Similar relations can be found in terms of the socio-economic relations between former colonies and the colonial powers in the immediate post-colonial period. But, this doesn't change the fact of the political independence of the former colony, any more more than these kinds of relations between former serfs and landowners changes the fact of the individual freedom of the former serfs. Moreover, as a consequence of that individual freedom, the further development of bourgeois economy meant that some of these peasants were able to become capitalist producers. For those that did not, they were now still free, as workers, to sell their labour-power to the highest bidder, freed from the shackles of feudal monopoly.
For the former colonies, their political freedom enables them to choose their own political destiny within the constraints imposed on every country by its relative strength and rank within the global hierarchy of states. It means that some of them experience more rapid economic growth, and consequent increase in power, some surpassing the status of their former colonial masters. For the rest, they are, at least, free to make deals with whichever stronger economies will provide them with the most favourable terms, and they are also free to join with other economies to form large single markets, economic blocs, currency and customs unions etc., so as to maximise their collective strength.
The transitional phase has the worst of both worlds, and simply reflects the fact that the mature bourgeois relations have not yet driven out the old immature forms, still tainted with the old mode of production. The Narodniks failed to recognise that the new features were simply the initial forms in which capital imposed itself on the existing feudal social relations and peasant production.
“With the development of commodity economy, however, the ground slips from under this initial form of the domination of capital: the impoverishment of the peasantry has now developed to the point of utter ruin, the point when the peasants have lost their implements, by which the feudal and the bonded forms of labour were maintained—and the landlord is thus compelled to go over to the use of his own implements, and the peasant to become a farm labourer.” (p 492)
Its this that alarms the Narodnik, because it spells the death knell of petty-bourgeois production, the property upon which the Narodniks rest. On the one hand, it means that the dominant form of property is capital, and some of the producers now become capitalists, increasingly dominated by ever larger capitals. On the other, it means that the remaining producers become proletarians. The Narodniks do not oppose bourgeois relations, but only the rational development of those bourgeois relations, the inexorable division of society into two great class camps, with contradictory interests.
“Why is this “installation” merely seen in its second form, and not in both forms? Why is the protest not directed against the basic historical fact that concentrated the means of production in the hands of “private landowners,” instead of merely against one of the methods of utilising this monopoly? Why is the root of the evil not seen in production relations that subordinate labour far and wide to the owner of money, instead of merely in the inequality of distribution that stands out in such relief in the latest form of these relations? It is this basic circumstance—a protest against capitalism based on those same capitalist relations—that makes the Narodniks the ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie, who do not fear bourgeois reality, but merely its accentuation, which alone leads to a fundamental change.” (p 493)
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