The same petty-bourgeois approach criticised by Lenin can be seen in the approach of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” today. On their desire to oppose large-scale monopoly and imperialist capital they jump into bed with even more reactionary, small-scale capitalists, as part of an “anti-monopoly alliance”, and with even more reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalists, and even medievalist regimes and movements, as part of an “anti-imperialist” alliance. This is also the hallmark of the petty-bourgeois ideology of Stalinism, on a global basis, as it sought to create a strategic alliance with the Third Worldists, but also in its national programmes, based on the theory of Socialism In One Country which amounted to nothing more than social-democratic, reformist programmes, based on protectionism for these backward forms of small capital, defended behind high protectionist walls of import and immigration controls.
And, the same applied to Stalinism inside the deformed workers' states themselves. As I have written elsewhere, Stalinism and National Socialism represents a form, maybe the ultimate form, of social-democracy, based on the defence and promotion of socialised capital, as a transitional form of property. It is social-democracy sans democracy. And, in these conditions, its petty-bourgeois nature is manifest in the only way it can be, not as the promotion of petty-bourgeois property – small capital – but, as Marx describes in The 18th Brumaire, the ideas that arise from that form of property. It is manifest in the promotion of the petty-bourgeois in the shape of the bureaucrat, the manager, technician and administrator, who see their functional and mediating role as synonymous with the interests of society as a whole.
As Simon Clarke put it,
“The social base of state socialism lies in the stratum of intellectual workers, including such groups as managers, administrators, scientists, technicians, engineers, social workers and teachers as well as the intelligentsia more narrowly defined.” These groups believe that the key to a more just society lies “in their mobilisation of their technical, administrative and intellectual expertise... The ability of this stratum to achieve its rationalist ambitions depends on its having access to positions of social and political power.”
“For the working-class the Party is a means of mobilising and generalising its opposition to Capital and its State, and of building autonomous forms of collective organisation, while for the intellectual stratum it is a means of achieving power over capital and the state... As soon as the party has secured state power, by whatever means, it has fulfilled its positive role as far as the intellectual stratum is concerned. The latter's task is now to consolidate and exploit its position of power to secure the implementation of the Party's programme in the interests of the 'working class'. Once the Party has seized power, any opposition it encounters from the working class is immediately identified as sectional or factional opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole, the latter being identified with the Party as its self-conscious representative.”
There were, of course, monopolies that Marxists opposed, but they were the monopolies inherited from feudalism, not those that arise naturally out of the process of capitalist competition, and the centralisation and concentration of capital. But, here, too, the nature of the Narodniks was exposed. Lenin quotes from an article in Russkoye Bogatsvo, “The Chronicle of Home Affairs”, which deals with the question of monopoly. The author refers to the sugar and kerosene industries, and notes that,
“The consumption of sugar and kerosene here is still practically in the embryo, to judge by the insignificant per capita consumption of these goods here as compared with that of other countries. It would seem that there is still a very large field for the development of these branches of industry and that they could still absorb a large amount of capital.” (p 249)
No comments:
Post a Comment