The Narodniks also criticised the Marxists for considering large-scale Russian capital as progressive. As a direct rebuke to today's equivalents of the Narodniks, the "anti-capitalists" and "anti-imperialists", Lenin says,
"Yes, the Marxists do consider large-scale capitalism progressive—not, of course, because it replaces “independence” by dependence, but because it creates conditions for abolishing dependence." (p 380)
The independence of the peasantry was itself a fantasy, which the old Narodniks accepted but did not understand.
"... it is also capitalist lack of independence, differing from that of the towns in being less developed, and containing greater relics of medieval, semi-feudal forms of capital, and nothing more." (p 380)
And, again, it is in this respect, also, that the more developed, larger-scale capital is more progressive. Lenin compares the capitalist production in the village with that in the large factory. In the former, the capitalists are small fry, conducting exploitation by semi-feudal methods, whereas in the large factory, the capitalists undertake exploitation on a mass scale, using the most modern methods.
"Of course, the latter is progressive: the very capitalism that is undeveloped in the village and, therefore, abounds in usury, etc., is developed in the factory; the very antagonism existing in the countryside is fully expressed in the factory". (p 380)
Note that Lenin's concept of progressive, here, has nothing to do with moral concepts of good or bad effects, but is taken in its purely Marxist, materialist conception of the most mature form of the development of the antagonistic relation. And Lenin spells that out.
"The Marxist turns to the most developed form of this relation, to the form that is the quintessence of all the other forms, and shows the producer that the aim and object to follow is the abolition of this relation and its replacement by another." (Note *, p 380/1)
The Narodniks had to accept the reality of capitalism in the towns, but even there, they tried to present it as something artificial. It is as though the bourgeoisie appeared from nowhere rather than developing out of the same differentiation of the peasantry.
"This superficiality in understanding things, incapable of seeing the roots of the phenomenon in the very economic structure of society, capable of giving a most detailed enumeration of the different representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, but incapable of understanding that the peasant’s and the handicraftsman’s small independent undertaking itself is not, under the present economic order, a “people’s” undertaking at all, but a petty-bourgeois one—is highly typical of the Narodnik." (p 382)
The Narodniks, on the one hand, in their description of reality, have to accept the existence of the bourgeoisie, but in their prescriptions pretend that it does not exist, is weak, artificial, and so on, so as to propose that "alternative paths" of development are open if capitalist development is "held back" or "turned back". But, they fail to understand that capitalist development comes from the very same petty commodity production they seek to promote, and the bourgeoisie comes out of the same petty commodity producers they represent. The measures they propose, on behalf of these petty commodity producers, do not hold back or turn back the development of capital, they simply are irrelevant, because they are halfhearted proposals that the bourgeoisie simply ignore in favour of full blooded bourgeois measures, or else they themselves are measures that simply assist in the differentiation of the rich peasants into capitalists and poor peasants into wage labourers.
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