Lenin quotes another article from Russkoye Bogatsvo, Number 2, in which the liberal, subjectivist stance of the Narodniks is manifest. In it, the author writes that Russia was fortunate in being a backward country, because it meant that its economic model could be developed on the principle of “solidarity”. Solidarity between whom, Lenin asks, the peasant and landlord, enterprising muzhik and the tramp, or mill owner and worker? But, this principle of solidarity also meant that Russia could be an exponent of such solidarity in international affairs “and that Russia’s chances for this are enhanced by her undeniable “political might”!!” (p 261)
But, as Lenin says, Russia had acted as the gendarme of Europe, the bulwark of reaction. In all of the conflicts in Europe, it was Russia that the non-historic peoples turned to for assistance, and the price it asked for such support was that these peoples too supported the reactionary schemes and intrigues that Russia itself perpetrated.
“... it is this gendarme who is described as an exponent of economic solidarity!” (p 261)
The same can be seen in relation to today's plight of non-historic people such as the Palestinians, who are similarly reduced to seeking support from today's bulwarks of reaction. And, today, we see the equivalents of the Narodniks lining up with those bulwarks of reaction, and bowing down in obeisance to them, be it with the WRP's fawning of Gaddafi, Galloway's cringing before Saddam, or the SWP's claim that “We are all Hezbollah now!”
“This is indeed beyond all limit! Messrs. the “friends of the people” will outdo all liberals. They not only plead with the government, they not only eulogise it, they positively pray to it, pray with such obeisance, with such zeal that a stranger cannot help feeling eerie at the sound of their loyal foreheads cracking on the flagstones.” (p 262)
But, the SWP, and others obeisance to one set of bulwarks of reaction is mirrored by the similar obeisance to different bulwarks of reaction, by other moral socialists from within the petty-bourgeois Third Camp, who pray to a different God. They bow down instead to US imperialism and its allies as they look to it to act as global gendarme, via various acts of liberal interventionism. These are merely two sides of the same moral socialist coin, each with their own Moral Imperative determining their course of action, which simply illustrates the subjectivist nature of their politics, which leads to opposing conclusions.
Whether it is a sycophantic appeal to the capitalist state in relation to the in relation to the economic sphere, or in the international sphere, the moralism of such liberals comes down to nothing more than an impotent plea for the state to “do the right thing” followed by the inevitable hand wringing at the consequences of its actual intervention. This petty-bourgeois politics can be seen from the Euston Manifesto Group, and from the AWL.
Lenin distinguishes between the old Russian peasant socialism, and the Liberalism of the Narodniks, who claimed to be heirs to it. Even Mikhailovsky had had to admit that the countryside was dividing into proletarians and kulaks.
“And again he is right: the countryside is indeed splitting up. Nay more, the countryside long ago split up completely. And the old Russian peasant socialism split up with it, making way for workers’ socialism, on the one hand, and degenerating into vulgar petty-bourgeois radicalism, on the other. This change cannot be described as anything but degeneration. From the doctrine that peasant life is a special social order and that our country has taken an exceptional path of development, there has emerged a sort of diluted eclecticism, which can no longer deny that commodity economy has become the basis of economic development and has grown into capitalism, but which refuses to see the bourgeois character of all the relations of production, refuses to see the necessity of the class struggle under this system. From a political programme calculated to arouse the peasantry for the socialist revolution against the foundations of modern society there has emerged a programme calculated to patch up, to “improve” the conditions of the peasantry while preserving the foundations of modern society.” (p 264-5)
And, something similar can be said about the politics of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. The insight of Marx was that the ownership and control over the means of production, which was the characteristic and basis of the political freedom of the individual producer, could only now be reproduced on the basis of the collective ownership of the means of production by the workers. The remnants of those individual producers, amongst the peasantry, and artisans, would be drawn in behind the working-class, as it pushed forward with its socialist programme. Similarly, the struggles for liberation by colonial peoples were seen by Marx and Engels, and more specifically by the early Communist International, as folding into the global socialist revolution, as part of a process of permanent revolution.
But, the “anti-capitalists” erect as their totem the attack on capital, and their demands in favour of small capital, as part of an “anti-monopoly alliance”. Instead of drawing in the petty-bourgeoisie behind the socialist programme of the working-class, they instead collapse their own agenda, reducing it to nothing more than a series of liberal demands for greater competition, and “fairness”. And, the “anti-imperialists” instead of seeing the bourgeois liberal agenda for self-determination etc., as subordinate to the agenda of international socialism, and so of the need to focus on rapid capitalist development of all economies, and consequent integration of those economies, and development of a global working-class, collapse their own programme into a purely petty-bourgeois nationalist programme, and likewise become the foot soldiers and cheerleaders of assorted petty bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements.
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