Lenin returns to Struve's exposition, which, having disposed of the Narodnik arguments about the role of the individual in history, continues to examine the question of the social group, and, thereby, the question of class struggle.
“Mr. Struve is absolutely right when he says that the theory of the class struggle crowns, so to speak, the general endeavour of sociology to reduce “the elements of individuality to social sources.” Furthermore, the theory of the class struggle for the first time pursues this endeavour so completely and consistently as to raise sociology to the level of a science. This was achieved by the materialist definition of the concept “group.”” (p 410)
The term group is, however, indefinite and arbitrary. There are all sort of groups – religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, political, juridical and so on.
“There is no firm token by which particular “groups” in each of these spheres can be distinguished. The theory of the class struggle, however, represents a tremendous acquisition for social science for the very reason that it lays down the methods by which the individual can be reduced to the social with the utmost precision and definiteness.” (p 410)
In this, however, Lenin is mistaken. There are fairly clear material definitions, for example, of what your ethnicity is, though, even here, people have parents of different ethnicity. There are clear material definitions of sex if not of gender. Moreover, people may be more closely attached to, and aligned with their sexual orientation, religious persuasion, and so on than they are with any conscious identification with class. And, clearly, Lenin's claim in relation to class itself is not true.
Much of his preceding analysis has been about the peasant who continues to farm their own bit of land, or use their own small means of production, but who also works as a wage labourer. As a wage labourer, who also owns the small piece of land that they then rent out, are they a proletarian, or also a rentier, interested in high rents? The same might be said, today, of the worker who buys houses and rents them out as a buy to let landlord. In Capital III, and in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx examines the capitalist who also owns land, and provides the money-capital required for their business. In that case, Marx says, they embody in their own person three different classes of property – landed property, money-lending capital, and industrial capital.
Lenin seems to have fallen into the trap that Marx himself was trying hard to avoid – that of becoming a “box person”, whereby, in accordance with the traditions of bourgeois science, and syllogistic logic, you start with the individual and then assign them to their appropriate class box. But, that simply follows bourgeois ideology in putting the individual at the centre of the universe, and working outwards from there. By contrast, for Marx, the individual is nothing more than the personification of these different forms of property, and their antagonistic interests. They are simply actors on a stage, performing the roles that these different forms of property assign to them. What role they play, at any point in time, depends upon which form of property is dominant in determining their ideas. As Engels puts it, in his Letter to Bloch,
“Secondly, history is so made that the end-result always arises out of the conflict of many individual wills, in which every will is itself the product of a host of special conditions of life. Consequently there exist innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant product – the historical event. This again may itself be viewed as the product of a force acting as a whole without consciousness or volition. For what every individual wills separately is frustrated by what every one else wills and the general upshot is something which no one willed. And so the course of history has run along like a natural process; it also is subject essentially to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – who desire what the constitution of their body as well as external circumstances, in the last instance economic (either personal or social) impel them to desire – do not get what they wish, but fuse into an average or common resultant, from all that one has no right to conclude that they equal zero. On the contrary, every will contributes to the resultant and is in so far included within it.”
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