On the one hand, the reformist wing of the labour movement absorbs itself in Economistic attempts to merely ameliorate workers' condition within capitalism. On the other, the supposedly revolutionary wing of the labour movement continues to wait for a political revolution similar to 1917, as the necessary prerequisite for transforming productive and social relations that have, in fact, already been transformed by the operation of natural social laws. What the labour movement needed to have done was to recognise that transformation in the productive and social relations, and to have engaged in a political struggle based on it. It needed to have focused on the property question, and to demand that the principles even of bourgeois property law be adhered to consistently, by ensuring that the associated producers, as owners of the socialised capital, exercised exclusive control over it.
Lenin, in “What Is To Be Done?”, had to engage in a similar struggle against Economism, but in the Russian police state, still under the Tsarist political regime, the political struggle took the form not of a struggle for industrial democracy, but for political democracy, for a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the kind that had already occurred in the West.
Lenin sets out the view of Marxists, as portrayed by Mikhailovsky. But, of course, this portrayal is false. According to Mikhailovsky, the position of Marxists is this.
““The truth” (the Marxists are represented as declaring) “is that in accordance with the immanent laws of historical necessity Russia will develop her own capitalist production, with all its inherent contradictions and the swallowing up of the small capitalists by the large, and meanwhile the muzhik, divorced from the land, will turn into a proletarian, unite, become socialised, and the trick is done, the hat reappears, and it only remains to put the hat on the head of now happy mankind.” (p 192)
On this basis, its presented that the Marxists and the Friends of The People do not differ in their view of reality, but only in their perception of the future. But, this is totally false. The Marxists did not base themselves on a perception of some future developments, of some future development of capitalism in Russia, but on their analysis that it already did exist in Russia!
“There can be no doubt that this is Mr. Mikhailovsky’s idea; the Marxists, he says, “are fully convinced that there is nothing utopian in their forecasts of the future, and that everything has been weighed and measured in accordance with the strict dictates of science”; finally and even more explicitly: the Marxists “believe in, and profess, the immutability of an abstract historical scheme.”” (p 192)
But, the Marxist position was based on no such abstract scheme. The Marxist position was not at all that Russia must pass through a capitalist stage, but that it was passing through such a stage.
“No Marxist has ever argued anywhere that there “must be” capitalism in Russia “because” there was capitalism in the West, and so on. No Marxist has ever regarded Marx’s theory as some universally compulsory philosophical scheme of history, as anything more than an explanation of a particular social-economic formation. Only Mr. Mikhailovsky, the subjective philosopher, has managed to display such a lack of understanding of Marx as to attribute to him a universal philosophical theory; and in reply to this, he received from Marx the quite explicit explanation that he was knocking at the wrong door.” (p 192)
Lenin is referring to Marx's Letter to the Editors Otecestvenniye Zapisky, taking Mikhailovsky to task on this particular misrepresentation of his theory.
“No Marxist has ever based his Social-Democratic views on anything but the conformity of theory with reality and the history of the given, i.e., the Russian, social and economic relations; and he could not have done so, because this demand on theory was quite definitely and clearly proclaimed and made the corner-stone of the whole doctrine by the founder of “Marxism” himself—Marx.” (p 192-3)
And the same point applies equally to Marx's own “predictions” in relation to Socialism. In other words, it is not a prediction of future events, but a statement about existing reality, i.e. about the actual transformation of the productive forces and productive relations that had occurred, and which had resulted in the destruction of capital as private property, the expropriation of the expropriators, and the establishment of socialised capital as a transitional form of property.
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