The irony of Struve's position is that he bases himself on Malthus, who plagiarised Sismondi, whilst adopting the position of those bourgeois economists that denied the contradiction. Struve is so intent on proving the progressive role played by the raising of productivity that capitalist production brings, that he denies the potential for capital to be the cause of the overpopulation, and insists that it is due to the Malthusian population theory. He insists that overpopulation is due only to insufficient development of means of subsistence, due to the persistence of natural-economic relations.
“How does he find it possible to draw the monstrous Malthusian conclusion that “the technical irrationality of the farm, and not capitalism” [note the “and not”] “is the enemy that deprives our peasantry of their daily bread” (224). As though this daily bread ever went in its entirety to the producer, and was not divided into the necessary product and the surplus, the latter being acquired by the landlord, the kulak, the “strong” peasant, the capitalist!” (p 483)
Struve explains “levelling” within the peasantry by reference to a disappearance of the middle peasantry. In previous works, Lenin has shown how the middle peasantry itself was differentiating with a small number becoming more affluent peasants, and a much larger number themselves being ruined, or falling into the ranks of poorer peasants. Struve says,
““The levelling in the present case is, of course, at the same time differentiation, but on the basis of such differentiation only bondage develops, which can be nothing more than a brake on economic progress” (226).” (p 483)
In fact, Marx, in Theories of Surplus Value, shows how it is only in pre-capitalist modes of production that this process leads to “bondage”, i.e. to the ruined producer becoming a slave, serf or debt slave. It is precisely because, in these previous mods of production, the material conditions do not permit the development of productive-capital. Markets are not large or extensive enough to justify large-scale commodity production, and the development of technology has not reached a level whereby large-scale production can sufficiently undercut handicraft production.
As Marx describes, this bondage, in these previous modes of production, was undoubtedly regressive as opposed to the differentiation, which leads to the development of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. But, what Struve describes, is not such a process of bondage. What he describes is only the first inevitable forms by which capital subordinates the labour of the peasant. It does so by extracting surplus value in the form of commercial profit and interest. But, these are the necessary precursor to the ruination of the individual peasant producers, and the conversion of some of the commercial and usurer's capital into productive-capital itself. Unlike the conditions in pre-capitalist modes of production, where commercial and usurer's capital plays a regressive role, as soon as capitalist relations of production arise, these forms of capital play a progressive function, because they are the forerunners of productive-capital itself.
“... this bondage which he has now demolished as retrogressive is nothing but the initial manifestation of capitalism in agriculture, of that very same capitalism which leads later to sweeping technical progress. And what, indeed, is bondage? It is the dependence of the peasant who owns his means of production, and is compelled to work for the market, on the owner of money—a dependence that, however differently it may express itself (whether in the form of usury capital or of the capital of the buyer-up, who monopolises marketing)—always leads to an enormous part of the product of labour falling into the hands of the owner of money and not of the producer. Hence, it is purely capitalist in essence, and the entire peculiarity consists in the fact that this initial, embryonic form of capitalist relations is totally enmeshed in the feudal relations of former times:” (p 484)
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