ABSTRACT
‘Bolshevism took shape, developed and became steeled in long years of struggle against petit bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism’ (Lenin, 1968T, 17). Indeed, Lenin’s perception of village communism as a ‘petit bourgeois’ red herring pervaded his first publication, What the People’s Friends Are (1894). In Lenin’s view, ‘Belief in the peasant’s communist instincts’ had induced Russian socialists ‘to set politics aside and “go among the people” … but practice soon convinced them of the naivety of the idea’. Thereupon ‘their entire activity was concentrated on a fight against the government, a fight waged by intelligenti alone’, but still ‘based on a theory that the people were ready for socialism and that, merely by seizing power, it would be possible to effect a social as well as a political revolution’. But this too was ‘based on a purely mythical idea of the peasant economy as a special communal system: the myth dissolved when it came into contact with reality; and peasant socialism turned into radical-democratic representation of the petit bourgeois peasantry’. For Lenin, village communism was a vain desire to have one’s cake and eat it: ‘Our petit bourgeois knights wish to preserve the peasant’s “tie” with the land, but not the serfdom which alone ensured this tie.… They want commodity economy without capitalism.… They don’t understand the antagonistic character of our production relations, within the “peasantry” as within other social estates.’ And ‘instead of trying to bring this antagonism into the open … they dream of stopping the struggle by measures that would satisfy everybody, to achieve reconciliation’. He thought ‘credit, migration, tax reform and transfer of all land to the peasants won’t appreciably change anything, but must on the contrary strengthen and develop capitalist economy’, as ‘all these credits, improvements, banks and similar “progressive” measures will be accessible only to the individual who, possessing a properly run and established farm, has certain “savings”, i.e. to … an insignificant minority’. Moreover, ‘the possible improvement in the position of a few individuals … can only be meagre and precarious on the general basis of capitalist relations’. As for ‘socialization’ of agriculture and village industries, this ‘requires organization of production on a scale exceeding the confines of a single village’. Indeed, ‘the organization of our “people’s” handicraft industries furnishes an excellent illustration of the development of capitalism’. Since ‘most handicraftsmen occupy a position in production that is not independent, but completely dependent’, organizationally ‘handicraft industry is pure capitalism; it differs from large-scale mechanized industry in being technically backward … and in its workers’ retention of minute farms’. But ‘don’t imagine that exploitation and oppression is any less pronounced because relations of this sort are still poorly developed.… Quite the contrary. This only leads to cruder, serf-like forms of exploitation, whereby capital, as yet unable to subjugate the worker directly … enmeshes him in a net of usurious extortion’ and ‘robs him not only of surplus value, but much of his wages too’. Lenin regarded ‘the work of our capitalism as progressive when it draws small, scattered markets into one nationwide market … when it shatters the subordination of working people to local blood-suckers and subordinates them to large-scale capital’. The latter ‘is progressive compared with the former — despite all the horrors of oppression of labour … the brutalization and the maiming of women and children because it awakens the worker’s mind, converts dumb, incoherent discontent into conscious protest, converts scattered, mindless revolt into organized class struggle to emancipate all working people’. Assuming it to be the common aspiration of socialists to ‘organize large-scale production without employers, it is first necessary to abolish the commodity economy in favour of a communal, communist system under which production is regulated not by the market … but by the producers themselves, and the means of production are owned not by private individuals, but by society as a whole’. But ‘a change from a private to a communal form of appropriation apparently requires that the form of production be changed first, that the separate, small-scale productive processes of petty producers be merged into a single productive process; i.e. it requires the very material conditions capitalism creates’. Socialists ‘can expect to perform fruitful work only by shedding their illusions and seeking support in the actual, not the desired, development of Russia; in actual, not potential, socioeconomic relations. Their theoretical work must be directed towards concrete study of all forms of economic antagonism’, highlighting their interconnections and sequential development, revealing antagonisms whose existence has been obscured by ‘juridical peculiarities or established theoretical prejudice’. Socialists ‘must present an integral picture of our realities as a specific system of production relations, show that exploitation and expropriation inhere in the system and reveal the way out of this system which is indicated by economic development’. Like Engels, Lenin rested his hopes on capitalist industrialization and Russia’s tiny industrial proletariat because ‘only the higher stage of capitalist development, large- scale machine industry, creates the material conditions and social forces necessary for … open political struggle towards victorious communist revolution’ (cf. Lenin, 1960–70T, vol. 1, 277, 235–47, 206–18, 296, 300).
