The “friends of the people” referred to are the liberal Narodniks. Narod is the Russian for people, Narodnik, therefore, meaning populist. Lenin's polemic, here, against these populists, as in the other articles covered in this series, has many lessons for us today, in relation to similar trends. It has lessons in relation to Brexit, and free movement, as well as in relation to the reactionary nature of the various “anti-imperialist”, and “anti-capitalist” movements, who, like the Narodniks, may well be moved by good intentions, but of the kind with which the road to Hell is paved.
In the given conditions of Tsarism and autocracy, Liberals were part of the range of oppositional groups. Some of the oppositional activity took on violent revolutionary form, but, as with most such activity, undertaken by middle-class elements, it was characterised by acts of individual terrorism, rather than mass, collective, class action. The liberal Narodniks, however, advocated conciliation with the Tsarist regime, and opposed the Marxists that sought to mobilise large scale class action against it.
Russkaya Bogatsvo (Russian Wealth) was the magazine of the liberal Narodniks such as Vorontsov, Mihhailovsky, Muzhazov, and Krivenko. In 1906, it became the organ of the Popular Socialist Party. In attacking the ideas of the liberal Narodniks, Lenin also attacked the ideas of the so called legal Marxists. His book is based on a series of lectures to Marxist circles in Samara in 1892-3. Given the police state conditions of the time, copies of the book were circulated in the form of hectographed copies. Most of these were lost, and the current work is based upon copies that came to light in 1936. However, Part II of the work has never been found.
In this book, Lenin develops on the ideas he had previously set out, particularly in “On The So Called Market Question”, criticising the economic theories of the Narodniks, which were based on the ideas of Sismondism, which focussed on the negative social consequences of capitalist development, seeing it as somehow “unnatural”, diverging from some “natural”, or ideal path of development. It saw the Russian village commune, and the peasant economy as the basis of this natural development. This focus on some supposedly existing natural form of economy, and the depiction of capitalist development as unnatural, meant that the Narodniks repeatedly presented data that emphasised that idea. It is what Lenin defines as Economic Romanticism. The data presented by the Narodniks attempted to show that the peasants formed an essentially homogeneous group, and also that there were limits to this “unnatural” development of capitalism in Russia.
As Marx demonstrated in Theories of Surplus Value, the ideas of Malthus and Sismondi were consonant, indeed, the former plagiarised the latter, as he plagiarised other writers. The difference being that Sismondi's ideas flowed from a moralistic concern for the workers, whereas Malthus had no such concern, and was only concerned with the interests of the landed aristocracy, and its associated parasitic layers, whose paid apologist he was. But, both result in reactionary ideas, and a catastrophist view of capitalist development. As Lenin demonstrated in “On the So Called Market Question”, this concept, put forward by Krasin, that Russian capitalism could not continue to expand, once the existing peasant production had been absorbed, without expanding into foreign markets, was wrong. We see a similar thing today, with explanations of the continued expansion of a capitalism that some claim is in its death agony, being its super exploitation of undeveloped economies. However, as Lenin points out, this does not mean that capitalist development does not necessarily expand beyond the limitations created by national borders.
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