Section VI
Lenin refers to Struve's description of a plan by the Narodnik Guryev as a revival of mercantilism, and “a project for a bourgeois-bureaucratic-socialist organisation of home industry”. (p 480)
Mercantilism, which existed from around the 15th century until the dominance of industrial capital, in the late 19th century, was a symbiotic relation between the landed aristocracy and commercial and financial capital. It saw the wealth of a nation as being represented purely in money, and so sought to increase the stores of money – primarily in the form of gold and silver – in the country. To achieve this, it introduced measures of protectionism such as import controls, quotas, tariffs, and so on, so as to restrict the money going out of the country. At the same time, it provided subsidies to domestic producers. It was accompanied by a policy of colonialism abroad, so that it had both protected markets to sell into, as well as cheap supplies of raw materials and foodstuffs required by domestic producers.
The landed aristocracy gained, because they also were now able to establish large estates in these colonies, vastly increasing their rent-roll. As they also expanded into the realm of banking and finance (renting out money-capital as well as land), they also obtained vast new revenues from interest on financing these overseas ventures. Commercial capital itself made huge commercial profits from the massive expansion of trade.
Not only did mercantilism result in millions of people in the colonies being enslaved, but it also greatly increased the exploitation of domestic workers.
“To describe Mr. Yuzhakov’s “plan” an even more complex term is required. It has to be called a feudal-bureaucratic-bourgeois-socialist experiment.” (p 480)
If we start at the top storey of this four-storey construct, it is “socialist”, because, in Struve's words,
“One of the chief features of the scientific conception of socialism is the planned regulation of social production,” (p 480)
In Yuzhakov's plan, it was proposed to organise the labour of tens of millions of workers on the basis of a predetermined plan. But, of course, all this shows is that there is, in reality, nothing inherently socialist about planning, rather than production for the market. The Nazis also established large-scale plans, and organised labour on the basis of them, as did Stalin, but there was nothing socialist about them, other than that they borrowed some of the forms of that future society. In WWI and WWII, governments also introduced large-scale planning and direction of labour, as well as voiding aspects of the market by the introduction of rationing, but there was nothing socialist about it. It was purely bourgeois in content, designed to further the needs of capital.
In the early 1930's, Oswald Moseley, at the time a Labour Minister, and Fabian, drew up his Moseley Memorandum, which was a mercantilist project of import controls, subsidies and state intervention. It was backed by other Labour figures such as Nye Bevan, but there was nothing socialist about it, as witnessed by the fact that it formed the basis of his economic and industrial policy for the British Union of Fascists, and similar policies have been adopted by subsequent British fascists such as the NF and BNP.
Similar mercantilist projects were developed by people on the statist, nationalist Left, in the 1970's, such as the Alternative Economic Strategy, promoted by Stuart Holland, Tony Benn, Tribune and the Communist Party. The same basic reactionary philosophy was behind the opposition to the EEC, in the 1970's, and in support of Brexit/Lexit in 2016.
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