Lenin uses data provided by Marx in Capital I to show that if Danielson's method was applied to it, the conclusion would be that capital was not fulfilling its mission of creating a unified working-class there either. According to Marx's data, out of a population of 20 million, in 1861, 1.6 million were employed in the main branches of industry. That amounts to just 8%. Indeed, 1.2 million were employed as domestic servants, and Marx refers to its very rapid growth. Lenin comments sarcastically,
“How can one speak of the “mission” of capitalism when it has not united even one twelfth of the population, and when, moreover, there is a more rapid increase in the “domestic slave” class—representing a dead loss of “national labour,” which shows that “we,” the English, are following the “wrong path”! Is it not clear that “we” must “seek different,” non-capitalist “paths of development for our fatherland”?!” (p 319)
Danielson also argues that capitalism had not created a working-class movement, in Russia, as it had done in Western Europe, and was doing in North America. This argument had been put forward before by Mikhailovsky, who argued that Marx had worked with a ready made proletariat. Mikhailovsky, referring to The Poverty of Philosophy, says that, in Russia, poverty is just poverty. But, Marx had not worked with a ready made proletariat. In 1848, when he and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, the proletariat was a new phenomenon, even in England, and did not exist, in any real sense, in Germany. Yet, in the relevant passage in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx says that the old communists “saw in poverty nothing but poverty without seeing its revolutionary, destructive side; which would overthrow the old society.” (p 319) Lenin notes that, even in 1875, when Marx wrote his Critique of the Gotha Programme, notes,
“In the first place, the majority of the "toiling people" in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians.” (Note *, p 319)
The development of the working-class movement in Germany did not occur until 20 years later, when large-scale industry had developed, when the ideas of Marxism had developed, and when numerous energetic proponents of those ideas disseminated them amongst the workers.
“In addition to presenting historical facts in a false light and forgetting the vast amount of work done by the socialists in lending consciousness and organisation to the working-class movement, our philosophers foist upon Marx the most senseless fatalistic views. In his opinion, they assure us, the organisation and socialisation of the workers occur spontaneously, and, consequently, if we see capitalism but do not see a working-class movement, that is because capitalism is not fulfilling its mission, and not because we are still doing too little in the matter of organisation and propaganda among the workers. This cowardly petty-bourgeois artifice of our exceptionalist philosophers is not worth refuting: it is refuted by all the activities of the Social-Democrats in all countries; it is refuted by every public speech made by any Marxist.” (p 320)
Lenin quotes Kautsky's comment that Social-democracy is the fusion of the working-class movement with socialism. The task of Marxists, in Russia, was to apply Marx's theory of historical materialism to analyse the specific nature of the development of capitalism in Russia, and the concrete forms of class struggle it produced. On that basis, they had to take this theory to the workers, and enable them to absorb it, to develop the appropriate workers' organisations on the basis of it.
The “people's system” that the Narodniks perpetually championed was nothing but a medieval form of primitive capitalism, in which merchant capital had a predominant role. In this “people's system” the peasants were being expropriated in large numbers every day, divided into rich peasants and paupers, bourgeois and proletarians; they were exploited not just by the landlord, but also by their fellow muzhik. They were forced into precarious day labour, one day employed by a landlord, the next by a railway contractor, the next as a factory worker. And, alongside this, the government facilitated this transition whilst stamping on any attempt to defend basic rights, let alone to win the bourgeois-democratic rights of workers in Western Europe. Yet, while they saw all this, the Narodniks went on about “alternative paths for the Fatherland”, different paths that they saw this very government bringing about. And, as capitalism expanded apace, the Narodniks pondered whether those different paths were necessary, because capitalism was not expanding fast enough, and not proving its progressive credentials,
“because “it is fulfilling its historic mission badly, very, very badly.”” (p 322)
By refusing to recognise the reality of that capitalist development, and escaping to Utopian fantasies of “different paths”, in which the reality of class contradictions did not exist, was “tantamount to sinking to Manilovism”.
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