The Narodniks tried to argue that these elements were no longer peasants but only hucksters, thereby claiming that the “people's industry” remained intact. However, Lenin says, setting these hucksters and others of their ilk on one side, and, setting on the other all of those who were no longer peasants, because they had become wage labourers, what remained of this so called “people's industry”? In fact, what it showed was that this “people's industry” did not exist, because what it actually consisted of was the hucksters, the merchant capitalists, and small productive-capitalists, on the one hand, and proletarians on the other, whether those proletarians were in the form of actual wage labourers, or in the form of the labourer exploited via the Putting Out System, and system of domestic production, or the handicraft workshop. In fact, these latter forms were more exploited than the actual wage labourers, because their atomised condition meant they could not organise collectively, and what they were paid frequently fell even below the value of labour-power. The same applies to workers in similar conditions today, who must, thereby, rely on massive levels of in-work welfare payments to subsidise their wages.
“This mass of small rural exploiters represents a terrible force, especially terrible because they oppress the isolated, single toiler, because they fetter him to themselves and deprive him of all hope of deliverance; terrible because this exploitation, in view of the barbarism of the countryside due to the low labour productivity characteristic of the system described and to the absence of communications, constitutes not only robbery of labour, but also the Asiatic abuse of human dignity that is constantly encountered in the countryside. Now, if you compare this real countryside with our capitalism you will understand why the Social-Democrats regard the work of our capitalism as progressive when it draws these small, scattered markets together into one nation-wide market, when, in place of the legion of small well-meaning blood suckers, it creates a handful of big “pillars of the fatherland,” when it socialises labour and raises its productivity, when it shatters the subordination of the working people to the local blood-suckers and subordinates them to large-scale capital.” (p 235-6)
In the era of globalisation and multinational capital, the same argument applies to the development of superstates, like the EU, and economic blocs like MERCOSUR, ASEAN, ACFTA and so on. And, the opponents, today, of such developments, the proponents of Brexit, and attempts to constrain capital within the confines of the nation state, are today's equivalents of the Narodniks and Sismondists. The bringing together of nation states into these larger units, which prefigure large superstates, are not only a reflection of the material conditions and needs of capital, they are the means by which this further development of capital is facilitated. In so doing, it facilitates the transformation to Socialism, which itself is predicated on such large-scale, international, economic relations. Lenin, in 1918, polemicising against ultra-lefts described this in relation to the development of large scale industrial capital in Germany, as providing the basis both for imperialism, and for socialism.
“To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries)...
And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.”
And, to emphasise the point that this was not simply some argument that he had raised to fit the particular conditions they found themselves in, Lenin quotes from his article in September 1917 The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It .
““. . . Try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state, for the landowner-capitalist state, a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!
“. . . For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs ” (pages 27 and 28)”
(ibid)
But, more than that, capital not only creates the material conditions for socialism, by developing the means of production, it also creates the social agent which brings about this social change, it creates the working-class, and the more capitalism develops, the larger, the more socially dominant this working-class becomes, and the more capitalism becomes a global system, the more this working-class too develops as a global class, for which national borders become an unnecessary fetter. If socialism is only possible on an international basis, which it is, then it can only be brought about by a working-class that is itself international, and internationalist in nature. It requires that this working-class, facing the same economic and social conditions, must exist not in the form of a national class, but at least as a continent wide class, organised in continent wide class organisations, in continent wide trades unions, cooperatives and workers parties. It must engage in continent wide class struggle for control and ownership of the means of production.
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