The petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, of the type of Sismondi, Proudhon and the Narodniks, similarly, focused on those vicissitudes and effects of industrial capital on the workers, but did so, not on the basis of seeking a continuation of the rule of the landed aristocracy, but of a utopian expansion of small-scale commodity production and exchange. As Lenin set out, in relation to the Narodniks, this economic romanticism was utopian because of the laws of that commodity production and exchange, set out by Marx, that necessarily leads, via competition, to the development of industrial capital, and consequently leads to a concentration and centralisation of capital into monopoly capitalism/imperialism, which forms the basis of Socialism.
Again, this utopian, petty-bourgeois socialism is seen, today, in the form of the “anti-capitalists”, and “anti-imperialists”, the “anti-monopoly alliances”, and so on. All of these trends subordinate the interests of workers to the interests of capital, in one form or another. As Lenin noted, in relation to the Narodniks, they subordinated workers' interests to the interests of the most backward, reactionary forms of capital, i.e. to small scale capital, but, in so doing, ultimately subordinated workers to the interests of big capital, because, whatever the intentions of the Narodniks/moral socialists, the laws of capital, and the role of the capitalist state, inevitably leads to the domination of that large-scale, monopoly capitalism/imperialism.
As Lenin also pointed out, in relation to the Narodniks, the idea that you could go back to the conditions of small-scale commodity production, and peasant production, i.e. of large-scale direct production, without also the social relations that went with it, i.e. the social relations of feudal society, was a utopian, reactionary, pipe-dream. So, whenever attempts have been made to engineer such a regression, it always involves the petty-bourgeoisie establishing some kind of authoritarian/Bonapartist regime, which, inevitably, even after some period of social chaos, collapses. The regime of Pol Pot is, perhaps, the most obvious example of that, but the attempts of the Brexiters, culminating in the Truss government, is another. All forms of economic nationalism, including the utopian, reactionary notion of “Socialism In One Country”, or national roads to socialism, are simply an extension of this reactionary, utopian, petty-bourgeois socialism.
The Marxist response to the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism is not a desire to hold back that development of capital, i.e. “anti-capitalism”, but to fight for the interests of the working-class that also arises, and grows along with that capital. When that capital grows to mammoth proportions, in the form of large-scale, socialised capital, in the shape of monopoly capitalism/imperialism, the Marxist response is not to advocate for the interests of the small-scale capital being destroyed by it, but to advocate for the workers themselves to insist on their right to control what is, then, their collectively owned capital.
Similarly, as Trotsky pointed out in The Program of Peace, when this monopoly capitalism/imperialism extends this process on a global/international scale, with the more powerful capitalist states annexing the smaller states, the role of Marxists is not to advocate for the bourgeois, and still less the pre-bourgeois, ruling classes of those smaller states, but is to advocate for the unity of the working-class, and for its interests within this new, progressive political entity. As Lenin noted, we are advocates not of the self-determination of nations, which means, in reality, of the ruling-class of those nations, and the continued exploitation and oppression of their workers, but of the self-determination of the workers themselves, across nations.
The same applies with inter-imperialist wars such as WWI and II, and, now, the war between NATO/Ukraine and Russia, which is one part of the developing WWIII between US imperialism/NATO and Russia/China/BRICS+. Marxists do not line the working-class up behind the ruling class of each of these contending imperialist camps, but insist on the primacy of the interests of the working-class, expressed in the form, “The Main Enemy Is At Home!” By these means, the Marxists seek to establish precisely that bridge which takes the working-class from the one condition of being subordinated to the other stage of being the dominant class, a process which, given the size of the working-class, in reality, means only the transformation of its consciousness, a transformation from being a class in itself to being a class for itself.
The petty-bourgeois socialist can never achieve that, because they only see the world in terms of a series of discrete events (stages), in which the working-class is enrolled only to support a “lesser-evil”. The working-class is, thereby, reduced to always being not a class for itself, but only a class for some other more powerful class, even though this other class only appears to be so, because it acts as a class for itself, whereas the workers do not.
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