p But that is enough; we are not studying handicraft industry in Russia. All we want is to point out the indisputable facts which show beyond refutation the transitory situation of our national economy. While those who have made the safeguarding of the people’s interests the main aim of their life close their eyes to the most significant phenomena, capitalism is going its way: it is ousting independent producers from their shaky positions and creating an army of workers in Russia by the same tested method as it has already practised "in the West”. "Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with their separation from their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry, the process of separation between manufacture and agriculture.... Still the manufacturing period, properly so called, does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely. It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere,  [235•*  because it needs them for the preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces,  [235•**  therefore, a new class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of the soil as an accessory calling, find their chief occupation in industrial labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or through the medium of merchants.... "Modern industry alone, and finally, supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic agriculture, expropriates radically the enormous majority of the agricultural population, and completes the separation between agriculture and rural domestic 236 industry...."  [236•*  At present we are going through that very process of the gradual conquest of our national industry by manufacture. And this process of "bringing into existence " or at least temporarily livening many branches of small handicraft industry gives Mr. V. V. and his associates the possibility of trying to prove with apparent success that in our country there is no "capitalisation of handicraft industry".  [236•**  The meagre pay for which the handicraftsmen sell their labour somewhat retards the transition to large-scale machine industry. But in this phenomenon as in its indubitable consequences there is not and cannot be anything exceptionalist.  "The cheapening of labourpower, by sheer abuse of the labour of women and children, by sheer robbery of every normal condition requisite for working and living,... meets at last with natural obstacles that cannot be overstepped. So also, when based on these methods, do the cheapening of commodities and capitalist exploitation in general. So soon as this point is at last reached ... the hour has struck for the introduction of machinery, and for the thenceforth rapid conversion of the scattered domestic industries and also of manufactures into factory industries."  [236•***  We have seen that this hour has struck already for the uyezds of the Shuya cottonweaving district. Soon it will strike in other industrial localities too. The giving out of work to be done "at home" is profitable to the capitalist only as long as industrial labour is a side-line and a subsidiary occupation for the handicraftsmen. The income from agriculture allows the labourer to be satisfied with an 237 incredibly low pay. But as soon as this income ceases, as soon as corn-growing is finally ousted by industrial labour, the capitalist is obliged to raise the wage to the level of the famous minimum of the worker’s requirements. Then it is more profitable for him to exploit the worker in the factory, where the productivity of labour is increased by its very collectiveness. Then comes the era of large-scale machine industry.

Cotton spinning and weaving are, as we know, the most advanced branches of modern capitalist industry. That is why the process which has only just set in, or perhaps not yet quite set" in in other productions, is there almost complete. At the same time the phenomena observed in more advanced branches of industry may and must be considered prophetic as regards other spheres of industry. What happened there yesterday can happen here today, tomorrow or in general in a not distant future.  [237•*