Lenin describes a story given by Krivenko, illustrating the application of the theoretical and practical aspects of Narodism. The events occurred around 1869-70. Krivenko describes how a group of enthusiastic Narodnik socialists had gone amongst the peasants, spreading the word of The International, and regaling them with stories about the organisation of workers in the West. They failed to make any headway. At the same time, a German gardener began to show the peasants how to grow grapes and utilise other more advanced methods. In later years, the peasants held fond memories of him. But, what is the real lesson here? It is that the socialist message of the young Narodniks could not take hold, amongst the peasants, because their assumptions about the inherently communistic nature of the peasants and peasant life were false. Lenin was to write later about the actual individualistic nature of the Russian peasant, which made such spontaneous organisation of them impossible. He based his work on Kautsky, who found that the successful examples of agricultural cooperatives were all where they were created by agricultural workers, amongst whom the ideas of collectivism had already been established.
"It goes without saying that Kautsky very emphatically maintains that communal, collective large-scale production is superior to capitalist large scale production. He deals with the experiments in collective farming made in England by the followers of Robert Owen* and with analogous communes in the United States of North America. All these experiments, says Kautsky, irrefutably prove that it is quite possible for workers to carry on large-scale modern farming collectively, but that for this possibility to become a reality "a number of definite economic, political, and intellectual conditions" are necessary. The transition of the small producer (both artisan and peasant) to collective production is hindered by the extremely low development of solidarity and discipline, the isolation, and the "property-owner fanaticism," noted not only among West-European peasants, but, let us add, also among the Russian "commune" peasants (recall A. N. Engelhardt and G. Uspensky). Kautsky categorically declares, "it is absurd to expect that the peasant in modern society will go over to communal production" (S. 129)."
On pages 124-26 Kautsky describes the agricultural commune in Ralahine, of which, incidentally. Mr. Dioneo tells his Russian readers in Russkoye Bogatstvo,[51] No. 2, for this year.
And, of course, no Marxist would deny the advantage of bringing more advanced techniques of production to the peasants, but what is the actual basis upon which these techniques can be applied? It is on the basis of capitalist agriculture. The peasants best able to implement any such measures are the richer peasants, the peasants that acquire capital. The only other way in which such methods can be properly implemented is on the basis of socialised capital, of the development of agricultural cooperatives, but, as described above, it is not the peasants, imbued with a spirit of individualism, that are led to develop such social forms, but the agricultural labourers, a class which itself only arises as a consequence of capitalist development.
“To draw a comparison with any sense in it, he should have inquired why the efforts of the young men and women who went among the people to stimulate the peasants to revolution were so unsuccessful—whether it was because they erroneously believed that the “peasantry” really represented the working people and exploited population, whereas in fact the peasantry does not constitute a single class (—an illusion only to be explained, perhaps, by the reflected influence of the epoch of the fall of serfdom, when the peasantry did indeed come forward as a class, but only as a class of feudal society), for within it a bourgeois and a proletarian class are forming—in a word, he should have examined the old socialist theories and the Social-Democratic criticism of these theories.” (p 279)
No comments:
Post a Comment