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| 1984-5 showed that "The People" actually meant only the capitalist class and its state. |
The same kind of nonsense about “the people” is seen today, and has been enhanced by the development of welfare states, which form a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They help create the delusion that the state is a “people's state” and so class neutral, rather than what it is, which is a capitalist state, there to protect and enhance the interests of the capitalist class. It could be seen in he signs erected at collieries when they were nationalised after WWII, which spoke of them being acquired on behalf of the people, when nothing could have been further from the truth. It can be seen in the claptrap when people talk about “Our NHS”, when again it is nothing of the kind, and if it were, ought to be a source of shame for “us”.
Lenin notes,
“Yes, gentlemen, that’s how he puts them, side by side: “science” and “commission agencies.”. . . The time to study the “friends of the people” is not when they are fighting the Social-Democrats, because on such occasions they don a uniform sewn from tatters of their “fathers’ ideals,” but in their everyday clothes, when they are discussing in detail the affairs of daily life. Then you get the full colour and flavour of these petty-bourgeois ideologists.” (p 254-5)
The Narodniks presented this vision of society from the perspective entirely of the condition and experience of the petty-bourgeoisie. In all of it, they failed to mention that what was actually happening, in the countryside, and had been happening since 1861, was that vast numbers of peasants were being impoverished and dispossessed, and for whom all such ideas about employing technicians and modern equipment were simply fantasies.
“One would think that, even apart from an analysis of our rural economy, it is enough to observe this striking fact in our modern economic history—namely, the generally-noted progress in peasant farming, parallel to the tremendous expropriation of the “peasantry”—to become convinced of the absurdity of picturing the “peasantry” as a single harmonious and homogeneous whole, to become convinced of the bourgeois character of all this progress! But the “friends of the people” remain deaf to all this. Having lost the good features of the old Russian social-revolutionary Narodism, they cling tightly to one of its grave errors—its failure to understand the class antagonism within the peasantry.” (p 255)
Lenin refers to the work of Hourwich, who, in turn, notes that, back in the 1870's, it was also Gleb Uspensky who had noticed that “individualism had become the basis of economic relations, not only as between the usurer and the debtor, but among the peasants at large. Cf. his article “Casting in One Mould” (Ravneniye pod odno), Russkaya Mysl, 1882, No. 1.” (Op. cit., p. 106.)” That the Narodniks, in that period, in the 1860's and 70's, should have failed to notice the differentiation of the peasantry was excusable, Lenin says, because it was at an early stage, and accurate information about the countryside was not available, but no such excuse existed for the Narodniks of the 1890's.
Vorontsov had even written a book stuffed with economic data showing that the technical development of the peasantry was occurring at a pace. Lenin notes,
“The reason the search for new methods of cultivation” is becoming “feverish” that the enterprising muzhik has to run a larger farm, and cannot cope with it by the old methods; that he is compelled by competition to seek new methods, inasmuch as agriculture is increasingly acquiring a commodity, bourgeois character.” (Note *, p 256)
But, Vorontsov fails to state that, alongside the technical development, undertaken by the richer peasants, vast number of poorer peasants were dispossessed.
“They bury their heads in the sand like ostriches so as to avoid looking facts in the face, so as not to notice that they are witnessing the process of the transformation into capital of the land from which the peasant is being separated, the process of creation of a home market.” (p 256)
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