Chapter 4 How Mr. Struve Explains Some Features of Russia’s Post-Reform Economy
“The last (sixth) chapter of Mr. Struve’s book is devoted to the most important problem, that of Russia’s economic development. Its theoretical contents are divided up into the following sections: 1) over-population in agricultural Russia, its character and causes; 2) the differentiation of the peasantry, its significance and causes; 3) the part played by industrial capitalism in ruining the peasantry; 4) private-landowner farming; the character of its development, and 5) the problem of markets for Russian capitalism.” (p 451)
Before examining each of these, Lenin begins by looking at what Struve says in relation to the Reform. Struve criticises the Narodniks “idealistic” understanding of the Reform. The basis of the Reform, according to Struve, is the need of the state to raise productivity. This is the point made by Marx and Engels on the consequences for Russia of its defeat in the Crimean War. The other thing Struve points to is land redemption, and pressure “from below”.
“It is a pity the author did not make his legitimate protest a thorough one.” (p 451)
The Narodniks idealist explanation of the Reform is the growth of “humane” and “emancipatory” ideas in “society”. This is typical of the subjectivist sociology of the Narodniks, as discussed earlier, which does not address the question of what causes these “humane” and “emancipatory” ideas to develop. The fact is that the development of these ideas was inseparable from the rise in the social importance of the bourgeoisie. The measures introduced were all bourgeois measures, designed to further the development of the bourgeoisie and capitalist productive relations. That the bourgeoisie attaches to these reforms words suggesting that it is solely about the emancipation of the whole of society, about introducing greater civilisation and humane relations, for the whole of society, is nothing new, and the bourgeoisie is unable to conceive of anything other than its interests being simultaneously the interests of “society”.
A materialist insists upon examining the actual content of the measures implemented, rather than looking solely at the words used to justify the Reform. The content was that some peasants simply lost the land they cultivated, but those that retained land were not gifted it. They had to “redeem” it, and they had to redeem it by buying it at prices around twice its market price.
“Not only here in Russia, but also in the West, such reforms were invested with theories about “freedom” and “equality,” and it has already been shown in Capital that it was commodity production that provided the basis for the ideas of freedom and equality. At any rate, however complicated the bureaucratic machine that put the Reform into effect in Russia, however apparently distant it was from the bourgeoisie themselves, it remains an undoubted fact that only the bourgeois system could develop on the basis of such a reform.” (p 452)
Lenin emphasises “apparently” distant, because, as described earlier, the foundation of the class nature of the state is not only that a given social class assumes dominance, and its form of property, and the ideas arising from it, form the ruling ideas upon which the fate of the state depends, but the personification of this is that the children of the ruling class take on the roles of teachers, professors, judges, civil servants, and so on, so that the state is directly imbued with these ideas, and tied to the ruling class by a thousand invisible threads.
Its wrong, Struve says, to compare the process in Russia with that in Western Europe, on the grounds that, in Western Europe, the peasants were emancipated without land, whereas, in Russia, they were emancipated with land. Lenin says that “in a general form” this is correct, but only in a general form. It was undoubtedly the case, Lenin says, that, in Western Europe, the peasants were deprived of their land by legislation, such as the English Enclosure Acts. That was true wherever a peasant reform took place, but it is not universally true that this resulted in all the peasants being deprived of land. Some redeemed their land; some were able to rent or buy additional land; some former petty producers, who made money as part of a growing urban bourgeoisie, bought land, either to become capitalist farmers themselves or as rent farmers, renting out the land to capitalist farmers. In other words, there was a differentiation of the peasants and petty producers into a bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the same thing was happening in Russia.
“Only the bourgeoisie are capable of hiding the fact of redemption and of asserting that the “emancipation of the peasants with land made a tabula rasa of Russia”” (p 452)
As Lenin notes,
“To speak the truth one should say: make it possible for part of the peasants to redeem part of their allotment land from the landlords at double the proper price. And even the words “make it possible” are no good, because the peasant who refused such “provision of an allotment” was faced with the threat of a flogging at the Volost Administration offices.” (Note **, p 452)
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