Lenin sets out the basic outline of what the authentic Marxist position was, as it appeared on the scene in the last two decades of the 19th century.
“What they began with was a criticism of the subjective methods of the earlier socialists. Not satisfied with merely stating the fact of exploitation and condemning it, they desired to explain it. Seeing that the whole post-Reform history of Russia consisted in the ruin of the masses and the enrichment of a minority, observing the colossal expropriation of the small producers side by side with universal technical progress, noting that these polarising tendencies arose and increased wherever, and to the extent that, commodity economy developed and became consolidated, they could not but conclude that they were confronted with a bourgeois (capitalist) organisation of social economy, necessarily giving rise to the expropriation and oppression of the masses. Their practical programme was directly determined by this conviction; this programme was to join in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the struggle of the propertyless classes against the propertied, which constitutes the principal content of economic reality in Russia, from the most out-of-the-way village to the most up-to date and perfected factory.” (p 190-1)
Lenin then goes on to explain how the Marxists would join in the political struggle. And that too flows, not from some set of ideas plucked from the air, but from the material reality that presented itself.
“Capitalism had brought the principal branches of industry to the stage of large-scale machine industry; by thus socialising production, it had created the material conditions for a new system and had at the same time created a new social force—the class of factory workers, the urban proletariat.” (p 191)
As Engels had set out, in his Letter to Danielson, therefore, this development of capitalism in Russia had brought it “new hope”. That was not just new hope in the tremendous revolutionising of the productive forces, and transformation of society it brought about, in the same way it had done in the West, the creation of a proletariat, whose living standards rise, and whose level of education and culture is raised by this same capitalist development, but whose existence itself placed in the same relation to the means of production, enables it to act as the agent of historical change.
“Being subjected to the same bourgeois exploitation—for such, in its economic essence, i.e., the exploitation to which the whole working population of Russia is subjected—this class, however, has been placed in a special, favourable position as far as its emancipation is concerned: it no longer has any ties with the old society based entirely on exploitation; the very conditions of its labour and the circumstances of life organise it, compel it to think and enable it to step into the arena of political struggle. It was only natural that the Social-Democrats should direct all their attention to, and base all their hopes on, this class, that they should reduce their programme to the development of its class consciousness, and direct all their activities towards helping it rise to wage a direct political struggle against the present regime, and towards drawing the whole Russian proletariat into this struggle.” (p 191)
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