Fields, factories and workshops

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The petty trades are thus an important factor of industrial life even in Great Britain, although many of them have gathered into the towns. But if we find in this country so many fewer rural industries than on the Continent, we must not imagine that their disappearance is due only to a keener competition of the factories. The chief cause was the compulsory exodus from the villages.

As everyone knows from Thorold Rogers’ work, the growth of the factory system in England was intimately connected with that enforced exodus. Whole industries, which prospered till then, were killed downright by the forced clearing of estates.[136] The workshops, much more even than the factories, multiply wherever they find cheap labour; and the specific feature of this country is, that the cheapest labour—that is, the greatest number of destitute people—is to be found in the great cities. The agitation raised (with no result) in connection with the “Dwellings of the Poor,” the “Unemployed,” and the “Sweating System,” has fully disclosed that characteristic feature of the economic life of England and Scotland; and the painstaking researches made by Mr. Charles Booth have shown that one-quarter of the population of London—that is, 1,000,000 out of the 3,800,000 who entered within the scope of his inquest—would be happy if the heads of their families could have regular earnings of something like £1 a week all the year round. Half of them would be satisfied with even less than that. The same state of things was found by Mr. Seebohm Rowntree at York.[137] Cheap labour is offered in such quantities in the suburbs of all the great cities of Great Britain, that the petty and domestic trades, which are scattered on the Continent in the villages, gather in this country in the cities.

Exact figures as to the small industries are wanting, but a simple walk through the suburbs of London would do much to realise the variety of petty trades which swarm in the metropolis, and, in fact, in all chief urban agglomerations. The evidence given before the “Sweating System Committee” has shown how far the furniture and ready-made clothing palaces and the “Bonheur des Dames” bazaars of London are mere exhibitions of samples, or markets for the sale of the produce of the small industries. Thousands of sweaters, some of them having their own workshops, and others merely distributing work to sub-sweaters who distribute it again amidst the destitute, supply those palaces and bazaars with goods made in the slums or in very small workshops. The commerce is centralised in those bazaars—not the industry. The furniture palaces and bazaars are thus merely playing the part which the feudal castle formerly played in agriculture: they centralise the profits—not the production.

In reality, the extension of the petty trades, side by side with the great factories, is nothing to be wondered at. It is an economic necessity. The absorption of the small workshops by bigger concerns is a fact which had struck the economists in the ’forties of the last century, especially in the textile trades. It is continued still in many other trades, and is especially striking in a number of very big concerns dealing with metals and war supplies for the different States. But there is another process which is going on parallel with the former, and which consists in the continuous creation of new industries, usually making their start on a small scale. Each new factory calls into existence a number of small workshops, partly to supply its own needs and partly to submit its produce to a further transformation. Thus, to quote but one instance, the cotton mills have created an immense demand for wooden bobbins and reels, and thousands of men in the Lake District set to manufacture them—by hand first, and later on with the aid of some plain machinery. Only quite recently, after years had been spent in inventing and improving the machinery, the bobbins began to be made on a larger scale in factories. And even yet, as the machines are very costly, a great quantity of bobbins are made in small workshops, with but little aid from machines, while the factories themselves are relatively small, and seldom employ more than fifty operatives—chiefly children. As to the reels of irregular shape, they are still made by hand, or partly with the aid of small machines, continually invented by the workers. New industries thus grow up to supplant the old ones; each of them passes through a preliminary stage on a small scale before reaching the great factory stage; and the more active the inventive genius of a nation is, the more it has of these budding industries. The countless small bicycle works which have lately grown up in this country, and are supplied with ready-made parts of the bicycle by the larger factories, are an instance in point. The domestic and small workshops fabrication of boxes for matches, boots, hats, confectionery, grocery and so on is another familiar instance.

Besides, the large factory stimulates the birth of new petty trades by creating new wants. The cheapness of cottons and woollens, of paper and brass, has created hundreds of new small industries. Our households are full of their produce—mostly things of quite modern invention. And while some of them already are turned out by the million in the great factory, all have passed through the small workshop stage, before the demand was great enough to require the great factory organisation. The more we may have of new inventions, the more shall we have of such small industries; and again, the more we have of them, the more shall we have of the inventive genius, the want of which is so justly complained of in this country (by W. Armstrong, amongst many others). We must not wonder, therefore, if we see so many small trades in this country; but we must regret that the great number have abandoned the villages in consequence of the bad conditions of land tenure, and that they have migrated in such numbers to the cities, to the detriment of agriculture.

In England, as everywhere, the small industries are an important factor in the industrial life of the country; and it is chiefly in the infinite variety of the small trades, which utilise the half-fabricated produce of the great industries, that inventive genius is developed, and the rudiments of the future great industries are elaborated. The small bicycle workshops, with the hundreds of small improvements which they introduced, have been under our very eyes the primary cells out of which the great industry of the motor cars, and later on of the aeroplanes, has grown up. The small village jam-makers were the precursors and the rudiments of the great factories of preserves which now employ hundreds of workers. And so on.

Consequently, to affirm that the small industries are doomed to disappear, while we see new ones appear every day, is merely to repeat a hasty generalisation that was made in the earlier part of the nineteenth century by those who witnessed the absorption of hand-work by machinery work in the cotton industry—a generalisation which, as we saw already, and are going still better to see on the following pages, finds no confirmation from the study of industries, great and small, and is upset by the censuses of the factories and workshops. Far from showing a tendency to disappear, the small industries show, on the contrary, a tendency towards making a further development, since the municipal supply of electrical power—such as we have, for instance, in Manchester—permits the owner of a small factory to have a cheap supply of motive power, exactly in the proportion required at a given time, and to pay only for what is really consumed.

Petty Trades in France.

Small industries are met with in France in a very great variety, and they represent a most important feature of national economy. It is estimated, in fact, that while one-half of the population of France live upon agriculture, and one-third upon industry, this third part is equally distributed between the great industry and the small one.[138] This last occupies about 1,650,000 workers and supports from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 persons. A considerable number of peasants who resort to small industries without abandoning agriculture would have to be added to the just-mentioned items, and the additional earnings which these peasants find in industry are so important that in several parts of France peasant proprietorship could not be maintained without the aid derived from the rural industries.

The small peasants know what they have to expect the day they become factory hands in a town; and so long as they have not been dispossessed by the money-lender of their lands and houses, and so long as the village rights in the communal grazing grounds or woods have not been lost, they cling to a combination of industry with agriculture. Having, in most cases, no horses to plough the land, they resort to an arrangement which is widely spread, if not universal, among small French landholders, even in purely rural districts (I saw it even in Haute-Savoie). One of the peasants who keeps a plough and a team of horses tills all the fields in turn. At the same time, owing to a wide maintenance of the communal spirit, which I have described elsewhere,[139] further support is found in the communal shepherd, the communal wine-press, and various forms of “aids” amongst the peasants. And wherever the village-community spirit is maintained, the small industries persist, while no effort is spared to bring the small plots under higher culture.