IV
Lenin examines Struve's analysis of private landowner farming.
“He quite rightly shows how closely and directly the forms assumed by this sort of farming depend on the ruin of the peasants.” (p 489)
Ruined peasants can no longer pay high rents to the landlord, so the landlord is led to hire wage labourers to cultivate the land. In place of rent, the landlord appropriates the surplus value in the form of profit. Lenin cites the work of Raspopin, who provided statistical data from zemstvo reports on landlord economy. It showed the “enforced” character of such cultivation of estates on capitalist lines. The data showing the capitalist nature of agriculture contradicted the Narodnik view, which tried to hide it behind talk of “people's production”, and talk of how future economy could be organised.
Struve refers to this process as,
““progressive trends in private-landowner farming” (244) and says that these trends are created by the “inexorable logic of economic evolution” (240).” (p 490)
Lenin says that the abstract nature of Struve's presentation makes it unintelligible as to why it is progressive or inexorable, unless its put into context. He sets out to provide the required context.
The Narodniks present the process as being the transition of the peasant producer from being independent to being dependent. The terms are used in their economic rather than political context. The fact is, Lenin says, that the peasants were never independent economically. The allotment land provided to them, under feudalism, was only the equivalent of what, under capitalism, is their wages. In other words, the landlord provides this land so that the peasant can produce the necessaries required for their subsistence. The landlord does so only that the peasant can then devote all of their surplus labour to working on the landlord's estates, providing them with a surplus product. The land, and other means of production are never the private property of the peasants, as the Narodniks portrayed it, but only provided to them by the landlord, on the basis that the peasant provided corvee labour to them.
By presenting matters as a transition from independence to one of dependence, the Narodnik portrays this process as a regression.
“Such a picture of the process is quite untrue in fact, does not correspond to reality at all, and hence the conclusions drawn from it are also absurd. By presenting things in this optimistic way (optimistic in relation to the past and the present), the Narodnik simply turns his back on the facts established by Narodnik literature itself, and turns his face towards utopias and possibilities.” (p 490)
A similar line of argument is made by the “anti-imperialists” who disregard the political independence won by ex-colonies, an independence which, itself, owes much to the replacement of colonialism with imperialism, and, instead, points to the economic dependence of these former colonies on their former colonial masters, or, in less crude versions, on “imperialism”, itself as some vaguely existing entity. There is, of course, no such thing as economic independence, in a global economy, even for the most powerful states, only varying degrees of dependence. Indeed, its one reason why the theory of Socialism In One Country is a reactionary delusion.
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