The examples that Struve gives show that his description of them as ideologists of natural economy and primitive equality is wrong.
Struve describes Danielson's description of Vasilchikov as liberal economist curious, but Lenin says, there is nothing curious in this description.
“By the practical measures he proposes, Vasilchikov, like all the Narodniks, represents nothing but the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. The only thing that is curious about this is that Mr. —on, sitting as he does side by side with the Russkoye Bogatstvo publicists, has “to this day” not noticed that they are exactly the same type of little “liberal economists” as Prince Vasilchikov. Utopian theories easily reconcile themselves in practice with petty-bourgeois progress. This description of Narodism is still further confirmed by Golovachov, who admits that to distribute allotments to everybody is absurd and suggests that “cheap credits be provided for working folk.” In criticising this “astonishing” theory, Mr. Struve calls attention to the absurdity of the theory, but he appears not to have observed its petty-bourgeois content.” (p 448-9)
Struve's view that Scherbina's law of average requirements confirms Malthus' theory is evidence of Struve's own Malthusianism, Lenin says. As seen previously, Scherbina had argued that if you take every peasant household, grouped according to allotment size, you get very little variation in the average size of family requirements, i.e. expenditure on various needs. But, as Lenin has previously demonstrated, this grouping together of households on the basis of allotment size is meaningless, because some households rent additional land to their allotment, whilst others are led to have to rent out their allotments, because they can't farm them effectively, and have to earn their income by engaging in wage labour.
Struve says that Scherbina's calculations of the average expenditure requirement per head confirms Malthus' law that “the living standard and the reproduction of the population are determined by the means of subsistence they have at their disposal.” (p 449) In fact, in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx demonstrates that this theory has no foundation. Marx demonstrated that a surplus of means of subsistence can be used by the bourgeoisie to employ more domestic servants, increase their own consumption, export them in exchange for luxury goods, fixed capital and raw materials etc. Moreover, it can be used to pay higher wages to workers in employment, whilst other workers are reduced to destitution and unemployment. The means of subsistence, of course, are not at the disposal of the producers, but of capital.
Referring to Scherebina's law, Struve says,
“‘People’s production’ in the present case simply means production without the employment of wage-labour. It is undoubted that where production is organised in that way the ’surplus-value’ remains in the hands of the producer” (176). And the author points out that where labour productivity is low, this does not prevent the representative of such “people’s production” living worse than the worker.” (p 450)
The latter point is undoubtedly true, which is why we see, in industrialising economies, particularly younger members of peasant households flocking to the towns and cities, in search of paid employment. In short the amount of surplus value is scant because of the low level of productivity, making relative surplus value near impossible. Indeed, often, not only is surplus value absent, but there is an encroachment into necessary labour, so that labour-power itself cannot be fully reproduced. But, the reality in Russia was also that the first part of Struve's comment is wrong. The poorer peasants found themselves not only handing over surplus labour in the form of interest to money lenders, but also to the merchants and buyers up. Th profits of the latter went beyond normal merchants' profit, and swallowed up not just the surplus value produced by the peasant, but also a part of their necessary labour. The merchants and buyers up essentially became the employers of the small peasant producers, via the Putting Out System, or simply as a result of the prices paid for the peasants' production. This was just like Marx's description of the Scottish pebble collectors.
“Merchant’s and usury capital subordinates labour to itself in every Russian village and—without turning the producer into a wage-worker—deprives him of as much surplus-value as industrial capital takes from the working man. Mr. Struve rightly indicated earlier on that capitalist production sets in from the moment the capitalist steps between the producer and the consumer, even though he buys the ready-made ware from the independent (apparently independent) producer (p. 99 and note 2), and it would be no easy job to find among the Russian “independent” producers those that do not work for a capitalist (merchant, buyer-up, kulak, etc.). One of the biggest mistakes of the Narodniks is that they do not see the very close and indissoluble tie between the capitalist organisation of Russian social economy and the absolute dominion of merchant’s capital in the countryside.” (p 450)
The use of the term “people's production”, therefore, does not correspond to any historical period in Russia. Before 1861, “people's production” was inseparable from serfdom, and the appropriation of the peasant's surplus product by the landlord. After 1861, there was a rapid development of commodity production and the market. The peasant now handed over surplus value as interest to the usurer, and profit to the merchants and buyers up.
“When the Narodnik says that the ownership of the means of production by the producer is the age-old basis of the Russian way of life, he is simply distorting history to suit his utopia, and does so by playing tricks with words: under serfdom. means of production were supplied to the producer by the landlord in order that the producer could engage in corvée service for him; the allotment was a sort of wages in kind—the “age-old” means of appropriating the surplus product. The abolition of serfdom did not mean the “emancipation” of the producer at all; it only meant a change in the form of the surplus product. While in, say, England the fall of serfdom gave rise to really independent and free peasants, our Reform immediately effected the transition from the “shameful” feudal surplus product to “tree” bourgeois surplus-value.” (p 450-51)
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