Engelhardt had described the true nature of the muzhik as individualistic and seeing themselves as a future kulak, yet he argued that what was needed was not factories, but small rural enterprises, such as distilleries and oil mills, as though these could be developed on a non-capitalist basis.
“It is one thing’ to argue that progress is possible without capitalism, and another thing to farm yourself. Having set himself the aim of conducting his farm on rational lines, Engelhardt was compelled, by virtue of surrounding circumstances, to strive for this by purely capitalistic methods and to leave aside all his theoretical and abstract misgivings concerning the “employment of farm labourers.” In the field of theory Skaldin argued like a typical member of the Manchester School, completely failing to realise both that his arguments were of just this character, and that they corresponded to the needs of Russia’s capitalist evolution. In the field of practice Engelhardt was compelled to act as a typical Mancunian, despite his theoretical protest against capitalism and his desire to believe that his fatherland was following a path of its own.” (p 511)
And, again, this illustrates the contradictory, utopian and reactionary nature of petty-bourgeois, moral socialism. Because it is idealist, it sets up moral imperatives of how it thinks the world should be, rather than how it is, and it then sets out its vision of how it wants the world to be, according to a preconceived path of development that is not connected to how the world is, or the laws of social development. Its vision continually conflicts with material reality, and it is left trying to force the two into alignment, by denying the reality, and constructing fantasies. It acts to try to hold back actual development.
“Though his own farming experience and his exposure of the peasant’s individualism refuted all illusions concerning the “community spirit,” Engelhardt not only “believed” that the peasants could adopt an artel form of economy, but expressed the “conviction” that such would indeed be the case, and that we, the Russians, would accomplish this great feat and introduce a new mode of farming. “It is this that constitutes the exceptional character, the specific nature of our economy” (p. 349). Engelhardt the realist turns into Engelhardt the romanticist, who replaces the complete lack of “exceptional character” in his own methods of farming, and in the peasants’ farming methods as he observed them by “faith” in a future “exceptional character”! From this faith it is only a stone’s throw to the ultra-Narodnik features which—though very few—one finds in Engelhardt, to a narrow nationalism bordering on chauvinism”. (p 512)
This relation between petty-bourgeois moralism and chauvinism is also not unusual, because, in order to argue that some alternative path is possible, based purely on idealism, its necessary to assert some form of exceptionalism, which is always the basis of parochialism and nationalism.
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