Lenin also notes Engelhardt's similarity with the enlighteners, as against the Narodniks, in that he saw many of the problems of the peasants arising from the continuance of the restrictions carried over from serfdom, and the state “reglementation”. This is entirely consistent with the anti-statist ideology of Marx and Engels, as set out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Critique of the Erfurt Programme, as well as their earlier philosophical writings.
Lenin associates entirely with these liberal, anti-statist positions, also consistent with his ideas set out in The State and Revolution. It is the antithesis of the petty-bourgeois, statist philosophy of the Narodniks, and their modern day equivalents, amongst the social-democrats and welfarists. A good example of this difference between Marxism and petty-bourgeois moralism is the different attitude to the COVID pandemic, with Marxists defending the liberty and self-activity of the working-class, whilst the petty-bourgeois statists and welfarists reached immediately for the intervention of the capitalist state, and colluded with it in the biggest withdrawal of workers' and civil liberties in over 200 years.
Its no surprise that when war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, these same elements again lined up with the capitalist state, abandoning any concept of workers' liberty and independence from the bourgeoisie and its state, summarised in the fundamental maxim, “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, and followed the example of pre-WWI social patriots in collapsing into jingoism, nationalism and warmongering.
“Engelhardt’s absolute hostility to reglementation and his caustic scoffing at all attempts to confer happiness on the muzhik through reglementation from above, are in the sharpest contrast to the Narodniks’ faith in “the reason and conscience, the knowledge and patriotism of the ruling classes” (the words of Mr. Yuzhakov, in Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1896, No. 12, p. 106), to their fantastic projects for “organising production,” etc.” (p 509)
Lenin gives a number of Engelhardt's denunciations of such reglementation from on high, all of which imply the stupidity of the peasant, and need for the state to tell them how to live their lives, in the same way that the statists and welfarists, today, do in relation to workers. They included limits on the sale of vodka, and forbidding the sowing of rye before August 15th. All of these types of regulation were ones that the Narodniks associated themselves with, and that is true for today's petty-bourgeois socialists, who see this top down regulation by the state as necessary for the benefit of the workers, as against their self-activity and self-government of the working-class, as proposed by Marx and Engels, being the fundamental basis of its own liberation, which must be achieved in militant opposition to that state.
Engelhardt had another similarity with Skaldin, as a practical farmer, which was his infatuation with every progressive development in farming, but Lenin says, he fails to see “that the social form of these improvements is the most effective refutation of his own theory that capitalism is impossible in our country. Let us recall, for instance, how delighted he was with the success he achieved on his farm thanks to the introduction of the piece-rate system of paying his workers (for flax scutching, threshing, etc.). Engelhardt does not even suspect that the substitution of piece rates for time rates is one of the most widespread methods by which a developing capitalist economy heightens the intensification of labour and increases the rate of surplus-value.” (p 510-11)
There is an inevitability in the way petty-bourgeois socialist trends move to become purely liberal in nature. Lenin referred to it in previous articles in relation to the Narodniks. It is a consequence of the contradiction at the heart of their ideas which are themselves a reflection of the material interests and property forms they represent. Engelhardt was a manifestation of this process at its beginning. On the one hand, as a farmer, he represents the interests of the liberal-bourgeoisie, at the point that it is progressive and revolutionary, as against the old feudal regime, but he remains ideologically tied to the peasants and small producers who formed the majority of the population, and its that which led to his Narodism. It leads to a split personality, as Lenin describes. Trotsky, made the same point about the trajectory into liberalism of the petty-bourgeois third camp of Burnham and Shachtman, and that has proved true of all of its followers in the decades since. Indeed, not just into liberalism, but for most of them into outright conservatism and reaction of one sort or another.
On the one hand, as a Narodnik, Engelhardt wrote scoffing at the liberal-bourgeois programme set out in Zemledelcheskaya Gazeta describing modern farming methods of crop rotation, wage labour, use of improved machines, implements and cattle breeds and so on.
“Yet it was this programme that Engelhardt adopted in his own practical farming; he achieved technical progress on his own farm precisely by basing it on the employment of farm labourers.” (p 511)
No comments:
Post a Comment