With regard to the sale of the produce, the small industries offer
the same variety of organisation. Here again there are two great
branches. In one of them the worker sells his produce directly to the
wholesale dealer; cabinet-makers, weavers, and workers in the toy
trade are in this case. In the other great division the worker works
for a “master” who either sells the produce to a wholesale dealer, or
simply acts as a middleman who himself receives his orders from some
big concern. This is the “sweating system,” properly speaking, under
which we find a mass of small trades. Part of the toy trade, the
tailors who work for large clothing establishments--very often for
those of the State--the women who sew and embroider the “uppers” for
the boot and shoe factories, and who as often deal with the factory
as with an intermediary “sweater,” and so on, are in this case. All
possible gradations of feudalisation and sub-feudalisation of labour
are evidently found in that organisation of the sale of the produce.
Again, when the industrial, or rather technical aspects of the
small industries are considered, the same variety of types is soon
discovered. Here also there are two great branches: those trades,
on the one side, which are purely domestic--that is, those which
are carried on in the house of the worker, with the aid of his
family, or of a couple of wage-workers; and those which are carried
on in separate workshops--all the just-mentioned varieties, as
regards connection with land and the divers modes of disposing
of the produce, being met with in both these branches. All
possible trades--weaving, workers in wood, in metals, in bone, in
india-rubber, and so on--may be found under the category of purely
domestic trades, with all possible gradations between the purely
domestic form of production and the workshop and the factory.
Thus, by the side of the trades which are carried on entirely at
home by one or more members of the family, there are the trades in
which the master keeps a small workshop attached to his house and
works in it with his family, or with a few “assistants”--that is,
wage-workers. Or else the artisan has a separate workshop, supplied
with wheel-power, as is the case with the Sheffield cutlers. Or
several workers come together in a small factory which they maintain
themselves, or hire in association, or where they are allowed to
work for a certain weekly rent. And in each of these cases they
work either directly for the dealer or for a small master, or for a
middleman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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