Lenin dissects Lange's argument in relation to natural economy, taking Lange's description of the division into large and small producers, with the latter provided allotments by the former. In exchange, the latter provide corvee labour to the former. Now, Lenin says, imagine these relations are shattered due to “emancipatory ideas” taking hold. The peasants get 20% of their land, and must buy the other 80% at prices double the market price. That means that, now, these peasants must continue to work for the large landowners, to obtain money to make these payments. But, now, they work as free labourers, each in competition with another, for the available work.
“This way of snatching up work inevitably forces some peasants out: because their allotments have grown smaller and their payments bigger, they have become weaker in relation to the landlord, and so competition among them increases the rate of surplus product, and the landlord can manage with a smaller number of peasants. However much the tendency to voluntary birth-control becomes entrenched in the people’s morals, the formation of a “surplus” is inevitable. Lange’s line of argument, which ignores social-economic relations, merely serves as striking proof that his methods are useless.” (p 456)
The same is true of today's Malthusians and catastrophists. Their “anti-capitalism” is manifest as nothing more than a reactionary, petty-bourgeois demand for progress to be slowed down so as to reduce consumption of resources. Such a slowdown means that millions of people remain subject to the idiocy of rural life for longer than is required; it means that the expansion of the working-class, and rise in their living standards is slowed down; it means that the increase in production, and rise in productivity that could reduce the prices of necessities for millions in those economies is deferred.
Lange's argument is based upon this concept of want, of immiseration of the worker, and this want is directly derived from the Malthusian claims, and from a Darwinian struggle for existence.
““And what, indeed, is this ever-growing want but the metamorphosis of the struggle for existence?” (163).” (p 457)
The worker, of course, has to sell their labour-power, in order to live, because they do not own means of production. But, the idea that this requires the worker to be in a state of want, or immiseration, is completely false, as Marx sets out in The Grundrisse, and as he also describes, in attacking the Lassallean Iron Law of Wages.
“It was made clear that the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity or labour power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understanding has gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle's dogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the essence of the matter.
It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!”
(Marx – Critique of the Gotha Programme)
No matter how affluent the worker may be, they still have to sell their labour-power, and, in fact, as Marx describes, even more so, because, unless they do, this affluence ceases immediately.
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