For the Sismondists and economic romanticists, who moralise over the dispossession of the direct producers, who are thereby forced into wage slavery, this is a tragedy, but for Marx, on the basis of his scientific honesty, it is an inevitable, and progressive historical development. The huge development of the productive forces that massively raises the level of total output reduces the values of commodities, raises living standards, makes possible the more rapid development of science and technology, and creates a world market, which is not possible without the expansion of the division of labour in the factory. The division of labour within the factory is also not possible without production on a large-scale, which also requires a division of labour in society, so that the production of products gives way to production of commodities. And, large-scale factory production is not possible without a concentration, a gathering together, of the scattered means of production, of a myriad individual, and more importantly individually minded, peasant producers.
Viewed abstractly, and with hindsight, it is, of course, possible to say what capitalism did forcibly, by bringing about this concentration of means of production and consumption could have been achieved voluntaristically. This was the idea that lay behind the economic romanticism of the Narodniks. They relied on Marx’s letter to Zasulich to argue that the introduction of capitalism in Russia, particularly a capitalism they saw as a foreign imposition, being introduced by large European capitalist firms, was unnecessary, and that Russia could simply industrialise on the basis of its existing social foundations, resting upon the primitive village communes. The same, essentially reactionary, notions lie behind the arguments of the “anti-imperialists” who oppose large-scale investment in less developed economies. In fact, in Marx's more detailed replies to Zasulich, he makes clear that any such development, on the basis of the existing communes, is dependent upon Russia being able to access the advanced technologies that capitalism in the West had already created.
As both Lenin and Trotsky pointed out, even for state capitalist development, capital is required, and if a poor country lacks capital, the first priority is to obtain it, including from foreign direct investment. And, the problem with the idea that peasant producers could have simply voluntaristically combined their resources to form large-scale cooperative production, is that these individual peasant producers had evolved over centuries, as atomised units in society, imbued with a petit-bourgeois, individualist mentality. It was precisely that which led Marx to argue that the peasantry, and petit-bourgeois in general, can never form a class for themselves, and can never, therefore, lead society as the ruling class.
Lenin, in this vein, quotes Kautsky, who undertook an analysis of agricultural co-ops, and concluded that the only places where they were successful was, for example, at Ralahine, in Ireland, where the working-class itself was relatively developed, and where the ideas of collectivism and discipline were also developed. They were not successful, however, wherever the peasants continued to be dominated by an individualistic mentality. As Marx pointed out to Zasulich, it was theoretically possible, on the basis of capitalist development that had already occurred in Europe, and which had created the technology and division of labour, for that to be transplanted to Russia, and grafted on to the social foundations of the village commune, but the reality was that the individualistic, backward Russian peasants were never going to do that, and, in the meantime, the same process of differentiation of that peasantry, in to kulaks and muzhiks, capitalist farmers and day labourers, was already overtaking it, and bringing about the development of capitalism in Russia.
Similarly, the peasants in Britain or France, in the 17th and 18th centuries, would never have voluntarily pooled their resources into the construction of large-scale cooperative production, because their whole existence and ideas that arose from it, mitigated against such a development.
“Thus primitive accumulation, as I have already shown, means nothing but the separation of labour and the worker from the conditions of labour, which confront him as independent forces. The course of history shows that this separation is a factor in social development. Once capital exists, the capitalist mode of production itself evolves in such a way that it maintains and reproduces this separation on a constantly increasing scale until the historical reversal takes place.” (p 271-2)
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