Lenin also sets out a reproach to those of today's “anti-capitalists” who argue that capitalism is no longer progressive. Struve had set out not only the inevitable and progressive nature of Russian capitalism, but also of capitalism in the West. The Narodniks not only felt that the development of capitalism in Russia was due to it taking a wrong path, but also that, in the words of Mikhailovsky, that he had seen “no good from capitalism yet”, in relation to the West also.
“The absurdity of these petty-bourgeois views is excellently proved by Mr. Struve’s data, especially since they are drawn from the latest bourgeois literature, which can on no account be accused of exaggeration. The passages quoted by the author show that in the West everybody, even the bourgeois, realises that the transition of capitalism to a new social-economic formation is inevitable.
The socialisation of labour by capital has advanced so far that even bourgeois literature loudly proclaims the necessity of the “planned organisation of the national economy.”” (p 445-6)
This same idea was taken up by Kautsky in The Road To Power.
Its on this basis also, Lenin says, that Struve's comment that no progress in the realm of distribution is possible without production itself being brought under national control.
“Clearly, the meaning of this postulate is that only large-scale capitalism based on rational production creates conditions that enable the producer to raise his head, to give thought and show concern both for himself and for those who, owing to the backward state of production, do not live in such conditions.” (p 446)
Struve describes the economic philosophy of Narodism as follows. The Narodniks are, he says, the ““ideologists of natural economy and primitive equality” (167).” (p 447)
This is wrong. As Lenin has described, the Narodniks are the ideologists of the small producers. It is the material conditions of the small producer, as a transitory, intermediate layer, between masters and workers that leads them to fail to understand the class antagonisms “and the queer mixture of progressive and reactionary points in their programme.” (p 447) The same is true of the petty-bourgeois in general. It is characteristic of the social-democratic bureaucracy, be it of the trades unions, workers parties, the state, or in the management of the large socialised capitals themselves.
In this context, Lenin says, the progressive elements of Narodism bring it close to West European democracy, and in evidence, Lenin quotes Marx's analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which he writes,
“The democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally.” (p 447)
Its not that they deny the existence of a privileged class, but in seeing themselves as “the people” believe that they represent society and its interests in the abstract, the interests that society would pursue if it acted on the basis of pure reason, of a universalisable moral law. This, of course, is also the foundation of political centrism that cannot see any legitimate political course outside that of its own self-defined, political centre-ground.
“The Russian Narodniks are exactly the same. They do not deny that there are classes in Russia which are antagonistic to the producer, but they lull themselves with the argument that these “pirates” are insignificant compared with the “people” and refuse to make a careful study of the position and interests of the respective classes, to examine whether the interests of a certain category of producers are interwoven with the interests of the “pirates,” thus weakening the former’s power of resistance against the latter.” (Note *, p 447)
Of course, when history creates conditions in which these class antagonisms break out in crises, the political centrists are lost, because they cannot understand why, in reality, “the people” appear to have moved to the extremes. They can only view it as an aberration, as them having gone down a wrong path to which they will return.
Or, as Marx put it,
“If in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotent, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps ... or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old stand point, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him” (The Eighteenth Brumaire)
And, of course, given the Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dum nature of bourgeois two party politics, this view is continually verified, as one centrist party simply has to wait until the electorate tire of the other centrist party, so that conditions now suit it, as a small number of voters move between them.
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