On The So Called Market Question - Part 1

Lenin's essay, here, was first given as a lecture to a Marxist circle in St. Petersburg, on the basis of a discussion of the pamphlet, “The Market Question” by G.B. Krasin. Krasin used, as the basis of his argument, Marx's schemas of reproduction, contained in Capital II, Chapter 21. Krasin's conclusion was that the existence of foreign markets was essential for capitalist production. The Narodniks and Legal Marxists argued that the immiseration of Russian peasants meant that no domestic market, in Russia, could be sufficiently developed to enable Russian capitalism to develop naturally. 

This concept of a “natural” development of capitalism, i.e. development that accorded with some preconceived ideal model of how capitalism should develop, as opposed to an analysis of how it actually was developing, in the concrete, historical conditions, was typical of the idealist and subjectivist approach of the Narodniks. Lenin deals with that more specifically in the next text I will examine in this series - “What The Friends of The People Are”. 

The conclusion that the conditions in Russia did not enable capitalism to develop “naturally”, on Russian soil, led the Narodniks to the view that the actual capitalist development they saw around them was “unnatural”, and only possible because of the intrusion of foreign capital into Russia, and likewise its relation to foreign markets. A similar line of argument is presented by those “anti-imperialists” who, today, portray the development of less developed countries by foreign, “imperialist” capital, as similarly “unnatural”, driven by imperialist greed, unequal exchange, super-exploitation, and so on, which they have repeatedly, and wrongly, presented as necessarily resulting in a “development of underdevelopment”, as opposed to the actual spread of capitalist production, and corresponding development we have seen. 

A lot of the material contained in Lenin's essay was contained in the previous work examined, so I do not intend to replicate it in looking at this work. A lot of the start of this work deals with the presentation of Marx's reproduction schemas by Krasin. I have set them out in my own coverage of Marx's Capital, and don't intend, therefore, to replicate that part in detail either, other than the skeletal outline. 

Lenin sets out that, in Capital I, Marx examined capital at the level of “many capitals”. In other words, he examines the production and reproduction of capital as it relates to one unit, one capital, as a specimen of one of these “many capitals”. In order to do so, it is only necessary to examine the question of the reproduction of values. In other words, a capital that produces yarn might comprise a constant capital of £1,000. It employs labour that creates £2,000 of new value, and, of this, £1,000 is paid as wages with £1,000 left as profit, required for the consumption needs of the capitalist. The value of output is £3,000, and so, if it is sold for £3,000 it returns sufficient exchange-value that the £1,000 of constant capital can be replaced, the workers can be paid £1,000 of wages, so as to be able to buy wage goods, in the period ahead, and the capital has the £1,000 of profit to be able to buy the consumption goods they need. 

At this level, the question of whether other capitalists and producers have, in fact, produced the cotton, machinery, etc., required to reproduce the consumed constant capital, wage goods and other consumption goods required by workers and capitalists is not considered. All of these other commodities could, in fact, be supplied by independent peasant and artisan commodity producers. The question of that supply, and of adequate demand for the yarn is set aside, and simply assumed, in order to analyse the question of the production and reproduction of capital in the abstract. 

In Capital II, however, Marx examines not just the production and reproduction of capital, at this abstract level of “many capitals”, but also examines the relationship between each of these many individual capitals to each other, and thereby, the nature of the circulation of capital, as each produces the use values that the others require, whether those use values comprise means of production (Department I), or means of consumption (Department IIa), or luxury goods (Department IIb).

Forward To Part 2