And so it is this direct experience of the real world by individuals that shapes the ideas in their heads. It is then not at all surprising that all those individuals that find themselves in one group – the labourers – have a very different view of the world from those individuals who find themselves in the other group – the capitalists.
“And, consequently, the interests of the producer do not, in any way, lie in reconciling these contradictory elements, but, on the contrary, in developing the contradiction and in developing the consciousness of this contradiction. We see that the growth of commodity production leads to such a development of the contradiction here in Russia, too: as the market widens and production grows, merchant capital becomes industrial capital. Machine industry, by finally destroying small, isolated production (it has already been radically undermined by the buyer-up), socialises labour.” (p 407)
So, despite all of the misery that this entails for the labourer, first as impoverished independent producer, and then as wage labourer, the Marxist looks through the misery to where it leads and how that provides the ultimate solution for the labourers' predicament. The independent producer cannot see beyond their own immediate position. They see the merchant capitalist and money-lending capitalist squeezing them on the one hand, and they see the larger capitalist producer undercutting them, and taking their markets on the other. They see descent into the ranks of the proletariat impending, a proletariat that itself is increasingly organised and begins to obtain a standard of living and social standing greater than that of the increasingly impoverished independent producer. They are neither fish nor fowl.
So, this independent small producer looks to ways to hold back or even turn back the capitalist development. Had Lenin been writing thirty years later, he would have seen the same factors at work in rallying these same layers of small capitalists and petty-bourgeois to the ranks of the fascists.
“The system of Plusmacherei, which in handicraft production is obscured by the apparent independence of the handicraftsman and the apparent fortuitousness of the power of the buyer-up, now becomes clear and is fully revealed. “Labour,” which even in handicraft industry participated in “life” only by presenting the surplus product to the buyers-up, is now finally “differentiated from life” of bourgeois society.” (p 407-8)
In other words, the independent producer is exploited by the buyer up and merchant. They clearly have one foot in the camp of the proletariat, but they can''t see it, because they cling to their existence as independent producers. All such individuals cling to the hope that tomorrow conditions may be better, and, maybe, even they will grow into a larger producer. And the petty-bourgeois politician codifies and represents this outlook. It is only further capitalist development that clears this illusion out of the way, by resolving matters in driving the independent small producers from the field, that the real contradiction is revealed, and so the real interests of the producers, in contradiction to the interests of capital, becomes manifest. It is only then, when the producer is completely divorced from capital, and from the individual ownership of means of production, that the real situation is revealed. So, it is only the industrial proletariat that is faced with this reality, and it is only the industrial proletariat that can provide the way forward, but, now, not on the basis of individually owned means of production, but on the basis of the large-scale socialised capital that capitalism has itself created. That, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, is its historic mission, to convert the scattered small-scale means of production into capital; to accumulate additional capital on a massive scale, and via concentration and centralisation, to convert it into socialised capital, thereby, abolishing capital itself as private property; it is to create a global economy and market and to create the working-class that is to take control of this socialised capital, and begin to transform it into socialised means of production, utilised to meet human needs.
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