The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 4 - Part 33

Marx demonstrated, in Volume II, that the expansion of wealth, production and capital is quite possible without resort to foreign markets, or third persons to absorb any supposed surplus production. Of course, having done so, Marx also sets out why the existence of foreign markets facilitates such expansion, because it brings with it a wider range of commodities that can be exchanged, thereby broadening the market and enabling its more rapid development. And, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, he sets out how, in practice, a surplus of goods not only can but inevitably does arise, because of overproduction, under-consumption and disproportion, as well as crises of overproduction of capital, where capital accumulates faster than labour supply/social working-day. 

That Struve falls into this error is surprising Lenin says, because he points to the overwhelming significance of the home market in Russia himself. He also notes the development of a strong, i.e. bourgeois peasantry, in Russia, which is an indication of the development of capital in agriculture, and along with it the consequent proletarianisation of the mass of peasants, which is the basis of the growth of the home market, as those workers now had to meet their needs from the market rather than their own production. 

In his concluding remarks, Lenin returns to the points raised at the beginning, in relation to what exactly was it of Marxism that Struve adopts, and what that he rejects. The main feature, Lenin repeats, is Struve's objectivism rather than materialism, which leads him to argue at the level of abstraction rather than an analysis of the facts. In attempting to demonstrate inevitability in this way, he fails to identify the creation of actual social classes, and the antagonistic relations between them. The Marxists too, Lenin says, sometimes argue with the Narodniks at the level of objective principles but always in the context of a different understanding of the available known facts. Struve, by arguing at the level of abstraction, put forward propositions that were open to misunderstanding and framed the argument in the way the Narodniks and Legal Marxists did, in terms of an academic debate about the future, rather than an analysis of current reality, and the existing classes, and class struggle taking place. It was on that basis, Lenin says, that a critique of his work and the provision of this additional analysis was required.

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