Lenin examines Krivenko's attack on Struve's “On Capitalist Development In Russia”. In this article, Struve attacks the Utopianism of Danielson, and his programme, which amounts to “National Socialism”. In the use of this term, Struve intends to convey that such National Socialism is not Socialism at all, in the same way that Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, describes Feudal Socialism, German True Socialism, and so on, as all being reactionary, and so having nothing to do with Socialism at all.
“Mr. Krivenko launches out against Mr. Struve for, as he alleges, classing the ideas of those who “stand for the village community and the allotment” as “national socialism” (which, he says, is of a “purely utopian nature”). This terrible accusation of being concerned with socialism drives our worthy author into a rage:” (p 272)
If Krivenko had read Struve's work carefully, he would have seen that he need not have been so affronted at being labelled socialist, because the National Socialism that Struve was describing has nothing to do with actual Socialism. Krivenko points out that proponents of the Reform, and the entire respectable press, also stood for the village community, and allotment, and so on. Were these too national socialists, he asks?
Lenin responds.
“And, indeed, what a crying injustice it would be to accuse those who stand for “the village community and the allotment” of being concerned with socialism! Pray, what is there socialistic in this? Socialism, as we know, is the name given to the protest and struggle against the exploitation of the working people, a struggle for the complete abolition of this exploitation— while “to stand for the allotment” means supporting the peasant’s payment of redemption money for all the land they used to have at their disposal. But even if one does not stand for land redemption but for the gratuitous retention of the land the peasants possessed before the Reform, there is nothing socialistic in it, for it is this peasant ownership of land (which evolved during the feudal period) that has everywhere in the West, as here in Russia, been the basis of bourgeois society. “To stand for the village community,” i.e., to protest against police interference in the customary methods of distributing the land—what is there socialistic in that, when everyone knows that exploitation of the working people can very well exist and is engendered within this community? That is stretching the word “socialism” to mean anything”. (p 272-3)
Lenin quotes from Struve's work, where he sets out that, as a result of the development of capitalism in Russia, the Narodnik philosophy would lose its material foundation. As a result it would degenerate into a bland reformist trend seeking compromise, or it would be forced to acknowledge the reality that capitalist development and draw the appropriate conclusions from it, thereby, losing its Utopian character. This opportunist, compromising character was to be readily observed in the pages of Russkoye Bogatsvo. Its theoretical magazine attempted to piece together bits of Narodnik doctrines and to reconcile it with the reality of capitalist development. Its political programme was reduced to promoting the interests of the small producers within the overall context of the reality of that capitalist development.
“Really, if we take the substance of the programme of Russkoye Bogatstvo—the regulation of migration, land renting, cheap credit, museums, warehouses, technical improvement, artels, common land cultivation and all the rest—we shall find that it is indeed very widely circulated in the whole “serious and respectable press,” i.e., in the whole liberal press, the publications that are not the organs of the feudal landlords and do not belong to the reptile press.” (p 274)
And so, Lenin says, if this is to be regarded as Narodism, its enormous success is indisputable. But, of course, it is not the traditional social-revolutionary Narodism that stood against such liberal opportunism.
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