Similarly, the moral socialists of Third Campism seem to believe that, under Socialism, surplus labour will not continue to be pumped from the labourers, whereas it will need to be so on an even larger scale than under capitalism. It will need to be so, because a socialist society, or at least a society in transition to communism, will need to accumulate means of production at a much faster rate. That is required so that production is increased, and living standards raised. It is required so that better technology is introduced, to raise labour productivity. But, the only means of achieving this accumulation is via surplus labour, and a significant rise, therefore, in the rate of exploitation. But, in addition to this, such a society will also need to set aside a growing portion of output to cater for the unproductive sections of society. It will need to set aside a growing portion to enable the sick to be enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and to ensure that workers can retire early and still maintain a high standard of living; it will require that increasing areas of production and distribution are removed from the realm of exchange-value, and so on.
The peculiar characteristics this assumes under Stalinism simply illustrates the way that political and juridical forms, erected on these underlying material conditions, results in the peculiarities that must always arise in the realm of phenomenal forms. That the particular conditions arising in the USSR enabled a parasitic state bureaucracy to appropriate a disproportionate share of the surplus labour, pumped from the workers, does not change the nature of the underlying property forms and social relations, any more than the fact that the Nazis were able to do the same or that the executives of Enron, TYCO etc., were able to line their pockets at the expense both of the companies themselves, and their shareholders.
Lenin gives another quote from the Narodnik, which he says is worth dwelling on. In this quote, a picture is painted that is familiar in all processes of industrialisation. The picture is one in which the majority of peasants have too little land, its often of poor quality; they are burdened with debt and taxes. A small section rise out of the mass, but a large number find they can earn more from wage labour, often at increasing distances from the village, whilst their wives and children stay in the village to tend the land.
“We see here, firstly, the statement of certain facts that can be expressed in a couple of words: the peasants are fleeing; secondly, an assessment of the facts (a negative one), and thirdly, an explanation of them from which there directly follows an entire programme, here not expounded, but well enough known (add land, reduce taxes; “raise” and “develop” peasant industries).” (p 365)
The first and second elements of this programme, from a Marxist perspective, are correct, but not in the petty-bourgeois context that the Narodniks advance them. A land reform that redistributes land away from large landlords to peasants is undoubtedly correct, but only on the basis that it is organised on a large industrial scale of collectivised farms. In other words, this really requires that the peasants themselves cease being individual peasants, with an individualist petty-bourgeois mentality, and instead become agricultural workers, organised on the basis of large-scale socialised labour.
The description provided by the Narodnik, of peasants fleeing the land is correct, as male workers went to work on railway construction, and so on, but also they were being pushed off the land, because rich peasants bought up or rented land that the poor peasants could no longer farm profitably or derive an adequate income.
“The Narodnik sees the causes of these things in that “there is little land,” taxes are burdensome, and “earnings” are falling—i.e., in peculiarities of policy— land, taxation, industrial—and not in the peculiarities of the social organisation of production, an organisation from which the given policy inevitably follows.” (p 366)
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