As Lenin says,
“Then one can understand that Mr. Mikhailovsky cannot grasp the simple truth that there is no other way of combating national hatred than by organising and uniting the oppressed class for a struggle against the oppressor class in each separate country, than by uniting such national working-class organisations into a single international working-class army to fight international capital.” (p 156)
Our Narodnik Lexiters of today want not only to pursue a reactionary course of turning back the clock on the most progressive historical achievement in European history, but also want to have the workers of each country fight with one hand tied behind their back, by making them fight international capital purely within the constraints of their own nation state!
“As to the statement that the International did not prevent the workers from cutting each others throats, it is enough to remind Mr. Mikhailovsky of the events of the Commune, which showed the true attitude of the organised proletariat to the ruling classes engaged in war.” (p 156)
Lenin's description of Mikhailovsky's polemical method could be applied to that of today's internet trolls, which, unfortunately, does not differ too significantly to some sections of the Left whose knowledge of Marxism seems largely peripheral and second-hand, imbibed from the propaganda and mantras of whichever sect they follow.
“Such too are the methods Mr. Mikhailovsky employs when he argues against the Russian Marxists: without taking the trouble to formulate any of their theses conscientiously and accurately, so as to subject them to direct and definite criticism, he prefers to fasten on fragments of Marxist arguments he happens to have heard and to garble them.” (p 156-7)
And Lenin, in describing Marx's method, compared to the earlier socialists, could equally be applied to large sections of today's Left that appears to have degenerated to pre-Marxist conditions.
“One may not agree with Marx, but one cannot deny that he formulated with the utmost precision those of his views which constitute “something new” in relation to the earlier socialists. The something new consisted in the fact that the earlier socialists thought that to substantiate their views it was enough to show the oppression of the masses under the existing regime, to show the superiority of a system under which every man would receive what he himself had produced, to show that this ideal system harmonised with “human nature,” with the conception of a rational and moral life, and so forth. Marx found it impossible to content himself with such a socialism. He did not confine himself to describing the existing system, to judging it and condemning it; he gave a scientific explanation of it, reducing that existing system, which differs in the different European and non-European countries, to a common basis—the capitalist social formation, the laws of the functioning and development of which he subjected to an objective analysis (he showed the necessity of exploitation under that system). In just the same way he did not find it possible to content himself with asserting that only the socialist system harmonises with human nature, as was claimed by the great utopian socialists and by their wretched imitators, the subjective sociologists. By this same objective analysis of the capitalist system, he proved the necessity of its transformation into the socialist system. (Exactly how he proved this and how Mr. Mikhailovsky objected to it is something we shall have to refer to again.) That is the source of those references to necessity which are frequently to be met with among Marxists.” (p 157-8)
Note, here, that Lenin does not have any truck with all the “anti-capitalist” nonsense, which sees Socialism as deriving from some kind of catastrophic crisis or collapse of capitalism, which is the basis of all those catastrophist theories of crisis based on The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (and similar catastrophism abounds amongst environmentalists), and which is also behind calls for Lexit and Scottish independence, i.e. the idea that if the existing capitalist formations – British state, EU – can be broken up, this will hasten the crisis that will destroy capitalism. Rather, Lenin, like Marx and Engels, talks of “the necessity of its transformation into the socialist system.”
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