Lenin picks upon Struve's distinction between Yuzhakov, who he says is a nationalist, and Mikhailovsky who has no nationalist bone in his body. Lenin identifies the basis of this distinction in the nature of the petty-bourgeoisie itself. It is again interesting from the perspective of Brexit. The petty-bourgeoisie, in the process of differentiation, Lenin says, is represented by a strand that is tearing away from the position of small producer. On the one hand, it forms into a bourgeoisie, and on the other into a proletariat, but, both these classes are outward looking, and internationalist in perspective. But, there is the element of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to cling to its position as small producers that rails at the expansion of capital, and fears the possibility of its impending expulsion into into the ranks of the proletariat. This section is reactionary, and seeks to “hold up” or “turn back” capitalist development, and is correspondingly inward looking and nationalist in outlook.
“That is why Russian Narodism, too, is able to combine progressive, democratic features in its doctrine with the reactionary features which evoke the sympathy of Moskovskiye Vedomosti.” (p 402)
Lenin gives a very long quote provided in Struve's book, of a statement by Yuzhakov, which shows clearly this reactionary sentiment. In it, Yuzhakov says that only peasant labour represents “pure labour”, and contrasts it with the wage labour of the industrial proletariat. He, of course, misses out the true nature of that peasant labour, and its subservience to feudal patriarchal relations, speaking only of its connection to the land, and Nature, of the purposeful production of the requirements of life to the peasant household. By contrast, the labour of the industrial workers is divorced from the land and Nature, and from any direct reproduction of the things required for their own reproduction. And, consequently, both types of labour produce the different types of morality that the Narodniks identify; on the one hand, the communal solidaristic morality of the peasant, and the individualistic bourgeois morality of the industrial worker.
“Here the reactionary features of the small producer appear in their pure form: his wretchedness, which induces him to believe that he is fated for ever to the “sacred duty” of being a beast of burden; his servility, “inherited from his fathers and forefathers”; his attachment to a tiny individual farm, the fear of losing which compels him to renounce even the very thought of a “fair reward” and to be an enemy of all “agitation,” and which, because of the low productivity of labour and the fact of the labouring peasant being tied to one spot, turns him into a savage and, by virtue of economic conditions alone, necessarily engenders his wretchedness and servility. The breakdown of these reactionary features must unquestionably be placed to the credit of our bourgeoisie; the progressive work of the latter consists precisely in its having severed all the ties that bound the working people to the feudal system and to feudal traditions. It replaced, and is still replacing, the medieval forms of exploitation—which were concealed by the personal relations of the lord to his vassal, of the local kulak and buyer-up to the local peasants and handicrafts men, of the patriarchal “modest and bearded millionaire” to his “lads,” and which as a result gave rise to ultra-reactionary ideas—replacing them by the exploitation of the “European type of jaunty entrepreneur,” exploitation which is impersonal, naked and unconcealed, and which therefore shatters absurd illusions and dreams. It has destroyed the old isolation (“settled life”) of the peasant, who refused to know, and could not know, anything but his plot of land, and has begun—by socialising labour and vastly increasing its productivity—to force the producer into the arena of social life.” (p 403-4)
This same mentality can be seen amongst backward workers too, who, in sensing their own impotence, rail against the ability of more advanced, organised workers to ameliorate their conditions. It is manifest in the willingness of such workers to criticise the “gold plated pensions” of public sector workers, and so on. But, amongst those that have committed themselves to a view of the working-class restricted to these lower strata, it is also witnessed in a concomitant willingness to abandon the more affluent sections of the working-class, and even to assign them to the ranks of the middle-class, in conformance with bourgeois subjectivist definitions of class. Amongst such sections support for the idea of taxing more heavily these better paid workers, and so on, is, therefore, rife, which not only acts to divide the real working-class, but completely diverts attention away from the real solution to the problems of all workers which resides not in a tinkering with the tax and benefits system, to bring about marginal, and usually ineffective measures of redistribution, but in raising the property question, and the need for the workers to take control of the socialised means of production.
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