Part 2
A note on the Narodnik opposition to Lenin’s work
We read in Lenin’s preface to the book:
“In the work here presented, the author has set himself the aim of examining the question of how a home market is being formed for Russian capitalism. As we know, this question was raised long ago by the principal exponents of Narodnik views (chief among them being Messrs. V. V. [Vorontsov] and N.—on [Danielson]), and it will be our task to criticise these views. We have not considered it possible to limit ourselves in this criticism to examining the mistakes and misconceptions in our opponents' views; in answering the question raised it seemed to us that it was not enough to adduce facts showing the formation and growth of a home market, for the objection might be raised that such facts had been selected arbitrarily and that facts showing the contrary had been omitted. It seemed to us that it was necessary to examine the whole process of the development of capitalism in Russia, to endeavour to depict it in its entirety.”
As we proceed through the book, we see many references to the erroneous judgments expressed by Vorontsov, Danielson and their Narodnik associates, but these reflect—to one degree or another— their theoretical grounding in the views of the Swiss theorist J.C.L. Sismondi, whose writings had emerged into print considerably before the 1840s. In 1897 Lenin had produced a definitive criticism of Sismondi’s theories in his polemical work, A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism: (Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists). In this essay, Lenin addresses the question of how he has come to find himself confronted by the Russian adherents of the theories of Sismondi. Lenin explains the substance of his rejection of the ideas of this economist:
“Sismondi asserted that as a result of the development of large-scale enterprise and wage-labour in industry and agriculture, production inevitably outruns consumption and is faced with the insoluble task of finding consumers; that it cannot find consumers within the country because it converts the bulk of the population into day labourers, plain workers, and creates unemployment, while the search for a foreign market becomes increasingly difficult owing to the entry of new capitalist countries into the world arena. The reader will see that these are the very same problems that occupy the minds of the Narodnik economists headed by Messrs, V. V. and N. —on. Let us, then, take a closer look at the various points of Sismondi’s argument and at its scientific significance.”
In other words, the development of large-scale industry through capitalist investment inevitably leads to the growing impoverishment of the masses and economic ruin. And it is for this reason that the communal village institutions of the mir must at all costs be fortified and protected so that Russia will achieve its prosperous future on the basis of the preservation of these ancient communities. So, for now, we can leave this question behind for the purposes of this essay, and for those who wish to look more deeply into Sismondi’s ideas, it would be a good idea to take a look at Lenin’s essay A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism: (Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists) in Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. II.
Technology in Europe and Russia
In mid-19th century Russia, natural economy prevailed throughout most of the national territory, with the exception of innovations in productive technology that had been introduced into some of the more advanced western gubernias (states), and were beginning to catch on. Russia, lagging behind Western Europe, was able to benefit from the knowledge of modern technology already discovered, engineered, and applied to production, first in England, then in continental Europe and America, blazing a trail that Russia could follow without too much difficulty. As Richard Rhodes writes in Energy: A Human History, (Chapter 5):
“With iron wheels on iron rails, a single horse could haul thirty tons of coal or ore. Mineral transport by rail no longer had to depend on gravity for its energy supply. At the same time that the old wagonways were being shod, new horse-drawn mineral railways began to be laid as direct feeders to canals, like multiplying capillaries draining into veins. Parliament authorized the first such railway on 13 May 1776, from Caldon Low Quarries in Staffordshire, below Liverpool, to Froghall Wharf on the Trent & Mersey Canal, a distance of 3.1 miles. From that beginning, the British network of feeder railways grew with the canal network.”
England’s rapid advance from the early 18th century continued to accelerate in the 19th century, paving the way for nations further east to simply learn, copy, apply, and build. But of course, there is the question of the formation of an army of landless proletarians, with nothing to sell but their labor power. And this brings us back to “natural economy.” How does the primitive, communal village life become transformed? How does it give rise to modern industry? That is the principal question Lenin had to resolve. But we must keep in mind that Marx had already written how this transition had occurred in Western Europe, and Lenin was able to extract from Marx’s work what was relevant to Russia.
We recognize the Russian village community, the Mir, as the birthplace of the differentiation of the population into bourgeoisie and proletariat. Lenin’s insights into the processes—partly revealed in Marx’s analysis of the origins of capitalist enterprise, and partly revealed and confirmed in Russian statistics—showed that what had happened already in England, France, Holland, Germany, etc., was, in the latter half of the 19th century, well underway in Russia.
The role of the merchant
There were two alternative pathways to the formation of the capitalist relation: within the village communities. First: the better-off peasants take on more hired labor, acquire more land, and —perhaps unconsciously in the earlier phases— chart a course to become exploiters of wage labor. At the same time, the poor peasants lose their advantages in land, their agricultural productivity declines, their income to feed their families lags behind, and they see themselves increasingly forced to work for wages as hired hands of the wealthier peasants. And the second pathway begins with the merchant who travels through the vast agrarian landscape, buying and selling. The merchant thrives on household and small-shop artisan production. He provides families with the raw materials they need: cotton, flax, wool, and in many cases the woman of the house spins and her husband weaves. The merchant purchases the fabric at the appointed time. In the mid-19th century in Russia, the merchant was called the “buyer-up.” Lenin explains:
“As we know, the small peasant industries in many cases give rise to special buyers-up, who are particularly engaged in the commercial operations of marketing products and purchasing raw materials, and who usually in one way or another subject the small tradesmen to themselves. Let us see what connection this phenomenon has with the general system of small peasant industries and what its significance is.
“The principal economic operation of the buyer-up is to buy goods (finished products or raw materials) in order to resell them. In other words, the buyer-up is a representative of merchant's capital. The starting-point of all capital—both industrial and merchant's—is the accumulation of free money in the hands of individuals (by free money we mean that money which is not needed for personal consumption, etc.).”
But, as we have indicated, this process was already well understood by the Russian intellectuals as something that was an important part of European history, and had been explained by various historians and political economists. Here is how Marx approached it (Capital, Vol. III, ):
“The transition from the feudal mode of production is two-fold. The producer becomes merchant and capitalist, in contrast to the natural agricultural economy and the guild-bound handicrafts of the medieval urban industries. This is the really revolutionising path. Or else, the merchant establishes direct sway over production. However much this serves historically as a stepping-stone — witness the English 17th-century CLOTHIER, who brings the weavers, independent as they are, under his control by selling their wool to them and buying their cloth — it cannot by itself contribute to the overthrow of the old mode of production, but tends rather to preserve and retain it as its precondition. The manufacturer in the French silk industry and in the English hosiery and lace industries, for example, was thus mostly but nominally a manufacturer until the middle of the 19th century. In point of fact, he was merely a merchant, who let the weavers carry on in their old unorganised way and exerted only a merchant's control, for that was for whom they really worked. This system presents everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production and goes under with its development. Without revolutionising the mode of production, it only worsens the condition of the direct producers, turns them into mere wage workers and proletarians under conditions worse than those under the immediate control of capital, and appropriates their surplus labour on the basis of the old mode of production.”
But let’s focus on this for a moment. Marx says the “producer becomes merchant and capitalist.” This is the “really revolutionising path,” as opposed to a system whereby a pre-existing merchant comes visiting the producer to drop off raw materials and pick up finished products. We see that in the latter arrangement, the producers remain as they have always been—trapped within a cyclical round of labor and exchange— where’s the disruption of the old?— and the emergence of the new? But in the alternate mode, as Marx said, “the producer becomes merchant and capitalist.” In this process we see the old system broken, and a transition towards something really new in the lives of the mass of the producers.
The splitting of the peasant community
Without this transition, the whole question of the “Russian revolution” would remain firmly in the hands of the Narodniks, and the Russian village commune would be seen as the cradle of virtue and the springboard of a wonderful future for the Russian peasantry. But the disruption and divergence of economic tendencies from within the village commune have been proceeding for a long time, and have become particularly evident in post-reform Russia from the 1860s forward. In one of Lenin’s charts, we see the economic changes in the makeup of the different peasant groups as registered in the Zemstvo statistical data gathered in the South Russian gubernias (Taurida, Kherson and Ekaterinaslav) as reported by M. Postnikov. Lenin taking into account, for example, the changes that have occurred in the village community:
“The unevenness in the distribution of the area under crops is very considerable: 2/5 of the total households (comprising about 3/10 of the population, for the size of these families is below the average) possess about 1/8 of the total area under crops; they belong to the poor group, cultivating little land, who cannot cover their needs with their income from farming. Further, there are the middle peasants, also constituting about 2/5 of the total households, who cover their average expenditure by income from the land under crops to cover its average expenditure). Lastly, there are the well-to-do peasants (about 1/5 of the households and 3/10 of the population), who concentrate in their hands over half the area cultivated, the crop area per household clearly indicating the "commercial" character of the farming done by this group.”
“. . . Consequently, the well-to-do peasants (the top two groups) engage in what is commercial cultivation, and secure a gross money income ranging from 574 to 1,500 rubles per annum. This commercial cultivation then becomes capitalist farming, for the areas cultivated by the well-to-do peasants exceed the family labour norm (i.e., the amount of land that a family can cultivate by its own labour), and compel them to resort to the hiring of workers: in the three northern uyezds [equivalent of counties] of Taurida Gubernia, the author estimates, the well-to-do peasants hire over 14,000 rural workers. The poor peasants, on the contrary, ‘provide workers’ (over 5,000), that is, resort to the sale of their labour-power, since the income from cultivating the land amounts, in the 5 to 10 dessiatine. group, for example, to only about 30 rubles in cash per household. We observe here, consequently, the very process of the creation of a home market that is dealt with by the theory of capitalist production-the ‘home market’ grows as a result of the conversion into a commodity of the product of commercial, entrepreneur farming, on the one hand, and of the conversion into a commodity of the labour-power sold by the badly-off peasants, on the other.”
In this case we see demonstrated with copious statistical data the process of the splitting-up and dissolution of the village community along with its pre-capitalist communal traditions (the customary division of the land among the members of the commune, the inheritance of land use rights from generation to generation, and the sharing of the common land for grazing, hunting and fishing). Now we see that arable land is being freely rented, bought and sold, and plots are being rented out by those who are unable to make full use of their allotment land to those who have idle hands that need to be put to use.
We have seen how Lenin’s studies of Marx prompted him to focus on the commonality of the processes that had occurred already in Western Europe with the processes occurring in Russia. But this observation would be meaningless if these evolutionary commonalities were merely coincidental or accidental. It must be recognized that one and the same developmental transition had already occurred in one place, then was proceeding in another (and in many other places, as well). What Marx had accomplished was the elucidation of the inner laws of capitalist development (the driving force of the process)—with descriptions of the external appearance of the economic and social changes (what can be witnessed by observers and recorded in statistical data).
Statistics printed in successive chapters
In Chapter VIII of the book the author produces six sections, the first five of which demonstrate the reality of capitalist development in Russia from the 1860s through the 1890s, and provide statistical proofs of the degree of development. It will be seen that each of these five categories of developmental change interacts with and stimulates the other categories. Also, a sixth section follows, which explains the significance of capitalist development in Russia for the future life of the different classes of the population. These six sections are as follows:
I. The Growth of Commodity Circulation
II. The Growth of the Commercial and Industrial Population
III. The Growth of the Employment of Wage-Labour
IV. The Formation of a Home Market for Labour-Power
V. The Significance of the Border Regions. Home or Foreign Market?
VI. The “Mission” of Capitalism
When we analyze the growth of commodity circulation, we recognize that this process embraces not only the creation of the products of labor in workshops, mines, sawmills, factories, etc., but also the means of transport, both within Russia and beyond its borders. When we contrast the precapitalist “natural economy” with the production and exchange in a growing capitalist environment, we see that there is a growing distance between the region occupied by the producer and that of the consumer. In a natural economy, production and consumption take place within the local households and communities, starting with the tradition-bound self-sufficient agricultural families and communities. In patriarchal, localized, precapitalist communities, there’s little or no demand for products that have to be imported from afar, except by the wealthy elite (nobility, gentry, royalty, etc.). But the exotic or luxury consumption of the elites is not decisive for the evolution of the underlying agrarian communities. Capitalism grows out of the economic behavior of the rural agrarian communities.
Once advancing technology opens up more possibilities for the exchange of products of labor on a wider scale, then there arises the need for means of transport to move commodities from their point of production to where the ultimate consumer can obtain them. The growth of large-scale production requires a proportional expansion of the capacity to transport the products to where they are needed. Lenin provides this example (Chap. 7, part 9):
“Timber exports rose from 5,947,000 rubles in 1856 to 30,153,000 rubles in 1881 and 39,200,000 rubles in 1894. The amount of building timber and wood fuel transported along the inland waterways of European Russia in 1866–1868 averaged 156 million poods [1 pood = 36 lb.] per year, and in 1888–1890, 701 million poods per year, i.e. , there was a more than fourfold increase. The amount transported by railway in 1888-1890 averaged 290 million poods, whereas in 1866-1868 it was probably no more than 70 million poods. That is to say, total timber freights in the 60s amounted to about 226 million poods, and in 1888–1890 to 991 million poods—a more than fourfold increase.”
The growth of the means of transport, the tonnage of products shipped and the values of the cargos are documented. Also the transportation infrastructure: rails, docks, bridges, serviceable roads, ships, etc. are statistically listed. As regards shipping:
“The development of mercantile shipping at all ports on the outer seas was as follows: during the five years 1856-1860 the number of homeward plus outward bound vessels averaged 18,901, with a total capacity of 3,783,000 tons; for the period 1886–1890 it averaged 23,201 vessels (+23%) with a total capacity of 13,845,000 tons (+266%). Capacity, therefore, increased 3 2/3 times. In 39 years (from 1856 to 1894) capacity grew 5.5-fold, and if we take Russian and foreign vessels separately, it is seen that during these 39 years the number of the former grew 3.4-fold (from 823 to 2,789), while their capacity grew 12.1-fold (from 112,800 tons to 1,368,000 tons), whereas the number of the latter grew by 16% (from 18,284 to 21,160) and their capacity 5.3-fold (from 3,448,000 tons to 18,267,000 tons).”
Urbanization and proletarianization
Needless to say, the growth of the means of transport and the quantities and categories of commodities being transported was only possible with the growth of the industrial population, in particular the landless proletarians who had no means of support other than the sale of their labor power. Further, they had to locate themselves in parts of the country where there were jobs and residential infrastructure. Lenin pointed to the significance of the growth and distribution of the population in accordance with the distribution of centers of production.
“The population of towns that are important industrial and commercial centres is growing much more rapidly than the urban population generally. The number of towns with 50,000 and more inhabitants more than trebled between 1863 and 1897 (13 and 44). In 1863, of the total urban population only about 27% (1.7 million out of 6.1) were concentrated in such large centres; in 1885 it was nearly 41% (4.1 million out of 9.9),[4] and in 1897 it was already more than half, about 53% (6.4 million out of 12 million). In the 1860s, therefore, the smaller towns provided the general pattern of the urban population, but in the 1890s they were completely outweighed by the big cities. The population of the 14 towns that had been the biggest in 1863 increased from 1.7 million inhabitants to 4.3 million, i.e., by 153%, whereas the overall urban population increased by only 97% . Hence, the enormous growth of large industrial centres and the emergence of a large number of new centres is one of the most characteristic features of the post-Reform period.”
Steam engines are mentioned many times through the course of the book. Steam power was a characteristic feature of large-scale industry during the historical period preceding the use of electric power to run machines. Steam engines were expensive to build and install, although continuous improvements to their construction and functionality were achieved over time, reducing their cost to the manufacturer and increasing their profitability. Steam engines could only become profitable if employed on a large scale, in factories employing hundreds or thousands of employees. Steam engines, whether they utilized wood or coal as the source of heat, were the critical component of the passage to a new world dominated by capital. As Marx explained (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. XV):
“The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be. Here we have the machine, but only as an elementary factor of production by machinery.
“Increase in the size of the machine, and in the number of its working tools, calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism requires, in order to overcome its resistance, a mightier moving power than that of man, apart from the fact that man is a very imperfect instrument for producing uniform continued motion. But assuming that he is acting simply as a motor, that a machine has taken the place of his tool, it is evident that he can be replaced by natural forces.”
Lenin points to the growth of large-scale industry with machinery powered by steam-engines, for example in the cotton textile processing plants:
“Hence, to assess the development of large-scale machine production in this branch of industry it is best to take the data giving the number of power-looms. In the 1860s there were about 11,000, and in 1890 about 87,000. Large-scale machine industry was consequently developing at enormous speed. In cotton spinning and weaving there was recorded in 1875–1878 a total of 148 mechanised establishments, having 481 steam-engines totalling 20,504 h. p., and in 1890, 168 mechanised establishments, having 554steam-engines with a total of 38, 750 h. p.”
As the scale of the productive operations increases, different regions of the country take the lead in building cities with ever-larger populations, supplying the labor needs of the growing factories and industrial installations. At the same time, the transportation infrastructure —roads, rails, shipping—expands, absorbing more fresh labor-power in their construction, as well as providing the means for workers to travel long distances to take on new occupations. Lenin comments on the major translocations of growing masses of workers:
“Large-scale machine industry creates a number of new industrial centres, which grow up with unprecedented rapidity, sometimes in unpopulated places, a thing that would be impossible without the mass migration of workers. Further on we shall speak of the dimensions and the significance of the so-called outside non-agricultural industries. At the moment we shall limit ourselves to a brief presentation of Zemstvo sanitation statistics for Moscow Gubernia. An inquiry among 103,175 factory workers showed that 53,238, or 51.6% of the total, were born in the uyezd in which they worked. Hence, nearly half the workers had migrated from one uyezd to another. The number of workers who were born in Moscow Gubernia was 66,038, or 64%. More than a third of the workers came from other gubernias (chiefly from gubernias of the central industrial zone adjacent to Moscow Gubernia).”
Lenin was acutely sensitive to the impact of urbanization on many thousands of workers, and recognized a very positive social benefit to those workers who left behind the patriarchal conditions of rural life and acclimatized themselves to the cities. He comments:
“One of the manifestations of this transformation is the separation of industry from agriculture, the liberation of social relations in industry from the traditions of the feudal and patriarchal system that weigh down on agriculture. In small commodity-production the industrialist has not yet emerged at all from his peasant shell; in the majority of cases he remains a farmer, and this connection between small industry and small agriculture is so profound that we observe the interesting law of the parallel differentiation of the small producers in industry and in agriculture. The formation of a petty bourgeoisie and of wage-workers proceeds simultaneously in both spheres of the national economy, thereby preparing the way, at both poles of differentiation, for the industrialist to break with agriculture. The chief representative of industry is no longer the peasant, but the merchant and the manufactory owner on the one hand, and the “artisan” on the other. Industry and the relatively developed commercial intercourse with the rest of the world raise the standard of living and the culture of the population; the peasant is now regarded with disdain by the manufactory workman. Large-scale machine industry completes this transformation, separates industry from agriculture once and for all, and, as we have seen, creates a special class of the population totally alien to the old peasantry and differing from the latter in its manner of living, its family relationships and its higher standard of requirements, both material and spiritual. In the small industries and in manufacture we always find survivals of patriarchal relations and of diverse forms of personal dependence, which, in the general conditions of capitalist economy, exceedingly worsen the condition of the working people, and degrade and corrupt them. Large-scale machine industry, which concentrates masses of workers who often come from various parts of the country, absolutely refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked by a truly “contemptuous attitude to the past.” It is this break with obsolete tradition that is one of the substantial conditions which have created the possibility and evoked the necessity of regulating production and of public control over it.”
Lenin, particularly interested in the transformation of proletarians into revolutionaries, sees that the conditions are being prepared for this transition. He continues:
“In particular, speaking of the transformation brought about by the factory in the conditions of life of the population, it must be stated that the drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive. It is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labour, etc.; but endeavours completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian. By destroying the patriarchal isolation of these categories of the population who formerly never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in social production, large-scale machine industry stimulates their development and increases their independence, in other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably superior to the patriarchal immobility of pre-capitalist relations.”
Many readers of Capital will recall how in Vol. I, Marx reports the truth about the superexploitation of women and children, and documents at great length the abuses these working people suffered at the hands of the unfettered capitalist exploiters. But at the same time, Marx does not take the side of those who wish to ban women and children from the industrial labor force. Instead, he says (see Capital, Vol I, Chapter XV, Section 9):
“However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes.”
. . .
“Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.”
In this passage, Marx brings to the fore the latent revolutionary potential of the working class, which in the Russia of the 1850s had only begun to emerge. But as this process continued, the working class found itself increasingly finding means of support for resolving its challenging life circumstances among the growing numbers of fellow workers who were continuously added to the rolls of the textile and garment factories, metallurgical works, mines, railroads, sawmills, etc., and thus a militant and increasingly unified class emerged. The workers rapidly learned how trade-union organization enabled them to apply pressure on the authorities and factory-owners to improve wages and working conditions.
The revolution approaches
As mentioned at the beginning of this essay (p. 3), Lenin’s “long-range purpose —to help build the revolutionary party that could organize the emerging political strength of the Russian laboring classes” was the motive that lay behind his painstaking labors in writing The Development of Capitalism in Russia. By the time of the abolition of serfdom in Russia, many members of the Russian intelligentsia were already deeply involved in the many forms of revolutionary discussion, planning, or activity — Russian intellectuals had been intently focused on the critical tasks of bringing Russia into the modern world, at least since the time of the Decembrist uprising in 1825, when a group of impatient young aristocratic revolutionaries attempted to accelerate the demise of the sluggish monarchy.
Trotsky explains in his History of the Russian Revolution:
“The Europeanization of the country, formally begun in the time of Peter, became during the following century more and more a demand of the ruling class itself, the nobility. In 1825 the aristocratic intelligentsia, generalising this demand politically, went to the point of a military conspiracy to limit the powers of the autocracy. Thus, under pressure from the European bourgeois development, the progressive nobility attempted to take the place of the lacking Third Estate. But nevertheless they wished to combine their liberal régime with the security of their own caste domination, and therefore feared most of all to arouse the peasantry. It s thus not surprising that the conspiracy remained a mere attempt on the part of a brilliant but isolated officer caste which gave up the sponge almost without a struggle. Such was the significance of the Decembrist uprising.”
By the 1890s, the accumulating evidence already confirmed that a self-confident urban proletariat had already become a key component of the impending anti-czarist revolution. In fact, the working-class, due to its new-found sense of liberation from the bonds of patriarchal backwardness, was in a better position than the budding entrepreneurs and landlord-capitalist exploiters. At the time of the 1899 publication date of Lenin’s book, the 1905 revolution was already in preparation.
The year 1905 was also the year of the Third Congress of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party —attended only by Bolsheviks, since the split with the Mensheviks had taken place two years earlier. It was a year of unprecedented proletarian revolt. Trotsky describes the burgeoning strike wave leading to the 1905 revolution:
“We have before us a curve – the only one of its kind – of the political temperature of a nation carrying in its womb a great revolution. In a backward country with a small proletariat – for in all the enterprises undergoing factory inspections there were only about 1½ million workers in 1905, about 2 million in 1917 – the strike movement attains such dimensions as it never knew before anywhere in the world. With the weakness of the petty bourgeois democracy, the scatteredness and political blindness of the peasant movement, the revolutionary strike of the workers becomes the battering ram which the awakening nation directs against the walls of absolutism. Participants in political strikes in 1905 numbering 1,843,000 – workers participating in several strikes are here, of course, counted twice – that number alone would permit us to put our finger on the revolutionary year in our table, if we knew nothing else about the Russian political calendar.”
In 1905, the proletarian strike wave coincided with a broad wave of peasant insurgencies, challenging the landlords’ control over agricultural land, as well as their many interconnections with the institutions of the monarchy. In Lenin’s polemical essay, Two Tactics, written in 1905, he draws a contrast between the Bolshevik position with that of the Mensheviks. Lenin describes the necessity for a broad-based alliance between the proletariat and the mass of the peasantry as a whole which will secure the objectives that correspond to what can be best accomplished by a bourgeois revolution, i.e., a revolution that embraces the tasks of the abolition of the archaic semi-feudal landlord state power and the establishment of a democratic republic to enforce the demands of this bourgeois-democratic alliance. As Lenin states in Two Tactics,
“No, the only force capable of gaining ‘a decisive victory over tsarism,’ is the people, i.e., the proletariat and the peasantry, if we take the main, big forces and distribute the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie (also part of ‘the people’) between the two. ‘A decisive victory of the revolution over tsarism’ is the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Our new-Iskraists [Mensheviks] cannot escape from this conclusion, which Vperyod [Bolshevik organ] pointed out long ago. No one else is capable of gaining a decisive victory over tsarism.”
Lenin continues:
“And such a victory will be precisely a dictatorship, i.e., it must inevitably rely on military force, on the arming of the masses, on an insurrection, and not on institutions of one kind or another, established in a ‘lawful’ or ‘peaceful’ way. It can be only a dictatorship, for the realisation of the changes which are urgently and absolutely indispensable for the proletariat and the peasantry will call forth the desperate resistance of the landlords, of the big bourgeoisie and of tsarism. Without a dictatorship it is impossible to break down that resistance and to repel the counter-revolutionary attempts. But of course it will be a democratic, not a socialist dictatorship. It will not be able (without a series of intermediary stages of revolutionary development) to affect the foundations of capitalism. At best it may bring about a radical redistribution of landed property in favour of the peasantry, establish consistent and full democracy including the formation of a republic, eradicate all the oppressive features of Asiatic bondage, not only in village but also in factory life, lay the foundation for a thorough improvement in the position of the workers and for a rise in their standard of living, and—last but not least—carry the revolutionary conflagration into Europe.”
As for the “socialist revolution” in Russia, Lenin could not rule out that possibility for the further development of the revolutionary process in the near future. But that would depend on the degree of maturity of the revolutionary working-class struggles then underway in Europe. He gave no indication of how much time might elapse between the establishment of the democratic dictatorship and the initiation of the socialist revolution. That would be a matter of how circumstances evolved both in Russia and in the rest of the world. As Lenin explained:
“The basic idea here is the one that the Vperyod [Bolshevik journal] has repeatedly formulated, stating that we must not be afraid (as is Martynov [Menshevik]) of a complete victory for Social-Democracy in a democratic revolution, i.e., of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, for such a victory will enable us to rouse Europe, and the socialist proletariat of Europe, after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, will in its turn help us to accomplish the socialist revolution.”
In October 1917, the revolutionary victory turned out to be a fulfillment of the outcome projected by Lenin. The “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletarian and the peasantry” was achieved in practice, according to the essay by Jack Barnes titled Their Trotsky and Ours. Barnes argues:
“The Bolsheviks insisted that the proletariat in Russia and its vanguard party had to pursue an alliance with the broadest possible sectors of the peasantry and their parties to bring down the tsar, while at the same time promoting the independent organization of the agricultural laborers and poor peasants — the most reliable allies of the working class, and those most likely to remain at the workers’ side as the socialist course the revolution deepened.”
Barnes continues:
“Lenin wrote that the proletariat is “fighting, and will fight valiantly, to win power for a republic, for the confiscation of the land, i.e., to win over the peasantry, make fill use of their revolutionary powers, and get the ‘non-proletarian masses of the people’ to take part in liberating bourgeois Russia from military-feudal ‘imperialism’ (tsarism).“
“The proletariat will at once utilize this ridding of bourgeois Russia of tsarism and the rule of the landowners ,“ he said, “not to aid the rich peasants in their struggle against the rural workers, but to bring about the socialist revolution in alliance with the proletarians of Europe.”
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