The Heritage We Renounce - Section I - One Representative Of The “Heritage” (3/5)

As a liberal, Skaldin was an opponent of all those legal ties imposed by the community over its members that restricted their freedom, and particularly, therefore, their freedom of movement. As a parallel with recent such issues, in respect to the withdrawal of freedoms, and requirements for “vaccine passports” and so on, Lenin describes Skaldin's “opposition to the passport system” (p 498) One of the reasons he opposed collective responsibility was that, as peasants were dispossessed of their land, maintaining them fell upon the community, and this burden both held back its own economic development, as well as tying peasants to the land and their community. Marx describes a similar process in Capital, in relation to the Parish Relief in England.

Lenin quotes Skaldin's comment,

““Can people placed in such a position be called free citizens? Are they not the same old glebae adscripti?”” (p 499)

That is the condition of peasants in the Roman Empire bound to given plots of land, which they could not abandon, no matter how unprofitable cultivation might be. Lenin continues to give numerous quotes from Skaldin which set out the reactionary nature of this lack of free movement, and the tying of the peasant to the community and the land.

“Skaldin, consequently, regards these aspects of peasant life from the purely bourgeois standpoint, but in spite of that (and, perhaps, because of it), his assessment of the harm caused to all social development and to the peasants themselves by the fact that the latter are tied down is very accurate.” (p 500)

Worst affected were the poorer peasants who also had difficulty even being able to escape temporarily to engage in wage labour. The position would be improved if the peasant could simply dispose of their land, Skaldin says, but, of course, that was an idea the Narodniks totally opposed.

“There has been ample evidence since then to show that Skaldin was perfectly right: the fact that the peasant remains tied to the land, and that the peasant community is an exclusive social estate only worsens the position of the rural proletariat and retards the country’s economic development, while being unable in any degree to protect the “settled proletarian” from the worst forms of bondage and subjection, or from the decline of his wages and living standards to the very lowest level.” (p 500)

But, Skaldin, also, did not call for this communal land tenure to be forcibly broken up, arguing from the perspective of the interests of the peasant, that it should be up to them when they brought that about.

“Consequently, Skaldin is opposed to the village community only for the reason that it hampers economic development, prevents the peasant from withdrawing from the community and giving up his land, that is, for the same reason that the “Russian disciples” are opposed to it today; this hostility has nothing in common with defence of the selfish interests of the landlords, with defence of the survivals and the spirit of serfdom, with advocacy of interference in the life of the peasants. It is very important to note this difference, because the present-day. Narodniks, who are accustomed to seeing enemies of the village community only in the camp of Moskovskiye Vedomosti and the like, very willingly pretend to be oblivious to any other kind of hostility to the village community.” (p 501-2)

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