Rather than basing himself on what is, Struve bases his argument on what might have been had the peasant continued on the basis of natural economy. If, instead, he had based himself on the real productive relations, he would have shown that the peasant and small producer, was simply a petty-bourgeois.
“To refute this thesis the Narodniks would have either to deny generally-known and undoubted facts about the growth of commodity economy and the splitting-up of the peasantry [and these facts prove the petty-bourgeois character of the peasantry], or else to deny the elementary truths of political economy. To accept this thesis would mean to admit the absurdity of contrasting “capitalism” to the “people’s system,” to admit the reactionary character of schemes to “seek different paths for the fatherland” and address requests for “socialisation” to bourgeois “society” or to a “state” that is still half “old-nobility” in character.” (p 487)
Lenin presumably puts state in quotation marks because he is not referring to the state in its scientific, Marxist definition, but to the political regime, i.e. the government, many of whose Ministers represented that old Tsarist nobility, but who were themselves having to promote bourgeois policies, as the Junkers had done.
Struve ends up in the ridiculous position of trying to argue against Narodism, but actually arguing against the basics of Marxism. He not only wants to defend the progressive role of capitalism, but also to claim that it is complimentary to the well-being of the peasant and small producer.
““We reject,” says he, “one of the most fundamental postulates of the Narodnik theory of Russia’s economic development, the postulate that the development of large-scale manufacturing industry ruins the peasant agriculturist” (246). Now that means, as the Germans say, to throw out the baby with the bath water! “The development of large-scale manufacturing industry” means and expresses the development of capitalism. And that it is capitalism which ruins the peasant is by no means a corner-stone of Narodism, but of Marxism.” (p 488)
This is the same problem that liberals have. They want to portray capitalism in terms of the small producer, and free and fair trade being beneficial to everyone. But, this same capitalism, and that same free and fair competition results in some of those producers growing and others declining, until eventually, there are just a few very large producers, and all of the remaining small producers can't compete with them. Then the liberals have to breach their own ideology about non-interference in the economy. They are led to artificially break up the monopolies that have developed, and, of course, then the whole process starts over again, and new monopolies are formed.
And, the Narodniks adopted the same standpoint, instead of seeing the ruination of the small producer and their separation from the means of production as due to the domination of commodity production, and development of capital, they blamed it on wrong government policies that had taken the country down an unnatural path, and on the failure of society as a whole to stand up to the cheats and tricksters that they characterised as representing the foundation of the development of capitalist relations. It was on this basis that the Narodniks called upon the state and society to take action to correct the errors they had made, and return the country to its “natural path”.
The same is true today with those reformists who call on the state to undertake action to correct some condition that they believe is wrong, as though it were a matter of that state needing their advice to tell it that it had made some error of judgement, rather than that the state has acted in the way it has precisely because it is a class state, and acts in the interests of capital.
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