“Once progressive, as the first to pose the problem of capitalism, nowadays Narodism is a reactionary and harmful theory which misleads social thought and plays into the hands of stagnation and Asiatic backwardness.” (p 516)
Not even this can be said in relation to the petty-bourgeois moral socialists of today. Their ideas and contribution has never had any positive content, because it arose in conditions not only of developed, indeed mature, capitalism, but when all of the fundamental work of understanding its contradictions and laws of motion were already well known. The only excuse for it is that following the death of Marx and Engels, a large portion of their ideas was itself corrupted by the Second International and inherited by the Third and Fourth Internationals. The Comintern further corrupted those ideas, and those of Lenin, itself representing a petty-bourgeois deviation whose material basis was the petty-bourgeois bureaucracy of the USSR.
A physical hiatus was created by the destruction of large parts of the generation of revolutionaries in WWI, the Russian Civil War, the Stalinist purges, the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, and in WWII. In many ways, after 1945, the global working-class had to start all over again its ideological development, and did so now with a huge weight on its neck represented by Stalinism and social-democracy. Both were ideologies of the petty-bourgeois, and a third was that of the New Left, whose social foundation was not in the working-class, but in academia, and increasingly studentism. The logical extension of this is some form of Katheder-Socialism.
“Today the reactionary character of its criticism of capitalism has even lent Narodism features that make it inferior to the outlook which confines itself to faithful guardianship of the heritage.” (p 516)
And, that is certainly true of the petty-bourgeois socialists and moralists of today. Lenin examines the three features of Narodism outlined, and shows why it is reactionary compared to the bourgeois-liberal defence of the heritage. Not long after the question of capitalism in Russia had been posed, it became clear that Russian development already was capitalistic. As has been described, in all these series of posts, Marx and Engels concluded, as soon as the end of the Crimean War, that such development was inevitable. The only thing that could change that would be socialist revolution elsewhere that would provide a model they could follow in Russia, and could also provide it with the technology required for its transformation. However, as Engels set out in his Letter to Danielson, no such revolution had occurred, and so capitalist development in Russia was not only inevitable but its best hope for the future.
“You yourself admit that "the social conditions in Russia after the Crimean War were not favourable to the development of the form of production inherited by us from our past history." I would go further, and say, that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless – that higher form was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model. That higher form being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequence of the capitalistic form of production and of the social dualistic antagonism created by it, it could not be developed directly out of the agrarian commune, unless in imitation of an example already in existence somewhere else. Had the West of Europe been ripe, 1860-70, for such a transformation, had that transformation then been taken in hand in England, France, etc., then the Russians would have been called upon to show what could have been made out of their commune, which was then more or less intact. But the West remained stagnant, no such transformation was attempted, and capitalism was more and more rapidly developed. And as Russia had no choice but this: either to develop the commune into a form of production from which it was separated by a number of historical stages, and for which not even in the West the conditions were then ripe – evidently an impossible task – or else to develop into capitalism; what remained to her but the latter chance?
As to the commune, it is only possible so long as the differences of wealth among its members are but trifling. As soon as these differences become great, as soon as some of its members become the debt-slaves of the richer members, it can no longer live. The kulaki and miroyedy (kulaks and parasites) of Athens, before Solon, have destroyed the Athenian gens with the same implacability with which those of your country destroy the commune. I am afraid that institution is doomed. But on the other hand, capitalism opens out new views and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West.”
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