Taking one of Russia's principal industries – textiles – Lenin says the buyer-up was the immediate forerunner of the big manufacturer. Even with no workshop of their own, they supplied yarn to domestic workers, and took possession of the finished goods.
“Our good Narodniks did not even attempt to investigate the origin of these buyers-up, their genealogical connections with the owners of small workshops, their role as organisers of the buying of raw materials and the selling of products, the role of their capital in concentrating means of production, in gathering together masses of scattered small handicraftsmen, in introducing division of labour, and in creating the elements of what is not only large-scale production but which is also becoming machine production. Our good Narodniks confined themselves to whining and complaining about this “deplorable,” “artificial,” etc., etc., phenomenon; they consoled themselves with the belief that this was not the “capitalisation” of production, but “merely” of the process of exchange, and talked sentimentally about “different paths for the fatherland.”” (p 424)
But, Marx's analysis, in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, shows how this stage of collecting together the existing scattered means of production is the first stage of capitalist production itself, and sets in motion the process of further concentration and centralisation of capital that leads through manufacture, to machine production, to the expropriation of the small capitalists, by the bigger capitalists, and then to the expropriation of the expropriators, to the expropriation of even the big private capitals by the even larger socialised capitals of the cooperatives and joint stock companies. And, this process occurred in Russia too.
“Meanwhile these “artificial” and “unsubstantial” “kulaks” kept on following their old path, continued to concentrate capital, to “gather together” means of production and producers, to extend their purchases of raw materials, to further the division of production into separate operations (warping, weaving, dyeing, finishing, etc.) and to transform scattered, technically backward capitalist manufacture, based on hand labour and servitude, into capitalist machine industry.” (p 424-5)
This same dynamic has occurred everywhere that capital has settled, whether that capital arose indigenously or as a result of relations with other capitalist economies, including via colonialism and imperialism. As soon as a country is drawn into the realm of generalised commodity production and exchange, the necessities imposed upon it by competition force it to produce capitalistically. The laws of capitalist competition force it to accumulate capital, setting in place the process of concentration and centralisation of capital. Simultaneously, that process expands the domestic market itself, and brings about the differentiation of the people into bourgeois and proletarians. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto,
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
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