The first of these essayists examined is Skaldin, whose writings in Otechestvenniye Zapiski were also collated in a book, “In The Backwoods and In The Capital”. The essays appeared between 1867-9, and the book in 1870. It is instructive, Lenin says, in terms of “the relation in which the representatives of the “heritage” stand to the Narodniks and the “Russian disciples.”” (p 494) In fact, rather than dealing with conditions in the capital, the book deals with the attitude of the capital to the countryside, and sets out a series of descriptions of the prevailing socio-economic conditions there. Given the conditions under which Skaldin was writing, of Tsarist absolutism, he made the usual proviso that “I will not write as I may, and may not write as I will”. (p 495)
Lenin then sets out a summary of Skaldin's views. He starts with the pre-eminent issue, which was the Reform. Land reform is a central plank of all bourgeois liberal revolutions. It strikes at the heart of the old aristocratic, land-owning ruling class. In every such revolution, therefore, criticism of such land reform is treated with great suspicion and hostility, because it is seen as being merely an attempt to prevent it, and, thereby, to protect the interests of the old ruling class, in Russia, a preservation of serfdom. In a similar way, as Marx describes, in The Communist Manifesto, conservative and aristocratic socialism is reactionary, because it makes criticism of the horrors of industrial capitalism from the standpoint of the old ruling class, omitting to mention the horrors associated with that previous mode of production.
Skaldin wrote, not only as a bourgeois-liberal proponent of the Reform, but on the basis of living experience of it. And, so, his criticism of the reality of the Reform, as it affected both peasants and landlords, was of great significance. Skaldin described the widespread poverty of the peasants that was the actual consequence of the Reform, at a time when the liberal-bourgeoisie were highly resistant to the idea of any such result. The reason for the widespread poverty of the peasants, following the Reform, a poverty that, for many, was even greater than under serfdom, has been elaborated in all of this series of posts dealing with Lenin's arguments against economic romanticism, moral and petty bourgeois socialism.
Firstly, the Reform did not simply give land to the peasants, but required them to compensate the landlords for it, via redemption payments. Those payments priced the land at twice its market price. To afford the payments, the peasants had to a) borrow money, and so pay interest on the loan, and b) produce for the market, rather than their own consumption, so as to obtain money, c) engage in wage labour to supplement this money income.
As previous posts have elaborated, the allocation of land to peasant households was not of an adequate size to be farmed efficiently, so as to provide an adequate level of income. This fact was seized upon by the Narodniks as the main defect that required correction. However, Lenin has shown that, in fact, this was not a defect from the perspective of those that designed the Reform, but also was not the actual cause of the poverty of the majority of peasants. The actual allocation of land was largely irrelevant, because land was bought and rented by richer peasants, meaning that they had farms many times the size of even the average, let alone that of the allocated plots. These larger farms meant that the richer peasants could dominate the market. The result was that the poorer peasants and many of the middle peasants, were then led to either sell, or rent out, their land to richer peasants, increasingly turning the poorer peasants, thereby, into landless wage labourers.
Marx had described a similar process in France where the Revolution brought land reform, and the peasants were encouraged to borrow money to develop their farms, to meet the needs of an expanding market. But, then, at the same time that all this expanding supply reduced agricultural prices, the state increased taxes, and the banks raised interest rates on the peasants' mortgages. As Marx describes, the peasants were reduced to being troglodytes, now exchanging their exploitation by the landlord for exploitation by the mortgage holder.
The liberals, of course, do not want to hear this reality, because their ideology is based on the fantasy of a property owning democracy, as the basis of the prosperity of all. Yet, the reality of such a society is inevitably that of market competition, in which the vast majority must be losers, and so dispossessed of that property, in order that a tiny minority can be winners, and who, thereby, monopolise this property in their hands.
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