In former times, under feudalism, the producer handed over their surplus product to the landlord, the clergy and the state. The relations between them were paternalistic and obscure. Similarly, as a result of debts, they only hand over some or all of their surplus value to the merchant as buyer-up, or via the Putting Out System, who appropriates surplus value via the price paid for the producer's output. Its only when the worker is employed as a wage labourer that these relations become transparent, as purely a cash relation between two free market participants.
“The author’s remark that the presence of capitalism does not entitle us “to blame it for all misfortunes” is true in the sense that our peasant who works for others suffers not only from capitalism, but also from the insufficient development of capitalism. In other words, among the huge mass of the peasantry there are now practically none who produce independently for themselves; in addition to work for “rational” bourgeois farmers we only see work for the owners of money capital, i.e., also capitalist exploitation, but exploitation which is undeveloped and primitive, and because of this it, firstly, worsens the conditions of the labouring peasant tenfold, involving him in a network of specific and additional encumbrances, and, secondly, prevents him (and his ideologist, the Narodnik) from understanding the class character of the “annoyances” inflicted on him and from regulating his activities in accordance with this character of the annoyances.” (p 485)
It is precisely in clearing away all of the old encumbrances that hid the true relations that differentiation plays a progressive role.
“Narodism, which stands for levelling out the peasants (before ... the kulak), is “regressive” because it desires to keep capital within those medieval forms that combine exploitation with scattered, technically backward production and with personal pressure on the producer.” (p 485)
The “anti-imperialists” who oppose the role of multinational capital in developing economies occupy the same position as the Narodniks, as do the “anti-capitalists”, who seek to portray large-scale capital as somehow more worthy of our condemnation than the far more regressive forms of small capital. Its not large-scale or multinational capital that is the enemy, as against small capital, but capitalism itself. The larger scale capital is, in fact, far more progressive than the small scale capital. As Lenin sets out in “Left-Wing Childishness”, it is, in fact, that large-scale, monopoly/imperialist capital that is the material-economic foundation of socialism, requiring only that the workers should recognise it as such and take control of it.
“... the author’s statements to the contrary, that it is “not capitalism” but “technical irrationality,” that “it is not capitalism that is to blame for the poverty of the peasants,” etc., merely show that Mr. Struve has been carried too far in his support of the correct idea that developed capitalism is to be preferred to undeveloped, and as a result of the abstractness of his propositions he has contrasted the former to the latter not as two successive stages of the development of the given phenomenon, but as two separate cases.” (p 485-6)
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