II - The Petty-Bourgeois Character of Romanticism
Lenin sets out why the idealisation of small-scale production is petty-bourgeois. The artisan producer, or peasant, under feudalism, was not a petty-bourgeois. They were independent labourers – as distinct from being wage labourers. Their means of production were not capital. They produced only to meet their own consumption requirements, whether by directly producing the use values/products they consumed, or else by producing commodities which they exchanged for them. When Sismondi shows concern for the labourer, it is this form of labour he has in mind, though he also supported measures that protected the factory workers too. The small scale producer, under feudalism is not a petty-bourgeois, because they do not own capital, but on a small scale. They only own means of production, they do not produce primarily to obtain exchange-value or profit, and given that bourgeois production itself does not exist, there is no means of them progressing from the ownership of small scale capital, to ownership of large-scale capital, i.e. of becoming bourgeois themselves. But, for the same reason, there is no process, by which they would become wage labourers. If they fail, instead they become slaves, serfs, debt slaves etc.
And, as Marx describes it has always been the case that some do fail, and become slaves etc. This is a fundamental difference between these previous modes of production, and capitalism. In other words, prior to capitalism, there is no material conditions which lead to a process of differentiation of these producers into bourgeois and proletarians. For that to occur, it requires a change of material conditions, whereby sufficiently large markets exist, so that commodity production, on a sufficiently large and generalised basis can arise, and where this creates conditions where production itself can be undertaken on a sufficient scale to enable capitalist production to become more efficient, and so supplant the small independent producers. For the small producer to be a petty-bourgeois, first, capitalist production itself must arise. As Marx describes, it arises first n the towns, in the 15th Century, but becomes more apparent in the 17th Century. The small producer then becomes a petty-bourgeois, their form of production represents only a less developed form of bourgeois production. They must themselves either grow larger, by accumulation, or else go under, becoming themselves proletarianised. Their small production does not represent a separate mode of production, or alternative path of development, but only a transitional stage of bourgeois production itself. That is why, as soon as capitalist production has started, the ideas of Sismondi, Proudhon or the Narodniks, of presenting this small production as some kind of alternative, is both Utopian and reactionary.
“We have seen that the French and the Russian romanticists are unanimous in converting small production into a “social organisation,” into a “form of production,” and in contrasting it to capitalism. We have also seen that this contrasting of one to the other is nothing but the expression of an extremely superficial understanding, that it is the artificial and incorrect singling out of one form of commodity economy (large-scale industrial capital) and condemnation of it, while utopianly idealising another form of the same commodity economy (small production).” (p 220)
A similar thing can be said about the petty-bourgeois socialism of Third Campism, which tried to make the production and social relations in the Stalinist states into some kind of new mode of production, rather than seeing them as purely transitional, having to either move forward towards Socialism, or else forced to collapse back into capitalism. The only difference is that the Sismondists, Proudhonists and Narodniks saw capitalism as unnatural, and saw their new mode of production, based upon the independent small producer, as progressive, whereas the Third Campists, saw what they thought was a new mode of production, as being reactionary, which, of itself, would pose a challenge to Marx's theory of historical materialism, by which new modes of production arise, because they are superior to previous modes of production, and are able to supplant them as a result of that superiority.
This is also the position of the economic romanticists of today who focus their ire on large scale industrial capitalism. It is the Utopian and reactionary basis of “anti-monopoly alliances”, and “anti-imperialist blocs”. But, there is no separate mode of production based upon this small scale private capital, just as there is no separate mode of production – be it called state capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism – based upon a managerialist or state capitalist class, as a similar intermediate and transitional middle class. Mercantilism represented a stage in which a merchant and financial bourgeoisie was becoming more powerful. A process was underway, in which capitalist production would inevitably supplant feudal production. It represented a transitional phase of development between feudalism and capitalism, not an independent and discrete mode of production in its own right.
When capitalism grows to the extent that private capital has been supplanted by socialised capital, and in which the immediate personification of this socialised capital, the manager or bureaucrat rises in importance, and the state acts to further the interests of that socialised capital, via measures of planning and regulation and so on, this stage of social-democracy, is not an independent, new mode of production in its own right – however much the proponents of the mixed economy might have seen it as such – but is merely a transitional stage, in which it must move forward, so that the socialised capital becomes democratically controlled means of production, and when all of the planning and regulation is undertaken not on the basis of maximising profit, so as to accumulate additional capital, but on the basis of maximising social welfare, maximising the production of use values.
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