Lenin quotes an article by Krivenko, in Russkoye Bogatsvo No.12, “Our Cultural Free Lances”. In it, Krivenko relates the story of how an engineer had visited their offices with proposals for a scheme for the technical exploitation of the Don region. Lenin mocks the idea even that Krivenko should even discuss such a scheme, because the Narodniks did not even hold governmental office, let alone state power. Lenin quips that Krivenko was “apparently under the impression that he has already been “called upon” to “solve practical economic problems”” (p 241) Again, this is rather like those microsects today who call on a right-wing Tory government to nationalise this or that industry in the workers' interest, and tag on the end the demand for workers control!
The Narodniks took the engineer's proposals and amended them to fit their populist programme.
“The author was recommended to modify his scheme roughly as follows: “The shares shall not belong to private persons, but to village communities; that part of the village population employed in the company’s enterprises shall receive ordinary wages, the village communities guaranteeing that their connection with the land is maintained.”” (p 241)
Lenin mocks the facile and superficial nature of such a programme.
“With what admirable simplicity and ease capitalism is introduced into the life of the people and all its pernicious attributes eliminated!” (p 241)
Indeed, this programme has elements reminiscent of both Proudhon and Lassalle. Proudhon's programme was based on this same concept of putting together the good bits of different modes of production, and discarding the bad, as though a new mode of production, and society, could be created in such a way, as an act of pure will. Proudhon also wanted to retain commodity production and exchange, but to do away with capital, which necessarily arises from commodity production and exchange. And, like Lassalle, this schema for such a society is seen as being grafted on to the existing society, from above, by the state, even though that state is a capitalist state. As Marx says, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organisation of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!”
Lenin notes that what Krivenko's proposal amounts to is that the rural bourgeoisie would buy these shares. No matter how it was proposed that these share allocations be limited, the reality was that, to buy them, the peasants required money, and only the rich peasants had money. As Lenin had already shown, in analysing the take up of credit, by villages, it was overwhelmingly used for the development of the farms of the richer peasants. A village might, as a collective, buy the proposed shares, but, if it was only the rich peasants in the village who put up the money, when the village itself divided up the dividends from the shares, the vast bulk would go to the rich peasants that had put up the money.
It would, of course, not be the rich peasants that were tied to the land, by the proposals to provide wage labour, but only those dependent on wage labour for an income. And, indeed, because of such a tie to the land, it would put these workers in a more disadvantaged position than other workers. On the one hand, the tie to the land was not one that ensured an adequate, independent existence, because if it did, there would be no reason for such a peasant to take up wage labour on ordinary wages, so it forced them into this wage labour to supplement their income. However, by tying them to the land, in their village, it imposed on them the same constraints that medieval serfdom had done, in terms of mobility. This has remarkable similarities to the discussion of free movement within the context of Brexit. Once again, the similarity of the reactionary position of the Stalinists and their fellow travellers, who join with the Moggites in opposing free movement, is similar to that of the Narodniks.
The consequence of the Narodnik proposition was to create “a “tie” insufficient to assure a livelihood from the land (otherwise who would go to work for “ordinary wages”?), but sufficient to bind a man to his locality, enslave him to the local capitalist enterprise and deprive him of the possibility of changing masters.” (p 241-2)
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