The Organization of the Jewish Proletariat in Russia
Sara Rabinowitsch
1903
2. The Situation of the Jews in Mohilev Today
Anyone arriving from Western Europe by steamship to Mohilev for the first time will be struck on the dock by nothing as much as by the enormous throng of people, comparable to that crowding large intersections in major European cities. The few well-dressed passengers who are disembarking here are immediately besieged. Five to ten Jewish porters offer to carry their luggage to a droshky; the cab drivers compete fiercely for the honor of conveying them to the city; women peddlers of every age, but all of Jewish descent, advertise their wares with hoarse voices: rolls, cakes, sausages, fruit of doubtful cleanliness and almost terrifying cheapness.
In the streets near the dock any stranger somewhat endowed with a talent for observation will notice the same nervous hustling: there is an overwhelming number of tiny shops and a ubiquitous presence of porters, cab drivers and women peddlers, offering their services with pleading voices. But having arrived in the center of the city, the picture is completely different. A quietude and stillness reign here as in hardly any other city of the same population size; one rarely hears a cart rattling by; the pedestrians appear entirely unhurried and nearly sleepy. If one turns to statistics to find an explanation for this contrast, one learns that Mohilev has 216 factories and workshops with 606 laborers and an annual production of goods valued at 614,532 rubles. Hence the poverty of one part of the population and the seemingly carefree state of the other do not represent, as an organic whole, the light and shadow of a highly developed industry. One has to go into the peripheral districts of the city, which are nearly exclusively inhabited by Jews, to find a more satisfying explanation for this remarkable phenomenon.
In these districts, which are unknown even to many natives, small wooden houses with tiny, low windows and broken chimneys are haphazardly scattered along dirty unpaved streets in which even under clear skies the feet are sinking into mud. Misery reigns in these houses. It is comparable only to the misery of Russia’s starving peasants: hunger, freezing cold, rampant child mortality and, among the adults, a grim enslavement to usury. And as in the countryside, where the whims of nature toy with human life, the urban misery is constantly in danger of becoming worse: these proletarians are threatened daily with the loss of the scant opportunities to earn a paltry income on which they and their families can barely subsist.
This is the cause of the nervous and anxious haste that is the hallmark of the economic life here: driven by the ever-present danger of starvation, hundreds throw themselves onto every possible source of income that will protect them from dying of hunger, and this danger—and not any economic principle—determines everyone’s economic activity. Here the shopkeeper needs the customer, the producer the consumer, not the other way around. In contrast to Western Europe, what is evolving among the Jews here is not a proletariat of laborers, but a proletariat of entrepreneurs. The local proletarian does not only sell his potential productivity but must also continually create a market for it.
The stunning excess of human services slows production and sales and squanders human potential in an entirely unique way. Since extreme need can neither wait nor calculate, as it must be satisfied immediately, the principle of lowest cost is unknown here.
On the path from producer to consumer is a long line of tormented human beings who occupy, with desperate determination, their barren niche. If they disappeared from the economic stage no one would feel it because no one needs them. But as long as they are there, they need to be busy and they will cling to the will to live with iron tenacity as long as they are in the least tolerated [generally] from custom or habit. [ . . . ]
Lumpenhändler (rag dealer) is the name for a small-scale retailer who, depending on the needs of the farmers, travels to different villages with goods of all kinds that he himself buys in open markets or in shops and exchanges for peasant products. He does not choose his profession as a result of economic considerations but out of dire need. His entire capital investment consists in a simple wooden cart and a little horse that he uses to drive around the villages. And even for this capital he is usually indebted to a solicitous usurer. The circulating capital is usually around three to ten rubles that are turned over in the course of a day. The work of the small retailer begins early in the morning when he buys his wares in the marketplace: metal tools, cheap articles of clothing, tobacco, herring, and so on. Some of these articles are often sold in small shops, which, in turn, employ individuals in business for themselves. With this baggage the Lumpenhändler mounts his cart and alone or accompanied by his wife or an adult son drives around the neighboring villages. He offers his wares to the peasants and exchanges them directly for the surplus products of the peasant economy. To the extent that the peasant does not need to exchange his products for money to pay taxes, but would exchange them for city goods, the barter with the Lumpenhändler saves the peasant the double trek of going to sell and going to buy. Usually the Lumpenhändler economy is only possible in the summer when the peasants work in the fields; in the winter the peasant needs money and brings his products to the market himself. After the exchange, the Lumpenhändler returns home, often late at night, where he is awaited by the shopkeepers, peddlers, and housewives of his neighborhood who will relieve him of the product he has obtained from the peasant (feathers, poultry, eggs, and so on). Sometimes brokers insert themselves, if the Lumpenhändler succeeded in bringing home a larger haul (small farm animals, canvas). When business is going well, his deals generate on average 2.5 to 5 rubles a week. If one ignores the minimal profit for the entrepreneur and wages for the work and assumes 10 rubles as the capital, the borrowed money accrues interest 13 to 26 times a year, even with daily sales. But because his overall sales are so tiny [and hence payback is slow], the interest owed on the capital becomes enormous.
From the shop and the peddlers the goods travel on. The shopkeepers sell them in the peripheral areas of the city where the Jewish proletariat lives, whereas the peddlers sell them in the marketplace, in the houses of the consumers or in the streets. The profit of the peddler amounts to about five to ten kopeks a day. Their workday is determined only by the time it takes them to sell their wares.
Case A: Large Farm
Large-scale sale of specific products: cereal, hay, cattle
1. Traveling wholesaler (Prassol)—Jew or Christian → Fair
2. Fair → Traveling wholesaler (as above) → Consumer
Case B
First example
Small-scale farm (money exchange; volume of sales and type of goods is uncertain and changeable based on one’s financial situation [rather than on the surplus] of the economy)
1. Market → Jewish peddler → Street → Consumer
2. Jewish small-scale shopkeeper → Jewish housewives → Street → Consumer
Second example
1. Home laborer → Vendor (in marketplace) or simple shop → Peddler → Marketplace or street → Consumer
2. Small-scale farm (volume of sales and type of produce as above, but under a barter economy) → Shopkeeper → Consumer
The Jewish so-called Lumpenhändler (barter economy; type of goods on both sides not clearly defined; dependence of both parties: one on liquidity, the other on accidental surplus and on the need for the goods of the Lumpenhändler).
How much human energy is wasted in these sales and how stiff the competition is among the poor Jews of Mohilev, emerges from the numbers I could establish in my research.
Among the roughly 1,000 Jewish families I questioned, the occupations were as follows:
| Lumpenhändler | 20 |
| Peddler | 107 |
| Women among them | 100 |
| Widows among them | 25 |
| Girls among them | 5 |
| Small shopkeeper, selling in the same street | 72 |
| Women among them | 35 |
| Widows among them | 7 |
It is clear that in the presence of such stiff competition, the battle for every penny is so intense that economic calculations are completely pushed aside.
Let’s spend a moment with the women peddlers. Only a small number (about eleven) of them are actually occupied with distributing the goods (chickens, feathers, eggs) that the Lumpenhändler hauled to the city. They are the “aristocrats” among the women peddlers. They work regularly and usually have an established customer base. In addition, there are five milk vendors who also know their clients.
The situation is very different for the large number of the others who must literally track down customers and are often dependent on their compassion. The fruit and potatoes, which they are buying from the peasants in the marketplace (see case B, example I), or baked goods and cheap sweets are put in baskets that the peddlers lug around in the streets. Their sales rarely exceed 50 kopeks; and it takes an entire day to sell these goods. Lack of money—even this paltry sum plays the role of capital here—makes this a sporadic enterprise. The entrepreneur becomes active not when the situation in the market is favorable, but when she has saved up a few ko-peks. Although economically completely superfluous, these ventures are, from the point of view of the individual entrepreneur, crucial because they supplement the meager income of the head of the family. Case A, described above, in which the raw materials are conveyed either directly from the peasant, via the fair, to the worker processing them, or are sold en masse by Jewish wholesalers, a path that does not feature the whole chain of intermediaries, illustrates sharply just how uneconomical these enterprises, represented by Case B, with their “droplet sales” are. The mass of the small-scale peasants and the entrepreneurial Jewish proletariat are economically completely superfluous and can exist only in an environment of minimal subsistence. It is to be expected that after the planned extension of a branch of the railway to Mohilev which will probably spur the city’s industrialization, these dwarf economies will be absorbed by the growing traffic and no one will miss the work of these piteous human beings.
We encounter the same superabundance of human beings in the domain of production. It is sufficient to look at the concentration in certain crafts occurring in response to necessity. I am turning again to numbers obtained in my fieldwork:
Among 1,000 individuals the self-ascribed professions are:
| Tailor | 65 |
| Seamstress | 69 |
| Cobbler | 55 |
| Hosier | 19 |
| Carpenter | 51 |
| Baker | 46 |
Since most of these were single-person operations that produced goods and provided services for the inhabitants in the immediate neighborhood or for a few shops in the city, it is easy to imagine how very little demand there was for each individual. Hence the observation articulated by Bücher is valid here: “The work that needs to be done can be smaller than the available human capacity to do it. In that case, the human capacity to work would not be fully exploited, if the worker limited himself to this one job. In addition, this job could not form the basis of a life-long profession providing him with sufficient sustenance.”1 Hence we find odd job combinations here too. For example, I found the following combinations: house painters who can usually find work in their main profession only in the summer months, work as tailors and galoshes manufacturers in the winter; small shopkeepers work as tailors, cobblers, and day laborers and so on.
For these people, the prospect of economic advancement outside of their actual profession is very dim indeed. This is because every start-up enterprise requires money; and money can be obtained in only one way: by giving oneself up entirely to the mercy of an urban usurer.
In the German Jewish language Wocher is the term for usurer. It does not derive from the German word for usurer (Wucherer), but from the word for week (Woche) because the money is lent at interest that is calculated for a week. The process is as follows: the borrowers agree to pay the lender 1%–3% interest every week for the particular sum he borrows. The money value of the interest is predetermined and stays constant until the last penny of the debt has been returned. If, for example, A lends B 100 rubles at 3%, B will have to pay 3 rubles interest every week for as long as he owes even a penny of that money, even if in the meantime B was able to pay back the debt with one ruble remaining. Since the borrower usually can amortize his debt only in installments, the profit for the Wocher is immense.
Certainly, the risk that the usurer must be willing to take in this enterprise is quite high—and the new Russian law concerning usury that limits the rate of interest to 12% has now also hugely increased the risk of coming into conflict with the law. Seen from this perspective the profit does not seem to be terribly high, especially if one takes into account the quick turnover of the tiny sums of capital. But where fixed investments are concerned (sewing machines for tailors, which will be examined later, horses and wagons for carters and Lumpenhändler), the profit the Wocher derives from the interest is clearly expressed in the rate he is setting. However, it is in the areas of the fixed investment and the emergency loan that the consequences of usury are particularly devastating. When someone has succeeded, after years of hard labor and self-deprivation, in putting aside a sum as the foundation for a better life, the Wocher knows how to press the savings out of him with clever tricks. From those who have nothing but their lives, he squeezes interest out of every step, every bite, every breath they take.
In the first case, the usurer assaults his victim at the very moment when he is happily in the possession of a small fortune and begins to contemplate buying a small house. The desire to be master in one’s own home is not a peculiar desire of the entrepreneurial class. Just as the Western European laborer yearns for nothing as much as for his own small parcel of land, the Russian Jewish proletarian considers the possibility of owning his house the pinnacle of economic independence, especially since, despite cheap land, the housing question is one of the most depressing problems in the life of the poor. Almost none of the families I interviewed had lived for more than two or three years in their apartments; in most cases it was the owner who had given notice to the tenants.
Once a tenant has managed to save a fortune of 50–100 rubles, he will immediately think about buying or building a small house. The opportunity to do so beckons everywhere, but requires twice or three times the means that the man commands. In such cases the Wocher seems to offer his service more willingly than usual, because this is not only a highly profitable, but also a safe investment of his capital, since the house is bought as a security in his name. It happens not infrequently that the Wocher, having collected his weekly payment for many years, simply declares the house his property after the first failure to remit the weekly payment, and demands it from the owner. Since the debtor is completely uninformed about the law, such cases almost never go to court.
This form of exploitation is even more depressing in cases where the debtor is faced with the decision either to borrow or to starve. In the long winter months, when unemployment with all its devastating consequences arrives, the poor Jews on the periphery of Mohilev fight a desperate battle against hunger. Not even the Wocher is coming to help them: their own neighbors are turning into usurers. The weight of the Wocher presses on them indirectly. The owner of the tiny shop, who is usually in debt to the Wocher, turns into a creditor himself for the customers who cannot pay. He does not really demand interest, but it is a matter of course that when a customer buys on credit rather than with cash, he will receive goods of lesser quality. In addition it is the shopkeeper alone who books the credit; hence it is to be expected that he, who is similarly miserable, will take advantage of his power.
At this point the charitable system should kick in, if it is to have any meaning at all. But the Jewish charitable organizations of Mohilev have not become active in any systemic way.2 Much more is being done by the benevolent brotherhoods (ḥevras), for example, in support of the sick. Thus poor workers are freed from the pressure of the shopkeepers at least during periods of illness. But since the brotherhoods are maintained by the wealthy, one can assume only a very limited understanding of the economic situation of those in need of support on the part of these organizations. In contrast, another kind of brotherhood is guided, at least in principle, by the right insights, even if it is powerless in the face of the overwhelming facts on the ground; these brotherhoods, also called ḥevras are formed among the poor, with the purpose of rendering mutual support to its members.
Notes
[Likely from the German economist Karl Bücher (1847–1930), Arbeit und Rhythmus (Labor and Rhythm, 1896).—Eds.]
This is not to reproach Jewish beneficence in Mohilev. The “drive to do something,” as [Herbert] Spencer put it, is present here too in the best sense of the word and led to the founding of charitable organizations. But what is being done is not guided by uniform and consistent principles.—Recently, Dr. Katzenelnsohn [sic] of Libau is said to have suggested at the Zionist congress in Basle that credit cooperatives should be founded on a large scale among the Jewish artisans and shopkeepers of Russia. According to his report such cooperatives already exist in Russia. This suggestion should be heeded in every respect.
Credits
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
