The liberal creators of “the heritage” held a completely different attitude to the Narodniks, in terms of this reglementation and defence of the old institutions.
“The representatives of this heritage were, as we have seen, distinguished by their ineradicable and fierce aversion for every survival of the old reglementation. Consequently, in this respect the “disciples” are incomparably closer to the “traditions” and “heritage” of the sixties than the Narodniks are.” (p 523)
The idealism and subjectivism of the Narodniks led them into a bureaucratic mentality of the type that is seen, today, in petty-bourgeois reformists and statists, in which the class content of institutions such as the state, NATO, the police, the NHS and welfare state, is ignored, because any connection of them to social relations and forms of property is ignored. There is no scientific, materialist basis for understanding the actions of these institutions, which means that there is no inevitability, or rationality, to them. They are seen as purely Quixotic, able to be turned, at will, to tilt at some other windmill.
“The Narodnik is always dilating on the path “we” should choose for our country, the misfortunes that would arise if “we” directed the country along such-and-such a path, the prospects “we” could ensure ourselves if we avoided the dangers of the path old Europe has taken, if we “take what is good” both from Europe and from our ancient village-community system, and so on and so forth. Hence the Narodnik’s complete distrust and contempt for the independent trends of the various social classes which are shaping history in accordance with their own interests. Hence the amazing levity with which the Narodnik (forgetting the conditions surrounding him) advances all sorts of social projects, from the “organisation of agricultural labour” to the “communalisation of production” through the good offices of our “society.”” (p 523-4)
This is the viewpoint of the petty-bourgeois moralist and reformist, who confuses government office with control of the state, and who thinks its only necessary to win an election, to take government office to set the ship of state on some new course. It is the kind of idealist and utopian nonsense that can even lead Paul Mason to think that its somehow possible for workers to take control of NATO, and completely change its class content and function!!!
Lenin quotes Marx's comment from The Holy Family that “With the thoroughness of the historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will therefore increase.” (Note *, p 524)
This, of course, is anathema to the petty-bourgeois reformer and their statist and bureaucratic mindset, because, for them, this mass is there only as voting fodder, or foot soldiers, not independent activity, as the agent of historical change. In the words of Engelhardt, in his ironic riposte, they see them as requiring the guiding hand of the paternalistic state, as was seen in the disgusting support they gave to lockdowns and other such reglementation during the pandemic.
“As man’s history-making activity grows broader and deeper, the size of that mass of the population which is the conscious maker of history is bound to increase. The Narodnik, however, always regarded the population in general, and the working population in particular, as the object of this or that more or less sensible measure, as something to be directed along this or that path, and never regarded the various classes of the population as independent history-makers on the existing path, never asked which conditions of the present path might stimulate (or, on the contrary, paralyse) the independent and conscious activity of these history-makers.” (p 524)
The Narodniks made a positive contribution, in posing the question about capitalist development in Russia, but, like Sismondi, because the solution they gave to that question amounted to a petty-bourgeois, moralistic and sentimental criticism of it, it was reactionary.
“Narodism’s association with the heritage and traditions of our enlighteners has proved in the end to be a drawback: the new questions with which Russian social thought has been confronted by Russia’s post-Reform economic development, Narodism has not solved, confining itself to sentimental and reactionary lamentations over them; while Narodnik romanticism has obscured the old questions already posed by the enlighteners, thus retarding their full solution.” (p 524)
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