The Narodniks neither wanted to acknowledge that the small-scale “people's production” was capitalist, nor that the exploitation of the workers within it was due to the fact that it was capitalist. Even less did they want to acknowledge that the particularly harsh oppression of the workers in this “people's industry”, compared to that of workers in the larger capitalist enterprises, was due to the undeveloped nature of the small scale capital in the former. Instead, they wanted to place responsibility for this “super exploitation” elsewhere. The same is true of today's “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. Instead of recognising that the misery of workers in small scale capitalist enterprises, and in economies that are not yet fully developed, is down to the fact that they are both capitalist, and yet not capitalist enough, they seek to find other causes for this condition, such as the existence of monopoly, super-exploitation, imperialism, unequal exchange, and so on.
For the Narodniks, the cause of oppression was proclaimed to be the agrarian and fiscal policy of the state.
“The question arises, what was, and is, the basis of the persistence of this opinion, which has now acquired almost the tenacity of a prejudice? Maybe it is the prevalence of a different concept of production relations in the handicraft industries? Not at all. It persists only because no attempt whatever is made to give an accurate and definite description of the facts, of the real forms of economic organisation; it persists only because the production relations are not singled out and submitted to an independent analysis. In a word, it persists solely due to a failure to understand the only scientific method of social science, namely, the materialist method.” (p 213)
And, the same is true of today's “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”, whose ideas are based, not on a scientific analysis founded in materialism, but which flow from the sense of moral outrage. They are like the Narodnik socialists, and like the Sismondists – moral socialists. For the Narodniks, they faced a logical contradiction, when they examined Russian large-scale capitalist production; it was obvious that the cause of the exploitation of the workers in these industries was to be found inside the industry, and the productive relations, in which the workers did not own the means of production, and were reduced to the status of wage labourer. They denied that there was anything capitalist about the existing handicraft or “People's Industry”. But, then, this created a contradiction for them, because how could they then explain the existence of this large-scale capitalist industry? Where had it come from, if not from developing out of smaller scale industry? How had it appeared fully formed like Minerva from the head of Zeus?
We see similar approaches today. Take the example of the burning of rainforests in Brazil, and other South American countries. The Sismondists are quick to blame such activities on “imperialism”, but is it imperialism that is actually responsible for such activity? In fact, we know that some of the largest, most profitable companies, based in the imperialist heartlands, the pharmaceutical companies, are highly reliant on rainforests, as sources of flora and fauna that provide them with the basis for the development of new drugs and compounds. The main cause or rainforest destruction comes not from imperialism, which also would like the rainforest to continue its function of soaking up CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, and so require it to spend less in other areas to achieve that effect, but from the domestic farmers. It is Brazilian and other South American farmers who are burning down the rainforest, in order to provide themselves with large additional areas of agricultural land, whether to use as arable land or for grazing.
The reason that Brazilian farmers are burning down the rainforest, to obtain additional agricultural land, is that the working-class in South America, as globally, has doubled since the 1980's. It has grown by about 30% just since the start of this century. That growth in the working-class means that a) those workers are no longer peasants eking out a mere existence on their own plot of land, producing their own food, but must now buy it in the market, and b) their standard of living has risen significantly, having become wage workers, and so their demand for food has risen sharply.
A look at the figures for food consumption in China illustrates the point. In 2005, Chinese consumption of meat was 2.4 times what it was in 1990, milk 3 times, fruit 3.5 times, vegetables 2.9 times, fish 2.3 times, whilst its consumption of cereals, mostly rice, fell by 20%. The large rise in demand from China, and other developing economies, was part of the reason for the spike in global food prices, at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. Demand for food rose so sharply that shortages began to appear, which, along with the price spikes, caused riots in a number of countries in 2008.
Brazilian, and other farmers have merely been responding to this increased demand for food and primary products that flows from the rise in living standards of workers that have escaped the misery and idiocy of rural life, and peasant production. That they respond in this destructive manner is not a symptom of imperialism, but the opposite. It is a symptom of the relatively undeveloped, under-capitalised nature of domestic agriculture in these countries that seeks to farm extensively rather than intensively. Moreover, they must also cultivate existing land more aggressively, wearing out its fertility, causing soil erosion, and so on. This is the opposite of what happens with more developed capitalist farming.
“It is in the nature of capitalist production that it develops industry more rapidly than agriculture. This is not due to the nature of the land, but to the fact that, in order to be exploited really in accordance with its nature, land requires different social relations. Capitalist production turns towards the land only after its influence has exhausted it and after it has devastated its natural qualities. An additional factor is that, as a consequence of landownership, agricultural products are expensive compared with other commodities, because they are sold at their value and are not reduced to their cost-price. They form, however, the principal constituent of the necessaries.”
(TOSV, Chapter 21)
In the developed capitalist/“imperialist” economies, this process unfolded long ago. Having exhausted the potential for agricultural and primary production on the old feudal/semi-feudal basis, large-scale capital had to turn its attention to agriculture itself, developing large-scale agribusinesses that are now highly capital-intensive. Where Britain used to employ 80% of its workforce on the land in 1800, and, even in 1925, 1 million worked on the land, today, that figure is only 100,000, or about 1.5% of the workforce, whilst agricultural production is higher today, driven by this rise in productivity due to intensive capital investment. And, that capital investment necessarily treats the land as a valuable resource that it must protect, so that it utilises capital investment in the use of fertilisers and so on, so that its investment can be protected over the long term, as opposed to the short-term over farming of previous pre-capitalist forms of agriculture.
In the more developed, capitalist forms of farming, as Marx describes in his analysis of rent, land is used more intensively, and more efficiently. More capital is employed per hectare of land, so as to provide drainage, irrigation and so on, as well as to use crop rotation, the use of artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and crop selection and breeding (of which genetic modification is now the latest scientific development), so as to significantly raise yields per hectare. That means that more developed capitalist farming is able to raise output more rapidly, even using less land to do so, and even using that land less aggressively.
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