“It is therefore obvious that the stock argument of there being no capitalism in our country since “the people own land” is quite meaningless, because the capitalism of simple co-operation and manufacture has never been connected anywhere with the worker’s complete separation from the land, and yet, needless to say, it has not on that account ceased to be capitalism.” (p 209-10)
But, large-scale, capitalist machine production does not tolerate this continued connection to the land by the worker. It necessarily arises on the basis of the process of concentration and centralisation of capital, described by Marx, whereby first the small capitalists are expropriated by the bigger capitalists, and then these big capitalists are themselves expropriated by the even larger socialised capitals. In the West, even the ability of some workers to become homeowners, in the postwar period, and to accumulate small amounts of savings, was problematic for capital, because it meant that they could utilise this wealth as a supplement to income, so as to hold out longer against attempts by capital to force them to accept lower wages. Capital, however, having defeated workers and their trades unions, turned this potential threat into an advantage, by increasingly forcing workers to rely on that wealth as an alternative to wages, by encouraging them to use it as debt collateral. By that means, it was able to maintain high levels of consumption, despite stagnant or falling wages, whilst surreptitiously, over the last few decades, again depriving workers of those accumulated assets, in the same way that they had previously expropriated the landed aristocracy which similarly mortgaged its estates to finance its consumption. In Britain, for example, although we are told that, as a result of astronomically high house prices, the proportion of homeowners has fallen, what is never pointed out is that, the majority even of these homeowners, in reality, are also no such thing, because they are mortgagees, with vast amounts of debt undertaken to buy the house. Usually, the debt is significantly more than the actual value of the house, as opposed to its market price, which is demonstrated every time the property bubble bursts, as in 1990, 2008, and 2010. About 30% of homes, in Britain, are owned outright by their occupants, and a further 40% are owner-occupied on a mortgage. The rest are rented.
Lenin notes that this fact that large-scale capital cannot live with a continued attachment of the worker to his land, was identified by Dementyev, in Russia, independently of Marx. That analysis showed that the connection of the Russian worker to the land was so tenuous, whilst the power of the capitalist, be they a money-lender, merchant or factory owner, was so great that any further technical advance would convert them into wage labourers pure and simple.
Lenin makes the point, here, that Marx also makes, in his Preface to Capital I, that the characteristic of these earlier and smaller forms of capitalist production is more oppressive in relation to the worker than is large-scale capitalist machine production. In his “The Development of Capitalism In Russia”, Lenin makes this point at greater length, setting out that workers in handicraft production had the worst wages and conditions, those employed in manufactories had better wages and conditions, but the much better wages and conditions were enjoyed by the workers in the large capitalist factories.
“The domestic system of large-scale production is not only a capitalist system, but the worst kind of capitalist system, one under which the most intense exploitation of the working people is combined with the minimum opportunity for the workers to wage a struggle for their emancipation.” (Note *, p 210)
Again, this highlights the reactionary nature of the Stalinists' and Third Worldists' hostility to this large-scale capital, and monopoly, which amounts to the same kind of Sismondism as that purveyed by the Narodniks that Lenin polemicises against here. Lenin provides another cannonade against it later in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy, where he says,
“And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class.”
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