Sunday 27 December 2020

The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 1 - Part 29

Lenin provides further quotes from the Narodnik writer, which describe the extent of land purchases, as well as the growth of usury, in different guises, but the Narodnik fails to realise that all of this is simply an expression of the extent to which capitalism had become entrenched in Russian agriculture. 

"... capital which, on the one hand, engenders the urban, banking, and in general European, capitalism that the Narodniks consider to be something adventitious, and, on the other hand, is supported and fed by this capitalism —in a word that it is one of the aspects of the capitalist organisation of the Russian national economy." (p 375) 

The 1861 Reform, the Narodniks argued, sanctioned the development of "people's production", and alongside it, as the Narodnik describes, the usurer of old, the patriarchal idler, turned into the more Westernised, energetic, "civilisation adorned vulture". So, why then would not the next stage of such sanctioning, as set out in the Narodnik proposals for an extension of peasant land tenure, migration, regulation of renting, and other progressive bourgeois proposals not similarly lead only to a change in form, "a further Europeanisation of capital, its transformation from merchant’s into productive, from medieval into modern?" (p 375) 

And, that must be the consequence, because the Narodnik proposals were bourgeois proposals that could not affect capital a a social relation, "that relation between people under which money, the product of social labour organised by commodity economy, is accumulated in the hands of some, while others have nothing but free “hands,” free precisely of the product that is concentrated in the possession of the previous category." (p 375) 

Lenin gives a very extensive quote from the Narodnik, which describes the nature of the Russian bourgeoisie. It is a similar picture to that provided by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class. On the one hand, it describes the coarse, boorish bourgeoisie that acts by every bit of sharp practice to squeeze out additional profit. On the other, it describes a more astute civilised bourgeois who eschews these old crude methods, but which, in doing so, appropriates to themselves much larger profits, while gaining for themselves the admiration of others, as some kind of benefactor or philanthropist. In reality, what the Narodnik describes is different degrees and forms of stealing and immorality. But, they are unable to see that this behaviour and its form is itself conditioned by capitalism. 

"The examples he gives deal with crime, swindling, arson, etc. One gets the impression that the “fleecing and enslaving” of the peasantry is a matter of accident, the result (as the author expressed himself above) of severe conditions of living, of the “grossness of moral ideas,” of obstacles to “making literature accessible to the people” (p. 152), etc.— in a word, that all this does not inevitably result from the present-day organisation of our social economy." (p 377) 

But, it is that which is the starting point for the Marxist analysis. 

"Once the peasant becomes a commodity producer (and all peasants have already become such), his “morality” will inevitably be “based on the rouble,” and we have no grounds for blaming him for this, as the very conditions of life compel him to catch this rouble by all sorts of trading devices." (p 377-8) 

But, these same material conditions, with or without the immorality and criminality, also leads to the differentiation of the peasantry, whereby a minority acquires capital, and the majority are dispossessed, and become wage labourers. 

"Thus, from the Marxist’s viewpoint capitalism has already taken firm root, taken definite shape not only in factory industry but also in the countryside and all over Russia in general." (p 378) 

So, despite the Narodniks' claim that the Marxists were simply imposing a schema, developed in relation to Western countries, on to Russia, where only 1.4 million of the population were factory workers, they could not, even in their own descriptions, avoid the reality of the pervasiveness of capital, and of bourgeois relations. 

"We see, consequently, that the young bourgeoisie grow within our “community,” and not outside of it, that they are brought into existence by the very social relations that exist among the now commodity-producing peasantry; we see that not only “1,400,000 people,” but the entire mass of Russian village folk work for capital, are “superintended” by it." (p 379) 

That was the reality as even described by the Narodniks, and so their talk about choosing different paths was simply romanticism, and, because it was Utopian, was also, thereby, reactionary.


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