Article 3
Section VI – What Is A Buyer-up?
Lenin examines the nature of the buyers-up. The significance of this analysis is that the Narodniks sought to deny that the buyers-up had any role in production, being only involved in the process of exchange and distribution. The reason they were keen to make such an argument was that they wanted to deny the extent to which capitalist production was already dominant within Russia. They wanted to emphasise the role of “people's production”, based upon small, independent, handicraft producers, linked to agricultural production in the village commune, and, thereby, to demonstrate that there existed another, non-capitalist, path of development for Russia.
This is typical of the petty-bourgeois, moralist approach. It is idealist and subjectivist, essentially starting from the proposition that nothing in history is inevitable, and that, whatever can be conceived in the human mind, can be translated into reality. Of course, as Lenin demonstrated, previously, in response to Struve's positivism, its true that, taken in the abstract, nothing is absolutely inevitable, but, for a materialist, nor does history simply unfold as nothing more than the realisation of ideas conceived in the human mind. There are constraints. Firstly, the ideas in human mind are themselves a reflection of material conditions, and conflicting interests. Secondly, whatever ideas arise in the human mind, at any one time, they are not necessarily achievable, in reality, given existing material conditions. The starting point, for the materialist, is these material conditions, and, given them, certain realities do, indeed, become inevitable. The truth is always concrete.
For the Narodniks, as petty-bourgeois moralists, the idea of capitalist development was unpalatable. As representatives of the interests and outlook of the petty bourgeois producer, they sought to present the idea of a path of development based upon such production as a viable and preferable alternative. To that end, they continually tried to deny or minimise the extent to which capitalist production was not only inevitable in Russia, but already established, and, instead, to overstate the significance of the independent producer. The same thing is seen today amongst the petty bourgeois moralists, and moral socialists for whom “imperialist” capital is anathema, and who seek to promote some alternative path of development for newly industrialising economies. But, it is also to be seen in their mirror image, amongst the petty bourgeois moralists who see imperialism as the saviour of the world, in the form of liberal interventionism. Although, time and again, their hopes for such salvation are dashed, as imperialism acts in ways that, from others, would cause them to fly into fits of moral outrage, they repeatedly rely on it as the means of opposing such atrocities.
Like the Narodniks, they believe that, whatever the concrete reality, determined by material conditions, nothing is inevitable. So, as with Einstein's definition of stupidity, they keep repeating the same experiment, each time expecting a different outcome. The latest example was their horror that imperialism had pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving the door open for a return of the Taliban, as though imperialist troops could ever be an alternative to the 40 million Afghans themselves, when it comes to the question of creating a viable state, and as though imperialism would do any other than act in its own material interests, and not as the policeman of some Kantian categorical moral imperative! Any question of the material conditions in Afghanistan, required for even a functioning bourgeois democracy, such as that it have a significantly developed capitalist economy, is totally ignored by these moralists. They seem to think that a bourgeois democracy can be built in a society whose economy is not only pre-capitalist, but even barely feudal! This is typical of the petty-bourgeois idealist and subjectivist, as against the materialist.
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