What The Friends of the People Are, Part III - Part 19

“I have dwelt once more in such detail on the differentiation of the peasants and handicraftsmen just because it was necessary to bring out clearly how the Social-Democrats picture the matter and how they explain it. It was necessary to show that the facts which to the subjective sociologist mean that the peasants have “grown poor,” while the “money chasers” and “blood-suckers” “derive profits for their own advantage,” to the materialist mean the bourgeois differentiation of the commodity producers necessitated by commodity production itself. It was necessary to show what facts serve as the basis for the thesis (quoted above in Part 1) [See p. 191 of this volume. –Ed.] that the struggle between the propertied and the propertyless is going on everywhere in Russia, not only in the mills and factories, but even in the most remote villages, and that everywhere this struggle is one between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that emerge as a result of commodity economy.” (p 232-30) 

Lenin's analysis, like that of Marx, was not based on subjective sociological criteria, about rich or poor, affluent or not affluent, which also forms the basis of modern subjective sociological definitions of class, but on objective material conditions or property ownership, and specifically ownership of capital. The distinction was not between affluent large capitalists on the one hand, and not very affluent workers and small capitalists on the other, but between the owners of capital, big and small, on the one hand, and workers on the other. 

“This thesis may be called the central point of the theory of WORKING-CLASS SOCIALISM as against the old peasant socialism, which understood neither the conditions of commodity economy in which the petty producers live, nor their capitalist differentiation due to these conditions. And, therefore, whoever wanted to criticise Social-Democracy seriously should have concentrated his argument on this, and shown that from the angle of political economy Russia is not a system of commodity economy, that it is not this which causes the break-up of the peasantry, and that the expropriation of the mass of the population and the exploitation of the working people can be explained by something other than the bourgeois, capitalist organisation of our social (including peasant) economy. 

Well, just try it, gentlemen!” (p 233)

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