Lenin apologises to the reader for spending so much time dealing with what must appear to them as nonsense. His readers were, of course, other Marxists. However, he says, this nonsense was a kind of nonsense that itself flowed from the material conditions in Russia, and so these ideas were ones that the Marxists would continue to have to deal with for some time. Indeed, as I have indicated, even today, we have to deal with these same ideas, now put forward by Stalinists, and other petty-bourgeois strands.
“The point is that the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production in Russia gave rise, and to some extent still gives rise, to a situation for the working people in which the peasant, being unable to obtain a livelihood from the land and to pay dues from it to the landlord (and he pays them to this very day), was compelled to resort to “outside employments,” which at first, in the good old days, took the form either of independent occupations (for example, carting), or labour which was not independent but, owing to the poor development of these types of employment, was comparatively well paid. Under this condition the peasantry were assured of a certain well-being as compared with things today—the well-being of serfs, who peacefully vegetated under the tutelage of a hundred thousand noble police chiefs and of the nascent gatherers of Russia’s land—the bourgeoisie.” (p 242)
The Narodniks, Lenin says, idealised that system, disregarding its dark sides. And, much the same can be said of the Stalinists and their fellow travellers. They are a bit like the reactionary Guild Socialists, who hankered after the days, long gone, when the labourers were protected by the monopoly and paternalism of the guilds. Indeed, Stalinism is like one huge guild with a monopoly imposed by the Stalinist state, secured within the borders of the nation state. The state itself is a paternalist state, which is why it devotes a disproportionate amount of resources to its welfare function, including subsidising various essential services etc. It is this huge, bureaucratic, paternalist state that makes decisions on the workers' behalf, and the whole thing takes place under the gaze of millions of police and security services, along with the gatherers of the nation's wealth, the Stalinist bureaucratic caste.
But, that old village system had already been destroyed in Russia, just as the Guild System had long since disappeared in Britain and Western Europe.
“Our petty-bourgeois knights want to preserve the peasant’s “tie” with the land; but they do not want the serfdom that alone ensured this tie, and which was broken only by the commodity production and capitalism, which made this tie impossible. They want outside employments that do not take the peasant away from the land, that—while work is done for the market—do not give rise to competition, do not create capital and do not enslave the mass of the population to it. True to the subjective method in sociology, they want to “take” what is good from here and from there; but actually, of course, this childish desire only leads to reactionary dreaming which ignores realities, to an inability to understand and utilise the really progressive, revolutionary aspects of the new system, and to sympathy for measures which perpetuate the good old system of semi-serf, semi-free labour—a system that was fraught with all the horrors of exploitation and oppression, and held out no possibility of escape.” (p 242-3)
In other words, this was the same kind of reactionary agenda that Marx had described as proposed by Sismondi. It wanted to discard all of the negative aspects of feudalism and retain the good, but, in reality, the two could not be separated. Similarly, in the given reality, the bad aspects of reality could only be destroyed by capitalism, but capitalism was itself not possible without bringing its own set of evils. The difference is that a) the evils represented by capitalism are less than those represented by feudalism, particularly capitalism in its more developed form, and b) capitalism creates the necessary conditions for Socialism, whereby those evils themselves are ended. As Marx says, in “Value, Price and Profit”.
“They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.”
Or, as Engels had put it in his Letter to Danielson
“But on the other hand, capitalism opens out new views and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West.”
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