Struve, because he has confronted the Narodniks on the ground of an abstract analysis of capital, falls into the same error as them. He accepts their terms of debate as being the question of the inevitability of capitalist development in Russia. If he had actually analysed the economic relations in Russia, on a Marxist basis, he would have found that the question itself is irrelevant. If he had done so, he would have found that capitalism already had developed, and so whether the development had been inevitable becomes pointless. It is only a matter then of an historical analysis of the factors that had led to that development.
A prima facie examination of the Russian economy showed that it indeed clearly did have all the outward characteristics of capitalism, from large factories to railways to banks. It was this developed form of capitalism that the Narodniks wanted to present as the only capitalist sector in Russia, and that, as some kind of anomaly, an accidental development that was simply a consequence of the country departing from some other natural path of development.
“It is the job of Marxists to prove that these heights are nothing more than the last step in the development of the commodity economy that took shape long ago in Russia and everywhere, in all branches of production, gives rise to the subordination of labour to capital.” (p 495-6)
Struve, because he fails to analyse Russian economic relations in detail, falls into the same error as the Narodniks, seeing its capitalist development as something occurring in the future. It is the same error that the “anti-imperialists” make. And, they, like the Narodniks, see the large scale manifestation of capitalism, particularly where they are foreign owned, as something unnatural, accidental and imposed against some supposed natural path of development. Struve failed to see that the “people's production”, in handicraft industry, as well as in agriculture, was itself also already dominated by capital, and today's “anti-imperialists” make the same mistake in relation to developing economies. What they, Struve and the Narodniks failed to understand is that this latter capitalist production is simply less developed, less mature, and, thereby, reactionary compared to the large-scale capitalist production they aim their attacks against.
Struve talks about the Russian peasant villages and individual farms alongside large capitalist farms. On the basis of the same legal categories that the Narodniks used in their analysis, Struve talks about the levelling tendencies being stronger than the differentiating influences. But, Lenin has shown that the legal categories were meaningless in the context of the actual already existing domination of capital, and production for the market. Those with money simply bought or rented additional land and labour.
Struve notes that Vorontsov and Danielson are caught in a vicious circle in which capitalism requires expanding markets to develop, but capitalism ruins the producers, which they believe means that markets cannot expand. Lenin has already shown why this argument is false, by simply referring to Marx's schemas of reproduction, in Capital II. It was on the basis of these same schemas that Krasin had sought to show that capitalism could not continue to develop in Russia without foreign markets, because of the same impoverishment of the producers (See: On The So Called Market Question). Struve, however, seeks to resolve this vicious circle on the basis of his own Malthusianism.
“The mistake of the authors mentioned is quite a different one: capitalism not only ruins, but splits the peasantry into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. This process does not cut down the home market, but creates it: commodity economy grows at both poles of the differentiating peasantry, both among the “proletarian” peasantry, who are compelled to sell “free labour,” and among the bourgeois peasantry, who raise the technical level of their farms (machinery, equipment, fertilisers, etc. Cf. Mr. V. V.’s Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming) and develop their requirements. Despite the fact that this conception of the process is directly based on Marx’s theory of the relation between capitalism in industry and in agriculture, Mr. Struve ignores it—possibly because he has been led astray by Mr. V. V.’s “theory of markets.”” (p 497)
No comments:
Post a Comment