“It goes without saying that the “Narodnik” measures can only serve to strengthen the petty bourgeoisie; or else (artels and common cultivation) are bound to be miserable palliatives, remain pitiful experiments of the kind which the liberal bourgeoisie cultivated so tenderly everywhere in Europe for the simple reason that they do not in the least affect the “school” itself.” (p 275)
Narodism, when it first began, was based on false assumptions about the nature of the Russian peasant, and the village commune. But, on the basis of these assumptions, Narodism developed a fairly consistent theory. Given that the theory was based on false assumptions, however, it still led to false conclusions, and reality exposed them. The assumptions were that the nature of the Russian village led to a natural cooperative and communistic spirit within the peasantry. It viewed the peasantry as a more or less homogeneous class. It saw, therefore, this class as a revolutionary class, and the means by which socialism could be established by it, on the basis of its own productive relations. This ideology is that of peasant socialism, represented later, in Russia, by the Left Social Revolutionaries. It is the same ideology that lay behind the movements of Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh etc.
“But it lacked theoretical elaboration and confirmation in the facts of Russian life, on the one hand, and experience in applying a political programme based on these assumed qualities of the peasant, on the other.” (p 275-6)
Narodism proceeded along two lines, theoretical and practical. In terms of the theoretical work, it performs the same role as the earlier Sismondists. That is it provides a wealth of information about the dire condition of large numbers of people in society.
“But this material, which mainly concerned the form of land ownership, completely obscured the economics of the countryside from the investigators’ eyes. This happened all the more naturally, because, firstly, the investigators lacked a sound theory of method in social science, a theory showing the need to single out and make a special study of production relations; and because, secondly, the collected factual material furnished direct evidence of the immediate needs of the peasantry, of the immediate hardships which had a depressing effect upon peasant economy. All the investigators’ attention was concentrated on studying these hardships—land poverty, high payments, lack of rights, and the crushed and downtrodden condition of the peasants.” (p 276)
And, in fact, Lenin says, all of this evidence about the dire condition of the peasants was presented with such clarity, and backed by such a volume of evidence that, if the Russian state really were a “people's state”, and class neutral, it could not but have been moved to take the necessary measures to relieve that misery from such a large number of its people. The same thing could be said of all of the social reformers in the West. There were no shortage of such reports into the conditions in the factory towns and cities, in the factories themselves, as well as in prisons and so on, undertaken by people like Chadwick, Fry, Rowntree, Shaftesbury et al. But, the capitalist state only moved on these things when doing so resulted in benefit to capital.
“The naïve investigators, believing in the possibility of “convincing” society and the state, were completely submerged in the details of the facts they had collected, and lost sight of one thing, the political-economic structure of the countryside, lost sight of the main background of the economy that really was being crushed by these immediate hardships. The result, naturally, was that defence of the interests of an economy crushed by land poverty, etc., turned out to be a defence of the interests of the class that held this economy in its hands, that alone could endure and develop under the given social-economic relations within the community, under the given economic system in the country.” (p 276)
In other words, it became a defence of the peasant economy, and of the petty-bourgeoisie. But, that very economy is unsustainable, because, contrary to the assumption of Narodism, the peasantry is not an homogeneous, single class, and commodity production and exchange necessarily leads to a differentiation of this peasantry into a bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the establishment and dominance of capital.
“Theoretical work directed towards the study of the institution which was to serve as the basis and support for the abolition of exploitation led to a programme being drawn up which expresses the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e., the very class upon which this system of exploitation rests!” (p 276-7)
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