Article Two
Section IV. The Agriculture of “Handicraftsmen.”
Lenin now turns to an examination of the data in relation to the nature of the agriculture undertaken by the handicraft producers. In summary, what this, again, illustrates is the fact that capitalist production begins in industry, in the towns, and then, later, migrates to the countryside and agriculture. The phenomenon had also been seen in England where capitalists who had made their money in industry and commerce, in the towns, then used their wealth to become landowners, and applied the same capitalistic methods they had used in industry to agriculture.
As early as 1724, Daniel Defoe had noted that, on estates near London, families of local gentry were being displaced by families enriched in business; and Cobbett, the writer who admired Squire Coke of Holkham, felt very differently about the people from London whom he termed “the Squires of Change Alley”. Parliament passed a series of so called Enclosure Acts. A few such Acts had been obtained under Queen Anne and George I, and over two hundred during George II’s reign, but even at the accession of George III in 1760, the open field system still existed in half the counties of England mostly in the Eastern counties bounded by the East Riding in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Wiltshire. During George III’s reign, however, some 3,200 Enclosure Acts were obtained including, in 1801, a General Enclosure Act, which simplified the procedure.
In other words, all of this change in agriculture comes long after the development of industrial capitalism in the towns, which began in the 15th century, and is, in fact, the necessary condition for the later transfer of capital into agricultural production.
Lenin provides the following table
and notes,
“We thus see that the more prosperous the handicraftsmen are as industrialists, the more prosperous they are as agriculturists. The lower they rank in production, the lower they rank in agriculture.” (p 387)
The idea, perpetuated by the Narodniks, that there was some kind of separate form of communal production, combining small industrial production and peasant agriculture was completely false. The same socio-economic relations established in industrial production were being replicated in agriculture.
“The handicraft census data, therefore, fully confirm the opinion already expressed in literature, namely, that the differentiation of the handicraftsmen in industry goes hand in hand with their differentiation as peasants in agriculture (A. Volgin, The Substantiation of Narodism, etc., pp. 211, et. seq.). As the wage-workers employed by the handicraftsmen are on an even lower (or not higher) level than the handicraftsmen who work for buyers-up, we are entitled to conclude that the proportion of impoverished agriculturists among them is even higher.” (p 387-8)
The inadequacy of detailed information in relation to the agricultural activity of the one-man handicraft producers made analysis difficult, and so Lenin has to use the information for specific industries, and from other sources. Lenin examines the tanning industry, and the agricultural activity of its owners. Of the 131 establishments, they employed 124 agricultural labourers, had 4.6 horses per establishment, and cultivated 16.9 dessiatines each. These workers divided into 73 annual and 51 seasonal, and received an average 20.1 roubles each. The average wage of a worker in the tanning industry, however, was 52 roubles.
“Here too, therefore, we observe the phenomenon common to all capitalist countries—the status of the agricultural labourer is lower than that of the industrial labourer. The “handicraft” tanners obviously represent the purest type of peasant bourgeoisie, and the celebrated “combination of industry with agriculture” so highly praised by the Narodniks is nothing more than the prosperous owners of commercial and industrial establishments transferring capital from commerce and industry to agriculture, and paying their farm labourers incredibly low wages.” (p 388)
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