I - General Data
The handicraft census covered 8,991 families, excluding families of wage workers. It was spread across all uyezds in the gubernia, covering about 72% of all handicraft production.
Two types of handicraft family were identified – I which owned a farm, and II which didn't. These were divided into three sub-groups - 1) those producing for the market, 2) those working to order for private customers, and 3) those working for buyers-up. In these latter two groups, the raw material is provided by the customer or buyer-up. This can amount to different economic and social relations. In the first case, what is sold is a labour service. For example, a tailor who comes to your house, and makes a coat, or someone who cooks your dinner. What is paid for is the value of this labour-service, not the value of labour-power. Labour-power is not sold as a commodity, the labour service is.
In the second case, the buyer up provides material, not for the producer to produce a use value for their own consumption, but in order that they produce a commodity that the buyer-up will sell in the market. The only reason to do this is to obtain a profit from it. This is the basis of The Putting Out System. The merchant, who is the first form of buyer-up, makes a commercial profit, because they buy from producers at a price below the exchange-value of the commodity. The producer agrees to this arrangement, because the price they get from the merchant is more than they would have obtained from going to market themselves, after all those costs were accounted for. The merchants are always the first to enter capitalist production, therefore, because, when markets, in the towns, for manufactured commodities, have grown large enough, the merchant can always add to their commercial profit, by also extracting surplus value from the production of what then become wage labourers.
When any handicraft producer fails, it is a result of not being able to reproduce their raw material from the sale of their output. At that point, the merchant can offer to provide the materials, on condition that the output then belongs to them, and that they will then only pay to the producer the equivalent of the value of their labour-power, i.e. wages. The producer has become a proletarian, a wage labourer, and they now sell, not the product of their labour-power, but their labour-power itself. This is the start of the process of differentiation of the small producers, into a proletariat and bourgeoisie.
“The division of handicraftsmen into those who farm land and those who do not is, of course, a sound and necessary method. The large number of landless handicraftsmen in Perm Gubernia, frequently concentrated in industrial settlements, has led the authors to stick to this classification and to use it in the tables. We learn, for example, that 6,638 persons, or one-third of the total number of handicraftsmen (19,970 working members of families and wage-workers in 8,991 establishments) do not farm land.” (p 359)
As Marx discussed in Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value, the separation of increasing spheres of industrial production from agriculture is one of the first manifestations of a social division of labour, as soon as agricultural labour becomes sufficiently productive that it can produce a social surplus product. It enables a portion of society to split off and to use the product of agriculture as raw material in its own production, which becomes increasingly concentrated in the towns, which then exchanges these products with the countryside, as described in the Tableau Economique.
“This fact alone shows the fallacy of the common assumptions and assertions that the connection between handicraft industry and agriculture is universal; this connection is sometimes stressed as a specifically Russian feature. If we exclude the rural (and urban) artisans who have been wrongly classed as “handicraftsmen,” we find that 2,268 of the remaining 5,566 families, or over two-fifths of the total number of industrialists working for the market, are landless.” (p 359)
As Lenin points out, however, in The Sketch, not even this basic distinction is applied consistently. Left out is the data for households of wage workers, for example. The reason is that the census only looked at those households which represented establishments where production was taking place. If the households of wage workers were included then its likely that the majority of these would have been landless. Wage workers, employed by handicraftsmen were no less engaged in handicraft production than those that hired them, and so this omission distorts the picture. Wage workers constituted a quarter of all workers.
“This omission is due to the fact that, in general, the census registered only the establishments, the owners, and ignored the wage-workers and their families. In place of these terms, the Sketch employs the very inaccurate expression “families engaged in handicraft industries.” This is inaccurate because families whose members are employed by handicraftsmen as wage-workers are no less “engaged in handicraft industries” than the families which hire them. The absence of house-to-house information on the families of wage-workers (who constitute one-fourth of the total number of workers) is a grave omission in the census. This omission is highly characteristic of the Narodniks, who at once adopt the viewpoint of the small producer and leave wage-labour in the shade.” (p 359-60)
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