Lenin provides a further quote from the Narodnik, which discusses the process as it unfolded in Germany. It also exposes the nature of the problem of Economism, with which Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had to deal. The process, the Narodnik says, had created a peasant aristocracy “an estate of small landowners not of noble origin”, as well as a mass of unskilled labourers, and “Finally the finishing touch was given, and all legal roads to an improvement of the workers conditions were cut off by the semi-aristocratic, semi-middle-class constitution of 1849, which gave the vote only to the nobility and the wealthy middle class.” (p 363)
This last comment, Lenin says, is simply a reflection of the Narodnik theory, by which it is only the intelligentsia that benefits from this freedom. In other words, Economism. The contemporary Narodniks, Lenin says, had themselves rejected this reactionary idea, but, in doing so, they had clearly exposed their own petty-bourgeois nature.
“... their insistence on paltry, middle-class reforms, arising out of their absolute inability to understand the class struggle, places them on the side of the liberals against those who take the side of the “antipode,” seeing in it the only creator, so to speak, of the good things in question.” (p 363)
A further lengthy quote from the Narodniks, in relation to Germany, Lenin says, sets out some of the best traditions of the old Narodism, which can be used by the Marxists to level against the contemporary Narodniks. Not much needed to be changed, Lenin says, because the process of development, and the social and political ideas reflecting it were so identical in both countries.
“In our country, too, “progressive” literature is governed and guided by individuals who talk of “fundamental differences between our peasant Reform and that of the West,” about the “sanction of people’s (sic!) production,” about the great “allotment of land” (land redemption is called that!!), etc., and who therefore await the dispensation by their superiors of a miracle called the “socialisation of labour,” wait for “ten, twenty, thirty years and more,” while the cat—of which we have spoken earlier—eats the chicken, looking with the tenderness of a sated and satisfied animal at the “sincere simpletons” who talk of the need to choose another path for the fatherland, of the harm of “threatening” capitalism, and of measures for assisting the people with credits, artels, common cultivation of the land and suchlike innocent patching. “Oh, those sincere simpletons!”” (p 364)
The Narodniks failed to identify underlying, determinant material conditions and instead focused on superficial legal and political forms. The same mistake is made by the petty-bourgeois moralists of the Third Camp. As a result, they pick out these superficial distinctions in relation to the USSR, and on the basis of it develop a theory of Russian particularism, by which it was travelling down its own peculiar path of development.
“... it sees the “principal point” in such juridical institutions, which play no fundamental role, as the forms of peasant land tenure (community or household); it sees something peculiar in our small peasant economy, as though it is not the ordinary economy of small producers, of the same kind—as to the type of their political and economic organisation—as the economy of the West-European handicraftsmen and peasants, but some “people’s” (?!) system of land tenure. According to the terminology established in our liberal and Narodnik press, the meaning of the word “people’s” is one that rules out the exploitation of the one who works—so that by the definition he gives the author actually conceals the undoubted fact that in our peasant economy there is the very same appropriation of surplus-value, the very same work for others as prevail outside of the “community,” and so opens the doors wide to sentimental and unctuous Pharisaism.” (p 365)
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