The Heritage We Renounce - Section V - Mr. Mikhailovsky on the “Disciples”’ Renunciation of the Heritage (2/2)

Mikhailovsky wanted to claim, as a Narodnik, that capitalism was not already bringing about progressive changes, and that any such future changes were, therefore, to be seen. However, Lenin says, it was not about future changes, but the very real changes underway. Today, the petty-bourgeois socialists try to claim that the days when capitalism/imperialism could bring such progressive changes have gone. For such petty-bourgeois, such progress is always something that capitalism brings at any time other than the present. And, today, as with the Narodniks, its always claimed that any such progress is somehow not real, because not possible, and always a harbinger of catastrophe, of the next recession, and so on.

“There is not a book put out by the “Russian disciples” which does not affirm and demonstrate that the replacement of labour service by wage-labour in agriculture, and the replacement of what is called “handicraft” industry by factory industry, is a real phenomenon which is taking place (and, moreover, at a tremendous speed) now, under our eyes, and not merely “in the future”; that this change is in all respects progressive, that it is breaking down routine, disunited, small-scale hand production which has been immobile and stagnant for ages; that it is increasing the productivity of social labour, and thereby creating the possibility of higher living standards for the working man; that it is also creating the conditions which convert this possibility into a necessity—namely, by converting the “settled proletarian” lost in the “backwoods,” settled physically and morally, into a mobile proletarian, and by converting Asiatic forms of labour, with their infinitely developed bondage and diverse forms of personal dependence, into European forms of labour; that “the European manner of thought and feeling is no less necessary (note, necessary. V. I.) for the effective utilisation of machines than steam, coal, techniques,” etc.” (p 533)

What the Russian Marxists were doing, Lenin says, was purging the best traditions of “the heritage” of Narodism. Today, we face the same challenge of purging Marxism all of the petty-bourgeois distortions of it that have been introduced since Marx and Engels' deaths.

Back To Part 1