The Narodniks idealisation of the countryside was even more at variance with the heritage, which saw it as the most glaring continuation of all the features of the previous society, and the spread of capitalism from the towns into the countryside, as the most progressive development. Again, that has echoes in the views of the “anti-imperialists”. As this led to differentiation and contradiction,
“... the Narodniks’ honeyed talk about the peasant’s “community spirit,” “artel spirit,” etc., on the one hand, and the actual division of the peasantry into a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat on the other; and the more rapidly did the Narodniks, who continued to look upon things with the eyes of the peasant, change from sentimental romanticists into ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie, because in modern society the small producer changes into a commodity producer.” (p 518)
In reality, as this capitalist development proceeded, the Narodniks knew that getting rid of the relics of the past would simply speed up capitalist development.
“Better stagnation than capitalist progress—this, essentially, is every Narodnik’s attitude to the countryside, although of course not every Narodnik would venture to say so frankly and bluntly, with the same forthrightness of a Mr. V. V.” (p 519)
And, that is certainly the attitude of the “anti-imperialists”, as well as the “anti-capitalists”, of the Malthusian and catastrophists, including those who can only see in capitalist development workers being bought off, a view which is itself, inherently bourgeois and economistic, seeing class struggle only as an industrial, distributional struggle, and not a political struggle over the property question. Their view centres on the idea that Socialism is a result of some socialist government being elected, or arising from a revolution, so as to hand it down to the workers from on high. In their view that cannot happen unless the workers suffer misery, and find life intolerable. The fact that such misery invariably results in the weakness of workers, and in their demoralisation, resulting in the strengthening of reaction, does not enter their calculation. Trotsky responded to such crude views as follows,
“a prolonged crisis, although it would doubtless act to heighten the embitterment of the working masses (especially the unemployed and semi-employed), would nevertheless simultaneously tend to weaken their activity because this activity is intimately bound up with the workers’ consciousness of their irreplaceable role in production.
Prolonged unemployment following an epoch of revolutionary political assaults and retreats does not at all work in favour of the Communist Party. On the contrary the longer the crisis lasts the more it threatens to nourish anarchist moods on one wing and reformist moods on the other...In contrast, the industrial revival is bound, first of all, to raise the self-confidence of the working class, undermined by failures and by the disunity in its own ranks; it is bound to fuse the working class together in the factories and plants and heighten the desire for unanimity in militant actions.
We are already observing the beginnings of this process. The working masses feel firmer ground under their feet. They are seeking to fuse their ranks. They keenly sense the split to be an obstacle to action. They are striving not only toward a more unanimous resistance to the offensive of capital resulting from the crisis but also toward preparing a counter-offensive, based on the conditions of industrial revival. The crisis was a period of frustrated hopes and of embitterment, not infrequently impotent embitterment. The boom as it unfolds will provide an outlet in action for these feelings. This is precisely what the resolution of the Third Congress, which we defended, states.”
(Flood Tide)
Similarly, the idea of Socialism being an act of self-liberation by workers, from the bottom up, who, on the basis of the now socialised capital, which objectively is their own collective property, come to recognise the need for their collective, democratic control over it, has no part in the petty-bourgeois, managerial perspective.
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