““Better that the peasants remain frozen in their routine, patriarchal form of life, than clear the way for capitalism in the countryside”— that, essentially, is how every Narodnik sees it. Indeed, probably not a single Narodnik would venture to deny that social-estate exclusiveness of the peasant community, with its collective responsibility and its ban on the sale of land and on the right to refuse an allotment, stands in the sharpest contradiction to contemporary economic realities, to contemporary commodity-capitalist relations and their development. To deny this contradiction is impossible, but the whole point is that the Narodniks are mortally afraid of this presentation of the question, of this contrasting of the legal status of the peasantry with economic realities and the present course of economic development. The Narodnik is stubbornly determined to believe in a non-existent non-capitalist development which is a figment of his romantic imagination, and therefore ... and therefore he is prepared to retard the present development, which is proceeding along capitalist lines.” (p 519)
Similar attitudes can be found, today, in relation to the arguments of the Lexiters, and certainly in relation to Starmer and all his reactionary, nationalist, Blue Labour Party. It is to be found in the support for the restrictions on free movement, and so on. It can be seen in the distasteful way in which large sections of the Left acted as cheerleaders for the biggest attack on workers' liberty and removal of workers' rights in 200 years, during the lockdown and lockout, their support for COVID passports, and so on. To these petty-bourgeois can be given Lenin's comment in relation to the Narodniks, where he cites Engelhardt's ironic rebuke.
“To such a Narodnik, one might retort in the words of Engelhardt: “The muzhik is stupid, he cannot manage his own affairs. If nobody looks after him, he will burn down all the forests, kill off all the birds, denude the rivers of fish, ruin the land and himself die out.” Here the Narodnik quite definitely “renounces the heritage,” becomes a reactionary.” (p 520)
It is again where the liberal bourgeois is more progressive than the petty-bourgeois statist, whose managerialism is manifest, not only in welfarism, but also in this support for police rule to protect the workers from themselves, to treat them as though they are idiots, unable to think and make decisions for themselves. It is the very antithesis of the opposition to statism expressed by Marx and Engels, of their advocacy of the self-activity and self-government of the proletariat in militant opposition to the state, as the foundation of its self-emancipation.
“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!..
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois...
But the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism.”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Again, the way these restrictions on free movement, today, impact the workers, rather than the bourgeoisie was mirrored in the way the Narodnik proposals impacted the rural workers.
“The 'enterprising muzhik' may easily rent land on the side, open an establishment in some other village, and travel on business wherever he likes, whenever he likes. But, for the 'peasant' who lives chiefly from the sale of his labour-power, being tied to the allotment and community is an enormous restriction on his economic activity, makes it impossible for him to find a better employer, and compels him to sell his labour-power only to local purchasers, who invariably pay less and seek all sorts of ways and means of reducing him to bondage. Having surrendered to the sway of romantic dreaming and set himself the aim of maintaining and preserving the foundations despite the course of economic development, the Narodnikm without himself observing it, had slipped down this inclined plane until he found himself side by side with the agrarian, who yearns with all his heart and soul for the preservation and consolidation of the 'peasant's tie with the land'”. (p 520)
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