The Heritage We Renounce - Section II - Narodism’s Addition to the “Heritage” (1/3)

Lenin then contrasts Skaldin's position with that of Engelhardt. The latter is more talented, Lenin says, and gives a lively, colourful picture of village life. He shares all of the same ideas as the liberal enlighteners, and, as an actual farmer, he is led, in practice, to adopt all of the same measures as other capitalists. Yet, Lenin notes, Engelhardt was already a Narodnik, and his views about the path Russia should take as against the path that he as an individual farmer adopted, were those of the Narodniks. But, in addition, in his actual description of rural life, he refutes the romantic notions upon which Narodism itself was founded.

“Idealisation of the peasant and his village community is one of the essential components of Narodism, and Narodniks of all shades, from Mr. V. V. to Mr. Mikhailovsky, have given full rein to this effort to idealise and embellish the “community.” There is not the slightest trace of such embellishment in Engelhardt. As against the fashionable talk about the communal spirit of our peasantry, the current contrasting of this “communal spirit” to the individualism of the town, the competition of capitalist economy, etc., Engelhardt is absolutely relentless in exposing the amazing individualism of the small farmer.” (p 507-8)

In later works, Lenin was to point to this, as well as the work of Kautsky, in relation to agricultural co-ops, such as at Ralahine, to show that such a development by Russian peasants was impossible. What made Ralahine, and other co-ops possible was the fact that they were the product of wage labourers, not peasants. Wage labourers, precisely because they have been engaged in co-operative, collective labour, develop collectivist ideas, as against the individualism of the peasant, and small commodity producer. By contrast, Engelhardt discusses the extreme pettiness with which the muzhiks would go to retain their individualism when required to work collectively, including cleaning only their bit of a table, only milking cows enough to provide milk for themselves, not others, and so on. Each muzhik saw himself as a potential kulak.

“Engelhardt shows that in his economic activity the muzhik aims at becoming a kulak. “There is a definite dose of the kulak in every peasant,” he says (p. 491), “kulak ideals prevail among the peasants.”... “I have said time and again that individualism, egoism, the urge to exploit are strongly developed among the peasants.”... “Each prides himself on being a pike and strives to swallow the tiddler.” Engelhardt demonstrates superbly that the trend among the peasantry is not towards the “communal” system, not towards “people’s production,” but towards the most ordinary petty-bourgeois system inherent in all capitalist societies. He describes and proves incontrovertibly the tendency of the well-to-do peasant to launch into trade (363), to loan grain in return for work, to buy the labour of the poor muzhik (pp. 457, 492, etc.)—or, in economic language, the conversion of enterprising muzhiks into a rural bourgeoisie.” (p 508-9)

And, in discussing this, and the failure, therefore, to obtain sufficient collective capital, he also sets out why this would lead to a differentiation, the very process that Lenin showed had occurred in he decades after Engelhardt was writing. Lenin cites Engelhardt's comments,

“Further, I believe that the difference in status among the peasants will be even wider than it now is. Despite communal ownership of the land, side by side with the rich,’ there will be many virtually landless farm labourers. “What benefit is it to me or my children if I have the right to land, but neither the capital nor the implements with which to cultivate it? It is like giving a blind man land and saying—eat it!” (p. 370). With a sort of melancholy irony, the “artel form of economy’ figures forlornly in this passage as a pious and innocent wish which, far from following from the facts about the peasantry, is directly repudiated and ruled out by them.” (p 509)

Back To Section I

Forward To Part 2

New Economic Developments In Peasant Life - Part 10

A feature not treated by Postnikov, Lenin says, is the negative impact on the poor peasants of this dominance of the wealthy peasants. The poor peasants owned inadequate land to be self-sufficient, but it was the rich peasants that were able to rent available land rather than the poor peasants who needed it. 

“In all three uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, the peasants rent a total of 476,334 dessiatines of land (non-allotment and allotment), of which 298,727 dessiatines, or more than three-fifths (63%), are taken by the prosperous group. Only 6% falls to the share of the poor group, and 31% to that of the middle group.” (p 65) 

The rich peasants were also almost exclusively the only purchasers of land. 

“... in Dnieper Uyezd they own 78% of all the purchased land, and in Melitopol Uyezd 42,737 dessiatines out of a total of 48,099 dessiatines, or 88%.” (p 67) 

Finally, it was the rich peasants who had almost exclusive access to credit to finance capital accumulation. 

“Summing up what has been said about the third group, we arrive at the following description of it: the prosperous peasants, who possess considerably more than the average quantity of means of production, and whose labour, as a consequence, is more productive, are the principal growers of agricultural produce in the district, and predominate over the remaining groups; this group’s farming is commercial in character, and is very largely based on the exploitation of hired labour.” (p 68) 

Lenin's purpose in undertaking this analysis was to show that the Narodnik conception of Russian society, based upon the economic foundations of the peasant village was already only a memory. The idea that the peasant village economy could somehow be a basis for socialist construction was a reactionary utopian fantasy. The peasantry were already differentiated into separate socio-economic groups, and it was only the presentation of aggregated and average data that hid that reality. 

Postnikov himself had an inadequate explanation for this process of differentiation, and the reason why, even in an area with abundant land and universal communal land ownership, an increasing proportion of peasants were abandoning farming to become wage labourers. He put the reason down to an inadequate allotment size per household, “which prevents him from making full use of the labour-power of his family” (p. 341).” (p 71) 

But Postnikov's own data had shown why productivity improved with farm size, and so the wealthier peasants, with the larger farms, had a competitive advantage, and when this is combined with their greater ownership of animals and implements that advantage is multiplied. 

Lenin quotes Postnikov's statement that the struggle over land ownership was not one between communalism and individualism, but a struggle of economic interests. 

““It is quite an obvious truth,” says Postnikov elsewhere, “that with this land poverty and the small size of the farms, and the absence of sufficient industries, there can be no prosperity among the peasantry, and all that is economically weak is bound, one way or another, sooner or later, to be ousted from peasant farming” (p. 368).” (p 72) 

The real phenomenon, Lenin says, is not so much the grabbing of land, but the fact that the larger farms have lower production costs, which provide them with competitive advantage, allowing them to expand, and to devote a larger proportion of output to the market. 

As Postnikov says, 

““If the size of a peasant farm falls below this minimum, farming becomes impossible. In such cases, the peasant will find it more profitable to give up farming and become a labourer, whose expenditure is more limited and whose needs can be more fully satisfied even with a smaller gross income” (p. 141).” (p 72) 

Lenin notes, 

“If, on the one hand, a peasant finds it profitable to expand his sown area far beyond his own grain requirements, it is because he can sell his produce. If, on the other hand, a peasant finds it profitable to give up farming and become a labourer, it is because the satisfaction of the greater part of his needs entails cash expenditure, that is, sale; and as, in selling his farm produce, he encounters a rival on the market with whom he cannot compete, the only thing left for him is to sell his labour-power. In a word, the soil in which the above-described phenomena grow is production for sale. The fundamental cause of the struggle of economic interests arising among the peasantry is the existence of a system under which the market is the regulator of social production.” (p 73) 

Back To Part 9

Economic Romanticism Index

Reply To Mike McNair Part IV

“(1) They seek (as insurance as much as for accumulation) to retain the whole of their surplus product for themselves, so that in the absence of market pressures on them, or slave or capitalist large-scale agriculture, no civilisation can exist without coercive extraction of the agricultural surplus from the peasantry.”

Other than in a rather vacuous sense I’m not sure that this statement is true. According to Engels in Anti-Duhring (The Force theory) ruling classes do not rule on the basis of force, but on the basis of legitimation. The peasant does not give up his surplus to the landlord because he is forced to do so, but because the peasant accepts such an arrangement as natural. If, the peasant gives up the surplus without the need for force “in the (presence) of market pressures on them, or slave or capitalist large-scale agriculture”, and as I have shown under feudalism then on what basis must we assume that force is required to extract the surplus under other conditions? It seems to me that precisely Trotsky’s argument that industrialisation, providing Capital equipment and consumer goods for the peasants in exchange for that surplus applies. There is a problem in respect of Primitive Socialist Accumulation as identified by Preobrazhensky, but I don’t think it’s the problem you identify here.

“(3) The peasant petty proprietors are, due to their atomization, incapable of ruling for themselves, and therefore as far as they take political action tend to throw up the absolutist bureaucratic state. (This is also true of the urban petty proprietors, but by an indirect route. Their horizon tends to be limited to the locality, and they throw up localised guild-corporatist forms which then through their localism throw up the absolutist bureaucratic state.)”

I think this is fundamentally wrong from a Marxist perspective. The peasantry in particular, but the petty-bourgeois and intermediate classes in general are not only incapable of ruling for themselves, but incapable of independent political action in general. Where they engage in what appears to be independent action, on further inspection it turns out to be at most nothing more than simply reaction to some other class e.g. acts of almost random violence, the burning and ransacking of landlord property for instance. It is one of the reasons that it is this layer of society that tends to throw up those that engage in individual acts of terror. The petit-bourgeois are incapable of independent class action not only because of their atomisation, which mitigates against effective organisation, and development of common ideas, culture etc. but also because of a lack of homogeneity within what is a highly differentiated strata, and a strata which by its nature is transitory, its members constantly rising up or falling down into other social classes. Not only do the interests of the peasant diverge from the interest of the solicitor or professor, but they differ also between the rich peasant and the poor peasant. It is what makes the other component of this strata – the bureaucracy – an impossible candidate for ruling class in the way the new class theorists of State capitalism or Bureaucratic Collectivism would have us believe.

So it is not true that this class “throw(s) up the absolutist bureaucratic state”. It is incapable of doing so. If such a state arises then it is the State of some other class. At best it is a reflection that this other class be it some feudal aristocracy, capitalist class or proletariat is too weak to effect the social change on its own account, and relies on the physical support of the peasantry in effecting a political revolution, and it is that same weakness that allows the resultant Bonapartist (or bureaucratic) state to rise above the conflicts between the contending classes, obtain a degree of independence from Civil Society for itself etc.

“In consequence, there can be no strategic alliance of the workers and peasants, smychka, or "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" except in the very short-term transitional sense of the Russian soviets between February and October.”

In a certain sense I agree with this, but not for the reasons you outline. At a more fundamental level I disagree with your argument here. Because, I believe that a Leninist political revolution will inevitably create a deformed workers state (at best) for the reasons I have previously outlined, I believe that an effective socialist revolution can only be effected on the basis of a social transformation, in short the development on a fairly large scale of co-operatives etc. I have elsewhere quoted Lenin, who in turn was quoting Kautsky on Agriculture, where he states that large scale Co-operative agriculture is more efficient than large scale private agriculture, BUT he goes on such a development is only possible under certain conditions, that is that the workers who are going to run and establish these co-operatives must themselves be of a certain cultural level, must be bound by a certain degree of discipline etc. In other words it assumes that the society has reached a certain level of economic and social development, that the workers in this society have through class struggle developed that minimum level of culture, and class solidarity that enables them to go beyond the limitations of individualism, and petit-property owner mentality. It is hard to reconcile these requirements with a society in which the working class constitutes a small minority of the population.

For that reason I believe that the conditions for creating a socialist transformation of property relations as the precondition for developing the necessary class consciousness of the working class as a whole, and of creating the kind of economic and social foundations on which a successful political revolution can be effected are not compatible with a society in which a smytchka between workers and peasants is a requirement for that political revolution.

But, to apply that principal absolutely would be to treat class struggle and proletarian revolution as something which proceeds as from a play book a failing of the petit-bourgeois socialists. History is not made that way. In the words of Harold Macmillan, “Events dear boy”. Or in the words of Marx, “Man makes his own history, but under conditions not of his own choosing.” Revolutions do not just happen when the revolutionary class has achieved a socialist class consciousness they happen also when they have just become so pissed off with the existing system that they lash out even without knowing what they will put in its place. In almost every instance of such revolts they end up with something they didn’t want, whether it be a Stalin, or whether it be some Ayatollah.

Moreover, I can think of at least two situations in which what you say does not apply. A country like France for instance with a highly developed working class COULD develop co-operative industries, and those co-operatives could either link up with either agricultural co-ops or with individual peasant producers. The problem that Russia had was precisely the problem that Preobrazhensky formulated of the need for primitive Capital accumulation due to the weakness both of Russian Capitalism, and of the working class. But, as Marx points out in relation to Britain the workers DO develop savings, the “civilising mission” of capital as he describes it in the Grundrisse, does raise workers intellectual and cultural level, as well as providing them with the basis of that accumulation. Yes, as he says as long as those higher earnings are diverted into consumption or into savings they cannot change the workers condition, he simply becomes a more affluent worker, but if those savings are used not simply as savings but as Capital, then a fundamental change comes about. Moreover, the worker as a collective is able to overcome the problem of primitive Capital accumulation via commercial credit, again a solution which did not exist for Russia due to its economic isolation. Under such a situation workers COULD carry through a socialist revolution without the assistance of the peasantry, PROVIDED only that the peasantry did not oppose them. But it is precisely to avoid such a potentiality that a sensible proletariat would seek to maintain a smytchka with at least sections of the poor peasantry.

Secondly, it is highly likely that if a successful socialist transformation were effected say in Europe then workers would want to establish a smytchka with peasant farmers say in Africa, and thereby to encourage trade and development, not because such a smytchka was necessary politically or militarily for the European workers, but because such an arrangement would undercut any existing imperialist powers, would strengthen the position of workers and socialist forces in those countries, and would ultimately lay the basis for the effective transformation of those economies, as well as facilitating trade and economic development.

“It performed well for a short period and then ran up against the resistance of the peasantry in the form of the scissors crisis. The Left Opposition offered technical solutions to this problem (Preobrazhensky) which failed to recognize that the scissors crisis was the expression of an underlying struggle of the peasantry to retain the whole product of the agricultural surplus, that is, a form of tax strike, a class struggle against what was still de facto a dictatorship of the cities over the country”

But this is not an accurate depiction of the situation. The resistance of the peasantry was not a reflection of those peasants wanting to retain the whole of the surplus. The fact is that NEP together with some of the other benefits of the ending of War Communism, meant that agricultural production rose quickly. But, NEP was certainly not a free market. The State continued to dictate prices of important commodities such as grain, and bought them at those prices. As Supply of those commodities rose, so prices fell. Meanwhile, industrial production only rose slowly. The ending of war Communism the leasing back to private capitalists, the repair of old equipment that could be quickly brought back into production eased the problem of capital accumulation, but it could only be a quick fix. The majority of manufacturing even under NEP remained in the hands of the State, and management of State enterprises was largely in the hands of the former owners or Party bureaucrats. The workers themselves had no real control over the enterprises, and no experience or skill for exercising such control, and consequently, given all the exertions of the War, and Civil War little enthusiasm for yet more demands on their time and energy. As industrial production rose more slowly than agricultural production the relative price of agricultural goods to industrial goods fell. The response of the peasantry was not a response based on a desire to retain the full surplus, but a response to becoming steadily worse off! What the peasant is really interested in is not the abstract question of the surplus product, but his living standard whether the products he takes to market can bring him more or less goods in exchange.

As I wrote elsewhere the fact is that whatever the Trotskyists believe the answer could not have come from the introduction of more planning, nor of the introduction of democratic planning in place of bureaucratic planning – look at Trotsky’s discussion of planning in these early years it is just as bureaucratic and centralist as that developed by the Stalinists, the only difference is that Trotsky argued for lower targets, and for the plan to be corrected as errors materialised themselves – as Draper points out in “The Two Souls of Socialism” this fetish with planning that the left has adopted has no grounding within Marx, planning can only develop organically by experience, and experiment. The real solution to the problem of Capital accumulation and of providing the necessary commodities for both workers and peasants that would have tied them to the Dictatorship was the use of the market. But, the market as NEP demonstrated meant the restoration and growing power of capitalist elements, and thereby of capitalist ideology. The only counter to that would have been the operation of the market on the basis of property owned by the workers in Co-operatives, but that was not possible. It was not possible because of a) the statist ideology of Leninism which required that property be owned and controlled by the State, and b) because that consideration of Kautsky, that the workers be sufficiently developed, disciplined etc. to be able to own and control co-operative enterprises was lacking.

“Without a labour market - which implies freedom of movement of workers and of capital - a working class is not a proletariat in the sense of Marx’s analysis, but an urban serf class. There was also a major growth of state slavery, in the form of the gulag.”

There is a confusion of ideas and terms here. Does a labour market imply freedom of movement? What about the existence of immigration controls in most countries? Moreoever, its quite true that Capital cannot exist without wage labour, but does the fact that a worker is not a wage worker mean he is not a worker? I think the idea that the workers in the USSR and other Stalinist states were an urban serf class does not stack up. If we are to make a comparison with the serfs under feudalism this becomes apparent. The actual serfs were tied to the land, and to the landlord. In the Stalinist states, enterprises hoarded labour because they had such a problem with retaining it. Workers would simply fail to turn up to work, and go and try a different factory or enterprise where they thought they might do better. They would often simply not turn up for work in the afternoon, frequently because they were drunk. This is not during those later times when workers were seeking methods of expressing frustration at the regime, but right from the beginning. It reflected that peasant, undisciplined attitude to work, and was as much a concern for Lenin and Trotsky as it was for Stalin.

The existence of slave type labour does not characterise the economy as pre-capitalist, but merely at a low level of technical development. Look at the extent that capitalism itself was dependent upon slavery as a means of primitive capital accumulation. Even in the 19th century as Marx remarks in Capital the capitalists were engaging in slavery within Britain itself with canal boat loads of workhouse inmates being bought wholesale by Northern Industrialists from the owners of the workhouses in the South and East Anglia, or the use of the Vagrancy laws which enabled right up until the end of the 19th century vagrants to be branded with an S on their foreheads, and used as a slave by whoever captured them. But, slavery and serfdom is slavery by another name is only compatible with low levels of productivity, primitive production. As the nature of production changes and more accurate and more delicate tools are used slavery dies out.

Its true that the USSR had to adjust the machines it acquired from the West, but the reason for that was the low technical level of the new workers who had only just been transformed from being peasants using medieval tools on the land. In the 1930’s productivity rose significantly, and it rose not because of Stakhanovism, but largely because of the effects of the investment in education and training that had by then been made, and which led to the establishment of a more highly skilled workforce. Unfortunately, a workforce that was wiped out in tens of millions a few years later in WWII.

“The very same phenomenon - scissors crisis, leading to a wildly ultra-left swing to coercing the peasantry under the name of "mobilizing" them, leading to mass starvation, etc. - can be seen most clearly in China's "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution". Milder forms of the same phenomenon have occurred in every soviet-style regime to have had a significant peasantry in the first place or to have created one through "land reform". A more extreme version can be seen in Cambodia under Pol Pot.”

But, the causes I would argue are the same, and not a function of freeing the peasantry, but of the inadequate development of industry, a problem of inadequate capital accumulation, and consequently an inability to meet the needs of the peasantry in terms of industrial products in exchange for their goods. In the case of Pol Pot, I don’t think even that is true. In Pol Pot’s case I would indeed agree with a description similar to yours, indeed I would go further and say that the State that he was trying to establish was not one transitional between feudalism and capitalism but was a feudal state full stop. For Marxists, the basic criteria is the development of the productive forces to a level beyond that achieved by Capitalism, but that was NEVER Pol Pot’s ambition. The charge could not be levelled at him that could be made against other “Marxist” regimes, to have tried and failed, because he never tried. From the beginning his goal was to smash all symbols of modernity, and to return Cambodia to a feudal, peasant economy.

“Trotsky anticipated in 1938 that the Stalin regime would collapse in the face of the coming world war. This assessment proved to be wrong. The frontal assault of Nazism in 1941 called forth an enormous mobilization of the Russian people (note the deliberate non-class expression of this point - workers, peasants and urban intelligentsia alike) under the banner of the defence of Holy Russia and the global people's front with US and British imperialism. The Soviet bureaucracy was significantly reshaped politically, but the regime held together at the head of this mass mobilization. The victories of the USSR opened the way for the creation of new Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Korea and Vietnam.”

But, I am concerned that you skip over the War in such a light manner given its importance, and its significance as a test both for your theory that the State was transitional between feudalism and capitalism, and for those new class theories which define the USSR as being some less progressive form than Capitalism. It has long been a dictum of Marxism that success in War is an indication of the development of the productive forces of a society. Certainly, in warfare for the last two centuries that has been the case, because the ability to effectively fight wars has been a function of the ability to produce effectively the means of destruction, and that is a function of the ability to produce industrially. In World War II, the USSR came up against one of the most industrially developed powers, Germany. Moreoever, despite the actual alignment of forces in the War itself Germany had been assisted in its rearmament both by Britain, and by the US. The US indeed, continued arming Germany through its plants in Germany such as Ford and General Motors which had been turned over to tank production, right up until the US entry into the War.

As Trotsky points out Russia despite its vast size and resources had not won a significant war against any developed nation for a long time. It could not even defeat Japan in 1905. Alec Nove gives details of Tsarist Russia’s terrible condition to fight a War in 1914, its utter incapacity to produce armaments in sufficient quantity or calibre, and so on. Yet, despite that, despite the enormous privations and destruction not just of the World war, but of the Civil War too, despite the terrible ineptitude, and waste of Stalinism we find a totally different picture even by the early 1930’s. Again Nove gives details of the percentage of GDP spent on armaments, a figure which remains remarkably low given the situation until the late 1930’s. Yet, Trotsky remarks in “The red Army” (March 1934) that the USSR was producing aircraft and heavy bombers in large numbers, he refers to a quote from Le temps which reported on a visit to the USSR by French technicians and French Minister of Aviation Cot, that they were “astonished and enthused” by the successes achieved.

And what of the actual empirical evidence? The fact is that on the outbreak of War with the USSR, despite the sizeable initial losses – the USSR lost around 25% of its industrial and agricultural production and territory, and around 30 million people, notably the young and future industrial proletariat – it was quickly able to relocate production, moving entire factories, and to direct that production into a war effort, which saw the introduction of some of the most technically developed equipment in terms of aircraft and tanks, and saw a massive commitment of Soviet citizens. Within short order it was able at a time when the US was not yet in the War, and was increasing its economic power, and when Britain was effectively defeated, and France actually was defeated, to turn all of that production round, and to roll over nazi Germany, and its allies in Eastern Europe. In addition we now know from Macarthur and others that the real reason for the Japanese surrender was not the dropping of the atomic bombs – the Japanese believed the US had none left – but was the fact that the USSR was sweeping down through Mongolia, and the Japanese preferred to surrender to the US than to be overrun by the USSR.

So for Marxists who place great store in determining societies from empirical evidence based on their productive capacity this begs some serious questions for those that argue that this was some reactionary (in the historical sense of the word) regime, because how is that a society with such productive relations can go from a medieval society, suffer the loss of millions of its citizens, huge swathes of its productive capacity, and yet in the space of 20 years turn itself into an industrial power capable of producing such technological weapons in such vast quantities, and simply roll over the most or at worst second most developed capitalist power of the time, and probably the most militarised power of the time, how indeed was it possible for this society with such a reactionary set of property relations, even despite the privations and losses caused to it during WWII, and the subsequent drain on its resources in propping up other regimes in Eastern Europe, in providing funding for national liberation movements around the world, and despite the economic restrictions placed upon it by the West, for such a society to become within just 30 years of the revolution the second superpower on the planet, a super power which outdid the other superpower in terms of the production of scientists, doctors and teachers, whose production relations enabled it to be the first into space, and even today to be ahead of the US in many aspects of space science. Now is not the time to get into whether the US actually did land on the Moon or not.

Go to Part V

What The Friends of the People Are, Part III - Part 46

Lenin describes a story given by Krivenko, illustrating the application of the theoretical and practical aspects of Narodism. The events occurred around 1869-70. Krivenko describes how a group of enthusiastic Narodnik socialists had gone amongst the peasants, spreading the word of The International, and regaling them with stories about the organisation of workers in the West. They failed to make any headway. At the same time, a German gardener began to show the peasants how to grow grapes and utilise other more advanced methods. In later years, the peasants held fond memories of him. But, what is the real lesson here? It is that the socialist message of the young Narodniks could not take hold, amongst the peasants, because their assumptions about the inherently communistic nature of the peasants and peasant life were false. Lenin was to write later about the actual individualistic nature of the Russian peasant, which made such spontaneous organisation of them impossible. He based his work on Kautsky, who found that the successful examples of agricultural cooperatives were all where they were created by agricultural workers, amongst whom the ideas of collectivism had already been established. 

"It goes without saying that Kautsky very emphatically maintains that communal, collective large-scale production is superior to capitalist large scale production. He deals with the experiments in collective farming made in England by the followers of Robert Owen* and with analogous communes in the United States of North America. All these experiments, says Kautsky, irrefutably prove that it is quite possible for workers to carry on large-scale modern farming collectively, but that for this possibility to become a reality "a number of definite economic, political, and intellectual conditions" are necessary. The transition of the small producer (both artisan and peasant) to collective production is hindered by the extremely low development of solidarity and discipline, the isolation, and the "property-owner fanaticism," noted not only among West-European peasants, but, let us add, also among the Russian "commune" peasants (recall A. N. Engelhardt and G. Uspensky). Kautsky categorically declares, "it is absurd to expect that the peasant in modern society will go over to communal production" (S. 129)." 

On pages 124-26 Kautsky describes the agricultural commune in Ralahine, of which, incidentally. Mr. Dioneo tells his Russian readers in Russkoye Bogatstvo,[51] No. 2, for this year. 

(Capitalism In Agriculture) 

And, of course, no Marxist would deny the advantage of bringing more advanced techniques of production to the peasants, but what is the actual basis upon which these techniques can be applied? It is on the basis of capitalist agriculture. The peasants best able to implement any such measures are the richer peasants, the peasants that acquire capital. The only other way in which such methods can be properly implemented is on the basis of socialised capital, of the development of agricultural cooperatives, but, as described above, it is not the peasants, imbued with a spirit of individualism, that are led to develop such social forms, but the agricultural labourers, a class which itself only arises as a consequence of capitalist development. 

“To draw a comparison with any sense in it, he should have inquired why the efforts of the young men and women who went among the people to stimulate the peasants to revolution were so unsuccessful—whether it was because they erroneously believed that the “peasantry” really represented the working people and exploited population, whereas in fact the peasantry does not constitute a single class (—an illusion only to be explained, perhaps, by the reflected influence of the epoch of the fall of serfdom, when the peasantry did indeed come forward as a class, but only as a class of feudal society), for within it a bourgeois and a proletarian class are forming—in a word, he should have examined the old socialist theories and the Social-Democratic criticism of these theories.” (p 279)

Back To Part 45

Forward To Part 47

The Economics of Co-operation - Part 1

Economics undergraduates are given a definition of Economics, which basically says that it is the study of the “allocation of scarce resources to meet unlimited wants.” Its an inadequate definition shaped by the concerns of the dominant Western School of Economics that arose out of the “Marginal Revolution”, a revolution which shifted the emphasis from what the study of Economics had until that time been about – essentially HOW society goes about producing what it produces, the laws which determine what things are produced and how that impacts on the way they are distributed – on to the mundane question of how efficiency and welfare can be increased by reallocation of inputs at the margin. In defining Economics in this way, it cuts out all possibility of raising the most important questions, which any study of Economics as a study of human society, need to raise.

The framework in which this optimal allocation is most frequently posited is that of so called Pareto Optimality. This can be summarised as saying this. Given any set of original conditions, an optimal state is reached – say for production – where no reallocation of resources, factor inputs, can result in an increase in output of at least one product without a consequent reduction in output of all other products. Similarly, and as a concomitant of this no reallocation can result in an increase in welfare for at least one person, whilst resulting in no reduction in welfare for every other individual.

It can fairly easily be seen what is wrong with all this. Take the definition. Is it true either that there are scarce resources, or unlimited wants? For thousands of years, the Plains Indians in America faced no such dilemma.

The fortunate topography of where they lived meant that there was abundant food resources in the form of herds of bison and other animals, and there was an abundance of root vegetables as well as fruit and nuts ample to feed the population. The climate and wide open spaces meant that the need for shelter and warmth could be accomplished and so on. Moreover, the Indians had lived their lives for all that time with a culture and limited range of needs that these ample resources could easily meet. They would have failed to understand the meaning of this definition of Economics. In fact, the idea of unlimited wants is a rather recent phenomenon. The Medieval peasant

whilst having a wider range of wants than the Plains Indian had a much more limited range of wants than the average person in today’s consumer society. It is one reason why for very long periods of time peasant societies were content to continue to use their traditional means and methods of producing in order to satisfy those limited wants. It is Capitalism, which in its need to continually expand the market, expand the scale and range within which Capital can operate and expand, which creates the idea of unlimited wants. It is Monopoly Capitalism, which needs to produce on a huge scale in order to enjoy the benefits of the economies of large scale production, which needs to keep its huge investments of fixed Capital constantly employed, and which relies on the consumption of millions of wage workers, which creates through sophisticated advertising and marketing, through the provision of consumer credit, the idea of unlimited wants, of a consumer society, or “retail therapy”, based on instant gratification through the continual purchase of ephemera, of throw away products.

A Plains Indian or a medieval peasant would probably look on in bewilderment at such a society. Often to explain economic principles Economists have referred to Robinson Crusoe on his island. Generally, such examples are rather facile, but they can sometimes illustrate a point. Imagine poor Robinson operating by such means. With his limited resource – his Labour Power – he deliberately, produces a pair of trousers that will quickly wear out, just so that he can keep himself busy some other day making a new pair of trousers, instead of spending his scarce Labour Power on producing something else that he requires!

And if we consider those Pareto Optimality conditions the obvious point is that they fail to consider some important issues. By simply accepting, the original starting points they rule out any question of how the different economic players arrived at that original factor endowment.

So the fact that one set of actors – the owners of Capital – arrived at that position by piracy, thieving or other unsavoury methods is not considered, along with the fact that other actors those who only have Labour Power as a commodity to sell, perhaps arrived at that position because they had had their means of production thieved from them! It can only tell us what is an optimum allocation on the basis of those original conditions. It does not tell us, for instance, if some other set of factor endowments were the starting point whether some new optimal condition could arise that would be even more efficient, create an even higher level of welfare than that first optimum.

Furthermore, it is a static model of optimality. It effectively assumes that the re-allocations of resources has no consequence for the nature of the factors themselves. But, this is quite clearly an untenable assumption. Take Capital in the form of machines and equipment. It is not homogenous and unchanging.

A reallocation of inputs might create an optimum condition provided we assume that no such change occurs, but it could be that a diversion of resources might result in the production of a machine that is twice as effective as current equipment, and consequently the efficiency of Capital against Labour is fundamentally altered. It would imply a reallocation to divert resources to employing more Capital and less Labour. Similarly, simply assuming that a change in welfare that results in the increase in welfare for already rich Capitalists, whilst no reduction in the welfare of workers, will have no negative consequences is also a rather silly assumption. It can be fairly well assumed that workers will react to such a change either by demanding higher wages for themselves, or else reducing the productivity of their output by various means.

I don’t start with this apparent diversion for no good reason. I do so in order to point out the limitations of attempting to study the economics of Co-operative production using the usual tools of orthodox economics. Although, I intend to look at those orthodox theories, and to deal with them in their own terms, I hope to show why the assumptions generally used have to be modified, and I also hope to show that the use of Marxist Value Theory is a better guide to understanding Co-operative Production and distribution.

Although, its not overtly stated, the Paretian model is always presented as though this allocation of resources to maximise production and welfare is effected through a competition between and for inputs. In other words an assumption of a competitive market. That is not essential. In fact, the Paretian Economist, Oskar Lange,

was one of those who showed in the 1930’s that the claim of Von Mises and others that planning was impossible, because its impossible to calculate efficient prices, was wrong. But, it is fairly unsurprising given the fact of the ruling capitalist ideas, that a general assumption of competitive behaviour is made, the notion that Man himself by nature is competitive. In the year of the centenary of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”, it also has to be admitted that whatever the general benefits that have derived from that theory, it along with Darwin himself, who, in later editions of his work, took on board the concept of “a war of all against all”, has contributed to the idea of Man as a naturally competitive animal like all others. Its worth I think before proceeding further to just look at that idea, and check its validity. In fact, I would argue that far from such competition being natural it is the very opposite.

If we think about most animals we in fact see Co-operative behaviour at least as much as competitive behaviour. Animals congregate in herds, because they provide protection against predators, particularly as means of protecting the young. Every member of the herd acts to keep watch and convey any sign of danger to the rest of the herd. Similarly, predators often hunt in packs combining their actions to best secure the kill.

In fact, its long been known that even animals thought to be natural enemies are only so, because of the environment in which their behaviour is conditioned. Experiments with animals have shown that through conditioned reflexes, far-reaching alterations in the environment have the effect of abolishing aggressive tendencies, which were once thought to be “unchangeable”. Its been shown that its possible to get cats and rats to co-operate peacefully provided you start the training early enough, and provided the obtaining of food is based on co-operation. As Zing Y. Kuo put it “Genesis of Cat’s Responses to the Rat”, in Journal of Comparative Psychology Vol II 1931 p35, “Nothing is more natural than for the cat to ‘love’ the rat. And if one insists that the rat has an instinct to kill the rat, I must add that it has an instinct to love the rat too.” In nature behaviour is what can be built in and not what is supposed to unfold from within. In the same journal Loh Seng Tsai came to a similar conclusion in his article “Peace and Co-operation among Natural Enemies”.

Both are quoted by the eminent American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in his book ”Direction of Human Development” see pp 34-5, 35-8. See: Montagu .

Langois even undertook similar experiments with perch that were presumed to be cannibalistic and showed they could be trained not to be. Montagu concluded,

“Slight changes in the environment are sufficient to change the behaviour of creatures from a cannibalism that was erroneously thought to be instinctive to social behaviour that is co-operative.” Op cit p44.

More recent studies also demonstrate that animals can co-operate.

Science Daily

Elena Berg Co-operative Jays

In fact, there is profusion of evidence of Co-operative behaviour in the natural world, and recent developments of Darwin’s Theory demonstrate why that is.

As Richard Dawkins has argued in The Selfish Gene what characterises natural behaviour is not a desire for the individual member of the species to survive and multiply, but the need for the SPECIES to survive and multiply, and so altruistic or co-operative behaviour amongst members of that species is the most effective way of achieving that end. This explains why some ants or bees give up their individual rights to pass on their genes, and live their lives servicing the hive instead.

It is unlikely that what is a basic urge within nature is not present in Man himself. In fact, as Mandel outlines in ”Marxist Economic Theory” there is more reason to believe that this altruism and co-operation is more natural in Man than in all other parts of Nature. As Ashley Montagu puts it in his book “Direction of Human Development” and also in Malinowski’s “A Scientific Theory of Culture” p209, competition is a tendency which is not “innate” but socially acquired. And as others have noted, of all the higher mammals it is the very biological nature of man, which makes him more disposed to co-operation, solidarity etc. than to competition. Man is a social being not just in the sociological sense but in the biological sense too. He is born in the weakest state of all the higher mammals, least protected and least capable of self-defence. Anthropo-biology considers Man to be an embryo prematurely born, one of the reasons for his greater adaptability thanks to socialisation, in fact its now thought that this is one of the features that leads to the creation of Modern man as a species. (See Portmann “Die Zoologie und das neueste bild des menschen pp74-76 and La barre “L’Animal humain” pp5051)

And, again as Mandel points out even studies undertaken in the most unpromising conditions – those of Nazi Germany – have confirmed this. Professor A. Gehlen in fact conducted one of the studies, which proved this, under the Nazi regime. See “Der Mensch” pp39-40 and Portmann “Die Zoologie und das neuest bild des menschen” p14. The Nazis tried to direct anthropology towards the study of “unchangeable biological characteristics” of “racial substances” and the like. Scientific truth showed itself stronger than these charlatan appeals even though the Nazis had massive state power behind them. As Gehlen concludes from his studies what is distinctive about man is precisely his capacity for adaptation, his capacity to create a second nature in the culture, which forms the only framework in which he can live.

(The above taken from Mandel “Marxist Economic Theory” pp 669-71)

So discussing Co-operation in terms of Economics as a means of Man achieving his basic needs is not in some way to suggest a change in Man’s behaviour, certainly not to suggest a change to a way of producing that is alien to Man, but is really to look at the specific ways in which that Co-operation has manifested itself in the past, how it is manifested within present Monopoly Capitalism, and how the current material conditions lead towards future such Co-operation, and the most effective means of organising it. The forms of Co-operation depend upon the forms of property that exist in society, and those forms of property in themselves depend upon the nature of the productive forces at any specific time, and the productive relations which grow up on those forces.

The most primitive forms of Co-operation arise within the most primitive societies where the limited nature of the productive forces prevents the development of private property in the means of production as a decisive social force. At its most basic level we can consider human society arising out of the animal world with packs of humans as hunters and gatherers with very little in terms of weapons or tools to assist their productive efforts, and whereby co-operative effort is essential. In fact, one of the techniques used by North American Indians involved no weapons at all, but consisted in driving the Bison towards a cliff or ravine into which they fell to their death. But, the first such weapons and tools would have been available materials – sticks to scrabble in the Earth with, or to sharpen as spears, rocks to throw or again to sharpen for use as a cutting blade. But, such tools would have formed a small part of the human activity of production. Quickly, worn out, destroyed there would be little in the way to be retained by the individual hunter-gatherer in the way of means of production. The main element would be the combined and collective effort of the members of the clan or tribe, and that collective effort in production would find its concomitant in the collective consumption of what was produced.

Even when society develops beyond such primitive levels and tools become more durable and passed on within the family such co-operative behaviour continues not because it is economically necessary in the strict sense, but because it gives other benefits, benefits which orthodox economics does not take into consideration when evaluating the responses of Labour as a factor input within a competitive model.

”The interest of primitive work is increased, and its drudgery mitigated, by the fact that it is often co-operative. Major undertakings, such as house-building or the construction of large canoes, usually require the labour of more than one person. And even when the task concerned could be done individually, primitive peoples often prefer collective labour. Thus in Hehe agriculture much of the cultivation is done individually or by small family groups. But at the time of the annual hoeing of the ground, it is customary for a man to announce that on a certain day his wife will brew beer. His relatives and neighbours attend, help with the hoeing, and are rewarded with beer in the middle of the day and in the evening. This is not to be regarded as payment, since casual visitors who have not helped with the hoeing may also take part in the beer drink. Under this system, each man helps others and is helped by them in turn. From the purely economic point of view, the system has no advantage, since each man could quite well hoe his own ground and the preparation of beer adds substantially to the work involved. But the system does possess psychological advantages. The task of hoeing might well appear endless if undertaken by each individual separately. Collective labour, and the collateral activity of beer-drinking, changes a dreary task into a social occasion. The same principle applies to collective labour in general in primitive society, and to the social activities of feasting, dancing and other forms of collective enjoyment which frequently accompany it or mark its conclusion.”

See for example: An Introduction to Social Anthropology – Piddington .

Even the development of slave society does not abolish such Co-operation in production, but the form of Co-operation changes. For the slave certainly it changes, the slave is now required to co-operate with other slaves in order to undertake production typically on some large plantation, or in some mine but as the property of the slave owner the slave does not engage in such co-operation on the basis of their own free will, not out of some desire for mutual advantage in bringing about a higher level of productive efficiency, nor even as described above by Piddington to reduce the tedium or unpleasantness of the work, but solely on the instruction of the slave-owner, who already recognises the advantages of the division of labour, whose concomitant co-operation is.

Moreover, it has to be remembered that even in the most successful slave societies such as the Roman Empire only a minority were slaves. At most around 30% of the population were slaves, though the figure is likely to have been much smaller than this. See: Slavery The majority of people were peasant producers with also a sizeable number of artisans as trade had a large role in the City States. And, although peasant production represents individual production par excellence, most peasants through to perhaps as late as the 18th century continued to live in some form of communal organisation be it a clan, or as in the case of Medieval Europe the Village Commune, and with similar structures within the Asiatic Mode of Production. Clan ownership of land continued until the Highland clearances in Scotland, and in Ireland clan ownership of land continued until it was forcibly destroyed by the British in successive apportionments to those who assisted the British State. Through until the General Enclosure Act in England of 1801, and similar measures throughout Europe, alongside the village commune stood the Common Land, owned and used in common by all the peasants and landless labourers.

And in the US even into quite modern times the principal of co-operation still existed even amongst the most individualistic of peasant farmers in the custom of “barn-raising” whereby farmers would all join together to help build a new barn for one of their neighbours, in a way reminiscent of the accounts given by Piddington above.

See:

Clans
Medieval Commune
Barn Raising

So, it is important to remember that even at the height of the age of individualism in the 18th century, an individualism that arises out of the nature of the form of individual, self-sustaining peasant production that leads to the development of the Libertarian

ideals of that century summed up in the writings of Rousseau, co-operation continued to be a powerful force within human production and life, but its specific form is dictated by the nature of productive relations, and of the property relations which dominate. It is not co-operation as collective action for overall production, as in the case of the primitive communist society, but co-operation between atomised family units for the purpose of mutual support. In a sense we see the same kind of co-operation today in the numerous agricultural co-operatives of particularly Southern Europe. The Co-op is not a collective farm effort, but a joint organisation made up of individual farms for such mutual support, and for the more effective marketing of output, or for the sharing of costs on the provision of equipment etc.

The revolutionising aspect of Capitalist production is that it does away with these individual family units of production and combines them in one large co-operative productive effort. But, where the individual peasant producer shares in common with the member of the primitive commune a decision to engage in co-operative effort out of free will, out of a recognition that such co-operative effort is to their own advantage, the worker in the Capitalist enterprise in contrast shares with the slave the distinction that their co-operation is borne not out of any such mutual benefit, nor even of lessening the tedium or drudgery of the task at hand – on the contrary the raising of the division of labour to previously unheard of heights magnifies those aspects of the work process – but, purely on the behest of the Capitalist who buys their labour power, and who recognises the tremendous power of that division of labour, and of the co-operative production function in order to raise the productivity of labour to every higher levels. It can be summed up like this in the Primitive Commune and the Peasant Commune it is the producer who owns the means of production, and that dictates the motivation for the Co-operation, and dictates its nature. In the slave society and under Capitalism, the producer does not own the Means of Production, and again that determines the motivation for Co-operation, and dictates its nature.

From the earliest human societies to today Co-operation has remained a constant of human labour and production. Its form and function have changed as the forms of production and property have changed.

In today’s Capitalism Co-operation has been raised in production to levels that would have been inconceivable in the period of 19th century free market capitalism. That Capitalism began by farming out production by Merchants to individual peasant producers, and then selling their individual products, increasingly raising their productivity as they concentrated more and more on that production at the expense of expending their labour on meeting their own immediate needs. It progressed by bringing those individual peasants together into a manufactory where, still using handicraft methods their labour could be combined in a co-operative manner to raise productivity, and thereby through the division of labour to increase productivity further by each worker becoming a specialist carrying out one single function, and their labour then being dependent upon co-operation with all other workers each of whom had their own specific function to perform.

But, this co-operation between different aspects of the labour process was only one aspect of the general extension of co-operative labour that Capitalism brought about. Each enterprise was in its turn dependent upon the output of other enterprises in which a similar process of co-operation took place, so that a division of labour occurred not just within the factory, but within the economy as a whole.

Adam Smith set out the idea that this co-operation arises within Capitalism spontaneously as a result of each individual seeking to maximise their own benefits. The butcher does not co-operate in providing meat to their customer out of any sense of altruism, but in order to turn a profit. It just so happens that this act benefits both parties who obtain what they want. Of course, Smith’s notion of the invisible hand here is one that a Marxist would challenge, and other economists too. Joe Stiglitz for example commented, "the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there." (Making Globalization Work, 2006).

Yet, the fact remains that in a very real sense Capitalism does raise to a high level this need for co-operation in production. The fact that this co-operation is not planned, that the invisible hand isn’t there, doesn’t change that fact, it only tells us something about the specific nature of Co-operation under Capitalism, its specific form determined by the productive relations and forms of property. In fact, its that criticism of the fact that under Capitalism that Co-operation is NOT planned, which is the fundamental basis for arguing for the rational extension of that Co-operation in a way which overcomes that criticism, which leads to a new form of Co-operation in the form of Worker Owned Co-operatives, and which in their turn form the rational core of the argument for socialism.

In fact, globalisation shows the degree to which Capitalism HAS raised that co-operation already. Globalisation makes every worker in Britain reliant upon tens of millions of workers all around the globe whether that reliance is upon the output of those workers for the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the car they drive and so on, or for the materials and machines they utilise in their own work process every day.

And, although the classical definitions of Capitalism talk about it being based on such concepts as competition and risk, the reality is that Capitalists themselves have always done everything they could to avoid both!!! The first large Capitalist enterprises were themselves Monopolies guaranteed by Royal Charter like the East India Company. From, the end of the 19th century in place of competition the Capitalists instead attempted to develop production based on their own Co-operation first in the form of price fixing agreements, then of cartels, and then of giant Trusts, the whole motivation for which was the removal of competition and risk.

As early as the middle of the 19th century the US Capitalists had forged a close relationship with the State, which provided its Army to clear American Indians from their lands so their railroad could traverse it, and which imposed high tariffs on foreign goods so those Capitalists could develop their own production free from external competition.

And as those cartels and trusts themselves became obsolete as the average size of many businesses expanded to huge proportions as the economies of scale ensured that production had to be conducted on an ever larger scale with ever larger investments of fixed Capital so those firms increasingly had to look to protect their investments in the long term, by looking for co-operation from the State in providing an overall macro-economic environment in which they could continue to invest with a certain degree of confidence, confidence that an adequate supply of suitable labour would be available, confidence that an adequate level of aggregate demand would continue in the economy so that they could sell their commodities at prices that guaranteed a return on those investments.

And in an economy where it is these huge enterprises that effectively determine the market price, and where the main concern is to ensure that their huge investments continue to be fully utilised, the mechanism for determining production, for allocating Capital can no longer be the idea of responses to the price mechanism, but can only be the formulation of long term production and business plans, based on sophisticated market research, demographics etc. and the shaping of the market around the margin by the use of psychologically based marketing and advertising techniques. In fact, except for this latter many of the techniques that a society in transition might use to determine consumer needs, and to organise production to meet them. Even that other fundamental aspect of an economy based on Co-operation rather than competition can be detected within the modern Capitalist economy. In the motorcar industry the huge costs involved have led to a sharing of not just technology, but of the basic building blocks of car construction. Nearly all motor manufacturers now share engines, gear boxes, etc., whilst the application of game theory to design and production decisions ensures – if the latter technical requirements didn’t already necessitate it – that within each range each manufacturer’s products are barely distinguishable from another’s. As the old song used to have it “boxes, little boxes all the same.”

In fact, one form of Co-operative production that began in the realm of computer programming – Open Source – has now even found its way into motor manufacture, as a means of reducing R&D costs. See: Open Source Car at Geneva Motor Show

In fact, if we look at modern capitalism we find that it has been forced increasingly to adopt the basic techniques and forms of a Co-operative, socialist society. Huge monopolistic enterprises engage in market research to determine consumer wants i.e. to ascertain what use values they should produce – though it has to be said that they also shape those consumer desires to fit what they have already committed to – and then develop long term plans to organise production accordingly. Large sections of the capitalist economy are taken out of the circuit of Capital and placed in the realm of direct production of Use Values i.e. provision of services by the Capitalist State such as Healthcare, Education, Roads and infrastructure, Social Services, Security and so on, amounting in most advanced economies to around 40% of all economic activity(See Edit Below). The provision of a “planned” macro environment. The recent examples of State intervention to deal with the consequences of risk taking by sections of Capital in the Bank bail-outs, and probably bail-outs of other sections of Capital, for example in the Motor Industry – even Larry Flynt has now petitioned for Congress to give a bail-out to the Sex Industry (I’ll resist the temptation to say because its fell on hard times) – show how far it is from the concept of Capitalism based on Competition and Risk Taking. The Anarcho-Capitalist variety of Libertarian may well bemoan such facts and conclude that they mean that what exists is some form of Mercantilism or even Socialism, but the truth is that what exists is just the mature form of Capitalism. A Capitalism in which the need to remove competition and risk taking, to enhance Co-operation etc. has been taken to the limit that it can reach within the confines of a still essentially Capitalist economy, an economy in which for all the above features the driving force remains the organisation of production in order to maximise profits over the longer term. The only way in which that process can be taken further now, is to step outside the bounds which Capitalist production imposes and to begin to organise production on a basis other than long-term profit maximisation.

(January 2011 Edit)
They are only taken out of the circuit of Capital in the sense that this is true for all Monopolies. For example, Marx shows how the Monopoly of Land Ownership leads to Capital involved in agriculture being taken out of the Circuit of Capital in the calculation of the Average Rate of Profit. It is this fact, which enables the Landlord to extract Rent. Similarly, an effective Monopoly enables a similar extraction of Rent, which may take the form of Monopoly Profit, or higher rates of wages. However, Marx makes the point that although competition leads to Monopoly, Monopoly also leads to competition. If Monopoly profits are being made, then this will lead to other large Capitalists entering production, or will lead to the development of alternative products. The same is true if the Monopoly leads to the prices of the product rising to levels that are uncompetitive with available alternatives, due to the monopoly leading to a lack of dynamism, and failure to revolutionise technique.

A lot of this can be related to the State Capitalist Sector, and the analysis of Aglietta in relation to neo-Fordism are relevant. Capital should be viewed as a single entity, and each enterprise as just a Department. A large company that provides a creche in order to sustain its supply of Labour Power, does not establish it as a profit making centre. The same company that sets up a gym for its workers to use, again does not do so as a profit making centre, but as a means of maximising its supply of suitable Labour Power. Yet, the Capital involved in providing the creche or the gym remain Capital, remain an expenditure to buy Labour Power, as much as if it had been laid out as wages. The role of the Capitalist State is the same. Its function is to ensure the reproduction of Labour Power, and the provision of State Education, and Healthcare are a central aspect of that function. But, if the company were to prove inefficient in the provision of the creche or gym, compared to some other private provider, then it would be possible for the workers to negotiate with the employer for a rise in wages in return for the employer no longer providing the creche and gym. The employer would raise profits by a reduction in costs, and workers living standards would rise provided the increase in wages was more than the cost of the new provision of creche and gym facilities.

This is essentially the situation workers face in the event that new more efficient provision of Education or Healthcare or other welfare provision opens up by alternative providers to the State Capitalist.

Forward to Part 2

The Heritage We Renounce - Section II - Narodism’s Addition to the “Heritage” (3/3)

Engelhardt had described the true nature of the muzhik as individualistic and seeing themselves as a future kulak, yet he argued that what was needed was not factories, but small rural enterprises, such as distilleries and oil mills, as though these could be developed on a non-capitalist basis.

“It is one thing’ to argue that progress is possible without capitalism, and another thing to farm yourself. Having set himself the aim of conducting his farm on rational lines, Engelhardt was compelled, by virtue of surrounding circumstances, to strive for this by purely capitalistic methods and to leave aside all his theoretical and abstract misgivings concerning the “employment of farm labourers.” In the field of theory Skaldin argued like a typical member of the Manchester School, completely failing to realise both that his arguments were of just this character, and that they corresponded to the needs of Russia’s capitalist evolution. In the field of practice Engelhardt was compelled to act as a typical Mancunian, despite his theoretical protest against capitalism and his desire to believe that his fatherland was following a path of its own.” (p 511)

And, again, this illustrates the contradictory, utopian and reactionary nature of petty-bourgeois, moral socialism. Because it is idealist, it sets up moral imperatives of how it thinks the world should be, rather than how it is, and it then sets out its vision of how it wants the world to be, according to a preconceived path of development that is not connected to how the world is, or the laws of social development. Its vision continually conflicts with material reality, and it is left trying to force the two into alignment, by denying the reality, and constructing fantasies. It acts to try to hold back actual development.

“Though his own farming experience and his exposure of the peasant’s individualism refuted all illusions concerning the “community spirit,” Engelhardt not only “believed” that the peasants could adopt an artel form of economy, but expressed the “conviction” that such would indeed be the case, and that we, the Russians, would accomplish this great feat and introduce a new mode of farming. “It is this that constitutes the exceptional character, the specific nature of our economy” (p. 349). Engelhardt the realist turns into Engelhardt the romanticist, who replaces the complete lack of “exceptional character” in his own methods of farming, and in the peasants’ farming methods as he observed them by “faith” in a future “exceptional character”! From this faith it is only a stone’s throw to the ultra-Narodnik features which—though very few—one finds in Engelhardt, to a narrow nationalism bordering on chauvinism”. (p 512)

This relation between petty-bourgeois moralism and chauvinism is also not unusual, because, in order to argue that some alternative path is possible, based purely on idealism, its necessary to assert some form of exceptionalism, which is always the basis of parochialism and nationalism.

Back To Part 2

Forward To Section Three

The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 2 - Part 16

Struve objects to the subjectivists making individuality a primary factor in sociological theory. He refers to Simmel's “Social Differentiation” to show that individuality is conditioned by social group, and social groups are a product of differentiation. However, Lenin says Struve falls into the same error as Mikhailovsky, by making this argument in abstract terms, rather than on the basis of a concrete analysis. So, for example, Lenin says, the replacement of capitalist manufacture, based on the detail worker, by machine industry, results in an homogenisation of labour. But, rather than leading to a corresponding homogenisation of the individuality of these workers it leads to the possibility of them developing far greater individuality. 

“Why could not the whole argument have been transferred to the concrete process of evolution of Russia? The author has made an attempt to formulate the question in this way, and had he adhered to it consistently his argument would have gained a great deal.” (p 413) 

Mikhailovsky saw the division of labour as equivalent of Man's fall from grace, because he fetishised the old peasant production, whereby the peasant household undertook all forms of labour required for its own reproduction. This homogenised existence he sees as creating a social group sharing the same individual characteristics as also the foundation of their social solidarity. Rather than division of labour, Mikhailovsky should really have said capitalism, and even Russian capitalism. 

“Capitalism is progressive in its significance precisely because it has destroyed the old cramped conditions of human life that created mental stultification and prevented the producers from taking their destinies into their own hands. The tremendous development of trade relations and world exchange and the constant migrations of vast masses of the population have shattered the age-old fetters of the tribe, family and territorial community, and created that variety of development, that “variety of talents and wealth of social relationships,” which plays so great a part in the modern history of the West. In Russia this process has been fully manifested in the post-Reform era, when the ancient forms of labour very rapidly collapsed and prime place was assumed by the purchase and sale of labour-power, which tore the peasant from the patriarchal, semi-feudal family, from the stupefying conditions of village life and replaced the semi-feudal forms of appropriation of surplus-value by purely capitalist forms. This economic process has been reflected in the social sphere by a “general heightening of the sense of individuality,” by the middle-class intellectuals squeezing the landlord class out of “society,” by a heated literary war against senseless medieval restrictions on the individual, and so on.” (p 414) 

The Narodniks would admit that the Emancipation led to a heightened sense of individuality, but they do not examine what material conditions led to the Emancipation. In Russia, just as Marx describes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in relation to France, the peasants are freed from feudal bonds, only to be bound by bourgeois bonds forged from the extension of credit. 

“If the Narodnik gentlemen are filled with pharisaic horror when they hear talk of the progressive character of Russian capitalism, it is only because they do not reflect on the material conditions which make for those “benefits of progress” that mark post-Reform Russia.” (p 415) 

Mikhailovsky's individualistic subjective sociology begins with the protests against the accidental nature of capitalism, in Russia, that is taking it down an unnatural path. But, Lenin says he fails to recognise that it is only capitalism that has created this individualism, along with the conditions that enable such individual protest. Here again there is seen the weakness of Struve's approach because he should have made his attack along the line of the concrete reality of conditions in Russia. The Narodniks had based their arguments on what might be for the simple reason that the facts of what was were daily destroying the foundations of the Narodnik position. 

The materialist starts from facts and then determines how ideas are developed on the basis of those facts. 

“The Narodnik subjectivists do exactly the opposite: they base their arguments on “ideals,” without bothering about the fact that these ideals can only be a certain reflection of reality, and, consequently, must be verified by facts, must be based on facts.” (p 416) 

The same applies today to the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. They start with an ideal “anti-capitalism” or “anti-imperialism” but do not address the facts of what, in any concrete situation, this involves. In the absence of any credible socialist alternative to capitalism or imperialism, the only other alternative is a step backwards, and is, thereby, reactionary. Simply declaring on the grounds purely of a set of ideas that the alternative to capitalism/imperialism is socialism, is simply the same kind of positing of pious wishes that the Narodniks engaged in. Unless, here and now, Socialism is on the agenda, simply declaring that your “anti-capitalism” is expressed in a demand for a non-existent socialist alternative is sheer revolutionary phrasemongering. What is more, because this socialist alternative only exists as a pious wish, a pipe-dream, of “what might be”, rather than what is, continuing with this “anti-capitalism/imperialism”, in real terms, can only mean a demand to turn the clock backwards, to some condition prior to this capitalism/imperialism, and so, consequently, is both Utopian and reactionary. 

For the “anti-capitalists/Imperialists”, as much as for the Narodniks, this seems incomprehensible, because they believe that their ideals trump facts. They believe that facts are to be shaped according to their ideals.

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What The Friends of The People Are, Part III - Part 36

1984-5 showed that "The People" actually
meant only the capitalist class and its state.

The same kind of nonsense about “the people” is seen today, and has been enhanced by the development of welfare states, which form a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They help create the delusion that the state is a “people's state” and so class neutral, rather than what it is, which is a capitalist state, there to protect and enhance the interests of the capitalist class. It could be seen in he signs erected at collieries when they were nationalised after WWII, which spoke of them being acquired on behalf of the people, when nothing could have been further from the truth. It can be seen in the claptrap when people talk about “Our NHS”, when again it is nothing of the kind, and if it were, ought to be a source of shame for “us”. 

Lenin notes, 

“Yes, gentlemen, that’s how he puts them, side by side: “science” and “commission agencies.”. . . The time to study the “friends of the people” is not when they are fighting the Social-Democrats, because on such occasions they don a uniform sewn from tatters of their “fathers’ ideals,” but in their everyday clothes, when they are discussing in detail the affairs of daily life. Then you get the full colour and flavour of these petty-bourgeois ideologists.” (p 254-5) 

The Narodniks presented this vision of society from the perspective entirely of the condition and experience of the petty-bourgeoisie. In all of it, they failed to mention that what was actually happening, in the countryside, and had been happening since 1861, was that vast numbers of peasants were being impoverished and dispossessed, and for whom all such ideas about employing technicians and modern equipment were simply fantasies. 

“One would think that, even apart from an analysis of our rural economy, it is enough to observe this striking fact in our modern economic history—namely, the generally-noted progress in peasant farming, parallel to the tremendous expropriation of the “peasantry”—to become convinced of the absurdity of picturing the “peasantry” as a single harmonious and homogeneous whole, to become convinced of the bourgeois character of all this progress! But the “friends of the people” remain deaf to all this. Having lost the good features of the old Russian social-revolutionary Narodism, they cling tightly to one of its grave errors—its failure to understand the class antagonism within the peasantry.” (p 255) 

Lenin refers to the work of Hourwich, who, in turn, notes that, back in the 1870's, it was also Gleb Uspensky who had noticed that “individualism had become the basis of economic relations, not only as between the usurer and the debtor, but among the peasants at large. Cf. his article “Casting in One Mould” (Ravneniye pod odno), Russkaya Mysl, 1882, No. 1.” (Op. cit., p. 106.)” That the Narodniks, in that period, in the 1860's and 70's, should have failed to notice the differentiation of the peasantry was excusable, Lenin says, because it was at an early stage, and accurate information about the countryside was not available, but no such excuse existed for the Narodniks of the 1890's. 

Vorontsov had even written a book stuffed with economic data showing that the technical development of the peasantry was occurring at a pace. Lenin notes, 

“The reason the search for new methods of cultivation” is becoming “feverish” that the enterprising muzhik has to run a larger farm, and cannot cope with it by the old methods; that he is compelled by competition to seek new methods, inasmuch as agriculture is increasingly acquiring a commodity, bourgeois character.” (Note *, p 256) 

But, Vorontsov fails to state that, alongside the technical development, undertaken by the richer peasants, vast number of poorer peasants were dispossessed. 

“They bury their heads in the sand like ostriches so as to avoid looking facts in the face, so as not to notice that they are witnessing the process of the transformation into capital of the land from which the peasant is being separated, the process of creation of a home market.” (p 256)

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