⁰²

We are fully aware that to the Narodniks the whole of the argument given in the text may appear not only unconvincing but positively unintelligible, But it would be too thankless a task to analyse in detail such opinions as, for example, that the purchase-and-sale of the land is an “abnormal” phenomenon (Mr. Chuprov, in the debate on grain prices, p. 39 of the verbatim report), that the inalienability of the peasants’ allotments is an institution that can be defended, that the labour-service system of farming is better, or at all events no worse, than the capitalist system, etc. All that has been said above goes to refute the political and economic arguments advanced by the Narodniks in support of such views.

* The West-European romanticists and Russian Narodniks strongly emphasise in this process the one-sidedness of capitalist agriculture, the instability created by capitalism, and crises—and on this basis deny the progressive character of capitalist advance as compared with pre-capitalist stagnation.

** Accordingly, notwithstanding the difference in the forms of land tenure, one can fully apply to the Russian peasant what Marx said of the small French peasant: “The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France’s bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production (Produktionsfeld), the small holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a Department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Hmb., 1885, S. 98-99.)¹⁰³

* “The need for association, for organisation in capitalist society, has not diminished but, on the contrary, has grown immeasurably. But it is utterly absurd to measure this need of the new society with the old yardstick. This new society is already demanding firstly, that the association shall not be according to locality, social-estate or category; secondly, that its starting-point shall be the difference in status and interests that has been created by capitalism and by the differentiation of the peasantry.” [V. Ilyin, loc. cit., pp. 91-92, footnote. (See present edition, Vol. 2, “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism.”—Ed.)]

** Russian Law.—Ed.

* One of Mr. N. —on’s innumerable plaints and lamentations over the destructive work of capitalism in Russia deserves special attention: “… Neither the strife among the appanage princes nor the Tartar invasion affected the forms of our economic life” (Sketches, p. 284); only capitalism has displayed “contempt for its own historical past” (p. 283). The sacred truth! Capitalism in Russian agriculture is progressive precisely because it has displayed “contempt” for the “age-old”, “time-hallowed” forms of labour-service and bondage, which, indeed, no political storms, the “strife among the appanage princes” and the “Tartar invasion” inclusive, were able to destroy.

* V. V., Essays on Theoretical Economics, p. 108 and foll. N. —on, Sketches, p. 214 and foll. The same ideas are to be found in Mr. Kablukov’s Lectures on Agricultural Economics, Moscow, 1897, p. 55 and foll.

* To make no bald assertion, let us give examples of our private landowner farms whose organisation approximates in the greatest measure to the purely capitalist type. Let us take Orel Gubernia (Zemstvo Statistical Returns for Kromy Uyezd, Vol. IV, Pt. 2, Orel 1892). The estate of Khlyustin, a member of the nobility, covers 1,129 dess., of which 562 are under crops, there are 8 buildings, and various improved implements. Artificial grass cultivation. Stud farm. Stock raising. Marsh drainage by ditch-cutting and other measures (“drainage is mainly done in spare time,” p. 146). The number of workers in summer, 50 to 80 per day, in winter, up to 30. In 1888 there were 81 workers employed, of whom 25 were for the summer. In 1889 there were 19 carpenters employed.—Estate of Count Ribopier: 3,000 dess., 1,293 under crops, 898 leased to peasants. Twelve-crop rotation system. Peat-cutting for manure, extraction of phosphorites. Since 1889 operation of experimental field of 30 dess. Manure carted in winter and spring. Grass cultivation. Proper exploitation of forests (200 to 300 lumbermen employed from October to March). Cattle raising. Dairy farming. In 1888 had 90 employees, of whom 34 were for the summer.—Menshchikov estate in Moscow Gubernia (Returns, Vol. V, Pt. 2), 23,000 dess. Manpower in return for “cut-off” lands, and also hired. Forestry. “In the summer the horses and the permanent workers are busy round the fields; in late autumn and partly in winter they cart potatoes and starch to the drying sheds and starch factory, and also cart timber from the woods to the … station; thanks to all this, the work is spread fairly evenly now over the whole year” (p. 145), as is evident, incidentally, from the register showing the number of days worked monthly: average number of horse days, 293 per month; fluctuations: from 223 (April) to 362 (June). Average male days, 216; fluctuations: from 126 (February) to 279 (November). Average female days 23; fluctuations: from 13 (January) to 27 (March). Is this reality anything like the abstraction the Narodniks are busying themselves with?

** Large-scale capitalist industry creates a nomad working class. It is formed from the rural population, but is chiefly engaged in industrial occupations. “They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that…. Nomad labour is used for various operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, etc.” (Das Kapital, I², S. 692¹⁰⁴.) “In general such large-scale undertakings as railways withdraw a definite quantity of labour-power from the labour-market, which can come only from certain branches of economy, for example, agriculture …” (ibid., II. B., S. 303).¹⁰⁵

* For example the Moscow Medical Statistics placed the number of factory workers in this gubernia at 114,381; this was the number at work; the highest figure was 146,338 and the lowest, 94,214 (General Summary, etc., Vol. IV, Pt. I, p. 98); in percentages: 128%—100% — 82%. By increasing, in general, the fluctuations in the number of workers, capitalism evens out, in this respect too, the differences between industry and agriculture.

** For example, in regard to the agricultural relations of England, Marx says: “There are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of the cultivation of the soil” (I², 725),¹⁰⁶ so that, notwithstanding the permanent “relative surplus-population,” the countryside seems to be inadequately populated. As capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, says Marx in another place, a surplus rural population is formed. “Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat” (ibid., 668)¹⁰⁷; this part of the population suffers chronically from unemployment; the work it gets is extremely irregular and is the worst paid (e.g., working at home for shops, etc.)

* Particularly noteworthy in this connection is Marx’s observation that in agriculture too there are ways of distributing the demand for labour more evenly over the entire year,” namely, by raising a greater variety of products, by substituting crop rotation for the three-field system, cultivating root-crops, grasses, etc. But all these methods “require an increase of the circulating capital advanced in production, invested in wages, fertilisers, seed, etc.” (ibid., S. 225-226).¹⁰⁸

** We say “somewhat,” because the deterioration of the conditions of the agricultural worker is far from being due to irregularity of employment alone.

* In another place Marx points out that “common lands (Gemein-eigentum) constitute the second supplement of the management of land parcels.” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 341).¹¹⁰

* If we are told that we are running ahead in making such an assertion, our reply will be the following. Whoever wants to depict some living phenomenon in its development is inevitably and necessarily confronted with the dilemma of either running ahead or lagging behind. There is no middle course. And if all the facts show that the character of the social evolution is precisely such that this evolution has already gone very far (see Chapter II), and if, furthermore, precise reference is made to the circumstances and institutions that retard this evolution (excessively high taxes, social-estate exclusiveness of the peasantry, lack of full freedom in the purchase and sale of land, and in movement and settlement), then there is nothing wrong in such running ahead.

* The defence of some of these institutions by the Narodniks very glaringly reveals the reactionary character of their views, which is gradually bringing them closer and closer to the agrarians.

* Let us recall that Engels, shortly before his death, and at a time when the agricultural crisis connected with the drop in prices was fully manifest, considered it necessary to protest emphatically against the French “disciples,” who had made some concessions to the doctrine of the viability of small-scale agriculture.¹¹²

* See Novoye Slovo, 1896, No. 5, February, letter to editors by Mr. N. —on, pp. 256-261. Here also is the “quotation” on the “moral of history.” It is remarkable that neither Mr. N. —on nor any other of the numerous Narodnik economists who have tried to use the present agricultural crisis to refute the theory of the progressive historical role of capitalism in agriculture, has ever once raised the question in a straightforward manner, on the basis of a definite economic theory; has ever once stated the grounds which induced Marx to admit the progressiveness of the historical role of agricultural capitalism, or has definitely indicated just which of these grounds he repudiates, and why. In this, as in other cases, the Narodnik economists prefer not to oppose Marx’s theory outright, but confine themselves to casting vague hints at the “Russian disciples.” Confining ourselves in this work to the economy of Russia, we have given above the grounds for our opinions on this question

* Are not, indeed, such manifestations as the celebrated Antrag Kanitz (Kanitz plan—Ed.) proposed in the German Reichstag,¹¹⁸ or the proposal of the American farmers that all elevators be made state property typical signs of the times”?

* Without rhyme or reason.—Ed.

Chapter V: The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry

* Kundenproduktion. Cf. Karl Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, Tübingen, 1893. (Work done to order. Cf. Karl Bücher, The Rise of the National Economy.—Ed.)¹¹⁹

** It would be impossible to cite quotations in support of this: innumerable references to artisan production are scattered throughout all investigations of handicraft industry, although according to the most accepted view, artisans do not come within the category known as handicraftsmen. We shall have more than one occasion to see how hopelessly indefinite is the term “handicraft.”

*** The chaotic condition of these statistics is illustrated particularly vividly by the fact that no criteria have yet been decided on for distinguishing handicraft from factory establishments. In the 60s, for example, village dyeing sheds of a purely handicraft type were classified with the latter (The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Vol. I, pp. 172-176), and in 1890, peasant fulling mills were mixed up with woollen factories (Orlov’s Directory of Factories and Works, 3rd ed., p. 21), etc. Nor is the latest List of Factories (St. Petersburg, 1897) free from this confusion. For examples, see our Studies, pp. 270-271. [See also present edition, Vol, 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.]

* We have devoted a special article to this census in our Studies, pp. 113-199. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry.—Ed.) All the facts cited in the text concerning the Perm “handicraftsmen” are taken from that article.

* The closeness of artisan production to the natural economy of the peasants sometimes leads to attempts on their part to organise such production for the whole village, the peasants providing the artisan with his keep, he undertaking to work for all the inhabitants of the village concerned. Nowadays this system of industry is to be met with only by way of exception, or in the most remote border regions (for example, the blacksmith’s trade is organised on these lines in some of the villages in Transcaucasia. See Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry in Russia, Vol. II, p. 321).

** E.g., the exchange of earthenware utensils for grain, etc. When grain was cheap the equivalent of a pot was sometimes considered to be the amount of grain the pot would hold. Cf. Reports and Investigations, I, 340.—Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, V, 140.—Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, I, 61.

* An investigation of one of these country fairs showed that 31% of the total turnover (about 15,000 rubles out of 50,000 rubles) was accounted for by “handicraft” goods. See Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, I, 38. How restricted the market is at first for the small commodity-producers is seen, for example, from the fact that the Poltava boot-makers sell their wares within a radius of some 60 vorsts from their village, Reports and Investigations, I, 287.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, I, 35-36.

** See Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, I, 81. V, 460; IX, 25-26.—Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. 1, 6-7; 253; Vol. VI, Pt. 2, 142; Vol. VII, Pt. 1, Sec. 2 about the founder of the “printing industry.”—Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, I, 145, 149.—Reports and Investigations, I, 89.—Grigoryev: Handicraft Lock-and Cutlery-Making in Pavlovo District (Supplement to Volga publication, Moscow, 1881), p. 39.—Mr. V. V. cited some of these facts in his Essay on Handicraft Industry (St. Petersburg, 1886), p. 192 and foll.; the only conclusion he draws from them is that the handicraftsmen are not afraid of innovations; it never enters his head that these facts characterise the class position and the class interests of the small commodity-producers in contemporary society.

* Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VI, 2, 193.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX, 2404.

*** Sensing that competition will be fatal to him, the petty bourgeois strives to stave it off, just as his ideologist, the Narodnik, senses that capitalism is fatal to the “foundations” so dear to his heart, and for that reason strives to “avert,” to prevent, to stave off, etc., etc.

* Here is an interesting example of how these two different processes occur in one and the same gubernia, at one and the same time and in one and the same industry. The spinning-wheel industry (in Vyatka Gubernia) is ancillary to the domestic production of fabrics. The development of this industry marks the rise of commodity production, which embraces the making of one of the instruments for the production of fabrics. Well, we see that in the remote parts of the gubernia, in the north, the spinning wheel is almost unknown (Material for a Description of the Industries of Vyatka Gubernia, II, 27) and there “the industry might newly emerge,” i.e., might make the first breach in the patriarchal natural economy of the peasants. Meanwhile, in other parts of the gubernia this industry is already declining, and the investigators believe that the probable cause of the decline is “the increasingly widespread use among the peasantry of factory-made cotton fabrics” (p 26). Here, consequently, the growth of commodity production and of capitalism is manifested in the elimination of petty industry by the factory.

* See, for example, S. A. Korolenko, loc. cit., on the movement of industrial workers to the outer regions, where part of them settle. Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. I (on the preponderance in Stavropol Gubernia of industrialists from the central gubernias), Vol. III, pp. 33-34 (the migration of boot-makers from Viyezdnaya, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, to the Lower-Volga towns); Vol. IX (tanners from the village of Bogorodskoye in the same gubernia established tanneries all over Russia). Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, IV, 136 (Vladimir potters carried their trade into Astrakhan Gubernia). Cf. Reports and Investigations, Vol. I, pp. 125, 210; Vol. II, pp. 160-165, 168, 222 for general remarks on the preponderance “all over the South” of industrialists from the Great-Russian gubernias.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III.

** For example, the same thing has been noted in the dyeing industry of Moscow Gubernia (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VI, I, 73-99), in the hat (ibid., VI, Pt. I), in the fur (ibid., VII, Pt. I, Sec. 2), in the Pavlovo lock and cutlery industries (Grigoryev, loc. cit., 37-38), and others.

*** Mr. V. V. hastened to draw this conclusion from a fact of this kind in his Destiny of Capitalism, 78-79.

* A. Smirnov: Pavlovo and Vorsma, Moscow, 1864.—N. Labzin: An Investigation of the Cutlery Industry, etc., St. Petersburg, 1870.—Grigoryev, loc. cit.—N. Annensky, Report, etc., in No. 1 of Nizhegorodsky Vestnik Parokhodstva i Promyshlennosti [The Nizhni-Novgorod Steam-Shipping and Industrial Journal] for 1891.—Material of Zemstvo statistics for Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1892.—A. N. Potresov, Report in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Loan and Savings Society Committee in 1895.—Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire, II, Vol. 3, St. Petersburg, 1872.—Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VIII.—Reports and Investigations, I, III.—Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VI, XIII.—Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VI, Pt. I, p. 111, ibid., 177; VII, Pt II, p. 8.—Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry, II, Col. VI, Industry 1.—Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 42. Cf. also Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III 18-19 and others.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX, 2303-2304.

*** Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VII, Pt. I, Sec. 2, 196.

**** The data on the brush, pin, hook, hat, starch, boot, spectacle frame, harness, fringe and furniture industries have been selected from the handicraft house-to-house census material quoted in Industries of Moscow Gubernia and in Mr. Isayev’s book of the same title.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 242-243.

** In his researches into the historical destiny of the Russian factory, M. I. T.-Baranovsky showed that merchant’s capital was a necessary historical condition for the formation of large-scale industry. See his The Factory, etc., St. Petersburg, 1898.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, II, 25, 270.

** Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Vol. II, Pt. II, p. 8 and foll.

* The fundamental theoretical error made by Mr. N. —on in his arguments about the “capitalisation of industries” is that he ignores the initial steps of commodity production and capitalism in its consecutive stages. Mr. N. —on leaps right over from “people’s production” to “capitalism,” and then is surprised, with amusing naïvety, to find that he has got a capitalism that is without basis that is artificial, etc.

** Describing “handicraft” industry in Chernigov Gubernia, Mr. Varzer notes “the variety of economic units” (on the one hand, families with incomes from 500 to 800 rubles, and on the other, “almost paupers”) and makes the following observation: “Under such circumstances, the only way to present a full picture of the economic life of the craftsmen is to make a house-to-house inventory and to classify their establishments in a number of average types with all their accessories. Anything else will be either a fantasy of casual impressions or arm-chair exercises in arithmetical calculations based on a diversity of average norms …” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. V, p. 354).

*** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vols. VI and VII. Industries of Moscow Gubernia, and A. Isayev’s Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Moscow, 1876-1877, 2 vols. For a small number of industries similar information is given in Industries of Vladimir Gubernia. It goes without saying that in the present chapter we confine ourselves to an examination of only those industries in which the small commodity-producers work for the market and not for buyers-up,—at all events, in the overwhelming majority of cases. Work for buyers-up is a more complicated phenomenon, one that we shall examine separately later on. The house-to-house censuses of handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up are unsuitable for judging the relations existing among small commodity-producers.

* On these grounds the pottery “industry,” in which 20 establishments employ 1,817 wage-workers, has been excluded. It is characteristic of the confusion of terms prevailing among us that the Moscow statisticians included this industry, too, among the “handicraft” industries (see combined tables in Part III of Vol. VII, loc. cit.).

* See, for example, Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. 1, p. 21.

* The same conclusion follows from the data regarding the Perm “handicraftsmen”, see our Studies, pp. 126-128. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

* For the starch-making industry, which is included in our tables, data are available on the duration of the working period in establishments of various sizes. It appears (as we have seen above) that even in an equal period the output per worker in a big establishment is higher than that in a small one.

* The small producer tries to make up for these unfavourable conditions by working longer hours and with greater intensity (loc. cit., p 38). Under commodity production, the small producer both in agriculture and in industry carries on only by cutting down his requirements.

* See our Studies, p. 153 and foll. (see present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.) where data are given for each industry separately. Let us note that all these data refer to handicraftsmen cultivators who work for the market.

** From the data given in the text it can be seen that in the small peasant industries a tremendous, and even predominant, part is played by establishments with an output exceeding 1,000 rubles. Let us recall that in our official statistics establishments of this kind have always been, and still are, classed among “factories and works” [cf. Studies, pp. 267 and 270 (see present edition, Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.) and Chapter VII, §II]. Thus, if we thought it permissible for an economist to use the current, traditional terminology beyond which our Narodniks have never gone, we would be entitled to establish the following “law”: among peasant, “handicraft” establishments a predominant part is played by “factories and works,” not included in official statistics because of their unsatisfactory nature.

* Let us add that in other gubernias, besides Moscow and Perm, the sources note quite analogous relations among the small commodity-producers. See, for instance, Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. II, house-to-house censuses of shoemakers and fullers; Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol II—on the wheelwrights of Medyn Uyezd; Vol. II—on the sheepskin dressers of the same uyezd; Vol. III—on the furriers of Arzamas Uyezd, Vol. IV—on the fullers of Semyonov Uyezd and on the tanners of Vasil Uyezd, etc. Cf. Nizhni-Novgorod Handbook, Vol. IV, p. 137,—A. S. Gatsisky’s general remarks about the small industries speak of the rise of big workshops. Cf, Annensky’s report on the Pavlovo handicraftsmen (mentioned above), on the classification of families according to weekly earnings, etc., etc. All these sources differ from the house-to-house census data we have examined only in their incompleteness and poverty. The essence of the matter, however, is identical everywhere.

* For example, concerning the metal-beaters¹²⁴ of Vladimir Gubernia, we read: “With the employment of a larger number of workers a considerable reduction in expenditure may be effected; this concerns expenditure on light, blocks, anvil-stone and casing” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 188). In the copper-beating industry of Perm Gubernia a one-man establishment needs a complete set of tools (16 items); for two workers “a very small addition” is required. “For workshops employing 6 or 8 persons three or four sets of tools are required…. Only one lathe is kept even in a workshop employing 8 men” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, X, 2939). The fixed capital of a big workshop is estimated at 466 rubles, of a medium workshop at 294 rubles, and of a small one at 80 rubles; and the total output at 6,200 rubles, 3,655 rubles, and 871 rubles respectively. That is to say, in the small workshops the output is 11 times the amount of the fixed capital, in the medium ones 12 times, and in the big ones 14 times.

* We do not think it worth our while to support the statement made in the text with examples, a host of which may be found in Mr. V. V.’s The Artel in Handicraft Industry (St. Petersburg, 1895). Mr. Volgin has dealt with the true significance of the examples cited by Mr. V. V. (op. cit., p. 182 and foll.) and has shown the very negligible part played by the “artel principle” in our “handicraft” industry. Let us merely note the following assertion by Mr. V. V.: “… the amalgamation of several independent handicraftsmen into one production unit … is not imperatively dictated by competition, as is proved by the absence in the majority of industries of workshops of any size employing wage-workers” (93). To advance such a bald and sweeping thesis is, of course, much easier than to analyse the house-to-house census data available on this question.

* See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.

* Regarding the significance of trading, merchant’s capital in the development of capitalism in general we would refer the reader to Capital, Vol. III. See especially III, I, S. 253-254 (Russ. trans., 212), on the essence of commodity-trading capital; S. 259 (Russ. trans., 217), on the cheapening of marketing by merchant’s capital, S. 278-279 (Russ. trans., 233-234), on the economic necessity of the phenomenon that “concentration appears earlier historically in the merchant’s business than in the industrial workshop”; S. 308 (Russ. trans., 259) and S. 310-311 (Russ. trans., 260-261), on the historical role of merchant’s capital as necessary “premises for the development of capitalist production.”¹²⁶

* The preconceived viewpoint of the Narodniks, who have idealised the “handicraft” industries and pictured merchant’s capital as a sort of deplorable deviation and not as a necessary accessory to small production for the market is unfortunately reflected in statistical investigations. Thus, we have a number of house-to-house censuses of handicraftsmen (for Moscow, Vladimir and Perm gubernias) which carefully investigated the business of each small industrialist, but ignored the business of the buyers-up, did not investigate how his capital is built up and what determines its magnitude, what are the sales’ receipts and purchase costs of the buyer-up etc. Cf. our Studies, p. 169 (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.).

* The emergence of buyers-up from among the small producers themselves is a common thing noted by investigators almost everywhere as soon as they touch upon this question. See, for example, the same remark about “distributors” in the kid-glove industry (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. II, pp. 175-176), about the buyers-up in the Pavlovo industry (Grigoryev, loc. cit., 92), and many others.

** Korsak (Forms of Industry) in his day quite rightly noted the connection between the unprofitableness of small-scale marketing (and of small-scale buying of raw materials) and the “general character of small, scattered production” (pp. 23 and 239).

*** Very often the big handicraft proprietors whom we discussed in detail above are also in some measure buyers-up. For instance, the purchase of the wares of small industrialists by big ones is a very widespread practice.

* Mr. V. V. asserts that the handicraftsman who is under the sway of merchant’s capital “suffers losses that are fundamentally quite superfluous” (Essays on Handicraft Industry, 150). Maybe Mr. V. V. imagines that the differentiation of the small producers is “fundamentally” a “quite superfluous” phenomenon, i.e., fundamentally as regards the commodity economy under which the small producer lives?

** “It is not a matter of the kulak, but of the shortage of capital among the handicraftsmen,” say the Perm Narodniks (A Sketch of the Condition of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia, p. 8). But what is a kulak if not a handicraftsman with capital? The trouble is just that the Narodniks refuse to investigate the process of differentiation of the small producers which yields entrepreneurs and “kulaks” from their ranks.

* Among the quasi-economic arguments advanced in support of the Narodnik theories is the one about the small amount of “fixed” and “circulating” capital needed by the “independent handicraftsman.” The line of this extremely widespread argument is as follows: handicraft industries greatly benefit the peasant and therefore should be implanted. (We do not dwell on the amusing notion that the mass of the peasantry which is being steadily ruined can be helped by turning some of their number into small commodity-producers.) And in order to implant these industries one must know how much “capital” the handicraftsman needs to carry on his business. Here is one of numerous calculations of this sort. The Pavlovo handicraftsman, says Mr. Grigoryev for our edification, needs a fixed “capital” of 3 to 5 rubles, 10-13-15 rubles, etc., counting cost of implements, and a circulating “capital” of 6 to 8 rubles, counting weekly expenditure on food and raw materials. “Thus, the amount of the fixed and circulating capital (sic!) in Pavlovo District is so small that it is very easy to acquire the tools and materials needed for independent (sic!!) production” (loc. cit., 75). And indeed, what could be “easier” than such an argument? With a stroke of the pen the Pavlovo proletarian is turned into a “capitalist”; all that was needed was to call his weekly keep and miserably cheap tools “capital.” But the real capital of the big buyers-up who have monopolised sales, who alone are able to be “independent” de facto, and who handle capital running into the thousands this real capital the author simply passes over! Queer people, indeed, these well-to-do Pavlovians: for generations they have used, and continue to use, every foul means to pile up thousands of rubles of capital, whereas according to the latest discoveries it seems that a “capital” of a few dozen rubles is sufficient to make one “independent”!

** at random.—Ed.

* The pure form of merchant’s capital is the purchase of a commodity in order to sell this same commodity at a profit. The pure form of industrial capital is the purchase of a commodity in order to sell it in worked-up form, hence the purchase of raw materials, etc., and the purchase of labour-power, which processes the material.

** See Combined Statistical Material on the Economic Position of the Rural Population, published by the Committee of Ministers, Appendix I: Data of Zemstvo house-to-house investigations, pp. 372-373.

* It is characteristic that the author of the description of the hat industry “did not observe” even here the differentiation of the peasantry both in agriculture and in industry. Like all Narodniks, he limited himself in his conclusions to the absolutely vapid banality that “industry does not prevent one from engaging in agriculture” (Industries of Moscow Gubernia, VI, I, p. 231) The social and economic contradictions both in the system of industry and in the system of agriculture were thus safely passed over.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, 57, 112; VIII, 1354; IX, 1931, 2093, 2185.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 187, 190.

** Industries of Moscow Gubernia, loc. cit.

* See Yuridichesky Vestnik [The Legal Messenger], 1883, Vol. XIV, Nos. 11 and 12.

** How near Mr. Kharizomenov was to drawing such a conclusion may be seen from the following description of post-Reform economic development which he gives in speaking of the silk trade: “Serfdom evened out the economic level of the peasantry: it tied the hands of the rich peasant, sustained the poor peasant and prevented the family division of property. Natural economy narrowed too much the arena for commercial and industrial activity. The local market did not provide sufficiently wide scope for enterprise. The peasant merchant or industrialist accumulated money—without risk, it is true, but very slowly—accumulated it and put it away in his chest. Beginning with the 60s conditions change. Serfdom comes to an end; credit and the railways, by creating an extensive and distant market, provide scope for the enterprising peasant merchant and industrialist. All those who have been above the average economic level quickly get on their feet, develop trade and industry and extend their exploiting activities quantitatively and qualitatively. All those who have been below that level fall, sink, drop into the ranks of the landless, the non-farming, the horseless. The peasantry split up into the groups of kulaks, semi-prosperous peasants and farmless proletariat. The kulak element of the peasantry rapidly copy all the habits of a cultured milieu; they live in grand style, and from them a huge class is formed of the semi-cultured sections of Russian society” (III, 20, 21).¹²⁷

* Mr. V. V. confines himself to the same sort of phrases in dealing with this subject in Chapter VIII of his Essays on Handicraft Industry. “Farming … is sustained by industry” (205). “Handicraft industries are one of the most reliable mainstays of agriculture in the industrial gubernias” (219). Proof? Any amount: take, for example, the master tanners, starch-makers, oil-millers (ibid., 224), etc, and you will find that their farming is on a higher level than that of the masses!

* See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.

** Sources are indicated above. The same thing is revealed by the household censuses of the basket-makers, guitar-makers and starch-makers in Moscow Gubernia. The Perm handicraft census also mentions the longer working period of the large workshops (see Sketch of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia, p. 78. No precise data, unfortunately, are given).

* For instance, in the woollen trade of Vladimir Gubernia the big “factory owners” and subcontractors are distinguished by the fact of their farming being on the highest level. “During periods of stagnation in production the subcontractors try to buy estates, to engage in farming, and to give up industry altogether” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, II, 131). This instance is worth noting, since facts of this kind sometimes lead the Narodniks to conclude that “the peasants are going back to agriculture,” that the “exiles from the soil must be restored to the land” (Mr. V. V. in Vestnik Yevropy, No. 7, 1884).

** “The peasants explained that latterly some of the prosperous master industrialists had moved to Moscow to carry on their business.” The Brush Industry According to the Investigation of 1895, p. 5.

* Korsak, in Chapter IV of the book mentioned above, cites historical evidence of the following nature, for example: “the abbot gave out (in the village) flax for spinning”; the peasants were bound to yield to the landowner “work or wares,”

* As has been shown above, such confusion of terminology prevails in our economic literature and economic statistics that the category peasants’ “industries” is used to cover domestic industry, labour-service, handicrafts, small commodity production, trading, work for hire in industry, work for hire in agriculture, etc. Here is an example of how the Narodniks take advantage of this confusion. Mr. V. V., singing the praises of the “combination of industry with agriculture,” points, in illustration, to the “timber industry” and “unskilled labour”: “He (the peasant) is strong and accustomed to hard work; that is why he can do all kinds of unskilled labour” (Essays on Handicraft Industry, 26). And this sort of fact figures among a heap of others to back the conclusion that: “We observe a protest against the splitting-up of occupations,” “the durability of the organisation of production that arose when natural economy still predominated” (41). Thus, even the conversion of the peasant into a lumberworker and unskilled labourer was passed off, among other things, as evidence of the durability of natural economy!

Chapter VI: Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry

* For a description of this process of the genesis of capitalist manufacture, see Marx’s Das Kapital, III, 318-320. Russ. trans., 267-270.¹³⁰

“It was not even in the bosom of the old guilds that manufacture was born. It was the merchant that became the head of the modern workshop, and not the old guild-master.” (Misère de la philosophie, 190.¹³¹ We have had occasion elsewhere to enumerate the principal features of the concept manufacture according to Marx. [Studies, 179 (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)]

** Das Kapital, I², S. 383.¹³²

* Cf. Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. III (Moscow, 1883), pp. 63-64.

* For a list of the most important towns of this type, see next chapter.

** Examples of such confusion will be given in the next chapter.

* See Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III. It would be impossible and superfluous to give detailed data on all the weaving industries described in the literature on our handicraft industry. Moreover, in the majority of these industries the factory now reigns supreme. On the subject of “handicraft weaving” see also Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vols. VI and VII.—Transactions of the Handicraft Commission—Material on Hand-Labour Statistics.¹³⁴—Reports and Investigations.—Korsak, loc. cit.

* The Military Statistical Abstract managed to count in Vladimir Gubernia, in 1866, 98 silk factories (!) with 98 workers and a total output of 4,000 rubles(!). The Directory for 1890 gives 35 factories, 2,112 workers, and 936,000 rubles. According to the List for 1894-95 there were 98 factories, 2,281 workers, with an output of 1,918,000 rubles, and in addition, 2,477 workers “outside of establishments, on the side.” Just try to distinguish “handicraftsmen” here from “factory workers”!

** According to the Directory for 1890 there were outside of Moscow 10 galloon factories, with 303 workers and an output totalling 58,000 rubles. But according to Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia (Vol. VI, Pt. II), there were 400 establishments, with 2,619 workers (of whom 72.8% were wage-workers) and with an output totalling 963,000 rubles.

*** The Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports for 1903 (St. Petersburg, 1906) states that in Saratov Gubernia there were 33 distributing offices with 10,000 workers. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* The centre of this industry is Sosnovka Volost, where the Zemstvo census of 1886 counted 4,626 households, with a population of 38,000 persons of both sexes; 291 industrial establishments. Altogether in the volost 10% of the households were houseless (as against 6.2% in the uyezd), and 44.5% of the households cultivated on land (as against 22.8% in the uyezd). See Statistical Returns for Saratov Gubernia, Vol. XI.—Capitalist manufacture has, consequently, created industrial centres here too which divorce the workers from the land.

** Let us note that the diagram given is typical of all Russian industries organised on the lines of capitalist manufacture: everywhere at the head of the industry we find big establishments (sometimes classed among “factories and works”), and a mass of small establishments completely under their sway—in a word, capitalist co-operation based on division of labour and hand production. Non-agricultural centres are formed by manufacture in exactly the same way, not only here, but also in the majority of other industries.

* They are naked as they work in a temperature of 22° to 24° Réaumur. The air is full of fine and also coarse dust, wool and other stuff. The floors in the “factories” are earthen (in the washing sheds of all places), etc.

** It is not without interest to note here the specific jargon of the inhabitants of Krasnoye; this is characteristic of the territorial isolation peculiar to manufacture. “In the village of Krasnoye factories are given the Matroisk name of povarnyas (lit. kitchens—Ed.)…. Matroisk is one of the numerous branches of the Ophen dialect, the three main branches of which are Ophen proper, spoken mainly in Vladimir Gubernia; Galivon, in Kostroma Gubernia; and Matroisk, in the Nizhni-Novgorod and Vladimir gubernias” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, V, p 465). Only large-scale machine industry completely destroys the local character of social ties and replaces them by national (and international) ties.

* Material for Evaluation of the Lands of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, Vol. XI, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1893, pp. 211-214.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VI.

*** Reports and Investigations, III.

**** Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. II.

(*) Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, Vol. II, p. 271.

(**) See Appendix I to Chapter V, Industry No. 27.

* Some of these establishments were occasionally included among “factories and works.” See, for example, the Directory for 1879, p. 126.

** See above, Chapter V, §VII.

*** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, IV, Pt. I, pp. 282-287.

**** See Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX, and Reports and Investigations, III.

(*) By some accident, such workshops have not yet been included among “factories and works.”

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, II.

** According to Zemstvo statistics (Vol. VII of Material, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1892) in these villages in 1889 there were 341 and 119 households, numbering respectively 1,277 and 540 persons of both sexes. There were 253 and 103 allotment households. Households participating in industries numbered 284 and 91, of which 257 and 32 did not engage in agriculture. There were 218 and 51 horseless households. Those leasing their allotments numbered 237 and 53.

* Cf. Nizhni-Novgorod Handbook, Vol IV, article by Rev. Roslavlev.

** Sketch of Condition of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia, p. 158; in the table totals there is a mistake or a misprint.

*** ibid., pp. 40 and 188 of table. To all appearances these same establishments also figure in the List, p. 152. For the purpose of comparing the big establishments with the small ones we have singled out the agriculturist commodity-producers, see Studies, p. 156. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

* The Handicraft Industries of Perm Gubernia at the Siberian-Urals Exhibition, Pt. III, p. 47 and foll.

** See Zemstvo statistical returns for Trubchevsk, Karachev and Orel uyezds of Orel Gubernia. The connection between the big manufactories and the small peasant establishments is also evident from the fact that the employment of wage-labour develops in the latter as well: for example, in Orel Uyezd, 16 peasant master spinners employ 77 workers.

* V. Ilyin, Studies, p. 176. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.).

** See precise data on Perm handicraft census about this, ibid., p. 177 (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

*** See Directory and List on Perm Gubernia and the village of Nevyansky Zavod (non-agricultural), which is the centre of this “handicraft industry.”

**** Cf. our Studies, pp. 177-178. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.).

(*) Reports and Investigations, I.

* Reports and Investigations, III.

** There are 14 big timber merchants. These have timber-seasoning rooms (costing about 300 rubles), of which there are 24 in the village, each employing 6 workers. These merchants also give out materials to workers, whom they get into their grip by advancing them money.

* It will be appropriate here to note in general the process of development of capitalism in the timber industry. The timber merchants do not sell the timber raw; they hire workers to dress it and to make various wooden articles, which they then sell. See Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, etc., VIII, pp. 1268, 1314. Also Statistical Returns for Orel Gubernia, Trubchevsk Uyezd.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol II, 1879. See also Zemstvo statistical Material for Semyonov Uyezd, Vol. XI, 1893.

** The statistics we have given (Appendix I to Chapter V, Industries Nos. 2, 7, 26) cover only a small fraction of the toy-makers; but these data show the appearance of workshops with 11 to 18 workers.

*** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. II, p. 47.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX.

** Material for the Evaluation of the Lands in Gorbatov Uyezd.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX.

** Thus, at the head of the horse-collar industry are 13 big proprietors, each with 10 to 30 wage-workers and 5 to 10 outside workers. The big mitten-makers do the cutting in their own workshops (employing 2 or 3 wage-workers) and get the mittens sewn off the premises by from 10 to 20 women; these are divided into thumb-makers and stitchers, the former taking the work from the owners and subdividing it among the latter, whom they exploit (information for 1879)

*** In 1889, of 1,812 households (with 9,241 inhabitants) 1,469 cultivated no land (in 1897 there were 12,342 inhabitants). The villages of Pavlovo and Bogorodskoye differ from the other villages of Gorbatov Uyezd in that very few of their inhabitants leave them; on the contrary, of all the peasants of the Gorbatov Uyezd who have left their villages, 14.9% live in Pavlovo and 4.9% in Bogorodskoye. The increase of the population between 1858 and 1889 was 22.1% for the uyezd, but 42% for the village of Bogorodskoye. (See Zemstvo statistical Material.)

* See Zemstvo statistical Material for uyezds mentioned.—Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX and VI.—Directory and List.—Reports and Investigations, II.

** In 1889 it had 380 households (none cultivating land) with 1,305 inhabitants In the whole of the Katunki Volost, 90.6% of the households are engaged in industries, 70.1% of working people being occupied in industries alone (i.e., not engaging in agriculture). As regards literacy, this volost stands far above the average for the uyezd, yielding in this respect only to the Chernoretsk Volost, which is also non-agricultural and has highly developed boat-building industries. The village of Bolshoye Murashkino had in 1887 a total of 856 households (of which 853 cultivated no land) with 3,473 persons of both sexes. According to the 1897 census, the population of Gorodets was 6,330, of Bolshoye Murashkino 5,341, of Yurino 2,189, of Spasskoye 4,494 and of Vatras 3,012.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX, p. 2567. Information for 1880.

** The conditions of the workers in the Arzamas factories are better than those of the rural workers (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, p. 133).

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, p. 76.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. XI, p. 3084. (Cf. Directory for 1890). Included among the handicraftsmen is the peasant-agriculturist Dolgushin, who owns a works employing 60 workers. There are several handicraftsmen of this type.

*** According to the Directory for 1890, there were some 27 masters employing over 700 workers.

* Cf. also List, p. 489, regarding the well-known “handicraft” village of Dunilovo, Shuya Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia. The Directory for 1890 listed here 6 fur factories employing 151 workers, while according to the Transactions of the Handicraft Commission (Vol. X) there are about 2,200 furriers and 2,300 sheepskin-coat-makers in this district; in 1877 as many as 5,500 “handicraftsmen” were counted. Probably, the making of hair sieves in this uyezd is organised in the same way; in this industry there are engaged about 40 villages and as many as 4,000 people, known as “Mardassers” (from the name of this district). We have described the similar organisation of the leather and cobbling industries in Perm Gubernia in our Studies, p. 171 and foll. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

* Here is some information about the “handicraftsmen” relating to 1894. “The squirrel furs are sewn by some of the poorest women in the town of Kargopol and by peasant women of the Pavlovo Volost. They are paid the very lowest price,” so that a seamstress earns only from 2 rubles 40 kopeks to 3 rubles per month, providing her own food, and for this pay (at piece rates) she has to sit without a break for 12 hours a day. “The work is very exhausting, for it calls for great strain and assiduity.” The number of seamstresses is now about 200 (Handicraft Industry in Olonets Gubernia, Essay by Messrs. Blagoveshchensky and Garyazin. Petrozavodsk, 1895, pp. 92-93).

* See Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire, II, Vol. III, St. Petersburg, 1872. Material for the Study of Handicraft Industry and Hand-Labour in Russia. Compiled by L. Maikov. Article by V. A. Pletnev. This work is the best for clarity of description of the whole organisation of the industry. The latest works give valuable statistics and facts of the people’s life, but give a less satisfactory exposition of the economic structure of this complex industry. See, further, Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. VIII, article by Mr. Pokrovsky.—Reports and Investigations, Vol. I.

* Cf. Reports and Investigations: 7 groups of industrialists: 1) traders in leather goods; 2) buyers-up of footwear; 3) masters of big workshops (5-6 of them), who stock leather and distribute it to home workers; 4) masters of small workshops employing wage-workers; also give out material to home workers; 5) one-man establishments—working either for the market or for masters (sub 3 and 4); 6) wage-workers (craftsmen, journeymen, boys); 7) “last-makers, notchers, and also owners and workers in currying, greasing and gluing workshops” (p. 227, loc. cit.). The population of Kimry village, according to the 1897 census, is 7,017.

* The “sawyer” saws the brush blocks; the “borer” bores holes in them; the “cleaner” cleans the bristle; the “setter” “sets” the bristle; the “joiner” glues wooden strips on the brush backs (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. I, p. 18).

* Let us observe that in this industry, as in the above-described weaving industries, capitalist manufacture is, strictly speaking, the economy of yesterday. Characteristic of the post-Reform era is the transformation of this manufacture into large-scale machine industry. The number of Gzhel potteries using steam-engines was 1 in 1866, 2 in 1879 and 3 in 1890 (according to data in The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Vol. I, and Directory for 1879 and 1890).

* See above regarding the greater literacy of the population of Pavlovo and Vorsma and the migration of peasants from the villages to these centres.

* Data from Zemstvo statistical Material, and Mr. Annensky’s Report, and also A. N. Potresov’s researches (cited above). The figures for the Murom district are approximate. The number of inhabitants, according to the 1897 census, was 4,674 in Vorsma, and 12,431 in Pavlovo.

* The data we have given by no means express this predominance to the full: as will presently be seen, the handicraftsmen who work for the market are subjugated to capital even more than those who work for proprietors, and the latter handicraftsmen even more than the wage-workers. The Pavlovo industries show in strong relief that inseparable connection between merchant’s and industrial capital which in general is characteristic of capitalist manufacture in its relation to the small producers.

** Connection with the land is also an important factor in reducing earnings. The village handicraftsmen “on the whole earn less than the Pavlovo locksmiths” (Annensky, Report, p. 61). True, we must bear in mind that the former grow their own grain, but even so “the conditions of the ordinary village handicraftsman can scarcely be considered better than those of the average Pavlovo locksmith” (61).

* During crises it also happens that they work literally without pay, exchange “white for black,” i.e., finished goods for raw materials; this happens “quite often” (Grigoryev, ibid., 93).

** Data taken from Directory and List for the whole district, including the villages of Selitba and Vacha and their environs. The Directory for 1890 undoubtedly included outside workers in the total number of factory workers; we have estimated the number of outside workers approximately, confining ourselves to a correction only for the two biggest establishments (the Zavyalovs and F. Varypayev). To compare the figures for “factories and works” in the List and the Directory, only establishments with 15 and more workers must be taken (this is examined in greater detail in our Studies, article: “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics”). (See present edition, Vol. 4.—Ed.)

*** In one branch of the Pavlovo industry, lock-making, there is, on the contrary, a decline in the number of workshops employing wage-workers. A. N. Potresov (loc. cit.), who recorded this fact in detail, pointed to its cause—the competition of the lock-making factory in Kovno Gubernia (Schmidt Brothers, which in 1890 had 500 workers, with an output of 500,000 rubles, and in 1894-95 had 625 workers, with an output of 730,000 rubles).

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IX. The population of Bezvodnoye village in 1897 was 3,296.

** Reports and Investigations, Vol. I.—The List gives 4 “factories” for this district, with 21 workers on premises and 29 outside workers, and output totalling 68,000 rubles.

* Reports and Investigations, I, p. 186.

** Appendix I to Chapter V, Industry No. 29.

*** ibid., No. 32.

**** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. 1, Sec. 2, and Industries of Bogorodsk Uyezd in 1890.

(*) See, for example, the List, No. 8819.

(**) Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. VI, investigation of 1880.—Reports and Investigations, Vol. I (1888-1889), cf. p. 271: “nearly the whole trade … is concentrated in workshops employing wage-workers.” Cf. also Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Vol. II, Yaroslavl, 1896, pp. 8, 11.—List, p. 403.

(***) Appendix I to Chapter V, Industries Nos. 19 and 30.

* A copper-smith’s workshop needs five operatives to do the different jobs; a tray-maker’s at least 3, while a “normal workshop” needs 9 workers. “In the large establishments” a “fine division” (of labour) is practised “with the object of increasing productivity” (Isayev, loc. cit., 27 and 31).

** The Directory for 1890 gives for the district of Zagarye 14 factories employing 184 workers, with an output totalling 37,000 rubles. A comparison of these figures with the above-quoted Zemstvo statistics shows that in this case too the factory statistics covered only the upper strata of widely developed capitalist manufacture.

*** Cf. Handicraft Industries of Bogorodsk Uyezd.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. IX, article by Mr. A. Tillo.—Reports and Investigations, Vol. III (1893). The industry continues to develop. Cf. letter to Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897, No. 231. Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 42. Output totals over 1 million rubles, of which about 200,000 rubles is received by the workers and about 300,000 rubles by buyers-up and merchants.

* “Among the Krasnoye handicraftsmen every kind of article and even every part is made by a specific craftsman, and therefore one rarely finds, for example, rings and ear-rings, bracelets and brooches, etc., made in the same house; usually a particular article is made in parts by different worker-specialists who live not only in different houses but even in different villages” (Reports and Investigations, Vol. III, p. 76).

* Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 42.

** See Mr. V. Borisov’s article in Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. IX.

*** The Tula blacksmith, Nikita Demidov Antufyev, won Peter the Great’s favour by building an ironworks near the town of Tula; in 1702 he was granted the Nevyansk works. His descendants were the famous Urals iron manufacturers, the Demidovs.

* The Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. X, contain an excellent description by Mr. Manokhin of the samovar industry in Suksun, Perm Gubernia. Its organisation is the same as that in Tula Gubernia. Cf. ibid., Vol. IX, Mr. Borisov’s article on handicraft industries at the 1882 exhibition.

* Evidently there are analogous features in the organisation of the mechanical trades in Tula and its environs. Mr. Borisov in 1882 estimated that the number of workers employed in these industries was from 2,000 to 3,000, producing wares to a value of nearly 2½ million rubles. These “handicraftsmen” are very much under the heel of merchant’s capital. The hardware “factories” in Tula Gubernia sometimes also have outside workers (cf. List, pp. 393-395).

** The development of accordion-making is also interesting as a process of the elimination of primitive folk instruments and of the creation of a wide, national market; without this market there could have been no division of labour by processes, and without division of labour the finished article could not have been produced cheaply: “Owing to their cheapness … the accordions have nearly everywhere displaced the primitive string folk instrument, the balalaika” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. IX, p. 2276).

* The Tula town census of November 29, 1891, gave 36 establishments selling accordions and 34 accordion workshops (see Tula Gubernia Handbook for 1895, Tula, 1895).

* Let us confine ourselves to one example. In the village of Borisovka, Graivoron Uyezd, Kursk Gubernia, there is an icon-painting industry, employing about 500 persons. The majority of the craftsmen hire no workers, but keep apprentices, who work from 14 to 15 hours a day. When a proposal was made to set up an art school, these craftsmen strongly opposed it, for fear of losing the gratuitous labour-power of their apprentices (Reports and Investigations, I, 333). In domestic industry the conditions of children under capitalist manufacture are no better than those of apprentices, since the domestic worker is compelled to lengthen the working day and exert all the efforts of his family to the utmost.

** “The domestic form of large-scale production and manufacture are an inevitable and to a certain extent even a desirable way out for small independent industry when it covers a large district” (Kharizomenov, in Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1883, No. 11, p. 435).

* Why is it that only capital was able to create this connection? Because, as we have seen, commodity production gives rise to the scattered condition of the small producers and to their complete differentiation, and because the small industries bequeathed to manufacture a heritage of capitalist workshops and merchant’s capital.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, IV, 22.

** Ibid., III, 63.

*** In 1890 it had 514 workers and an output of 600,000 rubles; in 1894-95, 845 workers, output 1,288,000 rubles.

**** This is very aptly described by the term “wholesale crafts.” “Beginning with the 17th century,” writes Korsak, “rural industry began to develop more perceptibly; whole villages, especially those near Moscow and situated along the high roads, began to engage in some particular industry; the inhabitants of some became tanners, of others weavers, and of still others dyers, cartwrights, smiths, etc…. Towards the close of the last century very many of these wholesale crafts, as some call them, had developed in Russia” (loc. cit., 119-121).

* Let us confine ourselves to two examples: Khvorov, the celebrated Pavlovo locksmith, made 24 locks to a weight of one zolotnik (4.25 grammes.—Ed.); some of the parts of these locks were no larger than a pin’s head (Labzin, loc. cit., 44). One toy-maker in Moscow Gubernia spent nearly all his life finishing harnessed horses and achieved such dexterity that he could finish 400 a day (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. II, pp. 38-39).

** This is how Mr. Grigoryev describes the Pavlovo handicraftsmen. “I met one of these workers … who for six years had been working at the same vice and had with his bare left foot worn more than halfway through the board on which he stood; with bitter irony he said that the employer intended to get rid of him when he had worn the board right through” (op. cit., pp. 108-109).

*** The squirrel-fur industry in Kargopol Uyezd, the wooden-spoon industry in Semyonov Uyezd.

* Imported (i.e., not local) raw material is used in the weaving industries, the Pavlovo and Gzhel industries, the Perm leather industries, and many others (cf. Studies, pp. 122-124). (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

* Mr. V. V. in his Essays on Handicraft Industry, assures us that “in our country … there are very few localities of handicraft industry where agriculture has been entirely abandoned (36)—we have shown above that, on the contrary, there are very many—and that “the slight manifestations of division of labour that we observe in our country must be ascribed not so much to the energy of industrial progress as to the immobility of the size of peasant holdings…” (40). Mr. V. V. fails to notice that these “localities of handicraft industry” are distinguished by a special system of technique, economy and culture, and that they characterise a specific stage in the development of capitalism. The important thing is that the majority of “industrial villages” received the “smallest allotments” (39)—(in 1861, after their industrial life had proceeded for scores and in some cases hundreds of years!)—and of course, had there not been this connivance of the authorities there would have been no capitalism.

* Das Kapital, I², 779-780.¹⁴²

** The importance of this fact impels us to supplement the data given in §II with the following. Buturlinovka settlement, Bobrov Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia, is one of the centres of leather production. There are 3,681 households, of which 2,383 do not engage in agriculture. Population over 21,000. Households with literate persons constitute 53%, as against 38% for the uyezd (Zemstvo statistical returns for Bobrov Uyezd). Pokrovskaya settlement and Balakovo village, Samara Gubernia, each have over 15,000 inhabitants, of whom very many are from outside. Non-farming households—50% and 42%. Literacy is above average. The statistical materials state that the commercial and industrial villages in general are distinguished for their higher literacy and the “mass-scale appearance of non-farming households” (Zemstvo statistical returns for Novouzensk and Nikolayevsk uyezds). Regarding the higher cultural level of “handicraftsmen” cf. additionally Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, p. 42; VII, p. 914; Smirnov, loc. cit., p. 59; Grigoryev, loc. cit., p. 106 and foll.: Annensky, loc. cit., p. 61, Nizhni-Novgorod Handbook, Vol. II, pp. 223-239; Reports and Investigations, II, p. 243; III, 151. Then Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, p. 109, giving a lively account of the conversation of the investigator, Mr. Kharizomenov, with his driver, a silk-weaver. This weaver strongly and bitterly declaimed against the “drab” life of the peasants, the scantiness of their requirements, their backwardness, etc., and wound up with the exclamation: “Good Lord, to think what these people live for!” It has long been observed that what the Russian peasant is poorest in is consciousness of his own poverty. Of the artisan in the capitalist manufactory (not to mention the factory), it must be said that in this respect he is, comparatively speaking, very rich.

* N. Ovsyannikov, “Relation of the Upper Volga Area to the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair.” Article in Nizhni-Novgorod Handbook, Vol. II (Nizhni-Novgorod, 1869). The author bases himself on data for Kimry village for 1865. This author supplements his review of the fair with a description of the social and economic relations in the industries represented there.

* Exactly like their Narodnik ideologists.

** For isolated heroes of individual endeavour (such as Duzhkin in V. Korolenko’s Pavlovo Sketches) this is still possible in the period of manufacture, but, of course, not for the mass of propertyless workers who perform a single operation.

* Let us supplement the above by one other example. In the furnishing industry of Moscow Gubernia (information dated 1876, from Mr. Isayev’s book), the biggest industrialists are the Zenins, who introduced the making of costly furniture and “trained generations of skilled artisans.” In 1845 they established a sawmill of their own (in 1894-95—12,000 rubles output, 14 workers, steam-engine). Let us note that altogether in this industry there were 708 establishments, 1,979 workers, of whom 846, or 42.7%, were hired, and an output totalling 459,000 rubles. In the beginning of the 60s the Zenins began to buy raw materials wholesale in Nizhni-Novgorod. They bought timber in waggon-loads at 13 rubles per hundred planks and sold it to small handicraftsmen at 18-20 rubles. In 7 villages (where 116 are at work) the majority sell furniture to Zenin, who has a furniture and plywood warehouse in Moscow (established in 1874) with a turnover reaching 40,000 rubles. About 20 one-man jobbers are working for the Zenins.

* Here is an example illustrating what has been said above. In the village of Negino, Trubchevsk Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, there is an oil works employing 8 workers, with an output of 2,000 rubles (Directory for 1890). This small works would seem to indicate that the role of capital in the local oil-pressing industry is very slight But the slight development of industrial capital is merely indicative of an enormous development of merchant’s and usurer’s capital. From the Zemstvo statistical returns we learn of this village that of 186 households 160 are completely in the grip of the local factory owner, who even pays all their taxes for them, lends them all they need (and that over many, many years), receiving help at a reduced price in payment of debt. The mass of the peasants in Orel Gubernia are in a similar state of bondage. Can one, under such circumstances, rejoice over the slight development of industrial capital?

** One can therefore imagine what sort of picture one gets of the economic organisation of such “handicraft industries” if the big manufactory owners are left out of account (after all, this is not handicraft, but factory industry!), while the “buyers-up” are depicted as being “virtually quite superfluous and called into being solely by the failure to organise the sale of products” (Mr. V. V., Essays on Handicraft Industry, 150)!

* In Western Europe also, as we know, the manufactory period of capitalism was distinguished by the extensive development of domestic industry—in the weaving industries for instance. It is interesting to note that in describing clock-making, which he cites as a classic example of manufacture, Marx points out that the dial, spring and case are rarely made in the manufactory itself, and that, in general, the detail worker often works at home (Das Kapital, I, 2-te Aufl., S. 353-354).¹⁴⁴

** These words are in English in the original.—Ed.

*** That, incidentally, is why the factory fights such middlemen, as, for example, the “jobbers,” workers who hire workmen on their own account. Cf. Kobelyatsky: Handbook for Factory Owners, etc., St. Petersburg, 1897, p. 24 and foll. All the literature on the handicraft industries teems with facts testifying to the extreme exploitation of craftsmen by middle-men where work is distributed to homes. Let us cite as an example Korsak’s general opinion, loc. cit., .p. 258, the description of “handicraft” weaving (quoted above), the descriptions of the women’s industries in Moscow Gubernia (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vols. VI and VII), and many others.

* These words are in English in the original.—Ed.

* Mme. Gorbunova, who has described the women’s industries, wrongly gives the earnings as 18 kopeks and 37 rubles 77 kopeks respectively, for she takes only the average figures for each industry and leaves out of account the different numbers of women working in the different industries.¹⁴⁵

** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. II, p. 104.

*** Ibid., p. 285.

**** Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 63. Cf. ibid., 250.

* Reports and Investigations, 1, 218. Cf. ibid., 280: statement by factory owner Irodov that he finds it more profitable to give out work to hand weavers working in their homes.

** Examples of workers’ indebtedness to employers in the brush industry of Moscow Gubernia (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. I, p. 32), the comb industry (ibid., 261), the toy industry (Vol. VI, Pt. II, 44), the stone-setting industry, etc., etc. In the silk industry the weaver is up to his ears in debt to the factory owner, who pays his taxes and, in general, “rents the weaver as one rents land,” etc. (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 51-55).

*** Not only a wage-slave, but also a debt-slave.—Ed.

**** “Of course,” we read of the blacksmiths of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, “here, too, the master exploits the worker’s labour, but to a lesser degree (?), and moreover it is done patriarchally, as it were, by common consent (!) without any misunderstandings” (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, IV, 199).

* Of course, in all capitalist society there will always be a rural proletariat that agrees to take home-work on the worst terms; but obsolete institutions enlarge the sphere of application of domestic industry and hinder the struggle against it. Korsak, as far back as 1861, pointed to the connection between the tremendously widespread nature of domestic industry in Russia and our agrarian system (loc. cit., 305-307).

** We have seen that the big master-industrialists, the buyers-up, workroom owners and subcontractors are at the same time well-to-do agriculturists. “The subcontractor,” we read, for example, in a description of galloon-weaving in Moscow Gubernia (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. II, p. 147), “is a peasant just like his weaver, but has a cottage, a horse and a cow more than the weaver has, and perhaps is able with his whole family to drink tea twice a day.”

* This error of the Narodniks is all the more gross in that the majority of them want to follow the theory of Marx, who most emphatically stressed the capitalist character of “modern domestic industry” and pointed especially to the fact that these home workers constitute one of the forms of the relative surplus-population characteristic of capitalism. (Das Kapital, I², S. S. 503 u. ff.; 668 u. ff.; Chapter 23, §4 particularly.)¹⁴⁶

** A small example. In Moscow Gubernia, the tailoring industry is widespread (Zemstvo statistics counted in the gubernia at the end of the 1870s a total of 1,123 tailors working locally and 4,291 working away from home); most of the tailors worked for the Moscow ready-made clothing merchants. The centre of the industry is the Perkhushkovo Volost, Zvenigorod Uyezd (see data on the Perkhushkovo tailors in Appendix I to Chapter V, Industry No. 36). The Perkhushkovo tailors did particularly well during the war of 1877. They made army tents to the order of special contractors; subcontractors with 3 sewing-machines and ten women day workers “made” from 5 to 6 rubles a day. The women were paid 20 kopeks per day. “It is said that in those busy days over 300 women day workers from various surrounding villages lived in Shadrino (the principal village in the Perkhushkovo Volost)” (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VI, Pt. II, loc. cit., 256). “At that time the Perkhushkovo tailors, that is, the owners of the workshops, made so much money that nearly all of them built themselves fine homes” (ibid.). These hundreds of women day workers who, perhaps, would have a busy season once in 5 to 10 years, must always be available, in the ranks of the reserve army of the proletariat.

* Let us recall that Mr. Kharizomenov (article quoted above) calculated that of 102,245 persons engaged in 42 industries of Moscow Gubernia, 66% were engaged in industries where there was an absolute predominance of the domestic system of large-scale production.

* Unfortunately, we are unable to acquaint ourselves with the latest work on handicraft industry in Yaroslavl Gubernia (Handicraft Industries. Published by Statistical Bureau of Yaroslavl Gubernia Zemstvo. Yaroslavl, 1904). Judging from the detailed review in Russkiye Vedomosti (1904, No. 248), it is an extremely valuable piece of research. The number of handicraftsmen in the gubernia is estimated as 18,000 (the number of factory workers in 1903 was placed at 33,898). Industries are on the decline. One-fifth of the enterprises employ wage-workers. One quarter of the total number of handicraftsmen are wage-workers. Of the total number of handicraftsmen 15% are engaged in establishments with 5 and more workers. Exactly one half of all the handicraftsmen work for masters, with materials supplied by the latter. Agriculture is on the decline; one-sixth of the handicraftsmen have neither horses nor cows, one-third cultivate by hiring a neighbour; one-fifth have no land under crops. The earnings of a handicraftsman are 1½, rubles a week! (Note to 2nd edition.)

** All these figures are approximate, for the source does not give precise figures. Among the village artisans are included millers, blacksmiths, etc., etc.

* See Studies, pp. 181-182. The figures for “handicraftsmen” here include artisans (25%). If we exclude the artisans, we get 29.3% wage-workers and 29.5% working for buyers-up (p. 122), i.e., 58.8% are capitalistically employed workers. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

** For example, capitalist work in the home is particularly developed in the ready-made clothing industry, which is growing rapidly. “The demand for such an article of prime necessity as ready-made clothing is increasing from year to year” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897 No. 52, Survey of Nizhni-Novgorod Fair). The enormous development of this industry has taken place only since the 80s. At the present time, in Moscow alone ready-made clothing is produced to a total value of not less than 16 million rubles, with some 20,000 workers employed. It is estimated that for the whole of Russia the output reaches the sum of 100 million rubles (Successes of Russian Industry According to Surveys of Expert Commissions, St. Petersburg, 1897, pp. 136-137). In St. Petersburg, the 1890 census gave the number employed in ready-made clothing (Group XI, Classes 116-118) as 39,912, counting members of industrialists families, including 19,000 workers, and 13,000 one-man producers with their families (St. Petersburg According to the Census of December 15, 1890). The 1897 census shows that the total number of persons employed in the clothing industry in Russia was 1,158,865, the members of their families numbering 1,621,511; total 2,780,376. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Let us recall that the number of “handicraftsmen” in Russia is estimated at no less than 4 million (Mr. Kharizomenov’s figure Mr. Andreyev gave the figure of 7½ million, but his methods are too sweeping)¹⁴⁷; consequently, the total figures given in the text cover about one-tenth of the total number of “handicraftsmen.”

** Cf. Studies, p. 179 and foll. (See present edition, Vol, 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

*** The desire to retain the term “handicraftsmanship” for the purpose of scientifically defining forms of industry has led in our publications to purely scholastic arguments about, and definitions of, this “handicraftsmanship.” One economist “understood” handicraftsmen to mean only commodity-producers, while another included artisans in this term; one considered connection with the land as an essential feature, while another allowed for exceptions; one excluded wage-labour, while another allowed for it where, for example, there were up to 16 workers, etc., etc. It goes without saying that arguments of this sort (instead of investigation of the different forms of industry) could lead nowhere. Let us observe that the tenacity of the special term “handicraftsmanship” is to be explained most of all by the social-estate divisions in Russian society; a “handicrafts man” is an industrialist belonging to the lower estates, a person who may be patronised and in relation to whom schemes may be concocted without compunction; the form of industry is left out of account. The merchant, however and the member of the nobility (even though they be small industrialists) are rarely classified as “handicraftsmen.” By “handicraft” industries are usually meant all sorts of peasant, and only peasant, industries.

* This term “capitalisation,” of which Messrs. V. V. and N. —on are so fond, is permissible in a newspaper article, for the sake of brevity, but it is totally out of place in an economic investigation of which the whole purpose is to analyse the various forms and stages of capitalism, their significance, their connection, and their consecutive development. “Capitalisation” may be taken to mean anything in the world: the hiring of a single “labourer,” buying-up, and a steam-driven factory. How can one make head or tail of it, with all these things jumbled together!

Chapter VII: The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry

* Das Kapital, I, Chapter 13 [Chap. 15, Eng. ed.—Ed.].

** Ibid., I², S. 499.¹⁴⁹

* Mr. N. —on in Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1894, No. 6, pp. 103 and 119.—See also his Sketches, and Mr. V. V.’s Destiny of Capitalism, passim.

** Otechestvenniye Zapiski, 1883, No. 7, Letter to the editor from Mr. Postoronny [Outsider].

* For a detailed review of the sources of our factory statistics, see in Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire, Series II, Vol. VI, St. Petersburg, 1872, Material for the Statistics of Factory Industry in European Russia for 1868. Compiled by Mr. Bok. Introduction, pp. I-XXIII.

** See article “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics” in Studies, where the latest publication of the Department of Commerce and Manufacture on our factory industries is examined in detail. (See present edition, Vol. 4.—Ed.)

* P. Semyonov in the preface to Statistical Chronicle, I, 1866, p. XXVII.

** Statistical Atlas of Main Branches of Factory Industry of European Russia, with List of Factories and Works, 3 vols., St. Petersburg, 1869, 1870 and 1873.

*** The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I, p. 140.

**** Ibid., p. 306.

* As to understatements by factory owners in their returns regarding the number of employed workers and the output, the above-mentioned sources make two interesting attempts at verification. Timiryazev compared the returns made by over a hundred big factory owners for the official statistics with the returns they made for the 1865 Exhibition. The latter figures proved to be 22% higher than the former (loc. cit., I, pp. IV-V). In 1868 the Central Statistical Committee, as an experiment, instituted a special investigation of factory industry in Moscow and Vladimir gubernias (where in 1868 nearly half of all the workers and of the total output of the factories and works of European Russia were concentrated). If we take the trades for which data are given both by the Ministry of Finance and the Central Statistical Committee, we get the following figures: according to the Ministry of Finance there were 1,749 factories, 186,521 workers, with an output totalling 131,568,000 rubles, whereas according to the investigation by the Central Statistical Committee there were 1,704 factories, 196,315 workers on premises plus 33,485 outside workers, and an output totalling 137,758,000 rubles.

* It is very possible that these returns were simply taken from gubernatorial reports, which, as we shall see below, always enormously exaggerate the number of factories and works.

** How widely the Military Statistical Abstract applied the term “factory” becomes particularly evident through the following: the Yearbook statistics are called “the statistics of our large establishments” (p. 319, authors’ italics). As we have seen, ⅓, of these “large” establishments have an output of less than 1,000 rubles!! We omit more detailed proof of the point that the figures given in the Military Statistical Abstract must not be used for purposes of comparison with present-day factory statistics, since this task has already been performed by Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky (see his book The Factory, etc., p. 336 and foll.). Cf. Studies, pp. 271 and 275. (See present edition, Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.)

* Sketches, p. 125 and Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1894, No. 6.

** Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1889, No. 9, and Material on the Russian National Economy, Moscow, 1898.

*** Lectures on Agricultural Economics, Moscow, 1897, p. 13.

* Examples will be given in the next section. Here let us refer to p. 679 and foll. of the Directory; a glance at these pages will readily convince anyone of the justice of what has been said in the text.

** In the third edition of the Directory (St. Petersburg, 1894), this reservation is not repeated, regrettably so, for the data are as unsatisfactory as ever.

*** Certain missing data have been added approximately; see Directory, p. 695.

**** See classification of factories according to total output in the second and third editions of the Directory.

* It goes without saying that the data on the small establishments are quite haphazard: in some gubernias and in some years their number is given in hundreds and thousands, in others in tens and units. For example, in Bessarabia Gubernia, from 1887 to 1890: 1,479—272—262—1,684; in Penza Gubernia, from 1885 to 1891: 4—15—0—1,127—1,135 — 2,148 — 2,264, etc., etc.

** Cf. examples in Studies, p. 274. (See present edition, Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.) Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky was somewhat mistaken in asserting that the number of actual factories dropped between 1885 and 1891 (The Factory, p. 350), and comparing the average number of workers per factory for different trades at different times (ibid., 355). The data in the Collection are too chaotic for use, without being specially processed, in drawing such conclusions.

* N. A. Karyshev, “Statistical Survey of the Distribution of the Principal Branches of Manufacturing Industry in Russia.” Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1889, No. 9, September. Together with Mr. Karyshev’s latest work, examined by us in our Studies, this article serves as an example of how not to handle our factory statistics.

* Section IV of Mr. Karyshev’s article. Let us observe that for comparison with the Returns we could, instead of the Collection, have taken Mr. Orlov’s Directory, the second edition of which (1884) is quoted by Mr. Karyshev too.

** “Thus, three quarters of the latter” (total annual output) “is provided by establishments of a relatively small type. This phenomenon may have its roots in many extremely important elements of Russian national economy. To them, by the way, should be assigned the system of land tenure of the mass of the population, the tenacity of the village community (sic!), which raises serious obstacles to the development of a professional class of factory workers in our country. With this is combined (!) the widespread character of the domestic form of the processing of products in the very (central) zone of Russia in which our factories and works are mainly concentrated” (ibid., Mr. Karyshev’s italics). Poor “village community”! It alone must bear all the blame for everything, even for the statistical errors of its learned admirers!

* Data from Mr. D Zhbankov’s Sanitary Investigation of Factories and Works of Smolensk Gubernia (Smolensk, Vol. I, 1896).

** Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Vol. II, Yaroslavl, 1896. Cf. also Tula Gubernia Handbook for 1895 (Tula, 1895), Sec. VI; pp. 14-15: Factory Returns for 1893.

*** See present edition, Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.

**** According to Mr. Karyshev’s calculations, the totals of the figures given in the List relating to European Russia are: 14,578 factories, with 885,555 workers and an output totalling 1,345,346,000 rubles.

(*) The collections of factory inspectors’ reports published by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (for 1901-1903) give data on the number of factories and works, as well as workers employed in them (for 64 gubernias of Russia), the factories and works being classified according to the number of workers (up to 20; 21-50; 51-100; 101-500- 501-1,000; over 1,000). This is a big step forward in our factory statistics. The data for large workshops (21 workers and over) are probably reliable, at least in some degree. The data for “factories” with fewer than 20 workers are obviously casual and utterly worthless. For example, in Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia the number of factories employing fewer than 20 workers in 1903 is given as 266; the number of workers employed in them—1,975, or an average of fewer than 8 workers. In Perm Gubernia there are 10 such factories with 159 workers! Ridiculous, of course. The total for 1903 for 64 gubernias: 15,821 factories with 1,640,406 workers; and if we deduct factories and works employing fewer than 20 workers, we get 10,072 factories and works with 1,576,754 workers. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Cf. Vestnik Finansov, 1896, No. 35. Reports of papers and debates at Nizhni-Novgorod congress. Mr. Mikhailovsky very vividly described the chaotic condition of factory statistics, showing how the questionnaire travels “down to the lowest police official, who circulates it at last, getting a receipt, of course, to those industrial establishments which he deems worthy of attention, but most often in those of them which he circularised the previous years”;—how the replies given to the various questions are either: “same as last year”—(it is enough to go over the Collections of the Department of Commerce and Manufacture for the various trades in various gubernias to be convinced of the truth of this)—or are absolutely meaningless, etc.

* The data concern all trades (i.e., including excise-paying) except mining. For 1879, 1890 and 1894-95 we have computed the data from Directories and the List. From the data in the List we have excluded printing works, of which no account was taken formerly in factory statistics (see Studies, p. 273) [See present edition, Vol 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.]. For 1866 we have according to the data in the Yearbook for 71 trades, 1,861 establishments each employing 16 and more workers, out of a total of 6,891 establishments; in 1890 these 71 trades accounted for about four-fifths of the total number of establishments with 16 and more workers. The criterion adopted by us for the term “factory” is, in our view, the most exact, since the most varied programmes for our factory statistics have undoubtedly accepted the inclusion of establishments with 16 and more workers among the factories, and this for all branches of industry. There can be no doubt that the factory statistics never could, and cannot now, register all establishments employing 16 and more workers (see instances in Chapter VI, §II), but we have no grounds for thinking that there were more omissions formerly than now. For 1903 the data are from the Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports. In the 50 gubernias of European Russia there were 8,856 factories and works with over 20 workers 41 each.

* In all cases, unless otherwise stated, we take the data of the Yearbook for 1866 and those of the Directories for 1879 and 1890.—The Historico-Statistical Survey (Vol. II) gives annual information on cloth production from 1855 to 1879; the following are the five-year averages of workers employed from 1855-1859 to 1875-1879: 107,433; 96,131; 92,117; 87,960 and 81,458.

** See A Survey of Various Branches of Manufactory Industry in Russia, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1862, particularly pp. 165 and 167. Cf. also Military Statistical Abstract, D. 357 and foll. At the present time we rarely meet in the lists of cloth manufacturers the celebrated noble families that constituted the overwhelming majority in the 1860s.

* The following examples are taken from Zemstvo statistical material. Concerning N. P. Gladkov’s cloth factory in Volsk Uyezd, Saratov Gubernia (in 1866 it had 306 workers), we read in the Zemstvo statistical abstract for this uyezd (p. 275) that peasants were forced to work in the factory belonging to the lord. “They worked in the factory until they married, and then became tax-paying members of the peasant community.” In the village of Ryassy, Ranenburg Uyezd, Ryazan Gubernia, there was in 1866 a cloth factory employing 180 workers. The peasants performed their corvée by working in the mill, which was closed down in 1870 (Statistical Returns for Ryazan Gubernia, Vol. II, Pt. I, Moscow, 1882, p. 330).

** See Nisselovich, A History of the Factory Legislation of the Russian Empire, Pts. I and II, St. Petersburg, 1883-1884.—A. Semyonov, A Study of Historical Data on Russian Foreign Trade and Industry, St. Petersburg, 1858-1859, 3 parts.—V. I. Semevsky, The Peasants in the Reign of Catherine II, St. Petersburg, 1881.—Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia. Sanitary Statistical Sec, Vol. IV, Pt. I (general summary), Moscow, 1890, article by A. V. Pogozhev, “The Manorial-Possessional Factories of Moscow Gubernia.”—M. Tugan-Baranovsky, The Russian Factory, St. Petersburg, 1898, Vol. I.

* Cf. Successes of Russian Industry According to Surveys of Expert Commissions, St. Petersburg, 1897, p. 60.

** The data on steam-engines in this and the following instances are taken from Material for the Statistics of Steam-Engines in the Russian Empire published by the Central Statistical Committee, St. Petersburg, 1882; for 1890 they are taken from Collection of Data on Factory Industry; data on mechanised establishments are from the Directory.

* Cf. Tugan-Baranovsky, loc. cit., p. 420.—The total number of village hand weavers working for capitalists was estimated by Semyonov at approximately 385,857 in 1859 (loc. cit., III, 273); to these he added another 200,000 village workers engaged “in other factory trades” (ibid., p. 302). At the present time, as we have seen above, the number of capitalistically employed home workers is much larger.

** Establishments with an output of under 2,000 rubles are classed as workrooms. The data of the special investigation of factories and works in Moscow and Vladimir gubernias made in 1868 by the Central Statistical Committee contain the repeated statement that the output figures of the small weaving establishments merely indicate pay for work done. Establishments that distribute work to home workers are classed as offices. For 1866 the figure given for these establishments is far from complete, owing to obvious omissions in the case of Moscow Gubernia.

* Military Statistical Abstract, 380.—Survey of Manufactory Industry, Vol, II, St. Petersburg, 1863, p. 451.—In 1898 the number of power-looms used in cotton weaving (for the whole Empire, evidently) was reckoned at 100,630. Successes of Russian Industry, p. 33.

** Military Statistical Abstract, pp. 367-368: Commissariat returns.

* In silk-weaving in 1879 there were 495 power-looms and 5,996 hand-looms (Historico-Statistical Survey), and in 1890 there were 2,899 of the former and over 7,500 of the latter.

** For example, in 1879 the number of factories computed in these trades was 729; of this number, 466 had 977 workers and an output of 170,000 rubles. Even today one can find many such “factories”—for instance, in the description of the handicraft industries of Vyatka and Perm gubernias.

*** Cf. Military Statistical Abstract, p. 389. Survey of Manufactory Industry, I, 309.

* Thus in 1879, of 91 bast-matting factories 39 had an output of less than 1,000 rubles each (Cf. Studies, p. 155). [See present edition Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.] In the pitch-and-tar trade for 1890 there were computed 140 factories, all with an output exceeding 2,000 rubles; for 1879, 1,033 were computed, of which 911 had an output of less than 2,000 rubles; for 1866 the number listed was 669 (for the Empire), while the Military Statistical Abstract even gave the figure of 3,164!! (Cf. Studies, pp. 156 and 271.) [See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia, and Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.—Ed.]

** Military Statistical Abstract, Historico-Statistical Survey and Productive Forces, IX, 16.—The number of workers in 1866—5,645; in 1890—25,471; in 1875-1878—38 mechanised establishments, with 34 steam-engines to a total of 332 h.p.; and in 1890—141 mechanised establishments, with 208 steam-engines to a total of 3,319 h.p.

*** Cf. Directory for 1879 and 1890 about potash production. The production of saltpetre is now concentrated in one factory in St. Petersburg, whereas in the 60s and 70s saltpetre was obtained from burti (dungheaps).

* Here, too, the number of factories in the 60s and 70s included a host of small establishments.

** In 1875, Prof. Kittary, in his Map of Leather Production in Russia, gave an aggregate of 12,939 establishments, with output totalling 47½ million rubles, whereas the factory statistics gave 2,764 establishments, with output totalling 26½ million rubles (Historico-Statistical Survey). In the fur trade, another in this section, a similar lumping is observed of small establishments together with factories: Cf. Directory for 1879 and for 1890.

*** The Military Statistical Abstract gave an aggregate of even 3,890!!

* If we distribute the factories shown in the Directory as for 1890 according to date of establishment we get the following: of 1,506 factories the number established at dates unknown was 91, before 1850—331; in the 1850s—147; in the 60s—239; in the 70s—320; in the 80s—351; in 1890—21. In every succeeding decade more factories were established than in the preceding one.

* The small establishments in these industries are now classed with the handicrafts. Cf., for instance, the table of small industries (Appendix I) or Studies, pp. 158-159. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.). The Ministry of Finance Yearbook (Vol. I) refused to give totals for these industries because the figures were obviously exaggerated. Progress in statistics since then is expressed in an increased boldness and disregard of the quality of material used.

** Thus, in the 60s, dozens of smithies were classed for some gubernias as “ironworks.” See Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance, 1866, No. 4, p. 406; 1867, No. 6 p. 384.—Statistical Chronicle, Series II, Vol. 6.—Cf. also the example quoted above (§II) where the Yearbook for 1866 includes the small handicraftsmen of the Pavlovo district among the “factory owners:”

* See examples in Studies, p. 269 and p. 284 (see present edition, Vol. 4, “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.), where Mr. Karyshev’s error in ignoring this circumstance is examined. The Directory for 1879, for instance, includes the Kulebaki and Vyksa ironworks, or departments of them (pp. 356 and 374), which are omitted in the Directory for 1890.

* And in addition 32,957 “small windmills,” not counted among the “factories and works.”

** See examples of such conclusions drawn by Mr. Karyshev in the above-quoted article in the Studies. (See present edition, Vol. 4, op. cit.—Ed.)

*** Large watermills are also in the nature of factories, of course, but we have no data to enable us to single them out from among the small ones. In the Directory for 1890 we saw listed 250 watermills each employing 10 and more workers. They employed 6,378 workers.

**** Military Statistical Abstract, Directories and Collection. According to the List for 1894-95, there are 1,192 steam-mills in European Russia. The statistics for steam-engines gave the number of steam-mills in European Russia in 1875-1878 as 294.

* Oil-pressing, starch, treacle, malt, confectionery, preserves and vinegar.

** Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1894, No. 6, pp. 104-105.

* The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I, pp. 76 and 82. The total number of distilleries (including those not in operation) was 4,737 and 4,646 respectively.

** Yearbook, I, p. 104.

*** E.g., in Simbirsk Gubernia, the Military Statistical Abstract computes 218 distilleries (!) with 299 workers and an output totalling 21,600 rubles. (According to the Yearbook there were 7 distilleries in the gubernia.) Very likely, these were small domestic or peasant establishments.

* The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, p. 61. Cf. Survey of Manufactory Industry (Vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1863), which gives detailed information for 1861: 534 factories, with 6,937 workers; and in Bessarabia Gubernia, 31 factories, with 73 workers. The number of tobacco factories fluctuates greatly from year to year.

* If we take the gross figures for all trades and for long periods, the exaggeration resulting from the cause mentioned will not be great, for the small establishments account for a small percentage of the total number of workers and the total output. It goes without saying that one presumes a comparison of figures taken from similar sources (there can be no question of comparing the returns of the Ministry of Finance with those of gubernatorial reports, or of the Military Statistical Abstract).

** Sources: Semyonov, A Study of Historical Data on Russian Trade and Industry, Vol. III, St. Petersburg, 1859, pp. 323-339. Military Statistical Abstract, section on mining industry. The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, Vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1869. Statistical Returns for Mining, for 1864-1861, St. Petersburg, 1864 1867 (published by the Scientific Committee of the Corps of Mining Engineers). I. Bogolyubsky, Essay in Mining Statistics for the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, 1878. Historico-Statistical Survey of Russian Industry, St. Petersburg, 1883, Vol. I (article by Keppen). Statistical Returns for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries of Russia in 1890, St. Petersburg, 1892. Ditto for 1901 (St. Petersburg, 1904) and for 1902 (St. Petersburg, 1905). K. Skalkovsky, Mining and Metallurgical Productivity of Russia in 1877, St. Petersburg, 1879. The Mining and Metallurgical Industry of Russia, published by the Department of Mines for the Chicago Exhibition, St. Petersburg, 1893 (compiled by Keppen). Returns for Russia for 1890, published by the Central Statistical Committee, St. Petersburg, 1890. Ditto for 1896, St. Petersburg, 1897. Productive Forces of Russia, St. Petersburg, 1896, Section VII. Vestnik Finansov for 1896-1897. Zemstvo Statistical Returns for Ekaterinburg and Krasnoufimsk uyezds of Perm Gubernia, and others.

* When the peasants were emancipated, the Ural ironmasters particularly insisted on, and secured the retention of, a law prohibiting the opening of any coal- and wood-burning establishments within the area of their undertakings. For some details, see Studies, pp. 193-194. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)

** The Ural worker “is … partly a cultivator, so that work in the mines is of good assistance to him on his farm, although the pay is lower than in the other mining-and-metal districts” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 8). As we know, the terms on which the Ural peasants were emancipated from serf dependence were made to correspond to their position in the mining industry. The mining and works population was divided into workmen having no land, who had to work in the industry all year round, and agricultural labourers, having allotments, who had to do auxiliary jobs. Highly characteristic is the term that has survived to this day, namely, of Ural workers being “debtbound.” When, for example, one reads in the Zemstvo statistics “information about a team of workers bound by debt to their jobs in the shops of the Arta works” one involuntarily turns to the title-page to see the date: Is it really ninety-four, and not, say, forty-four?¹⁵¹

* Transactions of the Commission of Inquiry into Handicraft Industry, Vol. XVI, St. Petersburg, 1887, pp. 8-9 and foll. The same author later goes on to talk about “healthy people’s” industry!

* For a description of this floating see Crags by Mr. Mamin-Sibiryak. In his writings this author vividly portrays the specific life of the Urals, which differs very little from that of the pre-Reform period, with the lack of rights, ignorance and degradation of a population tied down to the factories, with the “earnest, childish dissipations” of the “gentry,” and the absence of that middle stratum of society (middle class and other intellectuals) which is so characteristic of capitalist development in all countries, not excluding Russia.

** In mining statistics the term “South and South-West Russia” means the Volhynia, Don, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, Astrakhan, Bessarabia, Podolsk, Taurida, Kharkov, Kherson and Chernigov gubernias. It is to these that the quoted figures apply. All that is said further on about the South could also be said (with slight modifications) of Poland, which forms another mining area of outstanding significance in the post-Reform period.

* Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 16: The Nikopol-Mariupol Co. ordered a pipe-rolling mill in America and had it brought to Russia.

** Where it is well, there is my country.—Ed.

*** It goes without saying that the Ural ironmasters depict the situation somewhat differently. Here is a sample of their eloquent complaints at last year’s congresses: “The historical services rendered by the Urals are common knowledge. For two hundred years all Russia ploughed and reaped, hammered, dug and hewed with the products of Ural factories. The Russian people wore on their breasts crosses made of Ural copper, rode on Ural axles, used fire-arms made of Ural steel, cooked pancakes on Ural frying-pans, and rattled Ural pennies in their pockets The Urals satisfied the requirements of the entire Russian people …” (who used scarcely any iron. In 1851 the consumption of pig-iron in Russia was estimated at about 14 pounds per inhabitant, in 1895—1.13 poods, and in 1897—1.33 poods) “… producing articles to suit their needs and tastes. The Urals generously (?) squandered their natural wealth, without chasing after fashion, or being carried away by the making of rails, fire grates and monuments. And in return for their centuries of service—they found themselves one fine day forgotten and neglected” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 32; Results of Mining Congresses in the Urals). Indeed, what neglect of “time-hallowed” institutions. And it is all the fault of insidious capitalism, which has introduced such “instability” into our national economy. How much nicer it would be to live in the old way, without “being carried away by the making of rails,” and to cook oneself pancakes on Ural frying-pans!

* Mr. Bogolyubsky estimates the number of steam-engines used in mining in 1868 at 526 with a total of 13,575 h.p.

* The number of workers in iron production in the Urals in 1886 was 145,910, and in 1893—164,126, in the South 5,956 and 16,467. The increases are ⅓ (approx.) and 2¾-fold. For 1902 there are no data on the number of steam-engines and horse-power. The number however, of mine workers employed (not including saltminers) in 1902 in the whole of Russia was 604,972, including 249,805 in the Urals and 145,280 in the South.

** Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 21. In 1863 the population of Baku was 14,000 and in 1885—45,700.

* In 1882, over 62% of the locomotives were fuelled with wood; in 1895-96, however, wood fuelled 28.3%, oil 30% and coal 40.9% of the locomotives (Productive Forces, XVII, 62). After capturing the home market, the oil industry went in quest of foreign markets, and the export of oil to Asia is growing very rapidly (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 32) in spite of the a priori predictions of certain Russian economists who love to talk about the absence of foreign markets for Russian capitalism.

** Data taken from list of mines in Returns for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries in 1890.

* From data of N. S. Avdakov: Brief Statistical Survey of the Donets Coal Industry, Kharkov, 1896.

** Latterly the Urals, too, have begun to change under the influence of the new conditions of life; and this change will be still more rapid when the Urals are tied closer to “Russia” by railway lines. Of particular importance in this respect will be the proposed connection by rail of the Urals and the South with a view to the exchange of Ural iron-ore for Donets coal. Till now the Urals and the South have scarcely competed with each other, having worked for different markets and existed mainly on government contracts. But the abundant rain of government contracts will not go on for ever.

* Article by Yegunov in Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry, Vol. III, p. 130.

** For example, Mr. N. —on levelled all his complaints solely against capitalism (cf., in particular, his observations on the southern mine owners, Sketches, pp. 211 and 296) and thus utterly distorted the relation between Russian capitalism and the pre-capitalist structure of our mining industry.

* Returns and Material of the Ministry of Finance, 1867, No. 6. It has been shown above that for comparison with contemporary data one can only take data from the same source, i.e., those of the Ministry of Finance.

** The number of workers in brewing is 6,825, this figure is also exaggerated, but it cannot be corrected for lack of data; in beet-sugar making—68,334 (according to The Ministry of Finance Yearbook;) tobacco-making—6,116 (corrected) and distilling—46,660 (corrected).

*** Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky quotes for 1866 the figure given by Mr. Veshnyakov—493,371 (The Factory, p. 339). We do not know how this figure was arrived at; it differs very slightly from the one we give.

**** According to the Directory for 1890. From the total of 875,764 we have to subtract the number of workers duplicated in mining statistics, viz., 291 in asphalt, 3,468 in salt, and 32,275 in rails production.

(*) For the number of mine workers in the 60s, see Statistical Chronicle, I, 1866; The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I; Statistical Returns for Mining, for 1864-1867, St. Petersburg, 1864-1867, published by the Mining Scientific Committee.

* Statistical Returns for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries in 1890, St. Petersburg, 1892. According to this source the total for European Russia is 342,166, and if we subtract the number of workers at the kerosene refineries (included in the Directory) and correct certain minor errors, the total will be 340,912.

** Among the other branches of mining industries there are some in which the number of workers has probably increased slightly (salt mining), there are some in which the number must have increased very considerably (coal-mining, stone-quarrying), and some which did not exist at all in the 1860s (such as quicksilver-mining).

*** Statistical Survey of Railways and Inland Waterways, St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 22. Published by Ministry of Communications. Unfortunately, we lack the data to separate European Russia. Under railway workers we include, not only permanent, but temporary (10,447) and day labourers (74,504). The average annual pay of a temporary worker is 192 rubles, and of a day labourer 235 rubles. The average daily pay is 78 kopeks. Consequently, both the temporary and the day workers are engaged for the greater part of the year, so that to disregard them, as Mr. N. —on does (Sketches, p. 124), is wrong.

**** The number of workers per verst employed on the railways in 1886 was 9.0, in 1890—9.5; in 1893—10.2 in 1894—10.6; in 1895—10.9; thus the number obviously tends to grow. See Returns for Russia for 1890 and 1896, and Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 39.—Let us make the reservation that in this section we are concerned exclusively with comparing the data for 1865 and 1890, it is therefore absolutely immaterial whether we take the number of railway workers for the whole of the Empire or only for European Russia; whether we take 9 workers per verst or fewer, or whether we take all branches of mining or only those for which data exist for 1865.

* In European Russia the urban population in 1863 was 6.1 million, and in 1897, 12.0 million.

** The latest data on the number of workers in large capitalist enterprises are as follows for 1900 data exist regarding the number of factory workers in non-excise-paying enterprises; for 1903, data are available for excise-paying enterprises. On workers in the mining and metallurgical industries data exist for 1902. The number of railway workers may be determined by reckoning 11 men per verst (information as of January 1, 1904). See Yearbook of Russia, 1906, and Returns for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries, for 1902.

Summing up these data, we get the following: in the 50 gubernias of European Russia in 1900-1903 there were 1,261,571 factory workers; 477,025 mining workers; 468,941 railway workers. Total, 2,207,537. In the entire Russian Empire there were 1,509,516 factory workers, 626,929 mining workers, 655,929 railway workers. Total, 2,792,374. These figures, too, fully bear out what is said in the text. (Note to 2nd edition.)

*** N. —on, loc. cit., 326 and others.

* Lectures on Agricultural Economics, Moscow, 1897, p. 14.

** The Statesman’s Yearbook, 1897, p. 472.

* St. Petersburg According to the Census of 1890. St. Petersburg, 1893. We have taken the total of groups II to XV. The total number of persons engaged in industrial occupations is 551,700, of whom 200,748 are engaged in commerce, carting and innkeeping.—“One-man producers” refers to small producers who employ no workers.

** General Summary for the Empire of the Results of the Examination of the First General Population Census, January 28, 1897. Published by the Central Statistical Committee, Vol. II, Table XXI, p. 296. I have arranged the groups of occupations as follows: a) 1, 2 and 4; b) 3 and 5-12; c) 14 and 15; d) 16 and 63-65; e) 46-62; f) 41-45; g) 13; h) 17-21; i) 22-40.

* These number not less than 22 million. See further on.

* Wide World.—Ed.

** This is not the place to go into details concerning the statistics on workers and servants used by Mr. Lositsky. These statistics evidently err in very considerably understating the number of workers.

* Of the 13 groups of trades we omit, for purposes of comparison with 1892, the following groups: I (agriculture), XII (printing and lithography) and XIII (“plumbing,” etc.). Locomobiles are counted with steam-engines.

* We combine these gubernias because their boundaries have changed since 1878.

* The progress made in the employment of steam-engines in Russia since 1892 may be seen from the fact that in 1904, according to the factory inspectors’ reports, there were in 64 gubernias 27,579 factory steam-boilers; the total, not including those employed in agriculture, was 31,887. (Note to 2nd edition.)

** Sources: The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I (data only for 71 trades); Directories, first and third editions—data for all trades, as well as those in the List; but for a comparison of the data in the List and in the Directory, the manufacture of rails must be omitted from the trades given in the latter establishments for which home workers were included among the factory workers are omitted. In some cases the inclusion of home workers is specifically indicated in footnotes in the publications mentioned; in others the fact emerges from a comparison of the data for different years: cf., for instance, the data on cotton weaving in Saratov Gubernia for 1879, 1890, and 1894-95. (Cf. Chapter VI, §II, 1.)—Sinzheimer (Ueber die Grenzen der Weiter-bildung des fabrikmässigen Grossbetriebes in Deutschland, Stuttgart, 1893) [On the Limits of Extension of Large-Scale Factory Production in Germany, Stuttgart, 1893.—Ed.] classifies under large factories enterprises with 50 and more workers. We do not think this standard low, but owing to the difficulties involved in calculating Russian data, we have had to limit ourselves to the largest factories.

* Thus, in 1866, category A included 17 sugar-refineries, where the average annual output per worker was about 6,000 rubles, whereas in the textile factories (included in the top categories) the average annual output per worker ranged from 500 to 1,500 rubles.

* The total figures for our factory industry as given by the Directory and the List were quoted above, in §II [Cf. Studies, p. 276 (See present edition, Vol. 4 “On the Question of Our Factory Statistics.”—Ed.)]. We would point out that the rise in the percentage of large factories in the total number of “factories and works” indicates above all that this latter term is gradually acquiring a more restricted meaning in our statistics.

** These data have been compiled from Statistical Returns for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries in 1890, enterprises enumerated in the Directory having been excluded. By this exclusion, the total number of mining workers in European Russia is reduced by 35,000 (340,000-35,000=305,000).

* The industrial census for 1895 for the whole of German industry, including mine development, which is not registered in Russia, recorded a total of 248 establishments with 1,000 and more workers; the aggregate number of workers in these establishments was 430,286. Hence, the largest factories in Russia are larger than those in Germany.

** Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1894, No. 6, p. 101 and foll. The data for large factories which we have given above also indicate a lower percentage of growth in 1879-1890 as compared with 1866-1879.

* As Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky, for example, did in his Factory, p. 307 and chart. The chart clearly shows that 1879, and especially 1880 and 1881, were years of particular boom.

* See, for instance, felt cloth production—increased output of army cloth; tanning—enormous activity, leather goods—a large factory produces goods to the amount of 2.5 million rubles “for the War Department” (p. 288). The Izhevsk and the Sestroretsk works turn out artillery supplies to the value of 7½ million rubles, as against 1¼ million rubles in 1890. In copper-working one notes the production of supplies for the troops and of military instruments pp. 388-389); explosive factories work at full capacity, etc.

** “… In the uyezds (of Moscow Gubernia) the factories and works are far from evenly distributed: in highly industrialised uyezds, side by side with localities which, because of the more or less considerable concentration there of factory establishments, can be called real factory centres, one comes across entire volosts almost wholly devoid of factory industry; and, on the contrary, in uyezds generally poor in factories and works, there are districts with a more or less considerable development of one industry or another; side by side with handicraft cottages and workrooms larger establishments have arisen possessing all the attributes of large-scale production.” (Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Section of sanitation Statistics, vol. IV, Sec. 1, Moscow, 1890, p. 141.) This publication, the best in contemporary factory statistical literature, illustrates the distribution of large-scale industry with the aid of a detailed map. The only thing lacking for a complete picture of the distribution of factory industry is a classification of centres according to the number of factories, workers and total output.

* The table includes only establishments with a minimum output of 2,000 rubles, and of the flour-mills only the steam-powered ones. Outside workers are excluded wherever it has been stated that they are included among factory workers; such exclusions are indicated by an asterisk (*). The industrial boom of 1879 could not but affect these data, too.

** “… The large village of Cherkizovo in the vicinity of Moscow is, according to the local inhabitants, one large factory, and is a continuation of Moscow in the literal sense of the word…. Nearby, beyond the Semyonovskaya Tollgate … again a large number of diverse factories are clustered…. At no great distance from here we see the village of Izmailovo, with its weaving sheds, and the enormous Izmailovo Textile Mill.” That is to the north of Moscow. To the south, “beyond the Serpukhov Tollgate, what we meet first is the immense Danilov Textile Mill, in itself a whole township…. Further on, at no great distance from each other, are a whole ring of large brickworks,” etc. (Statistical Returns, IV, Sec. I, pp. 143-144). Thus, the concentration of factory industry is actually more considerable than we were able to indicate in our table.

* In 1879, only 10,900 were recorded here. Evidently, different methods of registration were employed.

* The population census of January 28, 1897, fully confirmed this conclusion. The urban population throughout the Empire was given as 16,828,395 persons of both sexes. The commercial and industrial population, as we showed above, is 21.7 millions. (Note to 2nd edition.)

** “In the township of Krivoi Rog the population grew between 1887 and 1896 from 6,000 to 17,000, at the Kamenka Works of the Dnieper Company—from 2,000 to 18,000; near Druzhkovka station, where as late as 1892 there was nothing but station buildings, there is now a settlement of 6,000 people; at the Gdantsevka Works there are nearly 3,500 people; near Konstantinovka station, where a number of works have been erected, a new settlement is being formed; Yuzovka is now a town with a population of 29,000…. On the sandy wasteland at Nizhne-Dnieprovsk, near Ekaterinoslav, where a number of factories are now situated, a new settlement has sprung up with a population of 6,000. The works at Mariupol has attracted a new population of 10,000, etc. Populated centres are springing up around the coal mines” (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 50). According to the Russkiye Vedomosti (November 21, 1897, No. 322), the Bakhmut Uyezd Zemstvo Assembly has filed an application for the status of townships to be granted to commercial settlements with a population of 1,000 and the status of towns to those with a population of 5,000…. “There is to be observed here … an unparalleled growth of commercial and factory settlements…. Altogether, there are by now as many as thirty settlements, which have been springing up and growing at a truly American pace…. In Volyntsevo, where a huge metallurgical works with 2 blast furnaces, a foundry and a rolling mill is nearing completion and will be started in the beginning of November, there is a population of from 5,000 to 6,000, which has settled on what only recently was almost uninhabited steppe. With the influx of a factory population we also observe an influx of traders, handicraftsmen and small industrialists in general, who anticipate an easy and rapid sale to the working population of all kinds of goods.”

* “The factory seeks cheap weavers, and finds them in their native villages…. The factory must follow the weaver….” (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 63.)

* Let us recall the fact cited above (Chapter III, §IV, p. 208, footnote) of the influence exerted by the mining industry in Bakhmut Uyezd, Ekaterinoslav Gubernia, on the local agricultural system.—Characteristic also are the common complaints of landowners about the factories “spoiling” the population.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, I, 61.

** Ibid., IV, 80.

*** Zhbankov, The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers on the Movement of the Population, Kostroma, 1887, p. 25.

**** Productive Forces. Russia’s Foreign Trade, p. 39. Timber exports in 1902—55.7 million rubles; in 1903—66.3 million rubles. (Note to 2nd edition.)

(*) Military Statistical Abstract, pp. 486-487.

(**) Statistical Survey of Railways and Inland Waterways, St. Petersburg, 1893 (published by Ministry of Communications), p. 40.

(***) Ibid., p. 26.

(****) Assuming that it amounted approximately to ⅕, of total railway freights (Military Statistical Abstract, p. 511; cf. 518-519).

* Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. I, Sec. 2. Frequently in this country no distinction is made in lumbering between masters and workers, the latter also being described as lumber industrialists.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, XI, 397.

*** Hired Labour.

**** Calculated from Transactions of the Handicraft Commission.

(*) Loc. cit., pp. 19-20 and 39. Cf. a quite analogous opinion in Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, XII, 265.

* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VIII, pp. 1372-1373, 1474. “Thanks to the requirements of the lumber industry there have developed in Tikhvin Uyezd the blacksmith, tanning, fur and partly the boot trades; the first makes boat-hooks, and the others boots, sheepskin coats and mittens.” Incidentally, we see here an example of how the making of means of production (i.e., the growth of Department I in capitalist economy) gives an impetus to the making of articles of consumption (i.e., Department II). It is not production that follows consumption, but consumption that follows production.

** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, XI, pp. 399-400, 405, 147. Cf. the numerous references in the Zemstvo Returns for Trubchevsk Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, to the fact that “agriculture is of secondary importance,” and that the principal part is played by industries, particularly lumbering (Statistical Returns for Trubchevsk Uyezd, Orel, 1887, particularly remarks on villages).

* Das Kapital, I², S. 668.¹⁵⁶

** Here is an illustration of this taken from the Report of the Members of the Commission of Inquiry into Factory Industry in the Kingdom of Poland (St. Petersburg, 1888, Pt. I). Coal in Poland costs half the Moscow price. The average expense of fuel per pood of yarn in Poland is 16 to 37 kopeks, and in the Moscow area—50 to 73 kopeks. In the Moscow area fuel is stocked for 12 to 20 months, in Poland for not more than 3 months, and in most cases for 1 to 4 weeks.

* Mr. N.—on, in dealing with the replacement of the lumber by the coal industry (Sketches, 211, 243), confined himself, as usual, to mere lamentations. Our romanticist tries not to notice the trifling fact that behind the capitalist coal industry stands the equally capitalist lumber industry, which is marked by incomparably worse forms of exploitation. But he dwells at length on the “number of workers”! What are some 600,000 British miners compared to the millions of unemployed peasants?—he asks (211). To this we reply: that capitalism creates a relative surplus-population is beyond doubt, but Mr. N. —on has absolutely failed to see the connection between this and the requirements of large-scale machine industry. To compare the number of peasants engaged in various occupations even casually and irregularly with the number of specialist miners engaged exclusively in coal extraction, is absolutely senseless. Mr. N. —on resorts to such devices only in order to hide the fact of the rapid growth in Russia of both the number of factory and mine workers, and of the commercial and industrial population in general, since that mars his theory.

* As we have had occasion to state above, it is difficult to establish this evolution because in our literature building workers in general are often called “artisans,” wage-workers being quite incorrectly classified in this category.—Regarding the analogous development of the organisation of the building industry in the West see, for instance Webb, Die Geschichte des britischen Trade Unionismus, Stuttgart, 1895, S. 7.¹⁵⁷

** In Yaroslavl Gubernia, for instance, Danilov Uyezd is particularly famous for its stove builders, plasterers and bricklayers, its different volosts mainly supplying specialists in one or other of these trades. Quite a large number of painters come from the Transvolga part of Yaroslavl Uyezd; carpenters come from the central part of Mologa Uyezd, etc. (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Vol II, Yaroslavl, 1896, p. 135 and others.)

*** At the end of the 50s, about 10,000 carpenters used to leave the Argunovo district (Argunovo Volost is the centre of the industry). In the 60s, out of 548 villages in the Pokrov Uyezd, 503 were engaged in carpentry (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, IV, p. 161, and foll.).

* Ibid., pp. 164-165. Our italics.

** Ibid., 165-166. Similar descriptions may be found in other sources. See Zhbankov: The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers on the Movement of the Population of Kostroma Gubernia in 1866-1883, Kostroma, 1887.—Urban Peasant Employments in Soligalich Uyezd, Kostroma Gubernia, in Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1890, No. 9.—Women’s Country, Kostroma, 1891.—Essay in Drafting a General Programme for the Investigation of Peasant Outside Employments.—Industries Employing Migratory Workers in Smolensk Gubernia in 1892-1895, Smolensk, 1896.—The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers on the Movement of the Population, in Vrach (Physician), 1895, No. 25.—See also above-mentioned Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Statistical Survey of Kaluga Gubernia for 1896, Kaluga, 1897; Agricultural Survey of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia for 1896, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1897, and other Zemstvo statistical publications.

* Sources, apart from those mentioned in the preceding footnote, are Zemstvo returns. Mr. V. V. (Essays on Handicraft Industry, 61) cites data for 13 uyezds in Poltava, Kursk and Tambov gubernias. The total number of building workers (Mr. V. V. classifies them all, and wrongly so, as “small industrialists”) is 28,644, ranging from 2.7% to 22.1% of the total adult male population of the uyezds. If we take the average percentage (8.8%) as the standard, the number of building workers in European Russia would be 1⅓ million (counting 15 million adult male workers). The gubernias mentioned occupy a position midway between those where the building industries are most developed and those where they are least developed.

** The census of January 28, 1897 (General Summary, 1905), gives the number of the independent population (those earning their own livelihood) engaged in the building industry throughout the Empire as 717,000, plus 469,000 cultivators occupied in this industry as a side line. (Note to 2nd edition.)

*** Fire insurance figures may, to some extent, help us to gauge the dimensions of the building industry. The value of buildings covered by fire insurance amounted to 5,968 million rubles in 1884, and to 7,854 million rubles in 1893. (Productive Forces, XII, 65.) This shows an annual increase of 188 million rubles.

**** In Yaroslavl Gubernia, for example, 11 to 20% of the total population, or 30 to 56%, of the male workers, leave their homes in search of work; 68.7% of those who leave are away all the year round (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia). Obviously, all these are “peasants only by official designation” (p. 117).

* For instance, in Ryazan Gubernia “at the Khludov factory alone” (1894-95—4,849 workers, output 6 million rubles), “as many as 7,000 horses are engaged in the winter in wood-carting, most of them belonging to peasants of the Yegoryevsk Uyezd”¹⁵⁸ (Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, VII, pp. 1109-1110).

** Chaos also reigns in the statistics for the peat industry. As a rule this industry is not classified among the “factory” trades (cf. Kobelyatsky, Handbook, p. 15), although at times it is. For instance, the List gives 12 peat fields employing 2,201 workers in Vladimir Gubernia and in that gubernia alone, although peat is extracted in other gubernias as well. According to Svirsky (Factories and Works of Vladimir Gubernia), in 1890 there were 6,038 persons employed in extracting peat in Vladimir Gubernia. The total number of workers in Russia employed in the extraction of peat must be many times greater.

*** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. VI.

**** Ibid., Vol. VIII, in Novgorod Gubernia.

* Ibid., Vol. IX, in the suburban volosts of Tula Uyezd.

** In Perm Gubernia, near the town of Kungur, in Tver Gubernia in the village of Kimry, etc.

*** See Report of the Zemstvo Board of the St. Petersburg Uyezd for 1889. Mr. Voinov’s report on Medical District V.

**** Reports and Investigations, I, p. 360.

(*) Reports of Inquiry into Factory Industry in the Kingdom of Poland, St. Petersburg, 1888, p. 24.

(**) In the List we counted 16 factories, each employing 1,000 and more workers on their premises, which had additionally a total of 7,857 outside workers. Fourteen factories, each with from 500 to 999 workers, employed 1,352 outside workers. The registration of outside work by the List is quite haphazard and full of gaps. The Collection of Factory Inspectors’ Reports estimates for 1903 a total of 632 work-distributing offices, giving work to 65,115 workers. These data are very incomplete, of course; nevertheless, it is characteristic that the overwhelming majority of these offices, and the workers they employ, relate to centres of factory industry (Moscow area: 503 offices 49,345 workers; Saratov Gubernia—Sarpinka fabrics—33 offices, 10,000 workers). (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Das Kapital, I², S. 779-780.¹⁵⁹

* Lectures on Agricultural (sic!) Economics, edition for students, Moscow, 1897, p, 13. Perhaps our learned statistician thinks that we may regard as “relatively few exceptions” 85% of all cases (see further in text)?

** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Section of Sanitation Statistics, Vol. IV, Sec. II, Moscow, 1893. Reprinted in Mr. Dementyev’s well-known work: The Factory, etc.

*** Statistical Returns, loc. cit., p. 292. The Factory, 2nd ed., p. 36.

* Returns, p. 280. The Factory, p. 26.

* Returns, Vol. IV, Sec. I, pp. 167, 170, 177.

** Mr. Zhbankov, in his Sanitary Investigation of Factories and Works of Smolensk Gubernia (Smolensk, 1894-1896), estimates the number of workers who leave for field-work at approximately a mere 10 to 15% at the Yartsevo Textile Mill only (Vol II, pp. 307, 445; in 1893-1894 the Yartsevo Mill employed 3,106 out of the 8,810 factory workers in Smolensk Gubernia). Of the men 28% (average for all factories, 29%) and of the women 18.6% (average for all factories, 21%) employed in this factory were casual workers, (See Vol. II, p. 469.) It should be noted that the casual workers include 1) those employed at the factory for less than a year; 2) those who leave for summer work in the fields; 3) those “who for various reasons ceased work at the factory for several years” (II, 445).

*** Returns, p. 296. The Factory, pp. 44-46.

* Statistical Summary of Russia’s Industrial Development. A paper read by M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, member of the Free Economic Society, and the debate on this paper at the sessions of section III. St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 41.

** Let us recall that category A includes factories with 100 to 499 workers, B, with 500 to 999, and C, with 1,000 and more.

* Confining ourselves, as stated in the preface, to the post-Reform period, we leave aside the forms of industry that were based on the labour of the serf population.

* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, IV, 5-7.—Directory for 1890.—Shishmaryov: A Brief Sketch of Industry in the Region of the Nizhni-Novgorod and Shuya-Ivanovo Railways, St. Petersburg, 1892, pp. 28-32.

** Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, p. 7 and foll.

*** Shishmaryov, 56-62.

**** Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. III, Moscow, 1883, pp. 27-28.

(*) A. Smirnov, Pavlovo and Vorsma, p. 14.

(**) Labzin, loc. cit., p. 66.

(***) Grigoryev, loc. cit., p. 36.

(****) Historico-Statistical Survey, Vol. II, p. 27.

* 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.

* Regarding the “factory hand” type cf. above, Chapter VI, §II, 5, pp. 404-405.—Also Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Vol. VII, Pt. III, Moscow, 1883, p. 58 (the factory hand is a moralist, a “smart alec”).—Nizhni-Novgorod Handbook, I, pp. 42-43- Vol. IV, p. 335.—Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 113-114 and elsewhere.—Novoye Slovo, Oct. 1897, p. 63.—Cf. also the above-mentioned works of Mr. Zhbankov which describe the workers who go off to the towns to commercial and industrial occupations.

** According to the Directory, the factories and works of European Russia in 1890 employed a total of 875,764 workers of whom 210,207 (24%) were women, 17,793 (2%) boys, and 8,216 (1%) girls.

* “The poor woman-weaver follows her father and husband to the factory and works alongside of them and independently of them. She is as much a breadwinner as the man is.” “In the factory … the woman is quite an independent producer, apart from her husband.” Literacy spreads among the women factory workers with remarkable rapidity. (Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, III, 113, 118, 112 and elsewhere.) Mr. Kharizomenov is perfectly right in drawing the following conclusion: industry destroys “the economic dependence of the woman on the family … and on the husband…. At the factory, the woman is the equal of the man; this is the equality of the proletarian…. The capitalisation of industry is an important factor in woman’s struggle for her independence in the family.” “Industry creates a new position for the woman in which she is completely independent of her family and husband.” (Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1883, No. 12, pp. 582, 596.) In the Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia (Vol. VII, Pt. II, Moscow, 1882, pp. 152, 138-139), the investigators compare the position of women engaged in making stockings by hand and by machine. The daily earnings of hand workers are about 8 kopeks, and of machine workers, 14 to 30 kopeks. The working woman’s conditions under machine production are described as follows: “… Before us is a free young woman, hampered by no obstacles, emancipated from the family and from all that constitutes the peasant woman’s conditions of life, a young woman who at any moment may leave one place for another, one employer for another, and may at any moment find herself without a job … without a crust of bread…. Under hand production, the knitter’s earnings are very meagre, insufficient to cover the cost of her food, earnings only acceptable if she, as a member of an allotment-holding and farming family, enjoys in part the product of that land; under machine production the working woman, in addition to food and tea, gets earnings which enable … her to live away from the family and to do without the family’s income from the land…. Moreover, the woman worker’s earnings in machine industry, under present conditions, are more secure.”

* In the less industrialised Smolensk Gubernia, an inquiry among 5,000 factory workers showed that 80% of them were natives of that gubernia (Zhbankov, loc. cit., II, 442).

* Statistical Returns for Moscow Gubernia, Sanitary Statistical Section, Vol. IV, Sec. I (Moscow, 1890), p. 240.

* The data quoted in the last three chapters show, in our opinion, that the classification of the capitalist forms and stages of industry given by Marx is more correct and sound than the now current classification which confuses the manufactory with the factory and regards working for a buyer-up as a special form of industry (Held, Bücher). To confuse the manufactory with the factory is to make purely superficial features the basis for classification and to ignore the essential features of technique, economy and social life which distinguish manufacture from the machine period of capitalism. As to capitalist domestic industry, it undoubtedly plays a very important part in the mechanism of capitalist industry. Just as undoubtedly, work for the buyer-up is particularly characteristic of pre-machine capitalism; but it is also to be met with (and on no small scale) in the most diverse periods of capitalist development. The significance of work for the buyer-up is not to be understood unless studied in connection with the whole structure of industry in the given period, or at the given stage of capitalist development. The peasant who weaves baskets to the order of the village shopkeeper, the Pavlovo artisan who makes knife-handles in his home to the order of Zavyalov, the woman worker who makes clothes, footwear, gloves or boxes to the order of big mill owners or merchants—all work for buyers-up, but in all these instances capitalist domestic industry bears a different character and has a different significance. We do not, of course, in the least deny the merits of Bücher, for example, in studying pre-capitalist forms of industry, but we think his classification of capitalist forms of industry is wrong.—We cannot agree with the views of Mr. Struve (see Mir Bozhy, 1898, No. 4) inasmuch as he adopts Bücher’s theory (in the part mentioned) and applies it to Russian “handicraftism.” (Since these lines were written, in 1899, Mr. Struve has managed to complete the cycle of his scientific and political development. From a person oscillating between Bücher and Marx, between liberal and socialist economics, he has become a liberal bourgeois of the purest water. The writer of these lines is proud of having helped, as far as has been in his power, to purge Social-Democracy of such elements. (Note to 2nd edition.)

Chapter VIII: The Formation of the Home Market

* Uebersichten der Weltwirtschaft (Surveys of World Economy.—Ed.), loc. cit. In 1904 the length was 54,878 kilometres in European Russia (including the Kingdom of Poland, the Caucasus and Finland) and 8,351 in Asiatic Russia. (Note to 2nd edition.)

* V. Mikhailovsky, The Development of the Russian Railway System in Transactions of Free Economic Society, 1898, No. 2.

** Military Statistical Abstract, 511.—Mr. N. —on, Sketches, appendix to Productive Forces, XVII, p. 67.—Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 43.—Yearbook of Russia for 1905, St. Petersburg, 1906.

*** Military Statistical Abstract, 445.—Productive Forces, XVII, 42.—Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 44.

* Military Statistical Abstract, 758, and The Ministry of Finance Yearbook, I, 363.—Productive Forces, XVII, 30.

** Productive Forces. Russia’s Foreign Trade, p. 56, and foll.

*** Ibid., p. 17. Yearbook of Russia for 1904, St. Petersburg, 1905.

* Returns for Russia, 1890, CIX.

** Returns for Russia, 1896. Table CXXVII.

*** Ibid.

**** Vestnik Finansov, 1898, No. 26.

* For 1863 the figures are from the Statistical Chronicle (I, 1866) and the Military Statistical Abstract. The figures of the urban population of the Orenburg and Ufa gubernias have been corrected according to the tables of towns. That is why our figure for the total urban population is 6,105,100 and not 6,087,100 as given in the Military Statistical Abstract.—For 1885 the data are from Returns for Russia for 1884-85.—For 1897 the figures are those of the returns of the census of January 28, 1897. (First General Census of the Population of the Russian Empire, 1897, Central Statistical Committee, St. Petersburg, 1897 and 1898, Pts. 1 and 2.) The permanent urban population, according to the 1897 census, was 11,830,500, i.e., 12.55%. We have taken the existing population of the towns.—Let us observe that we cannot vouch for the figures for 1863, 1885 and 1897 being absolutely uniform and comparable. For that reason we limit our comparison to the most general proportions and give the data for the big towns separately.

* “The number of urban settlements of an agricultural character is extremely small and the number of their inhabitants is quite insignificant compared with the total number of town-dwellers.” (Mr. Grigoryev in The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, Vol. II, p. 126.)

** Novoye Slovo, June 1897, p. 113.

*** Mr. Grigoryev gives a table (loc, cit., 140) which shows that in 1885 of all towns 85.6% had less than 20,000 inhabitants each; 38% of all town-dwellers were living in them; 12.4% of the towns (82 out of 660) had less than 2,000 inhabitants each, and only 1.1% of all town-dwellers (110,000 out of 9,962,000) were living in them.

* That we are right in combining with the metropolitan gubernias the non-agricultural gubernias taken by us is borne out by the fact that the population of the metropolitan cities is augmented chiefly by migrants from these gubernias. According to the Petersburg census of December 15,1890, there were in that city 726,000 members of the peasant and the burgher estates, of these, 544,000 (i.e., three-fourths) were members of the peasant and the burgher estates from the 11 gubernias out of which we constituted area No. 1.

* Loc. cit., p. 109. “This movement has no parallel in the modern history of Western Europe” (110-111).

* See above, Chapter VII, §VIII, and Appendix III to Chapter VII.

** On the significance of this circumstance, to which Korsak in his day drew attention, compare the just remarks of Mr. Volgin (loc. cit., pp. 215-216).

* How numerous in Russia are villages that constitute very big centres of population may be judged from the following (though obsolete) data of the Military Statistical Abstract: in 25 gubernias of European Russia there were in the 60s a total of 1,334 villages with over 2,000 inhabitants each. Of them, 108 had from 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants, 6 from 10,000 to 15,000, 1 from 15,000 to 20,000 and 1 over 20,000 (p. 169). The development of capitalism in all countries, not only in Russia, has led to the rise of new industrial centres not officially classified as towns. “Differences between town and country are obliterated, near growing industrial towns this takes place due to the removal of industrial enterprises and workers’ dwellings to the suburbs and outskirts of the towns; near declining small towns it takes place due to the merging of the latter with the surrounding villages and also to the development of large industrial villages…. Differences between the urban and rural populated areas are eliminated due to numerous transitional formations. Statisticians have recognised this long ago, and instead of the historico-juridical concept of the town have adopted the statistical concept, which distinguishes centres of population solely according to the number of inhabitants” (Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, Tübingen, 1893, S. 296-297 and 303-304). In this respect also Russian statistics lag far behind European statistics. In Germany and in France (Statesman’s Yearbook, pp. 536, 474) under towns are placed centres of population having more than 2,000 inhabitants, and in England “net urban sanitary districts,” i.e., also factory villages, etc. Hence, Russian data on the “urban” population are not at all comparable with European.

* Mr. N. —on has not noticed at all in Russia the process of the industrialisation of the population! Mr. V. V. observed it and admitted that the growth of migration expresses a diversion of the population from agriculture (The Destiny of Capitalism, 149); however, far from including this process in the sum-total of his views on the “destiny of capitalism,” he tried to hush it up with lamentations about the point that “there are people who find all this very natural” (for capitalist society? Can Mr. V. V. imagine capitalism without this phenomenon?) “and almost desirable” (ibid.). It is desirable without the “almost,” Mr. V. V.!

** Residential Permits Issued to the Peasant Population of Moscow Gubernia in 1880 and 1885.—Statistical Yearbook of Tver Gubernia for 1897.—Zhbankov: Industries Employing Migratory Workers in Smolensk Gubernia, Smolensk, 1896.—Same author’s: The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers, etc., Kostroma, 1887.—Industries of the Peasant Population of Pskov Gubernia, Pskov, 1898.—Mistakes in the percentages for Moscow Gubernia could not be corrected because there were no absolute figures.—For Kostroma Gubernia only uyezd figures are available, and then only in percentages. We had, therefore, to take the average of the uyezd figures, and for this reason we give the data for Kostroma Gubernia separately. As regards Yaroslavl Gubernia, it is estimated that of the migratory industrialists 68.7% are absent all year round: 12.6% in the autumn and winter, and 18.7% in the spring and summer. We would observe that the data for Yaroslavl Gubernia (Survey of Yaroslavl Gubernia, Vol. II, Yaroslavl, 1896) are not comparable with the preceding ones, since they are based on the statements of priests, etc., and not on passport data.

* It is known, for instance, that in the suburbs of St. Petersburg the population increases very considerably in the summer.

** Statistical Survey of Kaluga Gubernia for 1896, Kaluga, 1897, p. 18 in Sec. II.

* “Industries employing migratory workers … are a form that obscures the uninterrupted growth of the towns…. Communal land tenure and various peculiarities of the financial and administrative life of Russia do not allow the peasant to become a town-dweller as easily as in the West…. Legal threads sustain his (the migratory worker’s) tie with the village, but actually by occupation, habits and tastes he has become completely assimilated with the town and often regards this tie with his village as irksome” (Russkaya Mysl, 1896, No. 11, p. 227). That is very true, but for a publicist is not enough. Why did not the author declare definitely for complete freedom of movement, for the freedom of the peasant to leave the village community? Our liberals are still afraid of our Narodniks. But they have no reason to be.

And here, for purposes of comparison, are the views of a sympathiser with Narodism, Mr. Zhbankov: “Migration to the towns is, as it were, a lightning conductor (sic!) against the rapid growth of the capitals and big cities and the increase of the urban and landless proletariat. Both from the sanitary and from the social and economic points of view, this influence of industries employing migratory workers should be regarded as beneficial: so long as the masses of the people are not completely divorced from the land, which provides the migratory workers with some security” (a “security” they pay money to break with!), “these workers cannot become the blind instruments of capitalist production, and the hope remains of organising agricultural-industrial communes” (Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1890, No. 9, p. 145). Is not the retention of petty-bourgeois hopes really beneficial? As for “blind instruments,” the experience of Europe and all the facts observed in Russia show that this description is far more applicable to the worker who retains his ties with the land and with patriarchal relationships than to the one who has broken these ties. The figures and facts given by Mr. Zhbankov himself show that the migratory “Petersburger” is more literate, cultured and developed than the settled Kostromer in some “backwoods” uyezd.

* L. Vesin, The Significance of Industries Employing Migratory Workers, etc., Dyelo (Business), 1886, No. 7, and 1887, No. 2.

** Statistics of Excise-Paying Trades, etc., for 1897-1898, St. Petersburg, 1900. Published by Head Office of Non-Assessed Taxes Department.

*** Gubernias: Moscow (1885, obsolete data), Tver (1896), Kostroma (1892), Smolensk (1895), Kaluga (1895), Pskov (1896). The sources have been indicated above. The data refer to all departure permits, male and female.

**** Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny (Journal of Public Hygiene and of Forensic and Practical Medicine), July, 1896. M. Uvarov: The Influence of Industry Employing Migratory Workers on the Sanitary Conditions of Russia. M. Uvarov gathered the data for 126 uyezds of 20 gubernias.

* Cf. above, p. 239, footnote.

** The Condition of the Working Class in Russia, St. Petersburg, 1869, p. 400 and foll.

*** Data on passport revenue taken from Returns for Russia for 1884-85 and for 1896. In 1885, passport revenue in European Russia amounted to 37 rubles per 1,000 inhabitants; in the 11 non-agricultural gubernias it was 86 rubles per 1,000 inhabitants.

* The last two columns in the table have been added by us. Group I includes the following gubernias: Archangel, Vladimir, Vologda, Vyatka, Kaluga, Kostroma, Moscow, Novgorod, Perm, St. Petersburg, Tver, Yaroslavl; group II: Kazan, Nizhni-Novgorod, Ryazan, Tula, Smolensk; group III: Bessarabia, Volhynia, Voronezh, Ekaterinoslav, Don, Kiev, Kursk, Orenburg, Orel, Penza, Podolsk, Poltava, Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, Taurida, Tambov, Ufa, Kharkov, Kherson, Chernigov.—We must mention that this classification contains some inaccuracies exaggerating the proportion of migration for agricultural work. The gubernias of Smolensk, Nizhni-Novgorod and Tula should be included in group I (cf. Agricultural Survey of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia for 1896, Chapter XI—Tula Gubernia Handbook for 1895, Section VI, p. 10: the number of persons leaving for work away from their homes is given as 188,000—but Mr. Korolenko calculated that there were only 50,000 superfluous workers!—the 6 northern, non-black-earth uyezds accounting for 107,000 migrants.) Kursk Gubernia should be included in group II (S. Korolenko, loc. cit.: from 7 uyezds the majority leave for handicraft, and from the remaining 8 all leave for agricultural industries). Unfortunately, Mr. Vesin does not give the number, by gubernias, of departure permits issued.

* Incidentally, the author of the survey of these data (loc. cit., Chapter VI, p. 639) ascribes the decrease in the number of passports issued in 1898 to the drop in the migration of summer workers to the southern gubernias resulting from the bad harvest and the widespread use of machinery in agriculture. This explanation is of no value whatever, since the number of residential permits issued declined least in group III and most in group I. Are the methods of registration in 1897 and in 1898 comparable? (Note to 2nd edition.)

* Zhbankov: The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers, etc., p. 36 and foll. The percentage of literate males in the uyezds of Kostroma Gubernia from which there is migration is 55.9%; in the factory uyezds, 34.9%, in the settled (forest) uyezds, 25.8%; of literate females: 3.5%, 2.0% and 1.3%; school children: 1.44%, 1.43%, and 1.07%. Children in uyezds from which there is migration also attend school in St. Petersburg.

** “The literate Petersburgers take a positively better and more intelligent attitude to medical treatment” (ibid., 34), so that infectious diseases are not so fatal among them as in the “little-cultured” volosts (author’s italics).

*** “The uyezds from which there is migration are much superior to the agricultural and forest localities in the arrangement of their lives…. The clothes of the Petersburgers are much cleaner, smarter and more hygienic…. The children are kept cleaner, and that is why the itch and other skin diseases are not so frequent among them” (ibid., 39. Cf. Industries Employing Migratory Workers in Smolensk Gubernia, p. 8). “The villages from which there is migration differ considerably from those from which there is none: houses, clothes, habits and amusements remind one more of town than of village life” (Industries Employing Migratory Workers in Smolensk Gubernia, p. 3). In the volosts of Kostroma Gubernia from which there is migration “you find paper, ink, pencils and pens in half the houses” (Women’s Country, 67-68).

* Women’s Country, 26-27, 15.

** Ibid., p. 27.

*** For example, the Kostroma peasants are prompted to become registered as burghers, among other things by possible “corporal punishment,” which is “even more awful to the flashy Petersburger than to the raw country dweller” (ibid., 58).

* Ibid., 88.

** Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1890, No. 9, p. 142.

*** This expression is in English in the original.—Ed.

**** Cf. Chapter IV, §IV, pp. 270-271.

* Statistical Survey of Kaluga Gubernia for 1896, Sec. II, p. 48.

** Ibid., Sec. I, p. 27.

*** Ibid., p. 41.

**** Ibid., p. 40, author’s italics.

* Women’s Country, 39 and 8. “Will not these genuine peasants (newly-entered) exert a sobering influence, by the prosperous life they lead, upon the native population, who regard not the land but employment away from home as their main source of livelihood?” (p. 40). “Incidentally,” remarks the author sadly, “we have already cited an example of the opposite influence.” Here is the example. Vologda folk bought land and lived “very prosperously.” “In reply to the question I put to one of them as to why, though well-off, he let his son go to St. Petersburg, he said: ‘It’s true we are not poor, but life is very dull here, and my son, seeing others go, wanted to get educated himself; at home too he was the one with knowledge’ ” (p. 25). Poor Narodniks! How can they help deploring the fact that even the example of well-to-do, land-purchasing muzhik farmer cannot “sober” the youth, who, in their desire to “get educated,” flee from the “allotment that secures them their livelihood”!

** The Influence of Industries Employing Migratory Workers, etc., 33, author’s italics.

*** Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1890, No. 9, 138.

**** Russkaya Mysl (not Russky Vestnik, but Russkaya Mysl),¹⁶² 1887, No. 9, p. 163.

(*) Residential Permits, etc., p. 7.

(**) Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1896, No. 7, p. 18. So then, the “main” requirements are to be met by the allotment, and the rest apparently by “local employments” secured in the “countryside,” which “suffers from a shortage of capable and healthy labourers”!

* The figure given in the Combined Statistical Material, etc. (published by Chancellory of the Committee of Ministers, 1894), is 15,546,618. This figure was reached in the following way. The urban population was taken as equal to the population not participating in the production of material values. The adult male peasant population was reduced by 7% (4.5% on military service and 2.5% in civilian service).

* Above we saw that lumber workers alone are estimated at about 2 million. The number of workers employed in the last two groups of occupations we have indicated should be larger than the total number of non-agricultural migratory workers, for part of the building workers, unskilled labourers, particularly lumber workers are local and not migratory workers. And we have seen that the number of non-agricultural migratory workers is not less than 3 million.

** In factory industry, as we have seen, women and children constitute a little over ¼ of the total number of workers. In the mining, building and lumber industries, etc., few women and children are employed. In capitalist domestic industry, on the other hand, they are probably more numerous than men.

*** To avoid misunderstanding, let us make the reservation that we do not claim these figures to be statistically exact. We merely wish to show approximately the diversity of the forms of wage-labour and the numbers of those engaged in it.

* Cf. present edition, Vol. 2, “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism.”—Ed.

** Let us recall the argument of Mr. N. —on about the “handful” of workers, and also the following, truly classic, calculation by Mr. V. V. (Essays on Theoretical Economics, p. 131). In the 50 gubernias of European Russia there are 15,547,000 adult male workers belonging to the peasant estate; of these, 1,020,000 (863,000 in factory industry +160,000 railway workers) are “united by capital”; the rest are the “agricultural population.” With the “complete capitalisation of the manufacturing industries” “capitalist factory industry” will employ twice as many hands (13.3% in place of 7.6%, while the remaining 86.7% of the population “will remain on the land and be idle during half the year”). Obviously, comment could only spoil the impression created by this wonderful specimen of economic science and economic statistics.

* 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 Trade Unionismus, Stuttgart, Dietz, 1895, S. S. 363, 365, 381) [“the trade unionists … include, as a general rule, the picked men in each trade. The moral and intellectual influence which they exercise on the rest of their class is, therefore, out of all proportion to their numbers.” (S. and B. Webb: The History of Trade Unionism, London, 902, pp. 409, 411, 430).—Ed.]

* “Agricultural and statistical information based on material obtained from farmers. Vol. V. Hired Labour on private-landowner farms and the movement of workers, according to a statistical and economic survey of agriculture and industry in European Russia.” Compiled by S. A. Korolenko. Published by Department of Agriculture and Rural Industries, St. Petersburg, 1892.

* The other gubernias are omitted in order not to complicate our exposition with data that contribute nothing new to the subject under examination; furthermore, the other gubernias are either untouched by the main, mass, movements of workers (Urals, the North) or have their specific ethnographical, administrative and juridical features (the Baltic gubernias, the gubernias in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the Byelorussian gubernias, etc.). Data from the publication cited above. Wage figures are the average for the gubernias in the respective groups; the day labourer’s summer wage is the average for three seasons: sowing, haymaking and harvesting. The areas (1 to 6) include the following gubernias: 1) Taurida, Bessarabia and Don; 2) Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg; 3) Simbirsk, Voronezh, Kharkov; 4) Kazan, Penza, Tambov, Ryazan, Tula, Orel, Kursk; 5) Pskov, Novgorod, Kaluga, Kostroma, Tver, Nizhni-Novgorod; 6) St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yaroslavl, Vladimir.

* Thus, the peasants flee in mass from the localities where patriarchal economic relationships are most prevalent, where labour-service and primitive forms of industry are preserved to the greatest extent, to localities where the “pillars” are completely decayed. They flee from “people’s production” and pay no heed to the chorus of voices from “society” following in their wake. In this chorus two voices can be clearly distinguished: “They have little attachment!” comes the menacing bellow of the Black-Hundred Sobakevich.¹⁶³ “They have insufficient allotment land!” is the polite correction of the Cadet Manilov.

* Theoretical economics established this simple truth long ago. To say nothing of Marx, who pointed directly to the development of capitalism in agriculture as a process that creates a “home market for industrial capital” (Das Kapital, I², S. 776, Chapter 24, Sec. 5),¹⁶⁴ let us refer to Adam Smith. In chapter XI of Book I and Chapter IV of Book III of The Wealth of Nations, he pointed to the most characteristic features of the development of capitalist agriculture and noted the parallelism of this process with the process of the growth of the towns and the development of industry.

* “… It was thanks exclusively to them, thanks to these forms of people’s production, and on the basis of them that the whole of South Russia was colonised and settled.” (Mr. N. —on, Sketches, 284). How wonderfully broad and comprehensive is the term: “forms of people’s production”! It covers whatever you like: patriarchal peasant farming, labour-service, primitive handicrafts, small commodity-production, and those typically capitalist relations within the peasant community that we saw above in the data on the Taurida and Samara gubernias (Chapter II), etc., etc.

** Cf. articles by Mr. P. Semyonov in Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 21, and by V. Mikhailovsky in Novoye Slovo, June 1897.

*** See article by K. Khatisov in Vol. II of Reports and Investigations of Handicraft Industry, and by P. Ostryakov in Vol. V. of Transactions of the Handicraft Commission.

* The circumstance indicated in the text has another aspect. The development of capitalism in depth in the old, long-inhabited territories is retarded because of the colonisation of the outer regions. The solution of the contradictions inherent in, and produced by, capitalism is temporarily postponed because of the fact that capitalism can easily develop in breadth. Thus, the simultaneous existence of the most advanced forms of industry and of semi-medieval forms of agriculture is undoubtedly a contradiction. If Russian capitalism had possessed no range for expansion beyond the bounds of the territory already occupied at the beginning of the post-Reform period, this contradiction between capitalist large-scale industry and the archaic institutions in rural life (the tying of the peasants to the land, etc.) would have had to lead quickly to the complete abolition of these institutions, to the complete clearing of the path for agricultural capitalism in Russia. But the possibility (for the mill owner) of seeking and finding a market in the outer regions in process of colonisation and the possibility (for the peasant) of moving to new territory, mitigates the acuteness of this contradiction and delays its solution. It goes without saying that such a deceleration of the growth of capitalism is equivalent to preparing its even greater extension in the near future.

* Productive Forces, XX, 12.

* “Let us see what the further development of capitalism could bring even if we succeeded in sinking Britain to the bottom of the sea and in taking her place” (Mr. N. —on, Sketches, 210). The cotton industry of Britain and America, which meets ⅔ of the world’s demand, employs only a little over 600,000 people all told. “And it follows, that even if we got a considerable part of the world market … capitalism would still be unable to exploit the whole mass of labouring people which it is now continuously depriving of employment. What, indeed, are some 600,000 British and American workers compared with millions of peasants left for months on end without employment?” (211).

“History has gone on till now, but goes on no longer.” Till now every step in the development of capitalism in the textile industry has been accompanied by the differentiation of the peasantry, by the growth of commercial agriculture and agricultural capitalism, by the diversion of population from agriculture to industry, by “millions of peasants” turning to building, lumbering and all sorts of other non-agricultural work for hire, by the migration of masses of people to the outer regions and by the conversion of these regions into a market for capitalism. All this, however, has only gone on till now; nothing of the sort occurs any longer!

* His ignoring of the significance of the means of production and his careless attitude to “statistics” have led to the following utterly untenable statement by Mr. N. —on: “… all (!) capitalist production in the sphere of manufacturing industry at most produces new values to the amount of not more than 400 to 500 million rubles” (Sketches, 328). Mr. N. —on bases this calculation on the returns of the three-per-cent tax and the extra profits tax, without stopping to think whether such returns can cover “all capitalist production in the sphere of manufacturing industry.” Moreover, he takes returns which (on his own admission) do not cover the mining and metallurgical industries, and yet he includes in “new values” only surplus-value and variable capital. Our theoretician has forgotten that, in those branches of industry which produce goods for personal consumption, constant capital also represents new value for society and is exchanged for the variable capital and surplus-value of those branches of industry which produce means of production (mining and metallurgical industries, building, lumbering, railway construction, etc.). Had Mr. N. —on not confused the number of “factory” workers with the total number of workers capitalistically employed in manufacturing industry, he would easily have perceived the errors in his calculations.

* For example, in one of the principal centres of the Russian fishing industry, the Murmansk coast, the “age-old” and truly “time-hallowed” form of economic relationships was the “pokrut,”¹⁶⁷ which was already fully established in the 17th century and continued almost without change until recent times. “The relations between the pokrutmen and their masters are not limited to the time spent at the fisheries: on the contrary, they embrace the whole life of the pokrutmen, who are permanently dependent economically on their masters” (Material on Artels in Russia, Vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1874, p. 33). Fortunately, in this branch of industry also, capitalism is apparently marked by a “contemptuous attitude to its own historical past.” “Monopoly … is giving way to … the capitalist organisation of the industry with hired labourers” (Productive Forces, V, pp. 2-4).

** Cf. Studies, p. 91, footnote 85, p. 198. (See present edition, Vol. 2, “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism.”—Ed.)

I

* By the way, about translations. Quoting from my book the following passage: “… as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their (the productive forces’) outer limit” (57), Mr. Skvortsov gives me the following strict admonition: “Mr. Ilyin … did not notice the clumsiness of his translation, whereas the original says simply and clearly. ‘als ob nur die absolute Konsumptions-fähigkeit der Gesellschaft ihre Grenze bilde’” (2286). What is wrong with this (quite correct) translation the critic does not indicate. But to show how strict he is, it will be sufficient to quote a couple of his translations. Page 2284: “But when the normal annual reproduction is shown on a given scale … thereby it is also shown …” (in the original: ist damit auch unterstellt); page 2285: “We are dealing, primarily, with simple reproduction. Further on it will be shown” (in the original: Ferner wird unterstellt) not only that products are exchanged at their value,” etc. Thus, good Mr. Skvortsov is no doubt firmly convinced that “unterstellen” means “to show,” and that “wird interstellt” is future tense.

I say nothing about the style of our stern critic, who treats us to such phrases as: “now the capitalist mode of production equals agri-cullural industry” (2293).

II

* In chapter twelve, volume one of Capital [in the English edition it is Chapter XIV.—Ed.], which deals with manufacture, there is a special section entitled “Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in Society.” At the beginning of this section Marx says: “We shall now lightly touch upon the relation between the division of labour in manufacture, and the social division of labour, which forms the foundation of all production of commodities” (Das Kapital, I², S. 362).¹⁷⁵ How truly instructive it is to contrast this to the trick of our wrathful Jove!

* See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.

III

* All great minds think alike.—Ed.

* Incidentally, in my book I definitely advance this thesis (that labour-service is a survival of serfdom). Mr. Skvortsov says nothing about this but takes my remark that, fundamentally, labour-service has existed ever since the time of Russkaya Pravda and storms about it; he cites a quotation from Klyuchevsky, talks of home markets in the 12th century, and of commodity fetishism, and asserts that I think that “commodity production is the miraculous and all-explaining starting-point in history (sic!) since the days of Russkaya Pravda” (sic!). This, apparently, is some more of the “tchi-tchi” type of criticism to which, as it is, I think I devoted too much time at the beginning of this article.

* A propos of Mr. Hourwich, Mr. Skvortsov, by his unwarranted and supercilious attitude towards the “conclusions” of this writer who is known in Marxist literature as the author of two books and as a contributor to magazines, only reveals his own conceit.

* My words: “Before capitalism appeared, agriculture in Russia was the business of the gentry, a lord’s hobby for some, and a duty, an obligation for others” (313), in Mr. Skvortsov’s opinion “indicate that a whole social formation, the feudal mode of production, was merely a lord’s hobby.” No, Mr. Skvortsov, they do not “indicate” this at all, for I pointed out elsewhere that “feudal economy was a definite, regular and complete system” (192), and here I merely described one of the features of this system. That landlord economy contained an element of the “lord’s hobby” can easily be seen by anyone who remembers the “Oblomovs of the feudal or bondage-suffering countryside” (218); and it is borne out by the Zemstvo statisticians who invented the expression “lord’s hobby” (213),—it is proved even by the data on a certain period in the development of the agricultural-machinery industry in Russia: the attempts of landlords simply to import both workers and machines from abroad (193), which (219) were nothing but a “lord’s hobby.”—“When and where the transformation by capitalism of the lord of the manor [votchinnik]” (Mr. P. S. is wrong in thinking that this category is applicable only to the period “prior to the rise of serfdom”; it is also applicable to the period of serfdom) “and of the dependent peasant into industrialists was completed Mr. Ilyin does not, unfortunately, tell us.” (2293) I speak of this in chapters II and III, and particularly IV, of my book, where I deal precisely with the transformation of agriculture into commercial and industrial enterprise. Very possibly, what I say about this process requires supplementing and correcting, I have no doubt that any serious and well-informed critic could do this; but Mr. Skvortsov, unfortunately, has utterly obscured the issue by simply voicing stern rebukes. That’s hardly enough!

* See present edition, Vol. 4, Once More on the Theory of Realisation.—Ed.

** Cf. against Stammler the very proper remarks made by G. Cu-now, part of whose article was translated and published in the Nauchnoye Obozreniye in 1899; then B. Lvov’s The Social Law (ibid.), and the translation of Mr. Sadi Gunter’s article which the Nauchnoye Obozreniye promises to publish in 1900.

* It is this eclecticism, in my opinion, which is the substance of the “new” “critical” trend that has “begun to take shape” in our literature latterly (cf. Struve’s articles in Zhizn, 1899, No. 10, and 1900, No. 2, and Tugan-Baranovsky’s in Nauchnoye Obozreniye, 1899, No. 5, and 1900, No. 3). The first-mentioned author began to “give shape” to leanings towards eclecticism over five years ago in his Critical Remarks, and immediately after that book appeared an attempt was made (as Struve will be good enough to recall) to “open the eyes” of the public to the mixture of Marxism and bourgeois science in his views.¹⁷⁷ It is strange, therefore, to hear the following from Struve: “Simply to close one’s eyes to the so-called (wrongly so-called, perhaps?—V. I.) ‘bourgeois’ criticism of Marx’s teachings and to engage in repeating and paraphrasing them, has hitherto proved not only useless but even harmful” (Zhizn, No. 2, 305). “Simply to close one’s eyes,” not only to bourgeois science, but even to the most absurd doctrines, up to and including extreme obscurantism is, of course undoubtedly harmful; that is a banal commonplace. It is one thing, however, not to close one’s eyes to bourgeois science, by keeping watch on it, and using it, but being critical towards it, and refusing to surrender the integrity and definiteness of one’s world outlook; but it is another thing to give way to bourgeois science and to repeat, for example, catchwords about Marx being “tendentious,” etc., which have a very definite meaning and significance. As for “repeating and paraphrasing,” does the repeating and paraphrasing of Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser, Sombart and Stammler, in itself, a priori, deserve more attention than the repeating and paraphrasing of Marx? Has Struve, who has managed to discern (in Russian literature, mind you) the “harmfulness” (sic!) of repeating Marx, failed to notice the harmfulness of uncritically repeating the fashionable corrections of fashionable bourgeois “science”? How far must one have departed from Marxism to have arrived at such an opinion, and at such an unpardonable “closing of eyes” to the present-day “vacillation of thought”! At the end of his article Struve particularly requests my views on the questions raised by the so-called “critics.” I would reply to this that what specially interests me just now is the contemporary eclectic trend in philosophy and in political economy, and that I still hope at some future date to present a systematic analysis of this trend;¹⁷⁸ but to chase after every single “fundamental error” and “fundamental antinomy” … of eclecticism is (I ask the pardon of the respected “critics”!) simply uninteresting. That is why I shall confine myself for the moment to putting forward a counter-suggestion. Let the new “critical trend” take the most definite shape, and not limit itself to mere hints. The sooner this happens the better, for then the less will be the confusion and the more clearly will the public appreciate the difference between Marxism and the new “trend” in the bourgeois criticism of Marx.