So, why would socialists seek to ally with the petty-bourgeois or small capitalists against this monopoly capitalism, or state monopoly capitalism/imperialism? What they have done via the Popular Fronts, and the various alliances against imperialism and monopoly is only to pursue the course of Sismondi, Proudhon, Duhring and the Narodniks/Social Revolutionaries, not that of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Instead of recognising the progressive role of monopoly capitalism/imperialism, they have only seen in it its bad side, and railed against it, not by pushing it forward, and in so doing fighting for the interests of the working-class, but by allying with the even more reactionary forms of capitalism whose time has passed.
Lenin illustrates the point.
“At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.”
In other words, German imperialism represented all of the economic, the material conditions of socialism, with its advanced production, its planned production via the huge monopolies and so on, whilst Russia, lacked all of those material characteristics of socialism, but did have the political characteristics of it, in the form of the soviets, and the soviet state. In order to demonstrate to the petty-bourgeois, ultra Lefts that this was not some sophistry on his part, to cover an actual retreat, or Right deviation, brought about under pressure of events, Lenin notes that he had set out these same arguments, before the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917, in a pamphlet, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. He writes, quoting from it,
““. . . Try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state, for the landowner-capitalist state, a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!
“. . . For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs” (pages 27 and 28)
Please note that this was written when Kerensky was in power, that we are discussing not the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the socialist state, but the “revolutionary-democratic” state. Is it not clear that the higher we stand on this political ladder, the more completely we incorporate the socialist state and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviets, the less ought we to fear “state capitalism"? Is it not clear that from the material, economic and productive point of view, we are not yet on “the threshold” of socialism? Is it not clear that we cannot pass through the door of socialism without crossing “the threshold” we have not yet reached?
From whatever side we approach the question, only one conclusion can be drawn: the argument of the “Left Communists” about the “state capitalism” which is alleged to be threatening us is an utter mistake in economics and is evident proof that they are complete slaves of petty-bourgeois ideology.”
As Engels notes, Duhring had put words in Marx's mouth that he had never uttered, in order to fit his description of Marx as simply a Hegelian idealist, but Duhring's narrative of Marx deriving a prediction of socialist transformation/revolution as some future event – the expropriation of the expropriators – rather than as having already taken place, has ingrained itself. It fitted the ideas of the statists, be they Lassallean/Fabian reformists, petty-bourgeois socialists or Stalinists. And, as Engels' further elaboration sets out, this characterisation leads to reactionary consequences and conclusions. That was manifest in the ideas of the Narodniks, as set out by Lenin. His later comments, in Left-Wing Childishness, noting that, in soviet Russia, it was the petty bourgeoisie, and its small private capitalists that were the threat to the revolution, not the state capitalist property, further illustrates the point.
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