The elements of the Narodnik programme calling for education, expansion of present land tenure, and reduction of taxes, could hold no fear for the bourgeoisie. The other element of the programme “organisation of people's industry” implies that a struggle had already been won that would enable such organisation to be undertaken, but that was far from being the case.
“Your programme fights shy of the antagonism whose existence you yourself could not help admitting. That is why it holds no terrors for the masters of the “new middle-class stratum.” Your programme is a petty-bourgeois dream. That is why it is only good enough to be a “liberal passport.”” (p 343)
This is the same with the social-democratic agendas calling for welfare states. It poses no issues for developed capital, because it needs such welfare states as part of its requirement to plan and regulate the economy, including the efficient supply of labour-power. The welfare state only poses a problem for the remnants of small private capital, for whom its costs eat into their profits. It acts to accelerate the process of the disintegration of this small private capital, and the process of “the expropriation of the expropriators”, as large scale socialised capital absorbs it as part of the process of concentration and centralisation of capital. Where it does not expropriate and absorb it, it subordinates it. As Engels describes this transformation in the nature of capital,
“Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed.”
A similar thing can be seen in the approach of moral socialists today, for example the AWL, and Euston Manifesto Group. These moral socialists set out their agenda against various tyrannical regimes, and sees that “democratic imperialism” agrees with their immediate objective. On the basis of this, they either, as with the Euston Manifesto Group, actively call on this “democratic imperialism” to intervene militarily, or else, as with the AWL, they say they see no reason to oppose such intervention. Both are then shocked to find that this “democratic imperialism” doesn't even really share their own immediate and limited bourgeois-democratic objectives! This “democratic imperialism” instead carries out its own atrocities, puts in place its own, more compliant tyrants, or, where it puts in place a bourgeois-democratic republic, it does so only after ensuring that the working-class movement in the country is defeated and thoroughly incorporated into the new bourgeois-democratic regime. And, it could be no other way, because the reality is that these moral socialists create for themselves an illusion, just as it was for the Narodniks. The reality, for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, could never have resulted in some third way scenario in which “democratic-imperialism” unseated Saddam, and then, having established a bourgeois-democratic republic, said to the Iraqi workers “Okay, over to you”!
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