The old Narodism had developed as a “well-knit doctrine evolved in a period when capitalism was still very feebly developed in Russia, when nothing of the petty-bourgeois character of peasant economy had yet been revealed, when the practical side of the doctrine was purely Utopian, and when the Narodniks gave liberal “society” a wide berth and “went among the people.”” (p 396) But, by the 1890's, the capitalist development of Russia could no longer be denied, and the differentiation of the peasantry, in the countryside was also now apparent. The old Narodnik belief that the “village community” could offer some unique way forward, as they suggested in the 1870's, was in tatters. Both Marx and Engels had set out why it was doomed. And, in place of those earlier Utopian schemes of some separate path of development, the Narodniks had simply drawn closer to the liberals, essentially putting forward a set of compromise bourgeois demands, aimed at promoting the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie.
“In place of aloofness from liberal society we observe a touching intimacy with it. Now it is this change that compels us to distinguish between the ideology of the peasantry and the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie.” (p 397)
Making this distinction is important Lenin says, because the abstract nature of Struve's exposition of Narodism is its fundamental weakness. But, also, whilst Struve's objectivist philosophy attempts to explain historical events on the basis of objective necessity, the Marxist is led to the need to explain them on the basis of the underlying socioeconomic relations, and the differentiation of the peasantry, and subsequent development of a large number of petty-bourgeois producers is such an underlying socioeconomic development, whose effects must be examined.
Struve says that the Narodnik subjectivist sociology is best expounded by Mirtov (P.L. Lavrov) and Mikhailovsky.
“Both take as a corner-stone the thesis that history was made by “solitary fighting individuals.” “Individuals make history” (Mirtov). Mr. Mikhailovsky is even more explicit: “The living individual, with all his thoughts and feelings, becomes a history-maker on his own responsibility. He, and not some mysterious force, sets aims in history and moves events towards them through a lane of obstacles placed before him by the elemental forces of nature and of historical conditions”” (p 397)
This theory is meaningless, as Marx had set out as against Proudhon, in The Poverty of Philosophy. Of course, history is created by living individuals, but the question is what causes these individuals to act in the way they do, what leads them to develop the ideas in their heads that motivates them to act in these particular ways? And, why is it that these individuals congeal into specific social groups, each with the more or less same sets of ideas that causes them to act not as individuals but as collectives, to achieve these ideas?
For the Marxist, the determining, though not exclusive, factor is the underlying socioeconomic relations, as Engels describes in his Letter to Bloch.
Mikhailovsky says that individuals create history by navigating a series of obstacles placed in their way by historical conditions, but, when we ask what these historical conditions consist of, it is then only the actions of other individuals.
“And why are the actions of some living individuals called elemental, while of the actions of others it is said that they “move events” towards previously set aims?” (p 398)
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