Lenin also sets out a suitable rejoinder to those moral socialists, today, who judge capitalism on the basis of these kinds of short-term fluctuations and considerations, rather than its progressive historic mission.
“How can this idea be called anything but childish, when the progressive work of capitalism is not judged by the degree of socialisation of labour, but by such a fluctuating index of the development of only one branch of national labour! Everybody knows that the number of workers cannot be anything but extremely inconstant under the capitalist mode of production, and that it depends upon a host of secondary factors, such as crises, the size of the reserve army, the degree of the exploitation of labour, the degree of its intensity, and so on and so forth.” (Note *, p 312)
Danielson had picked on a section of Struve's article to make this point, comparing the size of the agricultural population in Russia to that in the US. Danielson had noted that, in Russia, 80% were employed in agriculture, whereas in the US it was only 44%. But, Struve points out that the very fact of capitalist development, in Russia, would eradicate this difference between the two. Indeed, Struve says, in this very fact could be witnessed its “mission”.
“It may be held that the word “mission” is very inappropriate here, but Mr. Struve’s idea is clear: Mr. Nik. —on did not notice that the capitalist development of Russia (he himself admits that this development is really a capitalist one) will reduce the rural population, whereas in fact it is a general law of capitalism. Consequently; to refute this objection, Mr. Nik. —on should have shown either 1) that he had not overlooked this tendency of capitalism, or 2) that capitalism has no such tendency.” (p 312-3)
Danielson equates the 56% of workers in the US, and the 20% in Russia not employed in agriculture as being employed as factory workers. But, as Lenin points out, this is a false assumption. Capitalism does not come into existence fully formed, as large scale machine industry. It passes through stages of domestic production, small-scale handicraft production, the Putting-Out System, workshop production and so on. Even in developed capitalist economies, some workers continue to be employed in this way. In Britain, today, there are 5 million small businesses, many of those employing 2-3 workers are not all involved in large-scale factory production. New small businesses come and go, some kinds of businesses are not profitable for capital to engage in on a large scale. Nor does the number employed in agriculture provide evidence of a lack of capitalist development, because wage labour employed in agriculture is itself evidence of capitalist development.
Danielson cites a figure of 1.4 million factory workers as constituting the working-class employed by capital, and compares it to the total population, but he fails to take account, not only of all the other industrial and agricultural workers, described above, but also he fails to take account of all the other workers employed in other spheres such as government employees, workers employed in the professions, soldiers and so on. In reality, Lenin concludes, the actual data available was so unreliable that no useful analysis could be derived from it, and so it was better not to make any conclusions based on it.
“Thirdly—and this is the chief and most outrageous distortion of Marx’s theory of the progressive and revolutionary work of capitalism—where did you get the idea that the “unifying significance” of capitalism is expressed in uniting only the factory workers?” (p 316)
No comments:
Post a Comment