Tuesday 16 June 2020

What The Friends of the People Are, Part I - Part 30 of 31

Lenin then picks up Mikhailovsky in relation to the point made earlier that rather than dealing with the arguments put forward by the actual Marxists, he instead puts up straw men, dealing with arguments from all kinds of charlatans who might proclaim themselves Marxists. And, Lenin quotes from Plekhanov to illustrate that they did not at all seek to simply adopt some abstract “Marxist schema” of historical development, and apply it to Russia, but sought merely to utilise Marx's historical materialist methodology, to analyse the actual productive and social relations existing in Russia. 

“... the Marxists unreservedly borrow from Marx’s theory only its invaluable methods, without which an elucidation of social relations is impossible, and, consequently, they see the criterion of their judgement of these relations not in abstract schemes and suchlike nonsense at all, but in its fidelity and conformity to reality.” (p 194) 

And, Lenin continues, dealing with the question that Zasulich had posed to Marx about whether Russia had to pass through a capitalist stage of development. Speaking of Plekhanov, Lenin goes on, 

“So it is fair to ask, how should a man who believes in abstract schemes have answered such a question? Obviously, he would have spoken of the incontrovertibility of the dialectical process, of the general philosophical importance of Marx’s theory, of the inevitability of every country passing through the phase of . . . and so on and so forth. 

And how did Plekhanov answer it? 

In the only way a Marxist could. 

He left aside entirely the question of the “must,” as being an idle one that could be of interest only to subjectivists, and dealt exclusively with real social and economic relations and their actual evolution. And that is why he gave no direct answer to this wrongly formulated question, but instead replied: “Russia has entered the capitalist path.”” (p 194-5) 

According to Mikhailovsky, the position of the Russian Social Democrats (Marxists) was that Russia would develop its own capitalist production. But, the actual position was that Russia already had developed its own capitalist production. A look at the industrial statistics for Russia indicates the point. In 1800, Russian output of metal was equal to that of Britain. By 1854 it was way behind. The same is true of railways, the navy etc., indicating why the Tsarist regime after The Crimean War needed to industrialise. Looking at manufacturing and mining, using 1900 prices, Russian output in 1860 is 13.9, by 1880 it has doubled to 28.2, by 1890 it has doubled again to 50.7, by 1900, doubled again to 100, and by 1913, it has risen to 163.6. (Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p 12) A look at the other data in that chapter illustrates the point.  As Nove points out, one soviet estimate (unlikely to exaggerate Tsarist performance) showed that between 1860-1910 world production grew by 6, GB by 2.5, Germany by 6, and Russia by 10.5.  Between 1890-1900 pig iron production trebled. Oil output kept pace with the US, and by 1900 was the highest in the world (p 13). In the same decade, railway track mileage increased by 73.5%. According to Dobb (Soviet Economic Development Since 1917) by 1903, there were 40,000 miles of track. That included the 4,000 miles of the Trans-Siberian railway constructed between 1891-1904, which connected Moscow to the Pacific Coast (p 35).

This development was combined and uneven.

“It is true that capitalist industry had in certain regions shown a quite remarkable development, particularly since the 1880's: in the coal and iron region of the Donetz and Dnieper in the south, in the Moscow region and the neighbourhood of Petersburg and Poland. Much of this industry was fairly modern in type, and was marked by a surprisingly high level of concentration both of production and of ownership and control. For example, the proportion of all workers in factories who were employed in enterprises with more than 500 workers reached the surprisingly high figure of 53 per cent as compared with an American figure of 31 per cent.” (Dobb p, 34)

Russian blast furnaces were bigger than their German equivalents, in terms of output, and half as big again as British blast furnaces. (ibid)

But, Russia is a vast country, and alongside these areas of rapid industrialisation, and modern technology, much of it introduced by foreign multinational capital, large areas of the country remained in conditions similar to those of the 18th century in Britain, and other parts of Western Europe. As happens today with the investments of multinational capital in industrialising economies, the factories established by these foreign companies were of the most modern type, and in line with Marx's analysis, although they used lots of fixed capital, the size of the factories meant that they also employed large numbers of workers in one place compared to the former manufactories and handicraft workshops. That brought more rapid economic development, and improvements in living standards for the workers in these areas, but it also facilitated trades union organisation in these large plants, and the spread of socialist ideas. It was in these large modern plants that the Bolsheviks built their base ahead of the revolution in 1917.

The corollary of Mikhailovsky's position was that there were no inherent contradictions in Russia, there was no exploitation of millions of workers and peasants, by a small class of capitalists, “... there is no exploitation of the mass of the people by a handful of capitalists, there is no ruin of the vast majority of the population and no enrichment of a few? The muzhik has still to be separated from the land? But what is the entire post-Reform history of Russia, if not the wholesale expropriation of the peasantry, proceeding with unparalleled intensity?” (p 195) 

The Friends of The People closed their eyes to all of this exploitation and misery, because they sought to deny that capitalism had already been established in Russia. They wanted to pretend that the industrial proletariat amounted to no more than around 1.5 million workers. They sought to deny what was obvious to the Marxist, which was, 

“... that its only possible explanation lies in the bourgeois organisation of Russian society, which is splitting the mass of the people into a proletariat and a bourgeoisie, and in the class character of the Russian state, which is nothing but the organ of the rule of this bourgeoisie, and that therefore the only way out lies in the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie” (p 196) 

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