The Narodniks, like Mikhailovsky, attack Marx's theory of historical materialism, on the basis that Marx only used it to analyse the development of capitalism, and that specifically to Europe. Lenin says its true that Marx only used it to explain the evolution of capitalism, and did not carry out the same analysis of feudalism etc. But, the objection was irrelevant. Darwin did not provide a detailed analysis of every species, on the basis of his theory of Evolution either. Instead, by examining a limited number of species, in detail, he could show that their evolution could be explained purely on the basis of resort to science, and the role of material conditions that made certain genetic characteristics better suited to these conditions. No resort to any outside will, design or plan was required to explain what existed, and Marx did the same in relation to the evolution of social rather than biological organisms.
Darwin could leave it to other biologists to use his theory to explain the evolution of other organisms, and Marx could do the same with the analysis of the development of slave society, feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production. But, any such analysis of what exists implies, also, an analysis of what it evolved from, and, at a certain point, what it is evolving into. Marx could not analyse capitalism's evolution without analysing those elements of feudalism out of which it evolved, and for the antediluvian forms of capital – money-lending and commercial capital – even an analysis of them in previous modes of production. Given the time that Marx was writing, and specifically by the time he was writing Capital, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and, with Engels, Anti-Duhring, capitalism had itself evolved from private capital into large-scale socialised capital, as the transitional form to Socialism, his analysis also, thereby, set out what it was becoming, Socialism.
“Thus, feudal production, to be judged properly, must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism. It must be shown how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as class antagonisms, how one of the classes, the bad side, the drawback of society, went on growing until the material conditions for its emancipation had attained full maturity. Is not this as good as saying that the mode of production, the relations in which productive forces are developed, are anything but eternal laws, but that they correspond to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that a change in men's productive forces necessarily brings about a change in their relations of production?” (p 113-4)
The revolutionary class smashes the old structures of feudalism that acted as a fetter on the productive forces of capital, such as the division into principalities, monopolies and so on, and establishes the capitalist nation state, with a national market, currency, and so on. When capital evolves into its imperialist form, as large scale, socialised, industrial capital that bursts out of the constraint of the nation state, it too must confront its previous incarnation as small scale, privately owned capital that clings to those old forms.
“Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves. There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
But, the rational form of that large-scale, socialised capital, which is already, objectively the collective property of the workers, is that of the worker cooperative, as a multinational/transnational corporation, and its only in this form that the constraints of the old nation state can be comprehensively smashed and replaced by international structures. The least rational form is that of the (nation)alised industry, which constrains it within the bounds of the nation state, and sets it in an antagonistic relation to capitals in other nations, and concomitantly sets the workers in those different nations against each other.
“As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment, the revolutionary class becomes conservative.” (p 114)
That is why we see those petty-bourgeois forces, and their ideological representatives clinging to the ideas of nationalism, national self-determination, national independence and so on, as with Brexit. But, now, in the age of imperialism, when material conditions have already moved beyond the structures of the nation state, those ideas are no longer, just conservative, but outright reactionary.
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