Another pernicious aspect of the Narodniks ideas was the way they idealised labour services as against money economy. Engelhardt had argued that it would be good if doctors had their own land so that peasants could pay for medical treatment by working on the doctor's land. The idea for paying for education on gymnasium farms has already been discussed.
“Every Narodnik says that capitalism in our agriculture is pernicious and dangerous, because capitalism, you see, substitutes the farm labourer for the independent peasant. The reality of capitalism (the “farm labourer”) is contrasted to the fiction of the “independent” peasant: and this fiction is based on the peasant ownership of means of production in the pre-capitalist era, the fact being modestly ignored that the peasant has to pay double their value for these means of production; that these means of production serve for the performance of labour service; that the living standard of this “independent” peasant is so low that in any capitalist country he would be classed as a pauper; and that added to the hopeless poverty and intellectual inertness of this “independent” peasant is the personal dependence that inevitably accompanies pre-capitalist forms of economy.” (p 521)
Turning to the third characteristic of Narodism, Lenin says it is “indissolubly bound with the previous ones”. (p 522) How else could it be that Russia's venture on the capitalist path could be seen as an error, which could be corrected if only those intellectuals and institutions could be brought to see the error of their ways. The same thing is seen, today, in the statements of the petty-bourgeois moralists who think that US imperialism was in error in pulling out of Afghanistan, and that it could have avoided this “error”. One of the most ludicrous examples of it is to be found in the writing of Paul Mason, who sees the actions of NATO imperialism, in the past, as being some kind of aberration, and who now wants to line workers up behind it on the basis that they could somehow take control of it, and use it as a force for spreading progress and democracy!!!
A parallel with this ridiculous idea, put forward by Paul Mason, was to be found in the Narodniks, who wanted to take and preserve the institutions of the previous feudal regime and simply fill them with a different class content, as the basis of progress.
“The substance of their dispute with the ‘economic materialists’ in this respect is that, in the opinion of the Narodniks, the remaining survivals of the old reglementation may serve as the basis for its further development. The intolerableness of the old reglementation is veiled from their eyes, on the one hand, by their conviction that the very ‘peasant soul (single and indivisible) is evolving’ towards reglementation, and, on the other, by their belief in the existing or coming moral beauty of the ‘intelligentsia,’ ‘society,’ or the ‘leading classes’ generally.” (p 522)
This could be taken as a perfect account of the approach of the petty-bourgeois reformists and statists.
The Russian Marxists opposed the whole basis of that “reglementation”, based on the old feudal monopolies, in favour of the bourgeois freedoms that competition and the capitalist market brought with it. The reglementation that the Marxists seek is not that of the past but that which arises out of the development of the productive forces, the development of large-scale, socialised capital, and the workers' control over it.
“And the economic materialists really do assert that the survivals of the old reglementation, which sprang from a natural form of economy, are daily becoming more ‘intolerable’ in a country that has passed over to a money economy, entailing countless changes both in the actual status and in the menial and moral complexion of the various sections of its population. They are therefore convinced that the conditions necessary for the rise of a new and beneficial ‘reglementation’ of the country’s economic life cannot develop out of the survivals of a reglementation which was adapted to a natural economy and serfdom, and can only evolve in such an atmosphere of wide and comprehensive freedom from the old reglementation as exists in the advanced countries of Western Europe and America.” (p 523)
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