Struve, as seen earlier, had identified Narodism, in general, with national socialism, as against Lenin's argument that it represented first peasant socialism, and later petty-bourgeois socialism. Struve continues this line of argument saying that Narodism specifically as presented by Yuzhakov, shows its Slavophile roots, and so its dispute with Marxism takes on a necessary picture of a conflict between Westernism and Slavophilism. Something similar is seen with the “anti-imperialists”. Their “anti-Westernism” become manifest as Islamophilism, Russophilism, etc., including apologism and accommodation of their reactionary nature. But, again, this is symptomatic of the petty-bourgeois nature of those tendencies.
The Narodniks like Yuzhakov, Lenin says, were responsible for a jingoism of the very worst type, and their rejection of Marx's sociological analysis leads to alienation from Westernism. But, Lenin says, the essence of Narodism is not its Slavophilism, or belief in Russia's exceptionalism. It lies in its attempt to represent petty-bourgeois interests. The very best Narodnik writers, as Struve accepts, had nothing in common with Slavophilism, and also admitted that Russia had entered the same path of capitalist development as Western Europe.
“You will never understand Russian Narodism through the medium of such categories as Slavophilism and Westernism. Narodism reflected a fact in Russian life which was almost non-existent in the period of the rise of Slavophilism and Westernism, namely, the contradiction between the interests of labour and of capital. It reflected this fact through the prism of the living conditions and interests of the small producer, and therefore did so in a distorted and cowardly way, creating a theory which did not give prominence to the antagonism of social interests, but to sterile hopes in a different path of developments. And it is our duty to correct this mistake of Narodism, to show which social group can become the real representative of the interests of the direct producers.” (p 404-5)
Lenin examines Struve's version of Marx's dictum that history is made by Men, but not in conditions of their own choosing, and how he applies this to the conditions in Russia. No one would suggest that a social group exists as something other than the individuals that comprise it, but what the subjectivist fails to ask is why these individuals come together in one social group rather than another. Or, more correctly, they see the individuals coming together in these different groups because they share ideas, they all have a vision of the Utopia they seek to achieve, but they never ask the question of where these ideas come from, or why different social groups seek different visions of Utopia. Mikhailovsky himself says,
“Sociology must start with some Utopia” (Works Vol III, p 155)
But, for the subjective sociologist, this question of where the ideas come from is not answered by looking at the actual living human beings and examining their actions; it is instead answered by the sociologist themselves, even though they may not realise it, looking into their own psyche, and determining what is logical, what would be the logical course of action for society to pursue to achieve Utopia. In other words, they apply the principle of morals developed by Kant, of the Categorical Imperative, of universalisability. The consequence, therefore, is that the subjective sociologists derive the source of the ideas in men's heads to there being some universal moral principles that can be deduced from logic, completely separate from the material world.
However, what this really means is that these universal moral principles are really just those that appear to the sociologist themselves, as categorical imperatives. They really only reflect their own petty-bourgeois outlook. Consequently, the subjective sociologist, having determined the Utopia that society should be aiming for, is then led to deny that there is any real, fundamental contradictions in society; it is only that individuals have false consciousness, have been led astray from the natural path and so on. But, again, this is simply a reflection of the nature of the class position of the petty-bourgeoisie as an intermediate class. It wants to deny any contradictions, and to conciliate any conflicts and antagonisms.
By contrast, the materialist says that social groups are indeed comprised of individuals, but these individuals are by no means simply abstract cyphers, but real living human beings, who interact with the material world, and are affected by it, as well as having their own effect on it. They do not come into a world that is a blank sheet of paper on which they can draw their own vision of Utopia, but one which has already been filled with generations of previous human beings, each leaving their own imprint upon it, as they too acted collectively in social groups to shape it. It is not credible, therefore, to argue, as the subjectivist does, that ideas simply drop into the minds of individuals out of thin air, developed by them on the basis of Pure Reason, because the building blocks of all these ideas are provided ready made for each individual by the material world in which they live, and their experience of it, and because large groups of these individuals experience the material world in fundamentally different ways, they develop fundamentally different sets of ideas as a consequence.
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