And, Lenin, then, in dissecting Krivenko's agenda also demonstrates the reactionary nature of today's Sismondists amongst the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”.
“To organise large-scale production without employers, it is necessary, first of all, to abolish the commodity organisation of social economy and to replace it by communal, communist organisation, under which production is not regulated by the market, as it is at present, but by the producers themselves, by the society of workers itself, and the means of production are owned not by private individuals, but by the whole of society. Such a change from the private to the communal form of appropriation apparently requires that the form of production first be changed, that the separate, small, isolated processes of production of petty producers be merged into a single social productive process; in a word, it requires the very material conditions which capitalism creates.” (p 247)
But, the “anti-capitalists”, and more specifically the “anti-imperialists” want, like the Narodniks, to be able to go somehow straight to this communist organisation without capitalism fulfilling this role.
“But the “friends of the people” have no intention of basing themselves on capitalism. How then do they propose to act? They do not say.” (p 247)
And, essentially, nor do the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. Somehow, simply on the basis of subjective ideology, and an act of sheer will, driven by intellectual insight, the world is to establish a system of global communism! But, in reality, the programme of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” is not about moving forwards to such a condition, but amounts to nothing more than a reactionary turning back of the clock to a system based on free competition and small capital.
“It is the consistent application of petty-bourgeois ideas. The author observes a fact like the struggle between big capital and small and, as a true “friend of the people,” he, of course, takes the side of small . . . capital. He has further heard that one of the most powerful weapons of the small capitalist is wage reduction—a fact that has been quite correctly observed and confirmed in a large number of industries in Russia, too, parallel to lengthening the working day. And so, desiring at all costs to save the small . . . capitalists, he proposes “some reduction in wages, provided it is compensated by other benefits”!” (p 248)
In developed economies, of course, capitalism has done its work of bringing together the scattered means of production, of turning them into capital, and of organising production as socialised production, even of expropriating the private capitalists by establishing socialised capital. But, here, the reactionary nature of the “anti-capitalists” agenda is shown by the fact that, instead of inserting into this process the furtherance of the progressive role of the working-class, by arguing the need for workers' control over this socialised capital, a goal that can only be achieved, ultimately, by an all out struggle for workers' power, they frame their demands in terms of an opposition to these more developed forms of capital; they argue for the form of that capital simply to be changed into state capital, which is, in fact, even more onerous for the workers, for the reasons Kautsky described, and these day to day demands are combined with an ultimatist demand for Socialism, or Revolution Now, completely dissociated from real life. There is only two ways that workers can gain control over the socialised capital. One is by creating worker-owned and controlled cooperatives, the second is via the wholesale implementation of workers control, which the bourgeoisie will never grant voluntarily, and which will have to be forced from it, in conditions of dual power in society. Outside these conditions, the demands of the “anti-capitalists”, however radical they may phrase them, in practice amount only to a reactionary demand that further capitalist development be held back, and that the less developed forms of capital be privileged over the more developed.
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