Sharapov comments,
“All summer, serfdom is practically restored—except, of course, that there is no manhandling and no floggings in the stable” (p. 29).” (p 484)
Lenin notes that this blunt admission by Sharapov simply exposes the nature of the Narodnik proposals that were only dressed up in the language of the publicist Yuzhakov.
“In both cases the whole essence lies in labour service; in both cases we have compulsion, either by the pressure of the rich men who dominate the “village community,” or the threat of being consigned to a corrective gymnasium. The reader may object that Mr. Sharapov runs his farm for profit, whereas the officials in Mr. Yuzhakov’s utopia do so from zeal for the common good. One moment. Mr. Sharapov says outright that he farms from moral motives, that he surrenders half the proceeds to the peasants, and so on; and we have neither the reason nor the right to believe him less than Mr. Yuzhakov, who, after all, also provides his utopian teachers with by no means utopian “lucrative posts.” And if some landlord follows Mr. Yuzhakov’s advice and lets his land be used as an agricultural gymnasium, and receives interest from the “students” for payment into the Nobles’ Bank (a ’gilt-edged mortgage,” in Mr. Yuzhakov’s own words), the difference will practically disappear. Of course, a tremendous difference in ’educational problems” still remains—but, heavens, would not Mr. Sergei Sharapov prefer to hire educated labourers at 50 roubles than uneducated ones at 60 roubles?” (p 485)
It was for these reasons, Lenin says, that the Russian Marxists “(and not only the Russian)”, were led to support “in the interests of labour”, “consistent bourgeois people and consistent bourgeois ideas, as against those survivals of the past which are responsible for farms like Mr. Sharapov’s and “utopias” like Mr. Yuzhakov’s”.
The petty-bourgeois socialists, reminiscent of Proudhon, sought to take what is good from here, and good from there, ignoring the fact that, in each case, the good was inseparable from the bad. Today, it means, for example, one group within the petty-bourgeois Third Camp want to take the “good” of the “anti-imperialism” of various anti-working class movements, whilst ignoring the inevitable bad that is attendant on the nature of such forces, whilst another strand within the Third Camp wants to take the “good” of imperialism, whilst ignoring the inevitable “bad” that goes with it.
In both cases, it amounts to a petty-bourgeois mindset which seeks, in practice, to deny, or at least ignore, the class nature of society, and the state, and to put forward proposals, to be implemented by society, and the state, on that basis. It is an attempt, by that petty-bourgeois mindset to rise above the actual material conditions of class society, and to put forward "non-class” ideas, simply plucked from the air, on the basis of Pure Reason, that are, thereby, the interests not of any class, but of “the people”, “society”, or “the nation”, considered in the abstract. In other words, it is petty-bourgeois idealism, as against materialism.
“To us, however, it seems that such reasoning is nothing but the Kleinbürger’s comic effort to rise superior to the definite classes that. have fully evolved in our midst and that have assumed quite a definite place in the process of historical development going on before our eyes. The “utopias” naturally and inevitably engendered by such reasoning are, however, no longer comic, but harmful, especially when they lead to utterly unbridled bureaucratic inventions. For quite understandable reasons this phenomenon is to be met with in Russia with particular frequency; but it is not confined to Russia. Not for nothing did Antonio Labriola, in his excellent book Essais sur la conception matèrialiste de I’histoire (Paris, Giard et Brière, 1897), say in reference to Prussia, that the pernicious forms of utopia against which the “teachers” fought half a century ago have now been supplemented by one other: “a bureaucratic and fiscal utopia, a utopia of cretins” (l’utopie bureaucratique et fiscale, l’utopie des crètins. Page 105, note).” (p 485-6)
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