56
A QUESTIONNAIRE ON THE ORGANISATIONS
OF BIG CAPITAL
48
The Industry and Economics Department of the Imperial
Russian Technical Society sent out a questionnaire on “pub-
lic organisations of the commercial and industrial class in
Russian”, or rather on the organisations of big capital. The
results of the questionnaire are now set forth in Mr. Gush-
ka’s
49
book Representative Organisations of the Commercial
and Industrial Class in Russia (St. Petersburg, 1912). Both
the material contained in the book and the conclusions,
which the author indicates in fairly definite terms, deserve
serious attention.
I
As a matter of fact, the questionnaire of the Technical
Society dealt with the “representative” organisations of
capitalists, which make up approximately 80 per cent of
all the organisations. About 15 per cent of the organisations
are cartels, trusts and syndicates, nearly 5 per cent are
associations of employers, and the rest are stock-exchange
committees, boards of congresses, etc. These latter organisa-
tions are very fond of calling themselves “representative”.
Their job is to influence government bodies.
The employers’ associations, in Mr. Gushka’s opinion,
conduct a “direct” class struggle against the wage-workers,
whereas the representative organisations conduct an “indi-
rect” class struggle—a “struggle against other classes by
exerting pressure on the state power and on public opinion”.
That terminology is wrong, of course. It at once betrays
one of the principal defects which Mr. Gushka has in common
with most representatives of “professorial”, bourgeois politi-
57
A QUESTIONNAIRE ON THE ORGANISATIONS OF BIG CAPITAL
cal economy. On the face of it, he accepts the concept of the
class struggle; on the face of it, the class struggle serves as
the basis of his investigation. Actually, however, that con-
cept is narrowed down and distorted. Indeed, from what
Mr. Gushka says, the struggle of the capitalists against the
wage-workers within the framework of a given political system
is a “direct” class struggle, while the struggle for the poli-
tical system itself is an “indirect” class struggle! What about
the struggle for “state power” itself—where does that belong?
But we shall have occasion to deal with this fundamental
fault of Mr. Gushka’s “world outlook” in the proper place.
The value of his work is not in its theory, but in the summary
of facts it offers. The data on organisations of the prepon-
derant type are at any rate of considerable interest.
The total number of “representative” organisations of big
capital in Russia in 1910 is given as 143. Seventy-one of
them were stock-exchange societies with their committees.
Then came 14 committees of commerce and manufacture,
three merchants’ boards, 51 organisations in the “combined”
group (congresses and their boards, advisory bureaus, etc.),
and four organisations of an indefinite type. The question-
naire was answered by only 62 organisations, or less than
half the total. Out of the 51 organisations in the “com-
bined” group, which is the most interesting, 22 answered the
questionnaire.
The data on the time the organisations were founded are
characteristic. Of the 32 stock-exchange committees which
answered the questionnaire, 9 were founded in the last century,
from 1800 to 1900, 5 in the four years 1901-04, 9 in the two
years of revolution—1905-06—and 9 in the period 1907 to 1910.
“Here,” writes Mr. Gushka, “we clearly see the effect of the
impetus which the social movement of the stormy year 1905 lent
the process of the self-organisation of the representatives of capital.”
Of the 22 organisations in the combined group, only 7
came into being during the period 1870 to 1900, 2 from 1901
to 1904, 8 in the two years of revolution—1905-06—and 5
from 1907 to 1910. All those “congress boards” of represent-
atives of industry in general—mine owners, oil industrial-
ists, and so on and so forth—are a product chiefly of the
period of revolution and counter-revolution.
V. I. L E N I N
58
The organisations are divided according to industries as
follows. The group of stock-exchange committees is predomi-
nantly mixed: these committees usually unite all the
branches of industry and commerce of the area concerned.
In the group of committees of commerce and manufacture,
the textile industry is in the forefront. In the main, combined,
group, almost half the organisations represent not commerce,
but industry—mining and metallurgy, to be specific.
“It is this group of industries (mining and metallurgy)
that constitutes the economic basis of the organisations
of Russia’s modern industrial ‘guard’,” writes Mr. Gushka,
who has a slight weakness for using a “lofty style” in speak-
ing of the subject of his investigation.
Only in the case of a part of the organisations was it pos-
sible to establish the total turnover or output for the entire
branch of commerce or industry to which the organisation
in question belongs. The total thus obtained is 1,570 million
rubles, of which 1,319 million rubles belongs to members of
the organisations. Consequently, the organised represent 84
per cent of the total. The turnover of 3,134 members of
organisations amounted to 1,121 million rubles, or an aver-
age of 358,000 rubles per member. The number of workers
employed by 685 members of organisations is approximately
219,000 (on p. 111, the author mistakenly puts it at 319,000),
or an average of more than 300 workers per member.
It is clear that we are dealing here with organisations
of big capital, or even the biggest capital, to be exact.
Mr. Gushka is fully aware of this, for he points out, for
instance, that only the really big and biggest merchants and
industrialists are admitted as members into the stock-ex-
change committees and the committees of commerce and
manufacture, and that the congresses of representatives of
industry and commerce are made up of the “biggest” capi-
talist undertakings.
That is why the author is wrong when he refers, in the
title of his book, to organisations “of the commercial and
industrial class in Russia”. That is incorrect. Here again
the author narrows down the concept of class. Actually,
Mr. Gushka is dealing with a stratum, not with a class.
Sure enough, the stratum of the biggest capitalists economi-
cally dominates all the other strata, which it unquestion-
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