Lenin then contrasts Skaldin's position with that of Engelhardt. The latter is more talented, Lenin says, and gives a lively, colourful picture of village life. He shares all of the same ideas as the liberal enlighteners, and, as an actual farmer, he is led, in practice, to adopt all of the same measures as other capitalists. Yet, Lenin notes, Engelhardt was already a Narodnik, and his views about the path Russia should take as against the path that he as an individual farmer adopted, were those of the Narodniks. But, in addition, in his actual description of rural life, he refutes the romantic notions upon which Narodism itself was founded.
“Idealisation of the peasant and his village community is one of the essential components of Narodism, and Narodniks of all shades, from Mr. V. V. to Mr. Mikhailovsky, have given full rein to this effort to idealise and embellish the “community.” There is not the slightest trace of such embellishment in Engelhardt. As against the fashionable talk about the communal spirit of our peasantry, the current contrasting of this “communal spirit” to the individualism of the town, the competition of capitalist economy, etc., Engelhardt is absolutely relentless in exposing the amazing individualism of the small farmer.” (p 507-8)
In later works, Lenin was to point to this, as well as the work of Kautsky, in relation to agricultural co-ops, such as at Ralahine, to show that such a development by Russian peasants was impossible. What made Ralahine, and other co-ops possible was the fact that they were the product of wage labourers, not peasants. Wage labourers, precisely because they have been engaged in co-operative, collective labour, develop collectivist ideas, as against the individualism of the peasant, and small commodity producer. By contrast, Engelhardt discusses the extreme pettiness with which the muzhiks would go to retain their individualism when required to work collectively, including cleaning only their bit of a table, only milking cows enough to provide milk for themselves, not others, and so on. Each muzhik saw himself as a potential kulak.
“Engelhardt shows that in his economic activity the muzhik aims at becoming a kulak. “There is a definite dose of the kulak in every peasant,” he says (p. 491), “kulak ideals prevail among the peasants.”... “I have said time and again that individualism, egoism, the urge to exploit are strongly developed among the peasants.”... “Each prides himself on being a pike and strives to swallow the tiddler.” Engelhardt demonstrates superbly that the trend among the peasantry is not towards the “communal” system, not towards “people’s production,” but towards the most ordinary petty-bourgeois system inherent in all capitalist societies. He describes and proves incontrovertibly the tendency of the well-to-do peasant to launch into trade (363), to loan grain in return for work, to buy the labour of the poor muzhik (pp. 457, 492, etc.)—or, in economic language, the conversion of enterprising muzhiks into a rural bourgeoisie.” (p 508-9)
And, in discussing this, and the failure, therefore, to obtain sufficient collective capital, he also sets out why this would lead to a differentiation, the very process that Lenin showed had occurred in he decades after Engelhardt was writing. Lenin cites Engelhardt's comments,
“Further, I believe that the difference in status among the peasants will be even wider than it now is. Despite communal ownership of the land, side by side with the rich,’ there will be many virtually landless farm labourers. “What benefit is it to me or my children if I have the right to land, but neither the capital nor the implements with which to cultivate it? It is like giving a blind man land and saying—eat it!” (p. 370). With a sort of melancholy irony, the “artel form of economy’ figures forlornly in this passage as a pious and innocent wish which, far from following from the facts about the peasantry, is directly repudiated and ruled out by them.” (p 509)
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