Lenin continued to explain that Russia was dominated by the petty-bourgeois, commodity producers and peasants, whilst the Bolsheviks had created a state-capitalist shell, “(grain monopoly, state controlled entrepreneurs and traders, bourgeois co-operators)” which sought to plan and regulate those aspects of the economy, and which, characterised its nature during this transitional phase, much indeed, as any other state-capitalist economy would do. But, in the developed economies of Western Europe and North America, where that large-scale monopoly capital dominated, and had dominated for several decades, not only the petty-bourgeoisie, but also the remnants of the small private capitals were subordinated to the interests of that monopoly capitalism, and its state. That was not the case in Russia, or in other developing economies. The petty-bourgeoisie, and the small private capitals still predominated, and it was their existence and activity that continually threatened the further development of that planned economy.
It “is pierced now in one place, now in another by profiteers, the chief object of profiteering being grain.”
Indeed, as Engels noted in his Prefaces to The Condition of The Working Class, this kind of “profiteering”, of relying on petty, thieving and cheating, is characteristic of the behaviour of the petty-bourgeois, methods that were abandoned as counter-productive by large-scale, industrial capital. It is one reason that this petty-bourgeoisie, and the small private capitalists, form the most vicious and reactionary oppressors of the workers. Yet, it is with those enemies of the working-class that the petty-bourgeois socialists have sought to ally the working-class to oppose “monopoly capitalism”, and “imperialism”.
Lenin continued,
“It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism. The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state capitalist or state socialist. This is an absolutely unquestionable fact of reality, and the root of the economic mistake of the “Left Communists” is that they have failed to understand it. The profiteer, the commercial racketeer, the disrupter of monopoly—these are our principal “internal” enemies, the enemies of the economic measures of Soviet power... We know perfectly well that the economic basis of profiteering is both the small proprietors, who are exceptionally widespread in Russia, and private capitalism, of which every petty bourgeois is an agent. We know that the million tentacles of this petty-bourgeois hydra now and again encircle various sections of the workers, that, instead of state monopoly, profiteering forces its way into every pore of our social and economic organism.”
It is seen again, today, in conditions where, since the 1980's, the petty-bourgeoisie has grown by around 50%, with a consequent rise in its social weight, and manifestation of that politically, in the rise of petty-bourgeois nationalism (Brexit, Trumpism, Starmerism etc.), and has similarly been accommodated to by the petty-bourgeois Left and its “anti-capitalism”, which really means anti-monopoly capitalism.
Lenin notes,
“To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics (bold AB), and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).”
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