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Lenin turns to Struve's criticism of Vorontsov's claims about the lack of markets in Russia. Struve begins by asking what Vorontsov means by capitalism. Its a relevant question, Lenin says, because Vorontsov and all Narodniks, have compared capitalism in Russia with its English form, rather than analysing the nature of Russian capitalism itself. Struve, however, does not give a comprehensive definition of capitalism, and what he does define is wrong. On the one hand, Struve focuses on just one element of capitalism – the domination of exchange economy - and, on the other, he focuses on a narrow definition of capitalism as seen in its more developed Western European form as “concentration of industrial production”. But, exchange economy in general, i.e. commodity production and exchange, as Marx and Engels describe, goes back 10,000 years. Money, which arises out of such commodity production and exchange, as the general commodity, as exchange-value incarnate, itself appears several thousand years ago. Exchange economy becomes dominant before industrial capital arises. At the same time, the concentrated industrial production that Struve describes, comes at the end of a process. Capitalist production arises several centuries before that.
““Mr. V. V.,” says the author, “did not go into an analysis of the concept ’capitalism,’ but took it from Marx, who mainly had in view capitalism in the narrow sense, as the already fully established product of relations developing on the basis of the subordination of production to exchange” (247).” (p 494)
As Lenin says, this is then wrong. Firstly, Marx, in Capital, gives a lengthy analysis of the way capitalism develops out of the existing generalised commodity production and exchange. It first takes the form not of industrial, but of merchant and usurer's capital, forms which themselves go back thousands of years, pre-dating generalised commodity production and exchange, but arises along with the creation of credit and money. He then shows how, on the basis of generalised commodity production, the creation of large, localised markets, and the development of technology, these antediluvian forms of capital begin to act not only to ruin and dispossess individual producers – which they had always done – but to bring about the concentration of the means of production, and to convert the ruined producers into wage labourers, thereby converting the means of production into productive-capital.
At the same time, the money-capital, and commodity-capital of the usurer and merchant becomes transformed into productive-capital. These capitalists now appropriate surplus value not (only) on the basis of unequal exchange, but increasingly (primarily) from the creation of surplus value in production, by wage-labour. It is this which constitutes primitive capital accumulation, as capitalist production emerges in the 15th century, and its on the basis of the production and appropriation of this surplus value, and its conversion into capital that the process of secondary accumulation of capital is set in motion. This process of capitalist production, but still on the basis of essentially handicraft industry goes on for centuries, before the large scale machine industry that Struve describes comes into existence. It is the end of that process, described by Marx, of capitalist production, not the starting point.
“Mr. Struve himself narrows down the concept of capitalism when he says: “The object of Mr. V. V.’s study was the first steps of the national economy on the path from natural to commodity organisation.” He should have said: the last steps. Mr. V. V., as far as we know, only studied Russia’s post-Reform economy. The beginning of commodity production relates to the pre-Reform era, as Mr. Struve himself indicates (189-90), and even the capitalist organisation of the cotton industry took shape before the emancipation of the peasants. The Reform gave an impulse to the final development in this sense; it pushed the commodity form of labour-power and not the commodity form of the product of labour to the forefront; it sanctioned the domination of capitalist and not of commodity production. The hazy distinction between capitalism in the broad and in the narrow sense leads Mr. Struve apparently to regard Russian capitalism as something of the future and not of the present, not as something already and definitely established.” (p 494-5)
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