VII - “Gratifying Features” of Handicraft Industry
Lenin examines those features of “handicraft” production which the Narodniks elaborate in The Sketch as illustrating its positive aspects.
“We are told, for example, that wage-labour in handicraft industry has a character of its own, for here the wage worker lives in “close contact” with the master, and “may” himself become a master. The “gratifying feature” here, then, is the benign wish to turn all workers into small masters! Incidentally, not all—only some, for “the tendency to exploit the labour of others is undoubtedly characteristic of all men in general, including the handicraftsman” (Sketch, p. 6).” (p 439)
This beautifully illustrates the petty-bourgeois nature of the Narodniks. Of course, the same traits can be found in liberals. Their vision of the perfect society in which everyone is a small employer, regardless of the fact that, if everyone was, there would be no one left for them to employ! If applied logically, it means a society of entirely self-sufficient peasant producers, a condition which would necessitate a return to conditions and living standards prior to the Industrial Revolution. The same mentality can be seen when the idea is put forward that workers can start at the bottom, and work their way to the top, as if, when 10,000 workers start at the bottom, then, no matter how intelligent, diligent and so on they might be, 9,999 of them will not fail to get the one single top job!
But, of course, its not true that everyone wishes to become such a small employer, let alone return to being a self-employed peasant producer. For one thing, as the data provided by Lenin showed – and its even more true today – the living standards of industrial workers are much higher than those of supposedly independent small producers, who find themselves, in any case, dependent upon large-scale capital in one form or another. More significantly, the alternative to being a dependent wage worker is no longer to return to being a supposedly independent small producer, but is for workers themselves, as associated producers, and collective owners of large-scale socialised capital, to insist upon their legal right to exercise control over their collective property, to become not small scale employers of others labour, but very large-scale employers of their own collective and cooperative labour.
The reality of the wage workers employed within the handicraft system has been previously described. If the handicraft masters were often in a worse condition than industrial wage workers, the position of the wage workers employed by them was worse still. It suffered from all of the aspects of paternalism carried over from feudalism, tied the worker to a given employer, and with all the restrictions of the Truck System. As Marx put it in the Preface to Capital, speaking of conditions in Germany,
“Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! [The dead holds the living in his grasp. – formula of French common law]””
The reality was that The Sketch described as “handicraft” many businesses that were clearly capitalist enterprises, employing significant numbers of wage workers. The Sketch emphasised the relations between these enterprises and local communities, which provided them with materials. But, all this showed, as with the Scottish pebble collectors, described by Adam Smith, was that these individual producers of the materials were wholly dependent on the capitalist enterprises they supplied. The Scottish pebble collectors could only sell their pebbles to stone masons at prices that just covered the value of their labour-power, meaning that essentially they were just wage workers, but without the stone masons having to assume any of the responsibilities of an employer. The same applies today with those employed in the gig economy. And, this was the reality of the relations described by the Narodniks, but which they presented as being advantageous.
To cover the inclusion of these capitalist enterprises in the category of handicraft industry, the Narodniks argued that the term applied where the owners also worked in the business, but even that was too limiting, and so they stretched the definition to include merely participation, “or even if the owners “are obliged to confine their participation to the various worries involved in running the industry” (p. 301).” (p 441)
The Narodniks also spoke in favour of the development of artels, but the artels had nothing in common with the advocacy of cooperatives by Marx and Engels. The latter were a development out of large-scale, socialised capital, brought forward by class conscious workers. The former were small-scale, usually family owned collective enterprises that also employed wage labour.
“Not one of the artels, as we have seen, expresses the “principle of labour’s independence of capital”: they are all artels of masters and small masters, many of them employing wage-workers. There is no co-operation in these artels; even the joint purchase of raw materials and sale of the product is ridiculously rare and embraces a surprisingly insignificant number of masters. It may be safely said that there is no capitalist country in the world where a register of nearly 9,000 small establishments, with 20,000 workers, would reveal such astonishing dispersion and backwardness of the producers; where among the latter one would find only a score or so cases of property owned in common, and less than a dozen cases of three to five owners uniting to buy raw materials and sell the product! Such dispersion would be the surest indication of unrelieved economic and cultural stagnation, if we did not, fortunately, see that capitalism is day by day uprooting patriarchal handicraft, with the parochialism of its small self-sufficing proprietors, and breaking down the small local markets (on which small production depends), replacing them by the national and the world market, compelling the producers, not only of a village like Gavryata, but of a whole country, and even of several countries, to enter into association with each other, forming associations that are no longer merely of masters, big and small, and confronting them with far wider problems than that of buying timber or iron more cheaply, or selling nails or carts more profitably.” (p 444-5)
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