Lenin then gives a practical example of this in relation to the Russian handicraftsman. The Proudhonist nature of the Narodnik analysis is described by Lenin. The Narodnik, he says, describes the “bad side” in relation to the handicraft worker, who exists from a miserable level of production, and is severely exploited by the buyer-up and so on. The “good side”, however, is that they are not a wage worker. The task, therefore, is to preserve the “good side”, and discard the “bad side”. The Marxist too, in observing such a situation cannot but observe and deplore the miserable condition of the handicraft worker; indeed, in Capital I, Marx describes and deplores the condition of the British hand-loom weavers. But, Marxists are scientists not moralists. Their task is to analyse the path of social development and hasten it along, not simply describe it or moralise over it. So, in addition, the Marxist asks,
“the question of how the industry is organised, i.e., what are the relations between the handicraftsmen in the production of the given product and why just these and no others. And he sees that this organisation is commodity production, i.e., production by separate producers, connected with one another by the market.” (p 407)
This evaluation is itself a social process. On the one hand, it is determined objectively by the value of the particular commodity, and, for each producer, this value, its individual value, varies, because they each produce under varying conditions. The market value emerges independently of each of them as an aggregate of these individual values. On the other hand, it is determined subjectively by the amount of this supply that consumers wish to buy at this market value (it determines what of the expended labour was socially necessary labour), and interaction between these elements of demand and supply results in constant fluctuations of the market price. But, the individual producer has no control over either of these elements. The consequence is that some producers will sell their output at a market price above the individual value of their production. They will accumulate money. In contrast, other producers will sell their output at a market price below their individual value of output. At best they will accumulate less money, and for some they will need to borrow money, or acquire additional money, by also selling their labour-service to others.
Those that acquire money, then become buyers up. They can use better access to markets and so on, to buy up the products of their neighbours, relieving them of costs of taking these products to market. They do not do so as an act of charity, but in order to make additional profit, and so they buy up this product at cheap prices. The buyer-up becomes a merchant capitalist, and when some handicraft producers fall on even harder times, the merchant becomes a productive-capitalist via the Putting Out System, providing the handicraft worker with materials and paying them only wages for the labour they provide. The worker now no longer sells a labour-service, but sells their labour-power itself as a commodity.
“The cause of the power of the money owner, the buyer-up, is therefore clear; it is that he alone, among the handicraftsmen who live from day to day, at most from week to week, possesses money, i.e., the product of earlier social labour, which in his hands becomes capital, an instrument for appropriating the surplus product of other handicraftsmen. Hence, the Marxist concludes, under such a system of social economy the expropriation and the exploitation of the producer are absolutely inevitable, and so are the subordination of the propertyless to the propertied and the contradiction between their interests which provides the content of the scientific conception of the class struggle.” (p 407)
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