lenin what the froends of people are

WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE AND HOW THEY FIGHT THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
P A R T III
Let us, in conclusion, make the acquaintance of Mr. Krivenko, another "friend of the people," who also launches open war against the Social-Democrats.

However, we shall not examine his articles ("Our Cultural Free Lances," in No. 12, 1893, and "Travel Letters," in No. 1, 1894) as we did those of Messrs. Mikhailovsky and Yuzhakov. An analysis in toto of their articles was essential to get a clear idea, in the first case, of the substance of their objections to materialism and Marxism in general, and, in the second, of their political-economic theories. Now, to get a complete idea of the "friends of the people," we shall have to acquaint ourselves with their tactics, their practical proposals and their political programme. This programme they have not anywhere set forth directly and as consistently and fully as they have set out their theoretical views. I am therefore obliged to take it from various articles in a magazine whose contributors are unanimous enough not to contradict each other. I shall give preference to the above-mentioned articles of Mr. Krivenko's merely because they furnish more material and because their author is as typical of the magazine as a practical man and a politician, as Mr. Mikhailovsky is a socialist and Mr. Yuzhakov is an economist.

However, before passing on to their programme, there is one more theoretical point we consider it absolutely essential to deal with. We have seen how Mr. Yuzhakov disposes of matters with meaningless phrases about people's land renting that supports people's economy, etc., using them to cover up the fact that he does not understand the economic life of our peasants. He did not deal with the handicraft industries, but confined himself to data on the growth of large-scale factory industry. Now Mr. Krivenko repeats

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exactly the same sort of phrases about handicraft industries. He flatly contrasts "our people's industry," i.e., handicraft industries, to capitalist industry (No. 12, pp. 180-81). "People's production" (sic!), says he, "in the majority of cases arises naturally," whereas capitalist industry "is very often created artificially." In another passage he contrasts "small-scale people's industry" to "large-scale, capitalist industry." If you were to ask what is the distinguishing feature of the former, you would only learn that it is "small"[*] and that the instruments of labour are united with the producer (I borrow this latter definition from Mr. Mikhailovsky's above-mentioned article). But this is certainly far from defining its economic organisation -- and, moreover, is absolutely untrue. Mr. Krivenko says, for example, that "small-scale people's industry to this day yields a much larger total output and employs more hands than large-scale capitalist industry." The author is evidently referring to data on the number of handicraftsmen, which is as many as 4 million, or, according to another estimate, 7 million. But who does not know that the form of economy predominating in our handicraft industries is the domestic system of large-scale production? that the bulk of the handicraftsmen occupy a position in production that is not independent at all, but completely dependent, subordinate, that they do not process their own material but that of the merchant, who merely pays the handicraftsman a wage? <"p206"> Data on the predominance of this form have been cited even in legal literature. Let me quote, for example, the excellent work by the well-known statistician, S. Kharizomenov, published in Yuridichesky Vestnik[66] (1883, Nos. 11 and 12). Summarising the published data on our handicraft industries in the central gubernias, where they are most highly developed, S. Kharizomenov reached the conclusion that there is an absolute predominance of the domestic system of large-scale production, i.e., an unquestionably capitalist form of industry. "Defining the economic role of small-scale independent industry," he says, "we arrive <"fnp206">

* The only other thing you would learn is this: "From it may develop a real (sic!) people's industry," says Mr. Krivenko. A common trick of the "friends of the people" to utter idle nnd senseless phrases instead of giving a precise and direct description of reality.

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at the following conclusions: in Moscow Gubernia 86.5% of the annual turnover of handicraft industry is accounted for by the domestic system of large-scale production, and only 13.5% by small-scale independent industry. In the Alexandrov and Pokrov uyezds of Vladimir Gubernia, 96% of the annual turnover of handicraft industry falls to the share of the domestic system of large-scale production and manufacture, and only 4% is accounted for by small-scale independent industry."

Nobody, as far as we know, has tried to refute these facts; nor can they be refuted. How, then, can one ignore these facts, and say nothing about them, call such industry "people's" in contradistinction to capitalist, and talk about the possibility of its developing into real industry?

There can be only one explanation of this direct ignoring of facts, namely, the general tendency of the "friends of the people," as of all Russian liberals, to gloss over class antagonism and the exploitation of the working people in Russia by representing all this as just plain "defects." But perhaps, an additional cause lies in so profound a knowledge of the subject as is revealed, for instance, by Mr. Krivenko when he calls the "Pavlovo cutlery trade" -- "a trade of a semi-artisan character." The lengths of distortion to which the "friends of the people" will go are simply phenomenal! How can one speak here of artisan character, when the Pavlovo cutlers produce for the market - and not to order? Or perhaps Mr. Krivenko regards as artisan industry the system under which a merchant orders articles from the handicraftsman and then sends them to Nizhni-Novgorod Fair? Funnily enough, this seems to be the case. As a matter of fact, the making of cutlery has least of all (compared with other Pavlovo industries) preserved the small-scale handicraft form, with its (seeming) independence of the producers. "The production of table and industrial cutlery,"* says N. F. Annensky, "is already largely approaching the factory, or, more correctly, the manufactory form." Of the 396 handicraftsmen engaged in the making of table cutlery in Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, only 62

* The largest of the Pavlovo trades, which produces 900,000 rubles' worth of goods out of a total output oi 2,750,000 rubles.

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(16%) work for the market, 273 (69%) work for a master,[*] and 61 (15%) are wage-workers. Hence, only one-sixth of them are not directly enslaved to an employer. As to the other branch of the cutlery industry -- the production of folding-knives (penknives) -- the same author says that it "occupies a position midway between the table-knife and the lock: the majority of the handicraftsmen in this branch are working for a master, but along with them there are still quite a number of independent handicraftsmen who have to do with the market."

In Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia there are in all 2,552 handicraftsmen producing this sort of cutlery, of whom 48% (1,236) work for the market, 42% (1,058) work for a master, and 10% (258) are wage-workers. Consequently, here too the independent (?) handicraftsmen are in the minority. And those who work for the market are, of course, only apparently independent; actually they are no less enslaved to the capital of buyers-up. If we take the data for the industries of the entire Gorbatov Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, where 21,983 working people, or 84.5%, of all who work,** are engaged in industries, we get the following (exact data on the economics of the industry are available for only 10,808 workers, in the following industries: metal, leather goods, saddlery, felt, and hemp spinning): 35.6% of the handicraftsmen work for the market, 46.7% work for a master, and 17.7% are wage-workers. Thus, here too we see the predominance of the domestic system of large-scale production, the predominance of relations under which labour is enslaved to capital.

Another reason why the "friends of the people" so freely ignore facts of this kind is that their conception of capitalism has not advanced beyond the commonplace vulgar idea that a capitalist is a wealthy and educated employer who runs a large machine enterprise -- and they refuse to <"fnp208">

* I.e.; for the merchant who supplies the handicraftsmen with materials and pays them ordinary wages for their labour.
** Exceptionalist Russian economists, who measure Russian capitalism by the number of factory workers (sic!), unceremoniously classify these working people, and the multitudes like them, as part of the agricultural population, who do not suffer from the yoke of capital, but from pressure artificially exerted on the "people's system" (???!!)

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consider the scientific content of the term. In the preceding chapter we saw that Mr. Yuzhakov dates the beginning of capitalism directly from machine industry, omitting simple co-operation and manufacture. This is a widespread error, which, incidentally, results in the capitalist organisation of our handicraft industries being ignored.

It goes without saying that the domestic system of large-scale production is a capitalist form of industry: here we have all its features -- commodity economy already at a high level of development, the concentration of the means of production in the hands of individuals, and the expropriation of the mass of the workers, who have no means of production of their own and therefore apply their labour to those of others, working not for themselves but for the capitalist. Obviously, in its organisation, handicraft industry is pure capitalism, it differs from large-scale machine industry in being technically backward (chiefly because of the preposterously low wages) and in the fact that the workers retain diminutive farms. This latter circumstance particularly confuses the "friends of the people," who, as befits true metaphysicians, are accustomed to think in naked and direct contrasts: "Yea, yea -- nay, nay, and whatsoever is more than these comes from the evil one."

If the workers have no land -- there is capitalism; if they have land -- there is no capitalism. And they confine themselves to this soothing philosophy, losing sight of the whole social organisation of economy and forgetting the generally-known fact that ownership of land does not in the least do away with the dire poverty of these landowners, who are most shamelessly robbed by other such "peasant" landowners.

They do not know, it seems, that capitalism -- while still at a comparatively low level of development -- was nowhere able to completely separate the worker from the land. For Western Europe, Marx established the law that only large-scale machine industry expropriates the worker once and for all. It is therefore obvious that the stock argument of there being no capitalism in our country since "the people own land" is quite meaningless, because the capitalism of simple co-operation and manufacture has never been connected anywhere with the worker's complete separa-

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tion from the land, and yet, needless to say, it has not on that account ceased to be capitalism.

As to large-scale machine industry in Russia -- and this form is rapidly being assumed by the biggest and most important branches of our industry -- here too, despite all the specific features of our life, it possesses the same property as everywhere in the capitalist West, namely, it absolutely will not tolerate the retention of the worker's tie with the land. This fact has been proved, incidentally, by Dementyev with precise statistical material, from which he has drawn (quite independently of Marx) the conclusion that machine production is inseparably connected with the worker's complete separation from the land. This investigation has demonstrated once again that Russia is a capitalist country, that the worker's tie with the land in Russia is so feeble and unreal, and the power of the man of property (the money owner, the buyer-up, the rich peasant, the manufactory owner, etc.) so firmly established, that one more technical advance will be enough for the "peasant" (?? who has long been living by the sale of his labour-power) to turn into a worker pure and simple.[*] The failure of the "friends of the people" to understand the economic organisation of our handicraft industries is far, however, from being confined to this. Their idea even of those industries where work is not done "for a master" is just as superficial as their idea of the cultivator (which we have already seen above). This, by the way, is quite natural in the case of gentlemen who presume to hold forth on questions of political economy when all they know, it seems, is that there is such a thing in the world as means of production, which "may" be united with the working people -- and that is very good; but which "may" also be separated from them -- and that is very bad. That will not take you far.

Speaking of industries that are becoming capitalist and of those that are not (where "small-scale production can <"fnp210">

* The domestic system of large-scale production is not only a capitalist system, but the worst kind of capitalist system, one under which the most intense exploitation of the working people is combined with the minimum opportunity for the workers to wage a struggle for their emancipation.

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freely exist"), Mr. Krivenko says, for one thing, that in certain branches "the basic expenditure on production" is very inconsiderable and that small-scale production is therefore possible. He cites as an example the brick industry, where the expenditure, he says, may be one-fifteenth of the annual turnover of the brickyards.

As this is almost the only reference the author makes to facts (it is, I repeat, the most characteristic feature of subjective sociology that it tears a direct and precise description and analysis of reality, preferring to soar into the sphere of the "ideals" . . . of the petty bourgeois), let us take it, in order to show what a false conception the "friends of the people" have of reality.

We find a description of the brick industry (the making of bricks from white clay) in the economic statistics of the Moscow Zemstvo (Returns, Vol. VII, Book 1, Part 2, etc.). The industry is chiefly concentrated in three volosts of Bogorodskoye Uyezd, where there are 233 establishments, employing 1,402 workers (567, or 41%, being family workers,[*] and 835, or 59%, hired), with an annual aggregate output valued at 357,000 rubles. The industry is an old one, but has developed particularly during the past fifteen years owing to the building of a railway, which has greatly facilitated marketing. Before the railway was built the family form of production predominated, but it is now giving way to the exploitation of wage-labour. This industry, too, is not exempt from the dependence of the small industrialists on the bigger ones for marketing: owing to "lack of funds" the former sell the latter their bricks (sometimes "crude" -- unbaked) on the spot at terribly low prices.

However, we are also able to acquaint ourselves with the organisation of the industry apart from this dependence, thanks to the house-to-house census of handicraftsmen which is appended to the essay, where the number of workers and the annual aggregate output of each establishment are indicated.

To ascertain whether the law that commodity econgmy is capitalist economy -- i.e., is inevitably converted into the latter at a certain stage of development -- applies to <"fnp211">

* By "family" workers, as against hired, are meant working members of the masters' families.

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this industry, we must compare the size of the establishments: the problem is precisely one of the relation between the small and the large establishments according to their role in output and their exploitation of wage-labour. Taking the number of workers as a basis, we divide the establishments of the handicraftsmen into three groups: I) establishments employing 1 to 5 workers (both family and hired); II) employing 6 to 10 workers, and III) employing over 10 workers.

Examining the size of establishments, the complement of workers and the value of the output in each group, we obtain the following data:[¥]

Groups of Handcraftsmen according to number of workers		I. Employing 1-5 workers	II. Employing 6-10 workers	III. Employing over 10 workers	Total
Ave. number wrkrs. per establishment		2.8	7.3	26.4	6.0
Percent	Estab. employing wage-workers	25	90	100	45
Percent	Wage-workers	19	58	91	59
Annual output per worker (rubles)		251	249	260	254
Percentage distribution	Establishments	72	18	10	100
	Workers	34	23	43	100
	Total output	34	22	44	100
Absolute figures	Number of establishments	167/43	43/39	23/23	233/105
	Number of workers	476/92	317/186	609/557	1,402/835
	Total output (rubles)	119,500	79,000	158,500	357,000

Take a glance at these figures and you will perceive the bourgeois, or, what is the same, the capitalist organisation of the industry: the larger the establishments, the higher the productivity of labour** (the middle group is an <"fnp212">

^[¥] [Transcriber's Note: The columns and rows on this table, as well as the ones on p. 215 and p. 225, have been switched to accommodate those with small screens. If I receive enough complaints about this, I will try to rectify the situation. -- DJR]
* The denominators indicate the number of establishments employing wage-workers and the number of wage-workers. Same in the next table.
** The annual output per worker in Group I is 251 rubles; in II -- 249, in III -- 260.

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exception), the greater the exploitation of wage-labour,[*] the greater the concentration of production.**

The third group, which almost entirely bases its economy on wage-labour, comprises 10% of the total number of establishments but accounts for 44% of the aggregate output.

This concentration of the means of production in the hands of a minority, which is connected with the expropriation of the majority (the wage-workers), explains both the dependence of the small producers on buyers-up (the big industrialists are in fact buyers-up) and the oppression of labour in this industry. Hence we see that the cause of the expropriation of the working people and of their exploitation lies in the production relations themselves.

The Russian Narodnik socialists, as we know, held the opposite view and considered that the cause of the oppression of labour in the handicraft industries did not lie in production relations (which were proclaimed to be based on a principle which precludes exploitation), but in something else -- in policy, namely, agrarian and fiscal policy and so on. The question arises, what was, and is, the basis of the persistence of this opinion, which has now acquired almost the tenacity of a prejudice? Maybe it is the prevalence of a different concept of production relations in the handicraft industries? Not at all. It persists only be cause no attempt whatever is made to give an accurate and definite description of the facts, of the real forms of economic organisation; it persists only because the production relations are not singled out and submitted to an in dependent analysis. In a word, it persists solely due to a failure to understand the only scientific method of social science, namely, the materialist method. We can now understand the train of thought of our old socialists. As far as the handicraft industries are concerned, they attribute the cause of exploitation to things lying outside production relations; as far as large-scale, factory capitalism <"fnp213">

* The proportion of establishments employing wage-labour is 25% in Group I, 90% in II and 100% in III; the proportion of wage-workers is 19%, 58% and 91% respectively.
** Group I, comprising 72% of the total establishments, accounts for 34% of the total output; II: 18% of the establishments, 22% of the output; III: 10% of the establishments, 44% of the output.

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is concerned, they could not help seeing that there the cause of exploitation lies precisely in the production relations. The result was an irreconcilable contradiction, an incongruity; where this large-scale capitalism could have come from, since there was nothing capitalist in the production relations of the handicraft industries (which had not been studied!) -- passed comprehension. The conclusion follows naturally: failing to understand the connection between handicraft and capitalist industry they contrasted the former to the latter, as "people's" to "artificial" industry. The idea appears that capitalism contradicts our "people's system" -- an idea that is very widespread and was quite recently presented to the Russian public in a revised and improved edition by Mr. Nikolai-on. This idea persists by inertia, despite its phenomenal illogicality: factory capitalism is judged on the basis of what it actually is in reality, whereas handicraft industry is judged on the basis of what it "might be"; the former on the basis of an analysis of production relations, the latter without even an attempt to examine the production relations separately, the matter being directly transferred to the sphere of politics. We have only to turn to an analysis of these production relations to find that the "people's system" consists of these very same capitalist production relations, although in an undeveloped, embryonic state; that -- if we reject the na&iumlve prejudice that all handicraftsmnen are equal, and accurately set forth the differences among them -- the difference between the "capitalist" of the factory and works and the "handicraftsman" will at times prove to be less than the difference between one "handicraftsman" and another; and that capitalism does not contradict the "people's system" but is the direct, next and immediate continuation and development of it.

Perhaps, however, it will be argued that the example quoted is unsuitable; we may be told that the percentage of wage-workers in the given case is altogether too high?* But, as a matter of fact, the important thing here is not the absolute figures but the relations they disclose, rela-

* This is scarcely true of the industries of Moscow Gubernia, but it may be true, perhaps, with regard to the less developed industries of the rest of Russia.

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tions which are bourgeois in essence, and which do not cease to be such whether their bourgeois character is strongly or weakly marked.

If you like, I shall take another example -- one deliberately chosen for its weak bourgeois character. I take (from Mr. Isayev's book on the industries of Moscow Gubernia) the pottery industry, "a purely domestic industry," as the professor calls it. This industry may, of course, be taken as representative of the small-scale peasant industries: its technique is the simplest, its equipment quite small and the articles it produces of universal and essential use. Well then, thanks to the house-to-house census of the potters giving the same particulars as in the previous case, we are in a position to study the economic organisation of this industry too, one that is undoubtedly quite typical of the numerous Russian small, "people's" industries. We divide the handicraftsmen into groups: I) those employing 1 to 3 workers (family and hired); II) those employing 4 to 5 workers, and III) those employing over 5 workers -- and make the same calculation:

Groups of Handcraftsmen according to number of workers		I. Employing 1-3 workers	II. Employing 4-5 workers	III. Employing over 5 workers	Total
Ave. number wrkrs. per establishment		2.4	4.8	8.4	3.7
Percent	Estab. employing wage-workers	39	48	100	49
Percent	Wage-workers	19	20	65	33
Annual output per worker (rubles)		468	498	533	497
Percentage distribution	Establishments	60	27	13	100
	Workers	38	32	30	100
	Total output	36	32	32	100
Absolute figures	Number of establishments	72/28	33/16	16/16	121/60
	Number of workers	174/33	144/29	134/87	452/149
	Total output (rubles)	81,500	71,800	71,500	224,800

Obviously, the relations in this industry too -- and similar examples could be quoted indefinitely -- are bourgeois: we find the same break-up arising out of commodity economy and it is a specifically capitalist break-up, leading to the exploitation of wage-labour, which already plays a primary part in the top group, where one-eighth of all the establishments and 30% of the total workers produce nearly one-third of the total output, and the productivity of labour is considerably above the average. These production relations alone are enough to explain the appearance and power of the buyers-up. We see how a minority, owning larger and more profitable establishments, and receiving a "net" income from the labour of others (in the top group of potters there is an average of 5.5 wage-workers per establish ment), accumulate "savings," while the majority are ruined, and even the petty masters (not to mention the wage-workers) are unable to make ends meet. It is obvious and inevitable that the latter should be enslaved to the former -- inevitable precisely because of the capitalist character of the given production relations. These relations are: the product of social labour, organised by commodity economy, passes into the hands of individuals and in their hands serves as an instrument for oppressing and enslaving the working people, as a means of personal enrichment by the exploitation of the masses. And do not think that this exploitation, this oppression, is any less marked because relations of this kind are still poorly developed, because the accumulation of capital, concomitant with the ruination of the producers, is negligible. Quite the contrary. This only leads to cruder, serf forms of exploitation, to a situation where capital, not yet able to subjugate the worker directly, by the mere purchase of his labour-power at its value, enmeshes him in a veritable net of usurious extortion, binds him to itself by kulak methods, and as a result robs him not only of the surplus-value, but of an enormous part of his wages, too, and, what is more, grinds him down by preventing him from changing his "master," and humiliates him by compelling him to regard as a boon the fact that capital "gives" (sic!) him work. It is obvious that not a single worker would ever consent to exchange his status for that of a Russian "independent" handicraftsman in "real," "peo- ple's" industry. It is equally obvious that all the favourite measures of the Russian radicals either will not in the least affect the exploitation of the working people and their enslavement to capital, and will remain isolated experiments (artels), or will worsen the conditions of the working people (inalienability of allotments), or, lastly, will only refine, develop and consolidate the given capitalist relations (improvement of technique, loans, etc.).

The "friends of the people," however, will never be able to grasp the fact that despite its general wretchedness, its comparatively tiny establishments and extremely low productivity of labour, its primitive technique and small number of wage-workers, peasant industry is capitalism. They simply cannot grasp the point that capital is a certain relation between people, a relation which remains the same whether the categories under comparison are at a higher or a lower level of development. Bourgeois economists have never been able to understand this; they have always objected to such a definition of capital. I recall how one of them, writing in Russkaya Mysl about Sieber's book (on Marx's theory), quoted this definition (capital is a relation), and indignantly put exclamation marks after it.

To regard the categories of the bourgeois regime as eternal and natural is most typical of bourgeois philosophers. That is why, for capital, too, they adopt such definitions as, for example, accumulated labour that serves for further production -- that is, describe it as an eternal category of human society, thereby obscuring that specific, historically definite economic formation in which this "accumulated labour," organised by commodity economy, falls into the hands of those who do not work and serves for the exploitation of the labour of others. That is why, instead of an analysis and study of a definite system of production relations, they give us a series of banalities applicable to any system, mixed with the sentimental pap of petty-bourgeois morality.

And now look at this -- why do the "friends of the people" call this industry "people's," and why do they contrast it to capitalist industry? It is only because these gentlemen are petty-bourgeois ideologists and cannot even conceive

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that these small producers live and operate under a system of commodity economy (that is why I call them petty bourgeois) and that their relations to the market necessarily and inevitably split them into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. Why don't you try studying the real organisation. Or our "people's" industries instead of phrase-mongering about what they "might" lead to, then we will see whether you can find in Russia any branch of handicraft industry, at all developed, which is not organised on capitalist lines.

And if you do not agree that the monopolising of the means of production by a minority, their alienation from the majority, and the exploitation of wage-labour (speaking more generally, the essence of capitalism is the appropriation by individuals of the product of social labour organised by commodity economy) are necessary and adequate features for this concept, then be good enough to give your "own" definition and your "own" history of capitalism.

Actually, the organisation of our "people's" handicraft industries furuishes an excellent illustration to the general history of the development of capitalism. It clearly demonstrates the latter's origin, its inception, for example, in the form of simple co-operation (the top group in the pottery industry); it further shows how the "savings" that -- thanks to commodity economy -- accumulate in the hands of separate individuals become capital, which first monopolises marketing ("buyers-up" and traders), owing to the fact that only the owners of these."savings" possess the necessary funds for wholesale disposal, which enable them to wait until the goods are sold in distant markets; how, further, this merchant capital enslaves the mass of producers and organises capitalist manufacture, the capitalist domestic system of large-scale production; and how, finally, the expansion of the market and increasing competition lead to improved techniques, and how this merchant capital becomes industrial capital and organises large-scale machine production And when this capital, having grown strong and enslaved millions of working people and whole districts, begins openly and brazenly to exert pressure on the government and turns it into its lackey -- our ingenious "friends of the

people" raise a howl about "the implanting of capitalism," about its "artificial creation"!

A timely discovery, indeed!

<"p219"> So that when Mr. Krivenko talks about people's, real, proper, etc., industry, he is simply trying to conceal the fact that our handicraft industries are nothing but capitalism at various stages of development. We have already become sufficiently acquainted with these methods in the case of Mr. Yuzhakov, who, instead of studying the peasant Reform, used empty phrases about the fundamental aim of the momentous Manifesto,[67] etc.; who, instead of studying land renting, dubbed it people's renting; and who, instead of studying how a home market is being formed for capitalism, philosophised about the latter's inevitable collapse from lack of markets, and so on.

To show how far Messrs. the "friends of the people" distort the facts, I shall dwell on one more example.* Our subjective philosophers so rarely condescend to give us precise references to facts that it would be unfair to ignore one of these most precise references of theirs, namely, the one Mr. Krivenko makes (No. 1, 1894) to the budgets of the Vorollezh peasants. Here, on the basis of data selected by themselves, we may make quite sure which idea of reality is more correct -- that of the Russian radicals and "friends of the people," or that of the Russian Social-Democrats.

Mr. Shcherbina, a Voronezh Zemstvo statistician, appends to his description of peasant farming in Ostrogozhsk Uyezd 24 budgets of typical peasant households, and analyses them in the text.**

* Although this example concerns the break-up of the peasantry, about which much has already been said, I consider it necessary to analyse their own data in order to show clearly what an insolent lie it is to assert that the Social-Deunocrats are interested not in reality but in "prophesying the future," and what charlatan methods the "friends of the people" use when in their controversies with us they ignore the substance of our views and dispose of them with nonsensical phrases.
** Statistical Returns for Voronezh Gubernia, Vol. II, Part II. Peasant Farming in Ostrogozhsk Uyezd, Voronezh, 1887. The budgets are given in the appendices, pp. 42-49, and the analysis in Cbapter XVIII: "Composition and Budgets of Peasant Households."

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Mr. Krivenko reproduces this analysis, failing, or rather refusing, to see that its methods are entirely unsuited to the purpose of getting an idea of the economy of our peasant farmers. The fact is that these 24 budgets depict entirely different households -- prosperous, middle and poor -- as Mr. Krivenko himself points out (p. 159); but, like Mr. Shcherbina, he simply employs average figures, lumping together the most different types of households, and thus completely disguises the fact of their differentiation. Yet the differentiation of our small producers is such a general, such a major fact (to which the Social-Democrats have long been drawing the attention of Russian socialists. See the works of Plekhanov.) that it is brought out quite distinctly even by the scanty data selected by Mr. Krivenko. Instead, when dealing with the farming of the peasants, of dividing them into categories according to the size of their farms and type of farming, he, like Mr. Shcherbina, divides them into legal categories -- former state and former landlords' peasants -- directing all his attention to the greater prosperity of the former as compared with the latter, and loses sight of the fact that the differences among the peasants within these categories are far greater than the differences between the categories.* To prove this, I divide these 24 budgets into three groups. I pick out a) 6 prosperous peasants, then b) 11 peasants of average prosperity (Nos. 7 to 10 and 16 to 22 in Shcherbina's table) and c) 7 poor peasants (Nos. 11 to 15, 23 and 24 in Shcherbina's table of budgets). Mr. Krivenko says, for example, that the expenditure per farm of the former state peasants is 541.3 rubles, and of the former landlords' peasants 417.7 rubles. But he overlooks the fact that the expenditures of different peasants are far from being equal: among the former state peasants, for instance, there is one with an expenditure of 84.7 rubles and another with an expenditure ten times as large -- 887.4 rubles (even if we leave out the

* Undoubtedly, the farm of a peasant who lives exclusively by agricultural pursuits and employs a labourer differs in type from the farm of a peasant who lives as a farm labourer and gets three-fifths of his earnings by farm-labouring. And among these 24 peasants there are both types. Judge for yourselves what kind of "science" will result if we lump together farm labourers and farmers who employ labourers, and make use of a general average!

German colonist with an expenditure of 1,456.2 rubles). What meaning can an average have if it is derived by lumping such magnitudes together? If we take the division into categories that I give, we find that the average expenditure per farm of a prosperous peasant is 855.86 rubles, of a middle peasant 471.61 rubles, and of a poor peasant 223.78 rubles.[*]

The ratio is, roughly, 4 : 2 : 1.

Let us proceed. Following in Shcherbina's footsteps, Mr. Krivenko gives the expenditure on personal requirements among the various legal categories of peasants: among the former state peasants, for example, the annual expenditure per person on vegetable food is 13.4 rubles, and among the former landlorde' peasants 12.2 rubles. But if we take them according to economic categories, the figures are: a) 17.7; b) 14.5 and c) 13.1 The expenditure on meat and dairy produce per person among the former landlords' peasants is 5.2 rubles and among the former state peasants 7.7 rubles. Taken by economic categories the figures are 11.7, 5.8 and 3.6 respectively. It is obvious that calculation according to legal categories merely conceals these huge divergences and nothing more. It is, therefore, obviously worthless. The income of the former state peasants is greater than the income of the former landlords' peasants by 53.7 per cent -- says Mr. Krivenko: the general average (for the 24 budgets) is 539 rubles; and for the two categories, over 600 rubles and about 400 rubles, respectively. But if graded according to economic strength, the incomes are a) 1,053.2 rubles, b) 473.8 rubles and c) 202.4 rubles, or a fluctuation of 10 : 2, and not 3 : 2. "The capital value of a peasant farm among the former state peasants is 1,060 rubles, and among the former land lords' peasants 635 rubles," says Mr. Krivenko. But if we take the economic categories,** the figures are a) 1,737.91 rubles, b) 786.42 rubles and c) 363.38 rubles -- again a fluctuation of 10 : 2, and not 3 : 2. By dividing the "peasantry" into legal categories the author prevented himself from <"fnp221">

* The fluctuation in the size of the average family is much less: a) 7.83, b) 8.36, and c) 5.28 persons per family.
** The divergence is greater still in the value of implements owned. The average is 54-83 rubles per household. But among the [cont. onto p. 222. -- DJR] well-to do peasants it is twice as much -- 111.80 rubles, and among the poor peasants one-third the amount -- 16.04 rubles. Among the middle peasants it is 48.44 rubles.

forming a correct judgement of the economics of this "peasantry."

If we examine the farms of the various types of peasants according to economic strength, we find that the prosperous families have an average income of 1,053.2 rubles, and expenditure of 855.86 rubles, or a net income of 197.34 rubles. The middle family has an income of 473.8 rubles and an expenditure of 471.61 rubles, or a net income of 2.19 rubles per farm (and that without counting credit debts and arrears) -- obviously, it can barely make ends meet: out of 11 farms, 5 have a deficit. The bottom, poor, group run their farms at a direct loss: with an income of 202.4 rubles their expenditure is 223.78 rubles, which means a deficit of 21.38 rubles.[*] It is evident that if we lump farms together and strike a general average (net income -- 44.11 rubles) we completely distort the real picture. We then overlook the fact (as Mr. Krivenko has done) that all the six prosperous peasants who secure a net income employ farm labourers (8 of them) -- a fact which reveals the character of their farming (they are in process of becoming capitalist farmers), which yields them a net income and relieves them almost entirely of the need to resort to "industries." These farmers all together cover only 6.5% of their budgets by industries (412 rubles out of a total of 6,319.5); moreover, these industries -- as Mr. Shcherbina in one place remarks -- are of such a type as "carting," or even "dealing in sheep," that is, such as, far from indicating dependence, presuppose the exploitation of others (precisely in the second case: accumulated "savings" are converted into merchant capital ). These peasants own 4 industrial establishments, which yield an income of 320 rubles (5% of the total).**

The economy of the middle peasants is of a different type: they, as we have seen, can barely make ends meet. <"fnp222">

* It is interesting to note that the budgets of the farm labourers two out of the seven poor peasants show no deficit: income 99 rubles and expenditure 93.45 rubles per family. One of the farm labourers is fed, clothed and shod by his master.
** See Appendix I (p. 301 of this volume. --Ed.).

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Farming does not cover their needs, and 19% of their income is from so-called industries. What sort of industries these are we learn from Mr. Shcherbina's article. They are given for 7 peasants: only two engage in independent industries (tailoring and charcoal-burning); the remaining 5 sell their labour-power ("went mowing in the lowlands,"[*] "works at a distillery," "does day-labouring at harvest-time," "herds sheep," "worked on the local estate"). These are already half peasants, half workers. Side occupations divert them from their farming and thus undermine it completely.

As to the poor peasants, they farm at a dead loss; the significance of "industries" in their budgets is still greater (providing 24% of the income), and these industries amount almost entirely (except in the case of one peasant) to the sale of labour-power. In the case of two of them, "industries" (farm-labouring) predominate, providing two-thirds of their income.

It is quite clear that what we have here is a process of the complete differentiation of the small producers, the upper groups of whom are being turned into a bourgeoisie, the lower into a proletariat. Naturally, if we take general averages we shall see nothing of this and get no idea of the economics of the countryside.

It was only his operations with these fictitious averages that enabled the author to adopt the following method. To determine the place of these typical farms in the peasant farming of the uyezd as a whole, Mr. Shcherbina groups the peasants according to the size of their allotments, and it transpires that the level of prosperity (general average) of the 24 farms selected is higher by about one-third than the average in the uyezd. This calculation cannot be regarded as satisfactory, both because there is great divergence among these 24 peasants and because the classification according to size of allotment conceals the differentiation of the peasantry: the author's thesis that the "allotments are the prime cause of the prosperity" of the peasant is absolutely wrong. Everybody knows that the "equal" distribution of land within the village community does not in any way prevent its horseless members from giv- <"fnp223">

* Peasants from Voronezh Gubernia hired themselves out to rich Cossacks in the Dou lowlands for the haymaking. --Ed. Eng. ed.

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ing up the land, letting it, going away to work and turning into proletarians; or the members with many horses from renting large tracts of land and running big and profitable farms. If, for example, we take our 24 budgets, we shall see that one rich peasant, with 6 dessiatines of allotment land, has a total income of 758.5 rubles; a middle peasant, with 7.1 dessiatines of allotment land, 391.5 rubles; and a poor peasant, with 6.9 dessiatines of allotment land, 109.5 rubles. In general, we have seen that the ratio of the incomes of the various groups is 4 : 2 : 1; while the ratio of allotment land is 22.1 : 53.2 : 8.5, which equals 2.6 : 1.08 : 1. This is quite natural, for we find, for example, that the rich peasants, with 22.1 dessiatines of allotment land per household, rent an additional 8.8 dessiatines each, whereas the middle peasants, who have smaller allotments (9.2 dessiatines), rent less -- 7.7 dessiatines, and the poor peasants, with still smaller allotments (8.5 dessiatines), rent only 2.8 dessiatines.[*] And so, when Mr. Krivenko says: "Unfortunately, the data given by Mr. Shcherbina cannot serve as an accurate measure of the general state of affairs even in the uyezd, let alone the gubernia" -- all that we can say is that they cannot serve as a measure only when you resort to the wrong method of calculating general averages (a method which Mr. Krivenko should not have resorted to), but that, generally speaking, Mr. Shcherbina's data are so comprehensive and valuable that they enable us to arrive at correct conclusions and that if Mr. Krivenko has not done so, it is not Mr. Shcherbina who is to blame.

The latter, for example, gives on page 197 a classification of the peasants according to draught animals and not according to allotment land, that is, a classification on economic, not legal lines -- and this gives us every ground for asserting that the ratios between the various categories of the selected 24 typical households are absolutely identical with the ratios between the various economic groups throughout the uyezd. <"fnp224">

* Of course, I do not mean to say that the data for the 24 farms are alone enough to refute the thesis that the allotments are of prime importance. But above we cited data for several uyezds which totally refute it.[38]

The classification is as follows:*

Ostrogozhak Uyezd, Voronezh Gubernia

Groups of householders according to number of draught animals owned			I. With no draught animals	II. With 1 draught animal	III. With 2 or 3 draught animals	IV. With 4 or more draught animals	Total
Number	Householders		8,728	10,510	11,191	3,152	33,581
Number	Percentage		26.0	31.3	33.3	9.4	100.0
Per Household	Head of cattle		0.7	3.0	6.8	14.3	4.4
	Land (dess.)	Allotment	6.2	9.4	13.8	21.3	11.2
	Land (dess.)	Rented	0.2	1.3	3.6	12.3	2.5
Average family (persons)			4.6	5.7	7.7	11.2	6.7
Percentage of Households	With farm labourers		0.6	1.4	8.3	25.3	5.7
	With com. or ind. estabs.		4.0	5.4	12.3	34.2	10.0
	With no house		9.5	1.4	0.4	0.1	3.0
	With no working member		16.6	4.9	1.3	0.4	6.3
	Cultivating no land		41.6	2.9	0.4	0.3	11.9
	With no impliments		98.5	2.5	---	---	23.4

[Transcriber's Note: In the printed text the data in the following table is appended within the above table, below the categories constituting the "Per household" division of the above table. -- DJR]

Of the 24 typical households [**]			Farm labourers	Poor peasants	Middle peasants	Prosperous peasants	Total
Per Household	Head of cattle		0.5	2.8	8.1	13.5	7.2
	Land (dess.)	Allotment	7.2	8.7	9.2	22.1	&ensp 12.2
	Land (dess.)	Rented	0.0	3.9	7.7	8.8	6.6
Average family (persons)			4.5	5.6	8.3	7.8	7.3 [***]

<"fnp225">

* The comparison of the 24 typical households with the categories of farms for the whole uyezd has been made by the same methods as Mr. Shcherbina used in comparing the average of the 24 farms with groups based on size of allotment.
** Two farm labourers (Nos. 14 and 15 of Shcherbina's budgets) have here been eliminated from the group of poor peasants so that only 5 poor peagants remain.
*** [Transcriber's Note: The following footnote is nearly two pages in length, which you may wish to skip for the moment. -- DJR] It must be noted in connection with this table that here too we find that the amount of rented land increases in proportion to growing prosperity despite the increase in allotment fand. Thus the facts for one more uyezd conflrm the fallacy of the idea that the allotments are of prime importance. On the contrary, we find that the proportion of allotment land to the total holding of a given [cont. onto p. 226. -- DJR] group diminishes as the prosperity of the group increases. Adding allotment land to rented land, and calculatinR the percentage of allotment land to the total, we obtain the following flgures by groups: I) 96.8%; II) 85.0%; III) 79.3%; IV) 63.3%. And this is quite natural. We know that with the emancipation Reform, land in Russia became a commodity. Whoever has money can always buy land; and allotment land too must be bought. It is obvious that the prosperous peasants concentrate land in their hands, and that this concentration is more marked in the case of rented land because of the medieval restrictions on the transfer of allotments. The "friends of the people," who favour these restrictions, do not realise that the senseless reactionary measure only worsens the condition of the poor peasants: the ruined peasants, possessing no agricultural implements, are obliged, in any case, to lease their land, and any prohibition on such leasing (or sale) will lead either to land being leased secretly, and, consequently, on worse terms for those who lease it, or to the poor peasants surrendering their land for nothing to the "village community," i.e., again to the kulak.
I cannot refrain from quoting a profoundly true comment made by Hourwich on this vaunted "inalienability":
"To see our way clearly through the question at issue, we have to discover who are the buyers of the land sold by peasants. We have seen that only a minor portion of the quarterly lots have been purchased by merchants. As a rule, the small lots sold by the nobility are acquired by peasants only. The question at issue is thus one that has been settled as between peasants alone, and that affects neither the interests of the nobility nor those of the capitalistic class. In such cases it may well please the Russian government to throw a sop to the peasantists [Narodniks]. <"p226"> This m&eacutesalliance of oriental paternalism with some queer sort of state socialistic prohibitionism, however, would be apt to meet with opposition from the very ones who were supposed to be benefited. As the process of dissolution is obviously spreading from within, and not from without the village, inalienability of peasant land would simply mean gratuitous expropriation of the poor for the benefit of the wealthy members of the community.
"We notice that the percentage of emigrants among the quarterly possessors[69] who have enjoyed the right of alienating their land has been far greater than that among the former state peasants who live in agrarian communism: namely, in the Ranenburg district (Ryazan Gubernia) the percentage of emigrants among the former is [cont. onto p. 227. -- DJR] 17, among the latter it 19 9. In the Dankov district among the former it is 12 and among the latter it is 5.
"To what is this difference due? A single concrete example will clear up the matter.
"In 1881 a small community of 5 households, former serfs of Grigorov, emigrated from the village of Bigildino, district of Dankov. Their land, 30 dessiatines, was sold to a rich peasant in consideration of 1,500 rubles. The emigrants could not make a living at home, and most of them were yearly labourers. (Statistical Report, Part II, pp. 115, 247.) According to Mr. Grigoryev (Emigration of the Peasants of Ryazan Gubernia ), 300 rubles, the price of an average peasant holding of 6 dessiatines, is sufficient to enable a peasant family to start farming in Southern Siberia. A peasant who has been absolutely ruined is thus enabled, through the sale of his lot in the communal land, to rise to the position of a farmer in the new country. Devotion to the sacred customs of forefathers would hardly be able to withstand such a temptation as this, but for the helpful right hand of the most gracious Bureaucracy.
"I shall, of course, be charged with pessimism, as I have been recently on account of my views on the emigration of the peasants. (Severny Vestnik, 1892, No. 5, in an article by A. Bogdanovsky.) The usual method of reasoning followed takes some such course as this: Granted that the case is presented true to life as it actually stands, <"p227"> the evil consequences" (of emigration) "are nevertheless due to the present abnormal condition of the peasantry, and under normal circumstances, the objections are 'no good.' Unhappily, however, these very 'abnormal' conditions are developing spontaneously, while the creation of 'normal' conditions is beyond the jurisdiction of the well-wishers of the peasantry." (Op. cit., p. l37.[70])

There can be no doubt that the general averages of the 24 typical farms are superior to the general run of peasant farm in the uyezd. But if, instead of these fictitious averages, we take economic categories, a comparison becomes possible.

We find that the farm labourers on typical farms are somewhat below the peasants who have no draught animals, but approach them very closely. The poor peasants approximate very closely to the owners of one draught animal (the number of cattle is less by 0.2 -- the poor peasants have 2.8 and the one-horse peasants 3.0 -- but on the other hand, their total land, both allotment and rented, is somewhat more -- 12.6 dessiatines as against 10.7 dessiatines). The middle peasants are only slightly above those with two or three draught animals (they have slightly more cattle and a little less land), while the prosperous peasants approximate to those who have four or more draught animals, being a little below them. We are therefore entitled to draw the conclusion that in the uyezd as a whole not less than one-tenth of the peasants engage in regular, profitable farming and have no need for outside work. (Their income -- it is important to note -- is expressed in money, and therefore presupposes agriculture of a commercial character.) To a large extent they conduct

their farming with the help of hired labourers: not less than one-fourth of all the households employ regular farm labourers, and the number employing temporary day labourers is not known. Further, more than half the peasants in the uyezd are poor (nearly six-tenths: horseless and one-horse peasants, 26% + 31.3% = 57.3%), who conduct their farming at a dead loss and are consequently sinking into ruin, steadily and inexorably being expropriated. They are obliged to sell their labour-power and about one-fourth of the peasants already gain their livelihood more by wage-labour than by agriculture. The remaining are middle peasants, who carry on somehow, farming at a regular loss made up by outside earnings, and who, consequently, have no economic stability whatever.

I have deliberately dwelt on these data in such detail in order to show how distorted is Mr. Krivenko's picture of the real situation. Without stopping to think, he takes general averages and operates with them. Naturally, the result is not even a fiction but a downright falsehood. We have seen, for example, that the net income (+197.34 rubles) of one prosperous peasant (from among the typical budgets) covers the deficits of nine poor households (-21.38 X 9 = -192.42), so that 10% of rich peasants in the uyezd will not only cover the deficits of 57% of poor peasants but even yield a certain surplus. And Mr. Krivenko, derivingfrom the average budget of the 24 farms a surplus of 44.14 rubles -- or, deducting credit debts and arrears, 15.97 rubles -- simply speaks of the "decline" of the middle and lower-than-middle peasants. Actually, however, one can talk of decline only in reference, perhaps, to the middle peasants,* whereas in the case of the mass of poor peasants we observe direct expropriation, accompanied, moreover, by the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a minority who own comparatively large and firmly-established farms.

Because he ignored this latter circumstance, the author failed to observe another very interesting feature of these budgets, namely, that they likewise prove that the differ-

* And even this would scarcely be true, because decline implies a temporary and casual loss of stability, whereas lhe middle peasants, as we have seen, are always in a state of instability, on the verge on ruin.

entiation of the peasantry is creating a home market. On the one hand, as we pass from the top group to the bottom, we observe the growing importance of income from industries (6.5%, 18.8% and 23.6% of the total budget of the prosperous, middle and poor peasants, respectively), that is, chiefly from the sale of labour-power. On the other hand, as we pass from the bottom to the top groups, we observe the growing commodity (nay, more: bourgeois, as we have seen) character of agriculture and an increase in the proportion of produce disposed of: the total income from agriculture of the categories is

       3,861.7               3,163.8                    689.9
a)  ^________,      b)  ^________,      c)  ^{________ .} The denominator indicates
       1,774.4                  899.9                  175.25

the money part of the income,[*] which constitutes 45.9%, 28.3% and 25.4% respectively, passing from the top category to the bottom.

Here we again see clearly how the means of production taken from the expropriated peasants turn into capital.

It is quite obvious that Mr. Krivenko could not draw correct conclusions from the material used -- or, rather, misused -- in this way. After describing the money character of peasant farming in Novgorod Gubernia on the basis of what he was told by a peasant from those parts with whom he travelled by rail, he was forced to draw the correct conclusion that it is precisely this circumstance, commodity economy, that "cultivates" "special abilities" and gives rise to one preoccupation: "to get it (the hay) mown as cheaply as possible" and "sell it as dear as possible" (p. 156).** This <"fnp229">

* A fairly complex calculation was required to arrive at the money income from agriculture (which Shcherbina does not give). It was necessary to exclude from the total income from crops the income derived from straw and chaff, which, according to the author are used as cattle feed. The author himself excludes them in Chapter XVIII, but only for the total figures for the uyezd, and not for the given 24 households. Taking his total figures, I determined the proportion of income from grain (compared with the total income from the crops, i.e., both from grain and from straw and chaff) and on this basis excluded straw and chaff in the present case. This proportion is, for rye 78.98%, for wheat 72.67%, for oats and barley 73.32% and for millet and buckwheat 77.78%. The amount of grain sold was then determined by excluding the amount consumed on the farm itself.
** "The worker must be hired cheap and the most made out of him," Mr. Krivenko quite rightly remarks in the same passage.

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<"p230"> serves as a "school" which "awakens" (quite true!) "and refines commercial gifts." "Talented people come to the fore to become the Kolupayevs, the Derunovs[71] and other types of blood-suckers,[*] while the simple-hearted and simple-minded fall behind, deteriorate, become impoverished and pass into the ranks of the farm labourers" (p. 156).

The data for a gubernia in which entirely different conditions prevail -- an agricultural one (Voronezh) -- lead to exactly the same conclusions. One would have thought the situation was quite clear: the system of commodity economy stands out distinctly as the main background of the economic life of the country in general and of the "community" "peasantry" in particular; the fact also stands out that this commodity economy, and it alone, is splitting the "people" and the "peasantry" into a proletariat (they become ruined, enter the ranks of the farm labourers) and a bourgeoisie (blood-suckers), i.e., it is turning into capitalist economy. But the "friends of the people" never dare look realities in the face and call a spade a spade (that would be too "harsh")! And Mr. Krivenko argues as follows:

"Some people consider this state of affairs quite natural" (he should have added: a quite natural consequence of the capitalist character of production relations. Then it would have been an accurate description of the views of "some people," and then it would have been impossible for him to dispose of these views with empty phrases and he would have had to make a real analysis of the matter. When the author did not deliberately set out to combat these "some people," he himself had to admit that money economy is precisely the "school" that produces "talented" blood-suckers and "simple-hearted" farm labourers) "and regard it as the irresistible mission of capitalism." (Well, of course! To believe that the struggle has to be waged against this "school" and the "blood-suckers" who dominate it, together with their administrative and intellectual lackeys, is to consider that capitalism cannot be overcome! But to leave the capitalist <"fnp230">

* Mr. Yuzhakov, how's this! Here is your collaague saying that "talented people" become "blood-suckers," whereas you assured us that people become so only because they have "uncritical minds." That won't do, gentlemen, contradicting each other like this in one and the same magazine!

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"school" with its blood-suckers in complete immunity and to want to eliminate its capitalist products by means of liberal half-measures is to be a true "friend of the people"!) "We look at the matter somewhat differently. Capitalism undoubtedly does play an important part here, as we pointed out above" (this refers to the remark about the school of blood-suckers and farm labourers), "but it cannot be said that its role is so all-embracing and decisive that no other factors are responsible for the changes taking place in the national economy, and that the future holds out no other solution" (p. 160).

There you are! Instead of giving an exact and straightforward description of the present system, instead of giving a definite answer to the question of why the "peasantry" is splitting into blood-suckers and farm labourers, Mr. Krivenko disposes of the matter with meaningless phrases. "It cannot be said that the role of capitalism is decisive." Why, that is the whole question: can it be said, or can it not?

To uphold your opinion you should have indicated what other factors are "decisive," what other "solution" there can be besides the one indicated by the Social-Democrats, namely, the class struggle of the proletariat against the blood-suckers.* But nothing is indicated. Unless, perhaps, the author regards the following as an indication? Amusing as it may be, you can expect anything from the "friends of the people."

"The first to fall into decline, as we have seen, are the weak farms poor in land" -- namely, with allotments of less than five dessiatines. "But the typical farms of the state peasants, with allotments of 15.7 dessiatines, are distinguished for their stability. . . . True, to secure such an income (a net income of 80 rubles) they rent an additional five dessiatines but that only shows what they need."

What does this "amendment," which links up the notorious "land poverty" with capitalism, amount to? Only to

* If only urban factory workers are as yet capable of assimilating the idea of the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, while the rural "simple-hearted and simple-minded" farm labourers i.e., the people who have actually lost those charming qualities so closely bound up with the "age-old basis" and the "community spirit," are not -- it only proves the correctness of the Social-Democrats' theory of the progressive and revolutionary role of Russian capitalism.

this, that those who have little lose that little, while those who have much (15.7 dessiatines each) acquire still more.[*] But, then, this is a meaningless paraphrase of the statement that some sink into ruin while others grow rich!! It is high time to abandon this meaningless talk about land poverty, which explains nothing (because the peasants are not given allotments free but have to buy them); it only describes a process, and moreover describes it inaccurately, because one should not speak about the land alone, but about the means of production in general, and not say that the peasants have a "poor" supply of them, but that they are being freed from them, are being expropriated by growing capitalism. "We have no intention of saying," Mr. Krivenko remarks, concluding his philosophical discourse, "that agriculture should and can, under all circumstances, remain 'natural' and separated from manufacturing industry" (another phrase! Was it not you who were just obliged to admit that a school of money economy already exists, which presupposes exchange and, consequently, the separation of agriculture from manufacturing industry? Why again this sloppy talk of what can be and what should be?); "all we say is that to create a separate industry artificially is irrational" (it would be interesting to know: is the industry of the Kimry and Pavlovo handicraftsmen "separate," and who "artificially created" it, and how and when?), "and that the separation of the labourer from the land and the instruments of production is being effected not by capitalism alone, but also by other factors that precede and promote it."

Here most likely he again had in mind the profound idea that if the labourer is separated from the land, which passes into the hands of the blood-sucker, this happens because the former is "poor" and the latter is "rich" in land.

And this kind of philosophy charges the Social-Democrats with "narrowness" for regarding capitalism as the decisive factor! . . . I have dwelt once more in such detail on the differentiation of the peasants and handicraftsmen just because it was necessary to bring out clearly how the Social-Democrats picture the matter and how they explain <"fnp232">

* Not to mention the absurdity of the idea that peasants with equal allotments are equal and are not also divided into "blood suckers" and "farm labourers."

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it. It was necessary to show that the facts which to the subjective sociologist mean that the peasants have "grown poor," while the "money chasers" and "blood-suckers" "derive profits for their own advantage," to the materialist mean the bourgeois differentiation of the commodity producers necessitated by commodity production itself. It was necessary to show what facts serve as the basis for the thesis (quoted above in Part 1)[*] that the struggle between the propertied and the propertyless is going on everywhere in Russia, not only in the mills and factories, but even in the most remote villages, and that everywhere this struggle is one between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that emerge as a result of commodity economy. The break-up, the depeasantisation of our peasants and handicraftsmen, which can be depicted accurately thanks to the admirable material provided by Zemstvo statistics, furnishes factual proof of the correctness of precisely the Social-Democratic conception of Russian reality, the conception that the peasant and the handicraftsman are petty producers in the "categorical" meaning of the term, that is, are petty bourgeois. This thesis may be called the central point of the theory of WORKING-CLASS SOCIALISM as against the old peasant socialism, which understood neither the conditions of commodity economy in which the petty producers live, nor their capitalist differentiation due to these conditions. And, therefore, whoever wanted to criticise Social-Democracy seriously should have concentrated his argument on this, and shown that from the angle of political ecouomy Russia is not a system of commodity economy, that it is not this which causes the break-up of the peasantry, and that the expropriation of the mass of the population and the exploitation of the working people can be explained by something other than the bourgeois, capitalist organisation of our social (including peasant) economy.

Well, just try it, gentlemen!

There is another reason why it was the data on peasant and handicraft economy that I preferred to take in illustration of the Social-Democratic theory. It would be a departure from the materialist method were I, when criticising the <"fnp233">

* See p. 191 of this volume. --Ed.

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views of the "friends of the people," to confine myself to contrasting their ideas with the Marxist ideas. One must in addition explain the "Narodnik" ideas, demonstrate their MATERIAL basis in our present social-economic relaties. Illustrations and examples of the economy of our peasants and handicraftsmen show what this "peasant" is whose ideologists the "friends of the people" want to be. They demonstrate the bourgeois character of our rural economy and thus confirm the correctness of classifying the "friends of the people" as ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie. But this is not all; they show that there is the closest connection between the ideas and programmes of our radicals and the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. It is this connection, which will become even clearer after a detailed examination of their programme, that explains why these radical ideas are so widespread in our "society"; it also admirably explains the political servility of the "friends of the people" and their readiness for compromise.

There was, lastly, one other reason for dwelling in such detail on the economics of precisely those sides of our social life where capitalism is least developed and from which the Narodniks have usually drawn the material for their theories. A study and description of these economics was the simplest way to reply in substance to one of the most wide spread objections to Social-Democracy current among people here. Proceeding from the usual idea that capitalism contradicts the "people's system," and observing that the Social-Democrats regard large-scale capitalism as progressive, that it is large-scale capitalism that they want to have as their basis in combating the present robber regime -- our radicals, without more ado, accuse the Social-Democrats of ignoring the interests of the mass of the peasant population, of desiring "to put every muzhik through the factory melting pot," etc.

All these arguments are based on the amazingly illogical and strange procedure of judging capitalism by what it really is, but the countryside by what it "might be." Naturally, there could be no better reply to this than to show them the real countryside and its real economics. Anybody who studies these economics dispassionately and scientifically will be bound to admit that rural Russia

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constitutes a system of small, scattered markets (or small branches of a central market), which regulate the social and economic life of separate small districts. And in each of these districts we find all the phenomena that are, in general, peculiar to the social-economic organisation whose regulator is the market: we find the division of the once equal, patriarchal direct producers into rich and poor; we find the rise of capital, especially of merchant capital, which spins its web around the working people and sucks the life blood out of them. When you compare the descriptions of peasant economy given by our radicals with precise first hand data on rural economic life, you are astonished that there is no place in the criticised system of views for that mass of small hucksters who swarm in each of these markets, all these higglers and chafferers or whatever else the peasants call them in different localities, for all that mass of petty exploiters who dominate the markets and ruthlessly oppress the working people. They are usually simply brushed aside with the remark -- "These are no longer peasants, but hucksters." Yes, you are quite right: these are "no longer peasants." But try to treat all these "traders" as a distinct group, that is, speaking in the precise language of political economy, those who engage in commercial enterprise and who appropriate, to whatever extent, the labour of others; try to express in precise figures the economic strength of this group and the part it plays in the entire economic life of the district; and then try to treat as an opposite group all those who also are "no longer peasants" because they bring their labour-power to the market, because they work for others and not for themselves -- try to fulfil these elementary requisites of a dispassionate and serious inquiry and you will get such a vivid picture of bourgeois differentiation that not a trace of the "people's system" myth will remain. This mass of small rural exploiters represents a terrible force, especially terrible because they oppress the isolated, single toiler, because they fetter him to themselves and deprive him of all hope of deliverance; terrible because this exploitation, in view of the barbarism of the countryside due to the low labour productivity characteristic of the system described and to the absence of communications, constitutes not only robbery of labour, but also the Asiatic abuse of human dignity that

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is constantly encountered in the countryside. Now, if you compare this real countryside with our capitalism you will understand why the Social-Democrats regard the work of our capitalism as progressive when it draws these small, scattered markets together into one nation-wide market, when, in place of the legion of small well-meaning blood suckers, it creates a handful of big "pillars of the fatherland," when it socialises labour and raises its productivity, when it shatters the subordination of the working people to the local blood-suckers and subordinates them to large-scale capital. This subordination is progressive compared with the former -- despite all the horrors of the oppression of labour, of gradual extinction, brutalisation, and the crippling of the bodies of women and children, etc. -- because it AWAKENS THE MIND OF THE WORKER, converts dumb and incoherent discontent into conscious protest, converts scattered, petty, senseless revolt into an organised class struggle for the emancipation of all working folk, a struggle which derives its strength from the very conditions of existence of this large-scale capitalism, and therefore can undoubtedly count upon CERTAIN SUCCESS.

<"p236"> In reply to the accusation of ignoring the mass of the peasantry, Social-Democrats would be quite justified in quoting the words of Karl Marx:

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain, not that man should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful embellishment, but that he should
throw of the chain and reach for the living flower."[72]

The Russian Social-Democrats are plucking from our countryside the imaginary flowers that adorn it, are combat ing idealisations and fantasies, and are performing the destructive work for which they are so mortally detested by the "friends of the people," not in order that the mass of the peasantry shall remain in their present state of oppression, gradual extinction and enslavement, but in order that the proletariat may understand what sort of chains every where fetter the working people, that they may understand how these chains are forged, and be able to rise against them, to throw them off and reach out for the real flower.

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When they bring this idea to those representatives of the working people who by virtue of their position are alone capable of acquiring class-consciousness and of launching a class struggle, they are accused of wanting to put the muzhik through the factory melting pot.

And who are the accusers?

People who themselves base their hopes for the emancipation of the working people on the "government" and on "society," that is, on the organs of that very bourgeoisie which has everywhere fettered the working people!

And these spineless creatures have the presumption to talk of the Social-Democrats having no ideals!

Let us now pass to the political programme of the "friends of the people," to whose theoretical views we have, we think, devoted far too much time. By what means do they propose to "put out the fire"? What way out do they propose in place of the one, which they claim is wrong, proposed by the Social- Democrats?

"The reorganisation of the Peasants' Bank," says Mr. Yuzhakov in an article entitled "The Ministry of Agriculture" (Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 10), "the establishment of a Colonisation Department, the regulation of state land leasing in the interest of people's farming . . . the study and regulation of land letting -- such is the progranime for the restoration of people's farming and its protection from the economic violence" (sic!) "of the nascent plutocracy." And in the article "Problems of Economic Development" this programme for "the restoration of people's farming" is supplemented by the following "first, but essential steps": "Removal of all restrictions that now encumber the village community; its release from tutelage, adoption of common cultivation (the socialisation of agriculture) and the development of the communal processing of raw materials obtained from the soil." And Messrs. Krivenko and Karyshev add: "Cheap credit, the artel form of farming, an assured market, the possibility of dispensing with employers' profit" (this will be dealt with separately below), "the invention of cheaper engines and other technical improvements," and, finally, "museums, warehouses, commission agencies,"

Examine this programme and you will find that these gentlemen wholly and completely adopt the position of modern society (i.e., that of the capitalist system, without realising it), and want to settle matters by mending and patching it up, failing to understand that all their progressive measures -- cheap credit, improved machinery, banks, and so on -- can only serve to strengthen and develop the bourgeoisie.

Nik.-on is quite right, of course, when he says -- and this is one of his most valuable theses, against which the "friends of the people" could not help protesting -- that no reforms under the present system are of any use, and that credit, migration, tax reform, the transfer of all the land to the peasants, will not appreciably change anything, but, on the contrary, are bound to strengthen and develop capitalist economy, retarded as it now is by excessive "tutelage," survivals of feudal dues, the tying of the peasantry to the land, etc. Economists, he says, who, like Prince Vasilchikov (an undoubted "friend of the people" in his ideas), desire the extensive development of credit, want the same thing as the "liberal," i.e., bourgeois, economists, and "are striving for the development and consolidation of capitalist relations." They do not understand the antagonistic character of our production relations (within the peasantry" as within the other social estates), and instead of trying to bring this antagonism out into the open, instead of simply joining with those who are enslaved as a result of this antagonism and trying to help them rise in struggle, they dream of stopping the struggle by measures that would satisfy everybody, to achieve reconciliation and unity. The result of all these measures is naturally a foregone conclusion: one has but to recall the examples of differentiation given above to be convinced that all these credits,* improvements, banks and similar "progressive"

* This idea -- of utilising credit to foster "people's farming," i.e., the farming of petty producers, where capitalist relations exist (and the ''friends of the people," as we have already seen, can no longer deny that they do exist) -- this meaningless idea, which reveals an inability to understand the elementary truths of theoretical political economy, quite clearly shows how vulgar is the theory advanced by these gentlemen who try to sit between two stools.

measures will be available only to the one who, possessing a properly-run and established farm, has certain "savings," i.e., the representative of an insignificant minority, the petty bourgeoisie. And however much you reorganise the Peasants' Bank and similar institutions, you will not in the least alter the fundamental and cardinal fact that the mass of the population have been and continue to be expropriated, and lack means even of subsistence, let alone of farming on proper lines.

The same must be said of "artels," and "common cultivation." Mr. Yuzhakov called the latter "the socialisation of agriculture." This is merely funny, of course, because socialisation requires the organisation of production on a wider scale than the limits of a single village, and because it necessitates the expropriation of the "blood-suckers" who have monopolised the means of production and now direct Russian social economy. And this requires struggle, struggle and struggle, and not paltry philistine moralising.

And that is why such measures of theirs turn into mild, liberal half-measures, barely subsisting on the generosity of the philanthropic bourgeois, and do much more harm by diverting the exploited from the struggle than good from the possible improvement in the position of a few individuals, an improvement that cannot but be meagre and precarious on the general basis of capitalist relations. The preposterous extent to which these gentlemen attempt to hide the antagonism in Russian life -- doing so, of course, with the very best intentions in order to put an end to the present struggle, i.e., with the sort of intentions with which the road to hell is paved -- is shown by the following argument of Mr. Krivenko

"The intelligentsia direct the manufacturers' enterprises, and they could direct popular industry."

The whole of their philosophy amounts to whining that struggle and exploitation exist but that they "might" not exist if . . . if there were no exploiters. Really, what did the author mean by this meaningless phrase? Can it be denied that year after year the Russian universities and other educational establishments turn out a brand of "intelligentsia" (??) whose only concern is to find someone to feed them? Can it be denied that today, in Russia, the means for maintaining this "intelligentsia" are owned only by the bourgeois

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minority? Can the bourgeois intelligentsia in Russia be expected to disappear because the "friends of the people" say that they "might" serve somebody other than the bourgeoisie? Yes, they "might," if they were not a bourgeois intelligentsia. They "might" not be a bourgeois intelligentsia, "if" there were no bourgeoisie and no capitalism in Russia! And they are content to spend their whole lives just repeating these "ifs" and "ands." What is more, these gentlemen not only decline to attach decisive importance to capitalism, but totally refuse to see anything wrong in it. If certain "defects" were removed, they would perhaps not fare so badly under it. How do you like the following statement by Mr. Krivenko:

"Capitalist production and the capitalisation of industries are by no means gates through which manufacturing industry can only depart from the people. It can depart, of course, but it can also enter the life of the people and come into closer proximity to agriculture and the raw materials industry. This can be contrived in various ways, and these gates, as well as others, can serve this purpose" (p. 161). Mr. Krivenko has a number of very good qualities -- as compared with Mr. Mikhailovsky; for example, frankness and straightforwardness. Where Mr. Mikhailovsky would have filled reams with smooth and glib sentences, wriggling around the subject without ever touching it, the business-like and practical Mr. Krivenko hits straight from the shoulder, and without a twinge of conscience spreads before the reader all the absurdities of his views without reservation. "Capitalism can enter the life of the people" -- if you please! That is, capitalism is possible without the working people being divorced from the means of production! This is positively delightful. At least, we now are absolutely clear as to what the "friends of the people" want. They want commodity economy without capitalism -- capitalism without expropriation and without exploitation, with nothing but a petty bourgeoisie peacefully vegetating under the wing of humane landlords and liberal administrators. And, with the serious mien of a departmental official who intends to confer a boon on Russia, they set about contriving schemes under which the wolves have their fill and the sheep their skins. To get some idea of the character of these

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schemes we must turn to the article by the same author in No. 12 ("0ur Cultural Free Lances"): "The artel and state form of industry," argues Mr. Krivenko -- apparently under the impression that he has already been "called upon" to "solve practical economic problems" -- "is by no means all that can be imagined in the present instance. For example, the following scheme is possible. . . ." And he goes on to relate how an engineer visited the offices of Russkoye Bogatstvo with a plan for the technical exploitation of the Don Region by a joint-stock company with shares in small denominations (not exceeding 100 rubles). The author was recommended to modify his scheme roughly as follows: "The shares shall not belong to private persons, but to village communities; that part of the village population employed in the company's enterprises shall receive ordinary wages, the village communities guaranteeing that their connection with the land is maintained."

What administrative genius, is it not? With what admirable simplicity and ease capitalism is introduced into the life of the people and all its pernicious attributes eliminated! All that is required is that the rural rich should buy shares* through the communities and receive dividends from the enterprise, in which a "part of the population" will be employed and their tie with the land guaranteed -- a "tie" insufficient to assure a livelihood from the land (otherwise who would go to work for "ordinary wages"?), but sufficient to bind a man to his locality, enslave him to

* I say the rich will buy the shares, despite the author's stipuIation that the shares shall be owned by the communities, because, after all, he speaks of the purchase of shares with money, which only the rich have. Hence, whether the business is conducted through the agency of the communities or not, only the rich will be able to pay, just as the purchase or renting of land by the community in no way prevents the rich from monopolising this land. The dividends too must go to those who have paid -- otherwise the shares will not be shares. And I understand the author's proposal to mean that a certain part of the profits will be earmarked for ''guaranteeing the workers their tie with the land." If the author does not mean this (although it inevitably follows from what he says), but that the rich shall pay for the shares and not receive dividends, then all his scheme amounts to is that the rich shall share with the poor. This reminds one of the anecdote about the fly-killer which requires that you first catch the fly and put it in the dish -- and it will die instantly.

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the local capitalist enterprise and deprive him of the possibility of changing masters. I say master, capitalist, quite legitimately, for he who pays the labourer wages cannot be called anything else.

The reader is perhaps annoyed with me already for dwelling so long on such nonsense, nonsense that would seem to be undeserving of any attention. But I must say that although it is nonsense, it is a type of nonsense that is useful and necessary to study, because it reflects the social and ecanomic relations actually existing in Russia and, as a consequence, is one of the social ideas, very widespread in our country, that Social-Democrats will have to reckon with for a long time to come. The point is that the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production in Russia gave rise, and to some extent still gives rise, to a situation for the working people in which the peasant, being unable to obtain a livelihood from the land and to pay dues from it to the landlord (and he pays them to this very day ), was compelled to resort to "outside employments," which at first, in the good old days, took the form either of independent occupations (for example, carting), or labour which was not independent but, owing to the poor development of these types of employment, was comparatively well paid. Under this condition the peasantry were assured of a certain well-being as compared with things today -- the well-being of serfs, who peacefully vegetated under the tutelage of a hundred thousand noble police chiefs and of the nascent gatherers of Russia's land -- the bourgeoisie.

And the "friends of the people" idealise this system, simply disregarding its dark sides, dream about it -- "dream," because it has long ceased to exist, has long been destroyed by capitalism, which has given rise to the wholesale expropriation of the peasant farmers and turned the former" employments" into the unbridled exploitation of abundantly offered "hands." Our petty-bourgeois knights want to preserve the peasant's "tie" with the land; but they do not want the serfdom that alone ensured this tie, and which was broken only by the commodity production and capitalism, which made this tie impossible. They want outside employments that do not take the peasant away from the land, that -- while work is done for the market -- do not give rise to competition, do not create capital and do not enslave the mass of the population to it. True to the subjective method in sociology, they want to "take" what is good from here and from there; but actually, of course, this childish desire only leads to reactionary dreaming which ignores realities, to an inability to understand and utilise the really progressive, revolutionary aspects of the new system, and to sympathy for measures which perpetuate the good old system of semi-serf, semi-free labour -- a system that was fraught with alI the horrors of exploitation and oppression, and held out no possibility of escape.

To prove the correctness of this explanation, which classes the "friends of the people" among the reactionaries, I shall quote two examples.

In the Moscow Zemstvo statistics we can read a description of the farm of a certain Madame K. (in Podolsk Uyezd), which (the farm, not the description) aroused the admiration both of the Moscow statisticians and of Mr. V. V., if my memory does not deceive me (he wrote about it, I think, in a magazine article).

This notorious farm of Madame K.'s was regarded by Mr. V. Orlov as "convincing practical confirmation" of his favourite thesis that "where peasant farming is in a sound condition, the private landowners' farms are also better conducted." From Mr. Orlov's account of this lady's estate, it appears that she runs her farm with the labour of the local peasants, who till her land in return for a winter loan of flour, etc. The lady is extraordinarily kind to these peasants and helps them, so that they are now the most prosperous in the volost and have enough grain "to last them almost until the new harvest (formerly, it did not even last until. St. Nicholas' day)."

The question arises, does "such an arrangement" preclude "the antagonism of interests of peasant and landowner," as Messrs. N. Kablukov (Vol. V, p. 175) and V. Orlov (Vol. II, pp. 55-59 and elsewhere) think? Obviously not, because Madame K. Iives on the labour of her peasants. Hence, exploitation has not been abolished at all. Madame K. may he forgiven for failing to see the exploitation behind her kindness to the exploited, but not so an economist and

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statistician who, in his ecstasy over the case in question, takes up exactly the same stand as those Menschenfreunde[*] in the West who go into ecstasies over the kindness of a capitalist to a worker, rapturously relate cases where a factory owner shows concern for his workers, provides them with general stores, dwellings, etc. To conclude from the existence (and therefore "possibility") of such "facts" that there is no antagonism of interests, is not to see the wood for the trees. That is the first point.

The second point is that we learn from Mr. Orlov's account that Madame K.'s peasants, "thanks to excellent crops (the landlady gave them good seed), have acquired livestock" and have "prosperous" farms. Let us assume that these "prosperous peasants" have become not "almost," but completely prosperous, that not the "majority," but all of them have enough grain, not "almost" until, but right until the new harvest. Let us assume that these peasants now have enough land, and that they have "cattle runs and pastures" -- which they have not got at present (fine prosperity!), and which they rent from Madame K., making payment in labour. Does Mr. Orlov really believe that in that case -- that is, if the peasant farming were really prosperous -- these peasants would agree to "perform all the jobs on Madame K.'s estate thoroughly, punctually and swittly," as they do now? Or perhaps gratitude to the kind lady who sweats the life-blood out of these prosperous peasants with such maternal care will be a no less potent incentive than the hopelessness of the present condition of the peasants, who, after all, cannot dispense with pastures and cattle runs?

Evidently, the ideas of the "friends of the people" are, in essence, the same: as true petty-bourgeois ideologists, they do not want to abolish exploitation, but to mitigate it, they do not want connect, but conciliation. Their broad ideals, from the standpoint of which they so vigorously fulminate against the narrow-minded Social-Democrats, go no further than the "prosperous" peasant who performs his "duties" to the landlords and capitalists, provided the landlords and capitalists treat him fairly.

Take the other example. Mr. Yuzhakov, in his quite <"fnp244">

* Philanthropists. --Ed.

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well-known article, "Quotas for People's Landownership in Russia" (Russkaya Mysl, 1885, No. 9), expounded his views on what should be the dimensions of "people's" landownership, i.e., in the terminology of our liberals, the kind of landownership that excludes capitalism and exploitalion. Now, after the excellent explanation given by Mr. Krivenko, we know that he too regarded things from the standpoint of "introducing capitalism into the life of the people." As the minimum for "people." As landownership he took such allotments as would cover "cereal food and payments,"[*] while the rest, he said, could be obtained by "employments.". . . In other words, he simply resigned himself to a state of affairs in which the peasant, by maintaining connection with the land, is subjected to a double exploitation -- partly by the landlord, on the "allotment," and partly by the capitalist, in "employments." This state of the small producers, who are subjected to a double exploitation, and whose conditions of life, moreover, are such as inevitably breed a cowed and crushed spirit, killing all hope that the oppressed class will fight, let alone be victorious -- this semi-medieval condition is the nec plus ultra of the outlook and ideals of the "friends of the people." Well then, when capitalism, which developed with tremendous rapidity throughout the whole of Russia's post-Reform history, began to uproot this pillar of old Russia -- the patriarchal, semi-serf peasantry -- to drag them out of these medieval and semi-feudal conditions and to place them in a modern, purely capitalist environment, compelling them to abandon their old homes and wander over the face of Russia in search of work, breaking the chains of enslavement to the local "work-giver" and disclosing the basis of exploitation in general, of class exploitation as distinct from the depredations of a particular viper -- when capitalism began to draw the rest of the peasant population, cowed and forced down to the <"fnp245">

* To show the relation between these outlays and the rest of the peasant budget, let me quote again the 24 budyets of Ostrogozhsk Uyezd. The average expenditure per family is 495.39 rubles (in kind and in cash). Of this, 109.10 rubles go for the maintenance of cattle, 135.80 rubles are spent on vegetable food and taxes, and the remaining 250.49 rubles on other expenses -- non-vegetable food, clothes, implements, rent, etc. Mr. Yozhakov allows the hay-fields and other grounds to account for the maintenance of cattle.

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level of cattle, en masse into the vortex of increasingly complex social and polilical life, then our knights began to howl and wail about the fall and destruction of the old pillars. And they continue to this day to howl and wail about the good old times, although now, it seems, one must be blind not to see the revolutionary side of this new mode of life, not to see how capitalism is creating a new social force, which has no ties wilh the old regime of exploitation and is in a position to fight it.

The "friends of the people," however, show no trace of a desire for any radical change in the present system. They are entirely satisfied with liberal measures on the existing basis, and in the invention of such measures Mr. Krivenko really displays the administrative abilities of a native Jack in-office. "Generally speaking" -- he argues, about the need for a "detailed study and radical transformation" of "our people's industry" -- "this question calls for special investigation, and for the division of industries into those that can be applied to the life of the people" (sic!!) "and those whose application encounters serious obstacles."

Mr. Krivenko himself gives us an example of such a division when he divides the various industries into those which are not capitalised, those in which capitalisation has already taken place, and those which can "contend with large-scale industry for existence."

"In the first case," this administrator decides, "petty production can exist freely" -- but can it be free of the market, whose fluctuations split the petty producers into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat? Can it be free of the expansion of the local markets and their amalgamation into a big market? Can it be free of technical progress? Or perhaps this technical progress -- under commodity production -- need not be capitalistic? In the last case, the author demands the "organisation of production on a large scale too": "Clearly," he says, "what is needed here is the organisation of production on a large scale too, what is needed is fixed and circulating capital, machinery, etc., or something else that will counterbalance these condition: cheap credit, the elimination of supernuous middlemen, the artel form of farming and the possibility of dispensing

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with employers' profit, an assured market, the invention of cheaper engines and other technical improvements, or, finally, some reduction in wages, provided it is compensated by other benefits."

This sort of reasoning is highly characteristic of the "friends of the people," with their broad ideals in words and their stereotyped liberalism in deeds. As you see, our philosopher starts out from nothing more nor less than the possibility of dispensing with employers' profit and from the organisation of large-scale farming. Excellent: this is EXACTLY what the Social-Democrats want, too. But how do the "friends of the people" want to achieve it? To organise large-scale production without employers, it is necessary, first of all, to abolish the commodity organisation of social economy and to replace it by communal, communist organisation, under which production is not regulated by the market, as it is at present, but by the producers themselves, by the society of workers itself, and the means of production are owned not by private individuals, but by the whole of society. Such a change from the private to the communal form of appropriation apparently requires that the form of production first be changed, that the separate, small, isolated processes of production of petty producers be merged into a single social productive process; in a word, it requires the very material conditions which capitalism creates. But the "friends of the people" have no intention of basing themselves on capitalism. How then do they propose to act? They do not say. They do not even mention the abolition of commodity economy: evidently, their broad ideals are quite unable to transcend the bounds of this system of social production. Moreover, to abolish employers' profit it would be necessary to expropriate the employers, who obtain their "profits" precisely because they have monopolised the means of production. And to expropriate these pillars of our fatherland, a popular revolutionary movement against the bourgeois regime is required, a movement of which only the working-class proletariat, which has no ties with this regime, is capable. But the "friends of the people" have no struggle in mind at all, and do not even suspect that other types of public men, apart from the administrative organs of the employers themselves, are possible and necessary.

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Clearly, they have not the slightest intention of taking any serious measures against "empIoyers' profit." Mr. Krivenko simply allowed his tongue to run away with him. And he immediately corrected himself: why, such a thing as "the possibility of dispensing with employers' profit" can be "counterbalanced" -- "by something else," namely credits, organised marketing, technical improvements. Thus everything is arranged quite satisfactorily: instead of abolishing the sacred right to "profit," a procedure so offensive to Messrs. the employers, there appear such mild, liberal measures as will only supply capitalism with better weapons for the struggle, and will only strengthen, consolidate and develop our petty, "people's" bourgeoisie. And so as to leave no doubt that the "friends of the people" champion the interests of this petty bourgeoisie alone, Mr. Krivenko adds the following remarkable explanation. It appears that the abolition of employers' profit may be "counterbalanced" . . . "by a reduction in wages"!!! At first glance this seems to be sheer gibberish. But, no. It is the consistent application of petty-bourgeois ideas. The author observes a fact like the struggle between big capital and small and, as a true "friend of the people," he, of course, takes the side of small . . . capital. He has further heard that one of the most powerful weapons of the small capitalist is wage reduction -- a fact that has been quite correctly observed and confirmed in a large number of industries in Russia, too, parallel to lengthening the working day. And so, desiring at all costs to save the small . . . capitalists, he proposes "some reduction in wages, provided it is compensated by other benefits"! Messrs. the employers, about whose "profit" some queer things seemed to have been said at first, need not worry. They would, I think, be quite willing to install this brilliant administrator, who plans to fight against the employers by a reduction in wages, in the post of Minister of Finance.

One could quote another example of how the pure-blooded bourgeois peeps out of the humane and liberal administrators of Russkoye Bogatstvo as soon as they have to deal with any practical question. "The Chronicle of Home Affairs" in Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 12, deals with the subject of monopoly. "Monopoly and the syndicate," says the author, "such are

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the ideals of developed industry." And he goes on to express his surprise that these institutions are appearing in Russia, too, although there is no "keen competition among the capitalists" here. "Neither the sugar industry nor the oil industry has developed to any great extent yet. The consumption of sugar and kerosene here is still practically in the embryo, to judge by the insignificant per capita consumption of these goods here as compared with that of other countries. It would seem that there is still a very large field for the development of these branches of industry and that they could still absorb a large amount of capital."

It is characteristic that as soon as it comes to a practical question, the author forgets the favourite idea of Russkoye Bogatstvo about the shrinking of the home market. He is compelled to admit that this market still has the prospect of tremendous development, and not of shrinkage. He arrives at this conclusion from a comparison with the West, where consumption is greater. Why? Because culture is on a higher level. But what is the material basis of this culture if not the development of capitalist technique, the growth of commodity economy and exchange, which bring people into more frequent intercourse with each other and break down the medieval isolation of the separate localities? Was not culture in France, for example, on a level no higher than ours before the Great Revolution, when the semi-medieval peasantry had still not finally split into a rural bourgeoisie and a proletariat? And if the author had examined Russian life more closely he could not have helped noticing, for example, that in localities where capitalism is developed the requirements of the peasant population are much higher than in the purely agricultural districts. This is noted unanimously by all investigators of our handicraft industries in all cases where they develop so far as to lay an industrial impress on the whole life of the population.* The "friends of the people" pay no attention to such "trifles," because, as far as they are concerned, the expla-

* As an example let me refer, say, to the Pavlovo handicraftsmen as compared to the peasants of the surrounding villages. See the works of Grigoryev and Annensky. I again deliberately give the example of the countryside in which a specific "people's system" supposedly exists.

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nation is "simply" culture or the growing complexity of life in general, and they do not even inquire into the material basis of this culture and this complexity. But if they were to examine, at least, the economics of our countryside they would have to admit that it is the break-up of the peasantry into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat that creates the home market. They must think that the growth of the market does not by any means imply the growth of a bourgeoisie. "In view of the low level of development of production generally," continues the above-mentioned chronicler of home affairs, "and the lack of enterprise and initiative, monopoly will still further retard the development of the country's forces." Speaking of the tobacco monopoly, the author calculates that it "would take 154,000,000 rubles out of people's circulation." Here sight is altogether lost of the fact that the basis of our economic system is commodity economy, the leader of which, here as everywhere else, is the bourgeoisie. And instead of speaking about the bourgeoisie being hampered by monopoly, he speaks about the "country," instead of speaking about commodity, bourgeois circulation, he speaks about "people's" circulation.[*] A bourgeois is never able to detect the difference between these two terms, great as it is. To show how obvious this difference really is, I will quote a magazine which is an authority in the eyes of the "friends of the people," namely, Otechestvenniye Zapiski. In No. 2 of that magazine, 1872, in the article "The Plutocracy and Its Basis," we read the following: "According to Marlo, the most important characteristic of the plutocracy is its love for a liberal form of government, or at all events for the principle of freedom of acquisition. If we take this characteristic and recall what the position was some eight or ten years ago, we shall find that in respect of libaralism we have made enormous strides. . . . No matter what newspaper or magazine you take up, they all seem more or less to represent democratic principles, they are all out for the interests of the people. But side by side with these democratic views, and even under the cloak of <"fnp250">

* The author must be particularly blamed for this use of terms because Russkoye Bogatstvo loves ths word "people's" as opposed to bourgeois.

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them" (mark this), "time and again, intentionally or unintentionally, plutocratic aspirations are pursued."

The author quotes as an example the address presented by St. Petersburg and Moscow merchants to the Minister of Finance, expressing the gratitude of this most venerable body of the Russian bourgeoisie for his having "based the financial position of Russia on the widest possible expansion of private enterprise, which alone is fruitful." And the author of the article concludes: "Plutocratic elements and proclivities undoubtedly exist in our society, and in plenty."

As you see, your predecessors in the distant past, when the impressions of the great emancipatory Reform (which, as Mr. Yuzhakov has discovered, should have opened up peaceful and proper paths of development for "people's" production, but which in fact only opened up paths for the development of a plutocracy) were still vivid and fresh, were themselves forced to admit the plutocratic, i.e., bourgeois character of private enterprise in Russia.

Why have you forgotten this? Why, when you talk about "people's" circulation and the development of the "country's forces" thanks to the development of "enterprise and initiative," do you not mention the antagonistic character of this development, the exploiting character of this enterprise and this initiative? Opposition to monopolies and similar institutions can, and should, of course, be expressed, for they undoubtedly worsen the condition of the working people; but it must not be forgotten that besides all these medieval fetters the working people are shackled by still stronger ones, by modern, bourgeois fetters. Undoubtedly, the abolition of monopolies would be beneficial to the whole "people," because, bourgeois economy having become the basis of the economic life of the country, these survivals of the medieval system only add to the capitalist miseries still more bitter medieval miseries. Undoubtedly, they must definitely be abolished -- and the quicker and more radically, the better -- in order, by ridding bourgeois society of its inherited semi-feudal fetters, to untie the hands of the working class, to facilitate its struggle against the bourgeoisie.

That is how one should talk, calling a spade a spade -- saying that the abolition of monopolies and of all sorts of

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other medieval restrictions (and in Russia their name is legion) is absolutely essential for the working class in order to facilitate its struggle against the bourgeois system. That is all. None but a bourgeois could see only the solidarity of the interests of the whole "people" against medieval, feudal institutions and forget the profound and irreconcilable antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat within this "people."

Incidentally, it would be absurd to think of putting the "friends of the people" to shame with this, when, for example, they say things like the following about the needs of the countryside:

"When, a few years ago," Mr. Krivenko informs us, "certain newspapers discussed what professions and what type of intellectual people the countryside needed, the list proved to be a very long and varied one and embraced nearly every walk of life: men and women doctors were followed by feldshers, then came lawyers, followed by teachers, librarians and booksellers, agronomists, forestry experts and agricultural experts generally, technicians of the most varied branches (a very extensive sphere, almost untouched as yet), organisers and managers of credit institutions, warehouses, etc."

Let us stop to consider, say, those "intellectuals" (??) whose activities directly pertain to the economic sphere, all those forestry experts, agricultural experts, technicians, etc. And how these people are needed in the countryside! But in WHAT countryside? It goes without saying in the countryside of the landowners, the countryside of the enterprising muzhiks, who have "savings" and can afford to pay for the services of all these "technicians" whom Mr. Krivenko is pleased to call "intellectuals." This countryside has, indeed, long been thirsting for technicians, for credits, for warehouses; all our economic literature testifies to this. But there is another countryside, much larger, and it would not harm the "friends of the people" to think of it a little more often; it is the countryside of the ruined, ragged and fleeced peasants, who not only have no ''savings'' with which to pay for the labour of "intellectuals," but have not even bread enough to save themselves from starvation. And it is this countryside that you want to assist with warehouses!! What will our one-horse and horseless peasants put in them?

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Their clothes? They pawned them as far back as 1891 to the rural and urban kulaks who at that time, in fulfilment of your humane and liberal recipe, set up regular "warehouses" in their homes, taverns, and shops. All they have left is their "hands"; but even the Russian bureaucrats have so far failed to invent "warehouses" for this sort of commodity. . . .

It would be hard to imagine more striking proof of the utter banality of these "democrats" than this sentimentality about technical progress among the "peasantry" and closing of eyes to the wholesale expropriation of this very "peasantry." For example, in Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 2 ("Sketches," §XII), Mr. Karyshev, with the fervour of a liberal cretin, tells of cases of "perfections and improvements" in peasant farming -- of the "spread on peasant farms of improved sorts of seed," such as American oats, Vasa rye, Clydesdale oats, etc. "In some places the peasants set special plots apart for seed and after careful tilling, they hand plant selected samples of grain on them." "Many and very varied innovations" are noted "in the sphere of improved implements and machines,"[*] such as cultivators, light ploughs, threshing-machines, winnowing-machines, seed sorters. Mention is made of "a greater variety of fertilisers" -- phosphates, glue waste, pigeon manure, etc. "Correspondents urge the necessity for setting up local Zemstvo stores in the villages for the sale of phosphates -- and Mr. Karyshev, quoting from Mr. V. V.'s book, Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming (Mr. Krivenko also refers to this book), is aflected by all this touching progress almost to the point of fervour:

"These reports, which we have been able to give only in brief, make a heartening and at the same time saddening impression. . . . Heartening, because these people, impoverished, debt-laden, very many of them horseless, work with might and main, do not give way to despair, do not change their occupation, but remain true to the land, realising that in it, in the proper treatment of it, lies their future, <"fnp253">

* I remind the reader of how these improved implements are distributed in Novouzensk Uyezd: 37% of the peasants (the poor) or 10,000 out of 28,000 households, have 7 implements out of $,724 that is, one-eighth of one per cent! Four-fifths of the implements are monopolised by the rich, who constitute only one-fourth of the total households.

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their strength, their wealth." (Why, of course! It goes without saying that it is just the impoverished and horseless muzhik who buys phosphates, seed sorters, threshing-machines and Clydesdale oat seed! 0, sancta simplicitas! And this is not written by a ladies' college damsel, but by a professor, a Doctor of Political Economy! No, say what you like, it can't all be due to sacred simplicity.) "They are feverishly searching for ways of eflecting that proper treatment, searching for new ways, methods of cultivation, seed, implements, fertilisers, everything that will lend fertility to the soil that feeds them and that will sooner or later reward them a hundredfold. . . .[*] Saddening, hecause" (perhaps you think that here at least this "friend of the people" mentions the wholesale expropriation of the peasantry that accompanies and engenders the concentration of land in the hands of the enterprising muzhiks, its conversion into capital, into the basis of improved farming -- the expropriation that throws on the market the "free" and "cheap" "hands" which make for the success of native "enterprise" which employs all these threshing-machines, seed sorters and winnowing-machines? -- Nothing of the kind!) "because . . . it is we ourselves who must be roused. Where is our aid to the muzhik who is striving to improve his farming? We have at our disposal science, literature, museums, warehouses, commission agencies." (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' <"fnp254">

* You are profoundly right venerable Mr. Professor, when you say that improved farming wiil reward a hundredfold the "people" who do not "give way to despair" and "remain true to the land." But have you not observed, O, great Doctor of Political Economy, that to acquire all these phosphates and so on, the "muzhik" must stand out from among the mass of the starving poor in having spare money -- and money, after all, is a product of social labour that falls into private hands; that the appropriation of the "reward" for improved farming will be the appropriation of other people's labour; and that only the most contemptible hangers-on of the bourgeoisie can see the source of this abundant reward in the personal effort of the husbandman, who "working with might and main," "fertilises the soil that feeds him"?

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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.) "Is there anything of that sort at the disposal of the muzhik? Of course, there are the rudiments of them, but somehow they are developing very slowly. The muzhik wants an example -- where are our experimental fields, our model farms? The muzhik is seeking the printed word -- where is our popular agronomic literature?. . . <"p255"> The muzhik is seeking fertilisers, implements, seed -- where are our Zemstvo stores for all these things, wholesale buying, purchasing and distributing conveniences?. . . Where are you, men of affairs, private and Zemstvo? Go forth and work, the time for it has long been ripe, and

Hearty thanks will be your meed
From Russia's people!"[73]
N. Karyshev (Russkoye Bogotstvo, No. 2, p. 19.)

Here they are, these friends of the petty "people's" bourgeoisie, revelling in their petty-bourgeois progress!

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.

"The peasantist [Narodnik] of 'the seventies,'" Hourwich aptly remarks, "had no idea of class antagonism with in the ranks of the peasantry themselves, regarding it as confined entirely to the 'exploiter' -- kulak or miroyed -- and his victim, the peasant imbued with the communistic spirit.* Gleb Uspensky stood alone in his scepticism, op-

* There have arisen opposite social classes within the village community," says Hourwich elsewhere (p. 104). I quote Hourwich only to supplement the facts given above.

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posing his ironical smile to the universal illusion. With his perfect knowledge of the peasantry, and his extraordinary artistic talent that penetrated to the very heart of the phenomena, he did not fail to see 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.)

It was pardonable and even natural to succumb to this illusion in the sixties and seventies, when relatively accurate information about rural economy was so scarce, and when the differentiation of the peasantry had not yet become so marked, but today one must deliberately close one's eyes not to see this differentiation. It is extremely characteristic that it is precisely of late, when the ruin of the peasantry seems to have reached its peak, that one hears so much on all sides about progressive trends in peasant farming. Mr. V. V. (also a most indubitable "friend of the people") has written a whole book on this subject. And you cannot accuse him of factual inaccuracy. On the contrary, the technical, agronomical progress of the peasantry is an un doubted fact, but so is the fact of the wholesale expropriation of the peasantry. And there you are -- the "friends of the people" concentrate all their attention on the fact that the "muzhik" is feverishly searching for new methods of cultivation to help him fertilise the soil that feeds him -- losing sight of the reverse side of the medal, namely, the feverish separation of that very "muzhiki" from the soil. 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.* Try to disprove the existence of these two opposite processes among our community peasantry, try to explain them in any other way than by the bourgeois character of our society! That would be too much!

* 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.

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Chanting hallelujahs and effusing humanitarian and benevolent phrases are the alpha and omega of their "science," of their whole political "activity."

And they even elevate this modest, liberal patching up of the present order to a regular philosophy. "Minor, genuine activity," says Mr. Krivenko, with an air of profundity, "is much better than major inactivity." How new and clever! Moreover, he goes on to say, "minor activity is by no means synonymous with minor purpose." And as examples of such ''extension of activity," when minor performance becomes "proper and good," he quotes the work of a certain lady in organising schools, lawyers' activities among the peasants eliminating pettifoggers, lawyers' plans to accompany circuit courts into the provinces to act as defendant's counsel, and, lastly, what we have already heard about, the organisation of handicraftsmen's warehouses: in this case the extension of activity (to the dimensions of a great purpose) is to consist in opening warehouses "by the combined eflorts of the Zemstvos in the busiest centres."

All this, of course, is very lofty, humane and liberal -- "liberal," because it will free the bourgeoise conomic system from all its medieval handicaps and thus make it easier for the worker to fight the system itself, which, of course, will be strengthened rather than hurt by such measures; and we have long been reading about all this in all Russian liberal publications. It would not be worth opposing it if the Russhoye Bogatstvo gentlemen did not compel us to do so; they began advancing these "modest beginnings of liberalism" AGAINST the Social-Democrats and, as a lesson to them, simultaneously rebuking them for renouncing "the ideals of their fathers." That being the case, we cannot help saying that it is, at the very least, amusing to oppose the Social-Democrats with proposals and suggestions for such moderate and meticulous liberal (that is, bourgeois-serving) activity. As for the fathers and their ideals, it should be said that however erroneous and utopian the old theories of the Russian Narodniks were, at all events they were ABSOLUTELY opposed to such "modest beginnings of liberalism." I have borrowed the latter expression from Mr. N. K. Mikhailovsky's article "About the Russian Edition of K. Marx's Book" (Otechestvenniye Zapiski, 1872, No. 4) -- an

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article written in a very lively and brisk style (compared with his present writings), and strongly protesting against the proposal not to offend our young liberals.

But that was long ago, so long ago that the "friends of the people" have managed to forget all about it, and have glaringly demonstrated, by their tactics, that when there is no materialist criticism of political institutions, and when the class character of the modern state is not understood, it is only one step from political radicalism to political opportunism.

Here are a few examples of this opportunism.

"The transformation of the Ministry of State Properties into the Ministry of Agriculture," declares Mr. Yuzhakov, "may profoundly influence the course of our economic development, but it may also prove to be nothing but a reshuffling of officials" (Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 10.)

Everything depends, consequently, on who will be "called upon" -- the friends of the people or the representatives of the interests of the landlords and capitalists. The interests themselves need not be touched.

<"p258"> "The protection of the economically weal; from the economically strong is the first natural task of state interference," continues this same Mr. Yuzhakov in the same article; and he is supported in the same terms by the chronicler of home affairs in Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 2. And so as to leave no doubt that his interpretation of this philanthropic nonsense* is the same as that of his worthy associates, the West-European liberal and radical petty-bourgeois ideologists, he at once adds:

"Gladstone's Land Bills,[74] Bismarck's workers' insurance, factory inspection, the idea of our Peasants' Bank, the or ganisation of migration, measures against the kulak -- all these are attempts to apply this same principle of state in terference for the protection of the economically weak." This at least has the merit of being frank. The author bluntly states that, like the Gladstones and Bismarcks, he wants to adhere to the present social relations, like them he wants to patch up and darn present-day society

* It is nonsense because the strength of the "economically strong" lies, among other things, in his possession of political power. Without it he could not maintain his ecconomic rule.

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(bourgeois society -- something he does not understand any more than the West-European followers of the Gladstones and Bismarcks do), and not combat it. In complete harmony with this, their fundamental theoretical tenet, is the fact that they regard as an instrument of reform an organ which has its basis in this present-day society and protects the interests of its ruling classes -- the state. They positively believe the state to be omnipotent and above all classes, and expect that it will not only "assist" the working people, but create a real and proper system as we have heard from Mr. Krivenko). But then, of course, nothing else is to be expected of them, dyed-in-the-wool petty-bourgeois ideologists that they are. For it is one of the fundamental and characteristic features of the petty bourgeoisie -- one, incidentally, which makes it a reactionary class -- that the petty producers, disunited and isolated by the very conditions of production and tied down to a definite place and to a definite exploiter, cannot understand the class character of the exploitation and oppression from which they suffer, and suffer sometimes no less than the proletarian; they can not understand that in bourgeois society the state too is bound to be a class state.*

Why is it then, most worthy "friends of the people," that till now -- and with particular energy since this very emancipatory Reform -- our government has "supported, protected and created" only the bourgeoisie and capitalism? Why is it that such unseemly conduct on the part of this absolute, allegedly supraclass, government has coincided precisely with a historical period characterised in the country's internal life by the development of commodity economy, commerce and industry? Why do you consider these latter changes in

* That is why the "friends of the people" are arch-reactionaries when they say that it is the state's natural task to protect the economically weak (that is what it should be according to their banal old wives' morality), whereas Russia's entire history and home polcy testify that the task of our state is to protect only the feudal landlords and the big bourgeoisie, and to punish with the utmost brutality every attempt of the "economically weak" to stand up for their rights. And that, of course, is its natural task, because absolutism and the bureaucracy are thoroughly saturated with the feudal bourgeois spirit, and because in the economic sphere the bourgeoisie hold undivided sway and keep the workers "as quiet as lambs."

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internal life to be the effect and the government's policy the cause, despite the fact that these changes were so deep down in society that the government did not even notice them and put innumerable obstacles in their way, and despite the fact that this very same "absolute" government, under other conditions of internal life, "supported," "protected" and "created" another class?

Oh, the "friends of the people" never concern themselves with such questions! All this, you see, is materialism, dialectics, "Hegelianism," "mysticism and metaphysics." They simply think that if you plead with this government nicely enough and humbly enough, it will put everything right. And as far as humbleness is concerned, one must do Russkoye Bogatstvo justice: truly, it stands out even among the Russian liberal press for its inability to display the slightest independence. Judge for yourselves:

"The abolition of the salt tax, the abolition of the poll tax and the reduction of the land redemption payments" are described by Mr. Yuzhakov as "a considerable relief to people's farming." Well, of course! But was not the abolition of the salt tax accompanied by the imposition of a host of new indirect taxes and an increase in the old ones? Was not the abolition of the poll-tax accompanied by an increase in the payments made by the former state poasants, under guise of placing them on a redemption basis? And is there not even now, after the famous reduction of redemption payments (by which the goverument did not even return to the peasants the profit it had made out of the redemption operations), a discrepancy between the payments and the income from the land, i.e., a direct survival of feudal quitrent? Never mind! What is important, you see, is "the first step," the "principle." As for the rest . . . the rest we can plead for later on!

These, however, are only the blossoms. Now for the fruit.

"The eighties eased the people's burden" (that's by the above measures!) "and thus saved them from utter ruin."

This is another phrase classic for its shameless servility, one that can only be placed, say, alongside Mr. Mikhailovsky's statement, quoted above, that we have still to create a proletariat. One cannot help recalling in this connection Shchedrin's incisive description of the evolution of the Rus-

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sian liberal! This liberal starts out by pleading with the authorities to grant reforms "as far as possible," then he goes on to beg for "well, at least something," and ends by taking up an eternal and unshakable stand on "anything, however mean." And what else can one say of the "friends of the people" but that they have adopted this eternal and unshakable stand when, fresh from the impressions of a famine affecting millions of people, towards which the government's attitude was first one of a huckster's stinginess and then of a huckster's cowardice, they say in print that the government has saved the people from utter ruin!! Several years more will pass, marked by the still more rapid expropriation of the peasantry; the government, in addition to establishing a Ministry of Agriculture, will abolish one or two direct and impose several new indirect taxes; the famine will then affect 40 million people -- and these gentlemen will write in the same old way: you see, 40 and not 50 million are starving, that is because the government has eased the people's burden and has saved them from utter ruin; it is because the government has hearkened to the "friends of the people" and established a Ministry of Agriculture!

Another example:

In Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 2, the chronicler of home affairs arguing that Russia is "fortunately" (sic!) a backward country, "which has preserved elements that enable her to base her economic system on the principle of solidarity,"* says that she is therefore able to act "in international affairs as an exponent of economic solitarity" and that Russia's chances for this are enhanced by her undeniable "political might"!!

It is the gendarme of Europe, that constant and most reliable bulwark of all reaction, who has reduced the Russian people, themselves oppressed at home, to the shameful position of serving as an instrument for oppressing the peoples in the West -- it is this gendarme who is described as an exponent of economic solidarity!

* Between whom? The landlord and the peasant, the enterprising muzhik and the tramp, the mill owner and the worker? To understand what this classical "principle of solidarity" means, we must rememher that solidarity between the employer and the workman is achieved by "a reduction in wages."

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This is indeed beyond all limit! Messrs. the "friends of the people" will outdo all liberals. They not only plead with the government, they not only eulogise it, they positively pray to it, pray with such obeisance, with such zeal that a stranger cannot help feeling eerie at the sound of their loyal foreheads cracking on the flagstones.

Do you remember the German definition of a philistine?

Was ist der Philister?
Ein hohler Darm,
Voll Furcht und Hofrnung,
Dass Gott erbarm.[*]

This definition does not quite apply to our affairs. God . . . God takes a back seat with us. But the authorities . . . that's a different matter. And if in this definition we substitute the word "authorities" for the word "God" we shall get an exact description of the ideological stock in-trade, the moral level and the civic courage of the Russian humane and liberal "friends of the people."

To this absolutely preposterous view of the government, the "friends of the people" add a corresponding attitude toward the so-called "intelligentsia." Mr. Krivenko writes: "Literature . . ." should "appraise phenomena according to their social meaning and encourage every active effort to do good. It has harped, and continues to harp, on the shortage of teachers, doctors, technicians, on the fact that the people are sick, poor" (there are few technicians), "illiterate, etc.; and when people come forward who are weary of sitting at card tables, participating in private theatricals and eating sturgeon patties at parties given by Marshals of Nobility, and who go out to work with rare self-sacrifice and in face of numerous obstacles" (think of it: they have sacrificed card tables, theatricals and patties!), "literature should welcome them."

Two pages later, with the business-like air of an old campaigner grown wise by experience, he reproves those who "wavered when confronted with the question whether or not to accept office as Zemsky Nachalniks," town mayors, or <"fnp262">

* What is a hilistine? A hollow gut, full of fear and of hope in God's mercy (Goethe). --Ed.

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chairmen or members of Zemstvo Boards under the new regulations. In a society with a developed consciousness of civic requirements and duties" (really, gentlemen, this is as good as the speeches of famous Russian lacks-in-office like the Baranovs and Kosiches!), "such wavering and such an attitude to affairs would be inconceivable, because it would assimilate in its own way every reform that had any vital side to it at all, that is, would take advantage of and develop those sides of the reform that are expedient; as to the undesirable sides, it would convert them into a dead letter; and if there were nothing whatever vital in the reform it would remain an entirely alien body."

<"p263"> What on earth do you make of that? What miserable twopenny-ha'penny opportunism, what indulgence in self admiration! The task of literature is to collect all the drawing-room gossip about the wicked Marxists, to bow and cringe to the government for saving the people from utter ruin, to welcome people who have grown weary of sitting at card tables, to teach the "public" not to fight shy even of such posts as that of Zemsky Nachalnik. . . . What is this I am reading -- Nedelya,[76] or Novoye Vremya? No, it is Russkoye Bogatstvo, the organ of the advanced Russian democrats. . . .

And such gentlemen talk about the "ideals of their fathers," claim that they, and they alone, guard the traditions of the days when France poured the ideas of socialism all over Europe" -- and when, in Russia, the assimilation of these ideas produced the theories and teachings of Herzen and Chernyshevsky. This is a downright disgrace and would be positively outrageous and offensive -- if Russkoye Bogatstvo were not so utterly amusing, if such statements in the columns of a magazine of this type did not arouse Homeric laughter, and nothing else. Yes, indeed, you are besmirching those ideals! What were actually the ideals of the first Russian socialists, the socialists of the epoch which Kautsky so aptly described in the words:

"When every socialist was a poet and every poet a socialist."

Faith in a special social order, in the communal system of Russian life; hence -- faith in the possibility of a peasant socialist revolution -- that is what inspired them and roused dozens and hundreds of people to wage a heroic struggle

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<"p264"> against the government. And you, you cannot reproach the Social-Democrats with failing to appreciate the immense historical services of these, the finest people of their day, with failing to respect their memory profoundly. But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly, that when Mr. V. V. tried to argue last year that the village community trains the people to common effort and is a centre of altruistic sentiments, etc.,[78] even Mr. Mikhailovsky's conscience was pricked and he shamefacedly began to lecture Mr. V. V. and to point out that "no investigation has shown a connection between our village community and altruism."[79] And, indeed, no investigation has. Yet there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith, without making any investlgation.

How? Why? On what grounds?. . .

"Every socialist was a poet and every poet a socialist."

Moreover, adds the same Mr. Mikhailovsky, all conscientious investigators agree that the countryside is splitting up, giving rise, on the one hand, to a mass of proletarians, and, on the other, to a handful of "kulaks" who keep the rest of the population under their heel. And again he is right: the countryside is indeed splitting up. Nay more, the countryside long ago split up completely. And the old Russian peasant socialism split up with it, making way for workers' socialism, on the one hand, and degenerating into vulgar petty-bourgeois radicalism, on the other. This change cannot be described as anything but degeneration. From the doctrine that peasant life is a special social order and that our country has taken an exceptional path of development, there has emerged a sort of diluted eclecticism, which can no longer deny that commodity economy has become the basis of economic development and has grown into capitalism, but which refuses to see the bourgeois character of all the relations of production, refuses to see the necessity of the class struggle under this system. From a political programme calculated to arouse the peasantry for the socialist revolution against the foundations of modern society* there has <"p264a">

* That, substantially, was what all our old revolutionary programmes amounted to -- from those, say, of the Bakuninists and the rebels,[80] to those of the Narodniks, and finally the Narodovoltsi, [cont. onto p. 265. -- DJR] for whom the conviction that the peasants would send an overwhelming majority of socialists to a future Zemsky Sobor [81] also occupied no small place in their thoughts.

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emerged a programme calculated to patch up, to "improve" the conditions of the peasantry while preserving the foundations of modern society.

Strictly speaking, all this should already suffice to give an idea of the kind of "criticism" to be expected from these gentlemen of Russkoye Bogatstvo when they undertake to "demolish" the Social-Democrats. They do not make the slightest attempt to give a straightforward and conscientious exposition of the Social-Democrats' conception of Russian realities (they could quite well do so, and get round the censorship, if they laid special stress on the economic side and kept to the general, partly allegorical terms in which they have conducted all their "polemics") and to argue against its substance, to argue against the correctness of the practical conclusions drawn from it. They prefer instead to confine themselves to the most vacuous phrases about abstract schemes and belief in them, about the conviction that every country has to pass through the phase . . . and similar nonsense, with which we have already become sufficiently familiar in the case of Mr. Mikhailovsky. Often we get downright distortions. Mr. Krivenko, for example, declares that Marx "admitted that, if we desired it" (?!! So, according to Marx, the evolution of social and economic relations depends on human will and consciousness?? What is this -- abysmal ignorance or unparalleled effrontery?!), "and acted accordingly, we could avoid the vicissitudes of capitalism and proceed by a different and more expedient path (sic!!!)."

Our knight was able to talk such nonsense by indulging in deliberate distortion. Citing the passage from the well known "K. Marx's Letter" )Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1888, No. 10), where Marx speaks of his high esteem for Chernyshevsky, who thought it possible for Russia not to "undergo the tortures of the capitalist system," Mr. Krivenko closes the quotation marks, i.e., ends the reproduction of what Marx actually said (the last words of which were: "he [Chernyshevsky] pronounces in favour of this latter solution") --

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<"p266"> and adds: "And I, says Marx, share" (Krivenko's italics) "these views" (p. 186, No. 12).

What Marx actually said was this: "And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my esteem for this 'great Russian scholar and critic' that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the Russian 'literary man' and Pan-Slavist[82] that I rejected them." (Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1888, No. 10, p. 271.)

And so Marx said that Mr. Mikhailovsky had no right to regard him as an opponent of the idea of Russia's special line of development because he also respected those who held this idea; but Mr. Krivenko misconstrues this to mean that Marx "admitted" this special line of development. This is an out-and-out distortion. Marx's statement quoted above shows quite clearly that he evaded the question as such: "Mr. Mikhailovsky could have taken as a basis either of the two contradictory remarks, i.e., he had no grounds for basing his conclusions as to my views on Russian affairs in general on either of them." And in order that these remarks should provide no occasion for misinterpretation, Marx, in this very same "letter," gave a direct reply to the question of how his theory could be applied to Russia. <"p266a"> This reply very clearly shows that Marx avoided answering the question as such, avoided examining Russian data, which alone could decide the question: "If Russia," he replied, "is tending to become a capitalist nation on the pattern of the West European countries -- and during the last years she has been taking much trouble in this respect -- she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians."[83]

This, I think, is perfectly clear: the question was whether Russia was tending to become a capitalist nation, whether the ruin of her peasants was the process of the creation of a capitalist system, of a capitalist proletariat; and Marx says that "if" she was so tending, she would have to transforrn a good part of her peasants into proletarians. In other words, Marx's theory is to investigate and explain the evolution of the economic system of certain countries, and its "application" to Russia can be only the INVESTIGATION of Russian production relations and their evolution, EMPLOYING

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the established practices of the MATERIALIST method and of THEORETICAL political economy.[*]

The elaboration of a new theory of methodology and political economy marked such gigantic progress in social science, such a tremendous advance for socialism, that almost immediately after the appearance of Capital "the destiny of capitalism in Russia" became the principal theoretical problem for Russian socialists; the most heated debates raged around this problem, and the most important points of programme were decided in accordance with it. And it is noteworthy that when (some ten years ago) a separate group of socialists appeared who answered in the affirmative the question of whether Russia's evolution was capitalist, and based this answer on the data of Russian economic reality, it encountered no direct and definite criticism of the point at issue, no criticism which accepted the same general methodological and theoretical principles and gave a different explanation of the data.

The "friends of the people," who have launched a veritable crusade against the Marxists, likewise do not argue their case by examining the facts. As we saw in the first article, they dispose of the matter with phrases. Mr. Mikhailovsky, moreover, never misses an opportunity to display his wit about the Marxists lacking unanimity and about their failure to agree among themselves. And "our well known" N. K. Mikhailovsky laughs heartily over his joke about Marxists "real" and "not real." It is true that complete unanimity does not reign among the Marxists. But, firstly, Mr. Mikhailovsky misrepresents this fact; and, secondly, it demonstrates the strength and vitality of Russian Social-Democracy and not its weakness. A parlicularly characteristic feature of the recent period is that socialists are arriving at Social-Democratic views by various paths and for that reason, while unreservedly agreeing on the fundamental and principal thesis that Russia is a bourgeois society which has grown out of the feudal system, that its political form is a class state, and that the only way to end the exploitation <"fnp267">

* I repeat that this conclusion could not but be clear to anybody who had read the Communist Manifesto, The Poverty of Philosophy, and Capital, and that a special explanation was required only for the benefit of Mr. Mikhailovsky.

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of the working people is through the class struggle of the proletariat -- they differ on many particular problems both in their methods of argument and in the detailed interpretation of this or that phenomenon of Russian life. I can therefore delight Mr. Mikhailovsky in advance by stating that, within the limits of the above-mentioned thesis, which is fundamental and common to all Social-Democrats, differences of opinion exist also on the problems that have been touched upon in these cursory notes, for example, the peasant Reform, the economics of peasant farming and handicraft industries, land renting, etc. The unanimity of people who content themselves with the unanimous acceptance of "lofty truths" such as: the peasant Reform might open for Russia peaceful paths of proper development; the state might call, not upon the representatives of capitalist interests, but upon the "friends of the people"; the village community might socialise agriculture and manufacturing industry, which might be developed into large-scale production by the handicraftsman; people's land renting supports people's farming -- this touching and moving unanimity has been replaced by disagreements among persons who are seeking for an explanation of Russia's actual, present economic organisation as a system of definite production relations, for an explanation of her actual economic evolution, of her political and all other types of superstructure.

And if such work -- while leading people from different angles to the acceptance of the common position which undoubtedly dictates joint political action and consequently confers on all who accept it the right and duty to call them selves "SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS" -- still leaves a wide field for differences of opinion on a host of particular problems open to various solutions, it merely demonstrates, of course, the strength and vitality of Russian Social-Democracy.* <"fnp">

* For the simple reason that no solution of these problems has so far been found. Indeed, you cannot regard as a solution of the land renting problem the assertion that "people's land renting supports people's farming," or the following description of the system of cultivating the landlord's land with the peasants' implements: "The peasant has proved to be stronger than the landlord," who "has sacrificed his independence for the benefit of the independent peasant", [cont. onto p. 269. -- DJR] "the peasant has wrested large-scale production from the grasp of the landlord", "the people are the victors in the struggle for the form of agricultural technique." This idle liberal chatter is to be found in The Destiny of Capitalism, the work of "our well-known" Mr. V. V.

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Moreover, it would be hard to imagine anything more ditficult than the conditions under which this work is being done: there is not, nor can there be, an organ to unite the various aspects of the work; in view of prevailing police conditions, private intercourse is extremely difficult. It is only natural that Social-Democrats cannot properly discuss and reach agreement on details, that they contradict each other. . . .

This is indeed funny, is it not?

Mr. Krivenko's references, in his "polemic" against the Social-Democrats, to "neo-Marxists" may cause some perplexity. Some readers may think that something in the nature of a split has taken place among the Social-Democrats, and that "neo-Marxists" have broken away from the old Social-Democrats. Nothing of the kind. At no time or place has anybody in a public defence of Marxism criticised the theories and programme of Russian Social-Democracy, or advocated any other kind of Marxism. The fact is that Messrs. Krivenko and Mikhailovsky have been listening to drawing-room gossip about the Marxists, have been observing various liberals who use Marxism to cover up their liberal inanity, and, with their characteristic cleverness and tact, have set out with this stock-in-trade to "criticise" the Marxists. It is not surprising that this "criticism" consists of a regular chain of absurdities and filthy attacks.

"To be consistent," argues Mr. Krivenko, "we should give an affirmative answer to this" (to the question: "should we not strive for the development of capitalist industry?"), and "not shrink from buying up peasants' land or opening shops and taverns"; we should "rejoice at the success of the numerous inn-keepers in the Duma and assist the still more numerous buyers-up of the peasants' grain."

Really, that is amusing. Try to tell such a "friend of the people" that everywhere in Russia the exploitation of the working people is by its nature capitalistic, that the enterprising muzhiks and buyers-up should be classed among the representatives of capitalism because of such and such political-

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economic features, which prove the bourgeois character of the splitting up of the peasantry -- why, he would raise a howl, call it outrageous heresy, shout about the indiscriminate borrowing of West-European formulas and abstract schemes (while at the same time most carefully evading the actual meaning of the "heretical" argument). But when pictures of the "horrors" caused by the wicked Marxists have to be painted, lofty science and pure ideals may be left aside, and it may be admitted that buyers-up of peasants' grain and peasants' lamd really are representatives of capitalism, and not merely "hankerers" after other people's goods.

Try and prove to this "friend of the people" that not only are the Russian bourgeoisie already in control of the people's labour everywhere, due to the concentration of the means of production in their hands alone, but they also bring pressure to bear upon the government, initiating, compelling and determining the bourgeois character of its policy -- why, he would fly into a real rage, begin to shout about the omnipotence of our government, about fatal misunderstanding and unlucky chance alone causing it always to "call upon" representatives of the interests of capitalism and not upon the "friends of the people," about its artificially implanting capitalism. . . . But on the sly they are themselves compelled to recognise as representatives of capitalism the inn-keepers in the Duma, i.e., one of the elements of this very government that is supposed to stand above classes. But, gentlemen, are the interests of capitalism in Russia represented only in the "Duma," and only by ''inn-keepers''?. . .

As to filthy attacks, we have had quite enough of them from Mr. Mikhailovsky, and we get them again from Mr. Krivenko, who, for example, in his eagerness to annihilate the hated Social-Democracy, relates that "some go into the factories (when, of course, they can get soft jobs as technicians or office workers), claiming that their sole purpose is to accelerate the capitalist process." There is no need, of course, to reply to such positively indecent statements. All we can do is to put a full stop here.

Keep on in the same spirit, gentlemen, keep boldly on! The imperial government, the one which, as you have just told us, has already taken measures (even though they have flaws in them) to save the people from utter ruin, will

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take measures, this time without any flaws whatever, to save your banality and ignorance from exposure. "Cultured society" will gladly continue as hitherto, in the intervals between sturgeon patties and the card table, to talk about the "younger brother" and to devise humane projects for "improving" his condition; its representatives will be pleased to learn from you that by taking up positions as Zemsky Nachalniks or other supervisors of the peasants' purses they display a developed consciousness of civic requirements and duties. Keep on! You may be certain not only of being left in peace but even of approval and praise . . . from the lips of the Messrs. Burenins.

In conclusion it will perhaps be worth while' replying to a question which has probably occurred already to more than one reader. Did it pay to argue so long with such gentlemen? Was it worth while replying seriously to this stream of liberal and censor-protected filth which they were pleased to call polemics?

I think it was, not for their sake, of course, or for the sake of the "cultured" public, but for the useful lesson which Russian socialists can and should learn from this onslaught. It provides most striking and most convincing proof that the period of Russia's social development, when democracy and socialism were merged in one inseparable and indissoluble whole (as was the case, for example, in Chernyshevsky's day), has gone never to return. Today there are absolutely no grounds for the idea, which Russian socialists here and there still cling to and which most harmfully affects their theories and practical work, that there is no profound qualitative difference in Russia between the ideas of the democrats and those of the socialists. Quite the contrary; a wide gulf divides these ideas, and it is high time the Russian socialists understood this, understood that a COMPLETE and FINAL RUPTURE with the ideas of the democrats is INEVITABLE and IMPERATIVE!

Let us see what this Russian democrat actually was in the days which gave rise to this idea, and what he has now

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become. The "friends of the people" provide enough material for such a comparison.

<"p272"> Extremely interesting in this connection is Mr. Krivenko's attack on Mr. Struve who, in a German publication, opposed Mr. Nik.-on's utopianism (his article "On Capitalist Development in Russia," "Zur Beurtheilung der kapitalis tischen Entwicklung Russlands," appeared in Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt,[84] III, No. 1, October 2, 1893). Mr. Krivenko launches out against Mr. Struve for, as he alleges, classing the ideas of those who "stand for the village community and the allotment" as "national socialism" (which, he says, is of a "purely utopian nature"). This terrible accusation of being concerned with socialism drives our worthy author into a rage:

"Were there," he exclaims, "no others" (apart from Herzen, Chernyshevsky and the Narodniks), "who stood for the village community and the allotment? What about those who drew up the regulation for the peasants, who made the community and the peasants' economic independence the basis of the Reform; what about the investigators of our history and of contemporary life who support these principles, and almost the whole of our serious and respectable press, which also supports these principles -- are they all victims of the delusion called 'national socialism'?"

Calm yourself, most worthy "friend of the people"! You were so scared by the awful accusation of being concerned with socialism that you did not even take the trouble to read Mr. Struve's "little article" carefully. And, indeed, what a crying injustice it would be to accuse those who stand for "the village community and the allotment" of being concerned with socialism! Pray, what is there socialistic in this? Socialism, as we know, is the name given to the protest and struggle against the exploitation of the working people, a struggle for the complete abolition of this exploitation -- while "to stand for the allotment" means supporting the peasant's payment of redemption money for all the land they used to have at their disposal. But even if one does not stand for land redemption but for the gratuitous retention of the land the peasants possessed before the Reform, there is nothing socialistic in it, for it is this peasant ownership of land (which evolved during the feudal period) that has everywhere in the West,

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<"p273"> as here in Russia,[*] been the basis of bourgeois society. "To stand for the village community," i.e., to protest against police interference in the customary methods of distributing the land -- what is there socialistic in that, when everyone knows that exploitation of the working people can very well exist and is engendered within this community? That is stretching the word "socialism" to mean anything; maybe Mr. Pobedonostsev,[85] too, will have to be classed as a socialist!

Mr. Struve is not guilty of such an awful injustice at all. He speaks of the "utopianism of the national socialism" of the Narodniks, and we can see whom he classes as Narodniks from the fact that he refers to Plekhanov's Our Differences as a polemic against the Narodniks. Plekhanov, undoubtedly, polemised against socialists, against people who had nothing in common with the "serious and respectable" Russian press. Mr. Krivenko, therefore, had no right to take as applying to himself what was meant for the Narodniks. If, however, he was so anxious to know Mr. Struve's opinion about the trend to which he himself adheres, I am surprised that he paid no attention to, and did not translate for Russkoye Bogatstvo, the following passage in Mr. Struve's article:

"As capitalist development advances," says the author, "the philosophy" (Narodnik philosophy) "just described is bound to lose its basis. It will either degenerate (wird herabsinken ) into a rather colourless reformist trend, capable of compromise and seeking for compromise,** promising rudiments of which have long been observable, or it will admit that the actual development is inevitable and will draw the theoretical and practical conclusions that necessarily follow from this -- in other words, will cease to be utopian."

If Mr. Krivenko cannot guess where, in Russia, are to be found the rudiments of the trend that is only capable of compromise, I would advise him to glance at Russkoye Bogatstvo, at the theoretical views of that magazine, which represent a pitiful attempt to piece together fragments of the Narodnik doctrine with the recognition of Russia's cap- <"fnp273">

* Proof -- the break-up of the peasantry.
** Ziemlich blaße kompromißfähige und kompromißs&uumlchtige Reformrichtung -- I think this might be rendered in Russian as kulturnichesky opportunism [uplift opportunism].

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italist development, and at its political programme, which aims at improving and restoring the economy of the small producers on the basis of the present capitalist system.[*]

One of the most characteristic and significant phenomena of our social life in recent times is, generally speaking, the degeneration of Narodism into petty-bourgeois opportunism.

<"p274"> Really, if we take the substance of the programme of Russkoye Bogatstvo -- the regulation of migration, land renting, cheap credit, museums, warehouses, technical improvement, artels, common land cultivation and all the rest -- we shall find that it is indeed very widely circulated in the whole "serious and respectable press," i.e., in the whole liberal press, the publications that are not the organs of the feudal landlords and do not belong to the reptile press.[86] The idea that all these measures are necessary, useful, urgent, "innocuous," has taken deep root among the entire intelligentsia and is extremely widespread. You will meet with it in provincial sheets and newspapers, in all Zemstvo <"fnp">

* Mr. Krivenko cuts an altogether sorry figure in his attempt to wage war on Mr. Struve. He betrays a childish inability to bring forward any really valid objections, and an equally childish irritation. For example, Mr. Struve says that Mr. Nik.-on is a "utopian," and gives very explicit reasons for calling him so: 1) because be ignores the "actual development of Russia," and 2) because he does not understand the class character of our state and appeals to "society" and the "state:" What arguments does Mr. Krivenke bring against this? Does he deny that our development is really capitalist? Does he say that it is of some other kind? Does he say that ours is not a class state? No. He prefers to avoid these questions altogether and to battle with comical wrath against "stereotyped patterns" of his own invention. Another example. Besides charging Mr. Nik.-on with not understanding the class struggle, Mr. Struve reproaches him with grave errors of theory in the sphere of "purely economic facts." He points out, among other things, that in speaking of the smallness of our non-agricultural population, Mr. Nik.-on "fails to observe that the capitalist development of Russia will smooth out this difference between 80%" (rural population of Russia) "and 44%" (rural population of America): "that, one might say, is its historical mission." Mr. Krivenko, firstly, garbles this passage by speaking of "our" (?) mission to deprive the peasant of his land, whereas the fact of the matter is that capitalism tends to reduce the rural population, and, secondly, without saying a single word on the substnnce of the question (whether a capitallsm that does not lead to a reduction of the rural population is possible), he talks a lot of nonsense about "doctrinaires," etc. See Appendix II (p. 308 of this volume. --Ed.).

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researches, abstrasts, descriptions, etc., etc. If this is to be regarded as Narodism, then undoubtedly its success is enormous and indisputable.

Only it is not Narodism at all (in the old, customary meaning of that term), and its success and tremendously widespread character have been achieved at the cost of vulgarising Narodism, converting social-revolutionary Narodism, which was sharply opposed to our liberalism, into uplift opportunism, that merges with this liberalism and expresses only the interests of the petty bourgeoisie.

To convince ourselves of this we need but turn to the pictures of differentiation among the peasants and handicraftsmen given above -- and these pictures by no means depict isolated or new facts, but are simply an attempt to portray in terms of political economy that "school" of "blood-suckers" and "farm labourers" whose existence in our countryside is not denied even by our opponents. <"p275"> It goes without saying that the "Narodnik" measures can only serve to strengthen the petty bourgeoisie; or else (artels and common cultivation) are bound to be miserable palliatives, remain pitiful experiments of the kind which the liberal bourgeoisie cultivated so tenderly everywhere in Europe for the simple reason that they do not in the least affect the "school" itself. For the same reason, even the Messrs. Yermolovs and Wittes[87] cannot object to progress of this kind. Quite the contrary. Do us the favour, gentlemen! They will even give you money "for experiments," if only these will divert the "intelligentsia" from revolutionary work (emphasising the antagonism, explaining it to the proletariat, attempting to bring this antagonism out on to the high road of direct political struggle) to such patching up of the antagonism, to conciliation and unification. Do us the favour!

Let us dwell a little on the process which led to this degeneration of Narodism. When it first arose, in its original form, it was a fairly well-knit theory: starting from the view of a specific way of life of the people, it believed in the communist instincts of the "communal" peasant and for that reason regarded the peasantry as a natural fighter for socialism. But it lacked theoretical elaboration and confirmation in the facts of Russian life, on the one hand, and

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experience in applying a political programme based on these assumed qualities of the peasant, on the other.

The development of the theory, therefore, proceeded along the two lines, the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical work was directed mainly towards studying that form of landownership in which they wanted to see the rudiments of communism; and this work yielded a wealth of factual material of the most varied kind. But this material, which mainly concerned the form of landownership, completely obscured the economics of the countryside from the investigators' eyes. This happened all the more naturally, because, firstly, the investigators lacked a sound theory of method in social science, a theory showing the need to single out and make a special study of production relations; and because, secondIy, the collected factual material furnished direct evidence of the immediate needs of the peasantry, of the immediate hardships which had a depressing effect upon pessant economy. All the investigators' attention was concentrated on studying these hardships -- land poverty, high payments, lack of rights, and the crushed and downtrodden condition of the peasants. All this was described, studied and explained with such a wealth of material, in such minute detail, that if ours were not a class state, if its policy were determined not by the interests of the ruling classes, but by the impartial discussion of the "people's needs," it should, of course, have been convinced a thousand times over of the need for eliminating these hardships. The na&iumlve investigators, believing in the possibility of "convincing" society and the state, were completely submerged in the details of the facts they had collected, and lost sight of one thing, the political-economic structure of the countryside, lost sight of the main background of the economy that really was being crushed by these immediate hardships. The result, naturally, was that defence of the interests of an economy crushed by land poverty, etc., turned out to be a defence of the interests of the class that held this economy in its hands, that alone could endure and develop under the given social-economic relations within the community, under the given economic system in the country.

Theoretical work directed towards the study of the institution which was to serve as the basis and support for the abolition of exploitation led to a programme being drawn

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up which expresses the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e., the very class upon which this system of exploitation rests!

At the same time, praclical revolutionary work also developed in quite an unexpected direction. Belief in the communist instincts of the muzhik naturally demanded of the socialists that they set politics aside and "go among the people." A host of extremely energetic and talented persons set about fulfilling this programme, but practice convinced them of the na&iumlveté of the idea of the muzhik's instincts being communist. It was decided, incidentally, that they did not have to do with the muzhik, but with the government -- and the entire activity was then concentrated on a fight against the government, a fight then waged by the intellectuals alone; they were sometimes joined by workers. At first this fight was waged in the name of socialism and was based on the theory that the people were ready for socialism and that it would be possible, merely by seizing power, to effect not only a political, but also a social revolution. Latterly, this theory is apparently becoming utterly discredited, and the struggle waged by the Narodovoltsi against the government is becoming a struggle of the radicals for political liberty.

Hence, in this case, too, the work led to results diametrically opposite to its point of departure; in this case, too, there emerged a programme expressing only the interests of radical bourgeois democracy. Strictly speaking, this process is not yet complete, but is already, I think, clearly defined. This development of Narodism was altogether natural and inevitable, because the doctrine was based on the purely mythical idea of peasant economy being a special (communal) system: the myth dissolved when it came into contact with reality, and peasant socialism turned into radical-democratic representation of the petty bourgeois peasantry.

Let me give examples of the democrat's evolution:

"We must see to it," argues Mr. Krivenko, "that instead of an integral man we do not get an all-Russian jelly fish filled only with a vague ferment of good sentiments but incapable either of real self-sacrifice or of doing any thing durable in life." The homily is an excellent one, but let us see what it is applied to. "In regard to the latter,"

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continues Mr. Krivenko, "I am acquainted with the following vexatious fact": in the South of Russia there lived some young people "who were inspired by the very best intentions and by a love for the younger brother; they showed the greatest attention and respect for the muzhik; they treated him as the guest of honour, ate out of the same bowl with him, treated him to jam and biscuits; they paid him higher prices than others did; they gave him money -- as loans, or as tips, or for no reason at all, they told him about European institutions and workers' associations, etc. In the same locality there lived a young German named Schmidt, the steward of an estate, or rather just a gardener, a man without any humanitarian ideas, a real, narrow, formal German soul" (sic??!!), etc. Three or four years passed, and these people separated and went their different ways. Another twenty years passed, and the author, on revisiting the locality, learned that "Mr. Schmidt" (as a reward for his useful activities gardener Schmidt had been promoted to Mr. Schmidt) had taught the peasants grape growing, from which they now obtain "some income," 75 to 100 rubles a year, and on this account they had preserved "kind memories" of him, whereas of the "gentlemen who merely cherished kind sentiments for the muzhik but did nothing tangible (!) for him, not even the memory was left."

<"p278"> A calculation shows that the events described occurred about 1869-1870, that is, roughly at the time when the Russian Narodnik socialists were trying to introduce into Russia the most advanced and most important of "European institutions" -- the International.[88]

Clearly, the impression created by Mr. Krivenko's account is a little too harsh, and so he hastens to make a reservation:

"I do not suggest, of course, that Schmidt was better than these gentlemen. I merely point out why, for all his defects, he left a more lasting impression in the locality and on the population." (I do not suggest that he was better, I merely point out that he left a more lasting impression -- what nonsense?!) "Nor do I say that he did anything important; on the contrary, I cite what he did as an example of a most trifling, incidental deed, which cost him nothing, but which for all that was undoubtedly vital."

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The reservation, you see, is very ambiguous; the point, however, is not its ambiguity, but the fact that the author, in contrasting the fruitlessness of the one activity with the success of the other, apparently does not suspect that there is a fundamental difference of tendency between these two types of activity. That is the whole point, which makes the story so characteristic in defining the contemporary democrat's physiognomy.

The young people who talked to the muzhik about "European institutions and workers' associations" evidently wanted to inspire in the muzhik a desire to alter the forms of social lite (the conclusion I draw may be wrong in this instance, but everyone will agree, I think, that it is a legitimate one, for it follows inevitably from Mr. Krivenko's story), they wanted to stir him to undertake a social revolution against contemporary society, which engenders such disgraceful exploitation and oppression of the working people, accompanied by universal rejoicing over all sorts of liberal progress. "Mr. Schmidt," on the other hand, true husbandman that he was, merely wanted to help others arrange their affairs -- and nothing more. Well, but how can one compare, juxtapose these two types of activity, which have diametrically opposite aims? Why, it is just as though somebody were to start comparing the failure of a person who tried to destroy a given building with the success of one who tried to reinforce it! 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. Instead, Mr. Krivenko moves heaven and earth to prove that "Mr. Schmidt's" work was "undoubtedly vital." But pardon me,

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most worthy Mr. "friend of the people," why hammer at an open door? Whoever doubts it? To lay out a vineyard and get an annual income of 75 to 100 rubles from it -- what could be more vital?[*]

<"p280"> And the author goes on to explain that if one peasant lays out a vineyard, that is isolated activity; but if several do, that is common and widespread activity, which transforms a small job into real and proper work, just as, for example, A. N. Engelhardt[89] not only used phosphates on his estate but got others to use them.

Now, isn't this democrat really splendid!

Let us take another example, one from opinions on the peasant Reform. What attitude towards it had Chernyshevsky, a democrat of that epoch, when democracy and socialism were undivided? Unable to express his opinion openly, he kept silent, but gave the following roundabout description of the contemplated reform:

"Suppose I was interested in taking measures to protect the provisions out of which your dinner is made. It goes without saying that if I was prompted to do so by my kind disposition towards you, then my zeal was based on the assumption that the provisions belonged to you and that the dinner prepared from them would be wholesome and beneficial to you. Imagine my feelings, then, when I learn that the provisions do not belong to you at all, and that for every dinner prepared from them you are charged a price which not only exceeds the cost of the dinner" (this was written before the Reform. Yet the Messrs. Yuzhakovs assert now that its fundamental principle was to give security to the peasants!!) "but which you are not able to pay at all without extreme hardship. What thoughts enter my head when I make such strange discoveries? . . . How stupid I was to bother about the matter when the conditions did not exist to ensure its usefulness! Who but a fool would bother about the retention of property in certain hands without first satisfying himself that those hands will receive the <"fnp280">

* You should bave tried to thrust yonr offer of this "vital" work on those young people who talked to the muzhik about European associations! What a welcome, what a splendid retort they would have given you! You would have been as mortally afraid of their ideas as you now are of materialism and dialectics!

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property, and on favourable terms? . . . Far better if all these provisions are lost, for they will only cause harrn to my dear friend! Far better be done with the whole business, for it will only cause your ruin! "

I have emphasised the passages which show most saliently how profoundly and splendidly Chernyshevsky understood the realities of his time, how he understood the significance of the peasants' payments, how he understood the antagonism between the social classes in Russia. It is also important to note his ability to expound such purely revolutionary ideas in the censored press. He wrote the same thing in his illegal works, but without circumlocution. In A Prologue to the Prologue, Volgin (into whose mouth Chernyshevsky puts his ideas) says:

"Let the emancipation of the peasant be placed in the hands of the landlords' party. It won't make much difference."[*] And in reply to his interlocutor's remark that, on the contrary, the difference would be tremendous, because the landlords' party was opposed to allotting land to the peasants, he replies emphatically:

"No, not tremendous, but insignificant. It would be tremendous if the peasants obtained the land without redemption payments. There is a diffrence between taking a thing from a man and leaving it with him, but if you take payment from him it is all the same. The only difference between the plan of the landlords' party and that of the progressists is that the former is simpler and shorter. That is why it is even better. Less red tape and, in all probability, less of a burden on the peasants. Those peasants who have money will buy land. As to those who have none -- there's no use compelling them to buy it. It will only ruin them. Redemption is nothing but purchase."

It required the genius of a Chernyshevsky to understand so clearly at that time, when the peasant Reform was only being introduced (when it had not yet been properly elucidated even in Western Europe), its fundamentally bourgeois character, to understand that already at that time Russian <"fnp281">

* I quote from Plekhanov's article "N. G. Chernyshevsky," in Sotsial-Demokrat.[90]

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"society" and the Russian "state" were ruled and governed by social classes that were irreconcilably hostile to the working people and that undoubtedly predetermined the ruin and expropriation of the peasantry. Moreover, Chernyshevsky underslood that the existence of a government that screens our antagonistic social relations is a terrible evil, which renders the position of the working people ever so much worse.

"To tell the truth," Volgin continues, "it would be better if they were emancipated without land." (That is, since the feudal landlords in this country are so strong, it would be better if they acted openly, straightforwardly, and said all they had in mind, instead of hiding their interests as serf owners behind the compromises of a hypocritical absolute government.)

<"p282"> "The matter is put in such a way that I see no reason for getting excited, even over whether the peasants are emancipated or not, let alone over whether the liberals or the landlords are to emancipate them. To my mind it is all the same. It will even be better if the landlords do it."

Here is a passage from "Unaddressed Letters": "They say: emancipate the peasants. . . . Where are the forces for it? Those forces do not yet exist. It is useless tackling a job when the forces for it are lacking. Yet you see the way things are going. They will start emancipating. But what will come of it? Well, judge for yourself what comes of tackling a job which is beyond your powers. You just botch it -- and the result will be vile."[91]

Chernyshevsky understood that the Russian feudal, bureaucratic state was incapable of emancipating the peasants, that is, of overthrowing the feudal serf owners, that it was only capable of something "vile," of a miserable compromise between the interests of the liberals (redemption is nothing but purchase) and of the landlords, a compromise employing the illusion of security and freedom to deceive the peasants, but actually ruining them and completely betraying them to the landlords. And he protested, execrated the Reform, wanted it to fail, wanted the government to get tied up in its equilibristics between the liberals and the landlords, and wanted a crash to take place that would bring Russia out on the high road of open class struggle.

Yet today, when Chernyshevsky's brilliant predictions have become fact, when the history of the past thirty

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years has ruthlessly shown up all economic and political illusions, our contemporary "democrats" sing the praises of the Reform, regard it as a sanction for "people's" production, contrive to draw proof from it of the possibility of finding a way which would get around the social classes hostile to the working people. I repeat, their attitude towards the peasant Reform is most striking proof of how profoundly bourgeois our democrats have become. These gentlemen have learned nothing, but have forgotten very, very much.

For the sake of comparison, I will take Otechestvenniye Zapiski for 1872. I have already quoted passages from the article "The Plutocracy and Its Basis," dealing with the successes in respect of liberalism (which screened plutocratic interests) achieved by Russian society in the very first decade after the "great emancipatory" Reform.

While formerly, wrote the same author in the same article, one would often find people who whined over the reforms and wailed for the good old days, they are to be found no longer. "Everybody is pleased with the new order; everybody is happy and satisfied." And the author goes on to show how literature "itself is becoming an organ of the plutocracy," advocating the interests and aspirations of the plutocracy "under the cloak of democracy." Examine this argument a little more closely. The author is displeased with the fact that "everybody" is pleased with the new order brought about by the Reform, that "everybody" (the representatives of "society" and of the "intelligentsia," of course, not of the working people) is happy and satisfied, notwithstanding the obvious antagonistic, bourgeois features of the new order: the public fail to notice that liberalism merely screens "freedom of acquisition," acquisition, of course, at the expense and to the disadvantage of the mass of working people. And he protests. It is this protest, characteristic of the socialist, that is valuable in his argument. Observe that this protest against a plutocracy screened by democracy contradicts the general theory of the magazine: for they deny that there are any bourgeois features, elements or interests in the peasant Rerorm, they deny the class character of the Russian intelligentsia and of the Russian state, they deny that there is a basis for capitalism in Russia -- nevertheless, they cannot but sense and perceive the capitalism and bourgeoisdom.

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And to the extent that Otechestvenniye Zapiski, sensing the antagonism in Russian society, fought bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy -- to that extent it fought in a cause common to all our pioneer socialists, who, although they could not understand this antagonism, nevertheless realised its existence and desired to combat the very organ isation of society which gave rise to it; to that extent Otechestvenniye Zapiski was progressive (from the point of view of the proletariat, of course). The "friends of the people" have forgotten this antagonism; they have lost all sensibility of the fact that in this country, too, in Holy Russia, the pure-blooded bourgeois hide "under the cloak of democracy"; and that is why they are now reactionary (in relation to the proletariat), for they gloss over the antagonism, and talk, not of struggle, but of conciliatory, ''uplilt'' activity.

But, gentlemen, has the Russian clear-browed liberal, the democratic representative of the plutocracy of the sixties, ceased to be the ideologist of the bourgeoisie in the nineties just because his brow has become clouded with civic grief?

Does "freedom of acquisition" on a large scale, freedom to acquire big credits, big capital, big technical improvements, cease to be liberal, i.e., bourgeois, while the present social-economic relations remain unchanged, merely because its place is taken by freedom to acquire small credits, small capital, small technical improvements?

I repeat, it is not that they have altered their opinions under the influence of a radical change of views or a radical change in our order of things. No, they have simply forgotten. Having lost the only feature that once made their predecessors progressive -- notwithstanding the utter unsoundness of their theories and their na&iumlve and utopian outlook on reality -- the "friends of the people" have learnt absolutely nothing during all this time. And yet, quite apart from a political-economic analysis of Russian realities, the political history of Russia during the past thirty years alone should have taught them a great deal.

At that time, in the era of the "sixties," the power of the feudal landlords was sapped: they suffered defeat, not complete, it is true, but so decisive that they had to slink from the stage. The liberals, on the contrary, raised their

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heads. Streams of liberal phrase-mongering flowed about progress, science, goodness, struggle against injustice, the interests of the people, the conscience of the people, the forces of the people, etc., etc. -- the very phrases which now, too, at moments of particular depression, are vomited forth by our radical snivellers in their salons, and by our liberal phrase-mongers at their anniversary dinners, and in the columns of their magazines and newspapers. The liberals proved strong enough to mould the "new order" in their own fashion -- not entirely, of course, but in fair measure. Although "the clear light of the open class struggle" did not shine in Russia at that time, there was more light then than there is now, so that even those ideologists of the working people who had not the faintest notion of this class struggle, and who preferred to dream of a better future rather than explain the vile present, could not help seeing that liberalism was a cloak for plutocracy, and that the new order was a bourgeois order. It was the removal from the stage of the feudal landlords, who did not divert attention to still mere crying evils of the day, and did not prevent the new order from being observed in its pure (relatively) form, that enabled this to be seen. But although our democrats of that time knew how to denounce plutocratic liberalism, they could not understand it and explain it scientifically; they could not understand that it was inevitable under the capitalist organisation of our social economy; they could not understand the progressive character of the new system of life as compared with the old, feudal system; they could not understand the revolutionary role of the proletariat it created; and they limited themselves to "snorting" at this system of "liberty" and "humanity," imagined that its bourgeois character was fortuitous, and expected social relations of some other kind to reveal themselves in the "people's system."

And then history showed them these other social relations. The feudal landlords, not completely crushed by the Reform, which was so outrageously mutilated in their interests, revived (for a time) and showed vividly what these other than bourgeois social relations of ours were, showed it in the form of such unbridled, incredibly senseless and brutal reaction that our democrats caught fright, subsided, instead of advancing and remoulding their na&iumlve demo-

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racy -- which was able to sense what was bourgeois but was unable to understand it -- into Social-Democracy, went backwards, to the liberals, and are now proud of the fact that their snivelling -- i.e., I want to say, their theories and programmes -- is shared by "the whole serious and respectable press." One would have thought the lesson was a very impressive one: the illusions of the old socialists about a special mode of life of the people, about the socialist instincts of the people, and about the fortuitous character of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, had become too obvious; one would have thought that the facts could now be looked straight in the face and the admission be openly made that there had not been and were not any other social economic relations than bourgeois and moribund feudal relations in Russia, and that, therefore, there could be no road to socialism except through the working-class movement. But these democrats had learned nothing, and the na&iumlve illusions of petty-bourgeois socialism gave way to the practical sobriety of petty-bourgeois progress.

Today, the theories of these petty-bourgeois ideologists, when they come forward as the spokesmen of the interests of the working people, are positively reactionary. They obscure the antagonism of contemporary Russian social-economic relations and argue as if things could be improved by general measures, applicable to all, for "raising," "improving," etc., and as if it were possible to reconcile and unite. They are reactionary in depicting our state as something standing above classes and therefore fit and capable of rendering serious and honest aid to the exploited population.

They are reactionary, lastly, because they simply can not understand the necessity for a struggle, a desperate struggle of the working people themselves for their emancipation. The "friends of the people," for example, seem to think they can manage the whole thing themselves. The workers need not worry. Why, an engineer has even visited the offices of Russkoye Bogatstvo, and there they have almost completely worked out a "scheme" for "introducing capitalism into the life of the people." Socialists must make a DECISIVE and COMPLETE break with all petty-bourgeois ideas and theories -- THAT IS THE PRINCIPAL USEFUL LESSON to be drawn from this campaign.

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I ask you to note that I speak of a break with petty bourgeois ideas and not with the "friends of the people" or with their ideas -- because there can be no breaking with something with which there has never been any connection. The "friends of the people" are only one of the representatives of one of the trends of this sort of petty-bourgeois socialist ideas. And if, in this case, I draw the conclusion that it is necessary to break with petty-bourgeois socialist ideas, with the ideas of the old Russian peasant socialism generally, it is because the campaign now launched against the Marxists by the representatives of the old ideas, scared by the growth of Marxism, has induced them to give particularly full and vivid expression to petty-bourgeois ideas. Comparing these ideas with contemporary socialism and with the facts of contemporary Russian reality, we see with astonishing clarity how outworn these ideas have become, how they have lost every vestige of an integral theoretical basis and have sunk to the level of a pitiful eclecticism, of a most ordinary opportunist uplift programme. It may be said that this is not the fault of the old socialist ideas in general, but of the gentlemen in question, whom no one thinks of classing as socialists; but such an argument seems to me quite unsound. I have throughout tried to show that such a degeneration of the old theories was inevitable. I have throughout tried to devote as little space as possible to criticism of these gentlemen in particular and as much as possible to the general and fundamental tenets of the old Russian socialism. And if the socialists should find that I have defined these tenets incorrectly or inaccurately, or have left something unsaid, then I can only reply with the following very humble request: please, gentlemen, define them yourselves, state them fully and properly!

Indeed, no one would be more pleased than the Social-Democrats of an opportunity to enter into a polemic with the socialists.

Do you think that we like answering the "polemics" of these gentlemen, or that we would have undertaken it if they had not thrown down a direct, persistent and emphatic challenge?

Do you think that we do not have to force ourselves to read, re-read and grasp the meaning of this repulsive

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mixture of stereotyped liberal phrase-mongering and philistine moralising?

Surely, we are not to blame for the fact that only such gentlemen now take upon themselves the job of vindicating and expounding these ideas. I ask you also to note that I speak of the need for a break with petty-bourgeois ideas about socialism. The petty-bourgeois theories we have examined are ABSOLUTELY reactionary INASMUCH AS they claim to be socialist theories.

But if we understand that actually there is absolutely nothing socialist in them, i.e., that all these theories completely fail to explain the exploitation of the working people and therefore cannot serve as a means for their emancipation, that as a matter of fact all these theories reflect and further the interests of the petty bourgeoisie -- then our attitude towards them must be different, and we must ask: what should be the attitude of the working class towards the petty bourgeosie and its programmes? And this question cannot be answered unless the dual character of this class is taken into consideration (here in Russia this duality is particularly marked owing to the antagonism between the big bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie being less developed). It is progressive insofar as it puts forward general democratic demands, i.e., fights against all survivals of the medieval epoch and of serfdom; it is reactionary insofar as it fights to preserve its position as a petty bourgeoisie and tries to retard, to turn back the general development of the country along bourgeois lines. Reactionary demands of this kind, such, for example, as the notorious inalienability of allotments, as well as the many other projects for tutelage over the peasants, are usually covered up by plausible talk of protecting the working people but actually, of course, they only worsen their condition, while at the same time hampering them in their struggle for emancipation. A strict distinction should be drawn between these two sides of the petty-bourgeois programme and, while denying that these theories are in any way socialist in character, and while combating their reactionary aspects, we should not forget their democratic side. I shall give an example to show that, although the Marxists completely repudiate petty-bourgeois theories, this does not prevent them from including democracy in their

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programmes but, on the contrary, calls for still stronger insistence on it. We have mentioned above the three main theses that always formed the theoretical stock-in-trade of the representatives of petty-bourgeois socialism, viz., Iand poverty, high payments and the tyranny of the authorities.

There is absolutely nothing socialist in the demand for the abolition of these evils, for they do not in the least explain expropriation and exploitation, and their elimination will not in the least aflect the oppression of labour by capital. But their elimination will free this oppression of the medieval rubbish that aggravates it, and will facilitate the worker's direct struggle against capital, and for that reason, as a democratic demand, will meet with the most energetic support of the workers. Generally speaking, the question of payments and taxes is one to which only the petty bourgeois can attach any particular significance; but in Russia the payments made by the peasants are, in many reapects, simply survivals of serfdom. Such, for example, are the land redemption payments, which should be immediately and unconditionally abolished; such, too, are the taxes which only the peasants and the small townspeople pay, but from which the "gentry" are exempt. <"p289"> Social-Democrats will always support the demand for the elimination of these relics of medieval relations, which cause economic and political stagnation. The same can be said of land poverty. I have already given proof at length of the bourgeois character of the wailing on this score. There is no doubt, however, that the peasant Reform, for example, by permitting the cutting-off of lands[92] positively robbed the peasants for the benefit of the landlords, rendering service to this tremendous reactionary force both directly (by snatching land from the peasants) and indirectly (by the clever way the allotments were marked out). And Social-Democrats will most strenuously insist on the immediate return to the peasants of the land taken from them and on the complete abolition of landed proprietorship -- that bulwark of feudal institutions and traditions. This latter point, which coincides with the nationalisation of the land, contains nothing socialist, because the capitalist-farming relations already taking shape in our country would in that case only flourish more rapidly and abundantly; but it is extremely important

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from the democratic standpoint as the only measure capable of completely breaking the power of the lamled nobility. Lastly, only the Yuzhakovrs and V. V.s, of course, can speak of the peasants' lack ol rights as the cause of their expropriation and exploitation. As for the oppression of the peasantry by the authorities, it is not only an unquestionable fact, but is some thing more than mere oppression; it is treating the peasants as a "base rabble," for whom it is natural to be subject to the landed nobility; to whom general civil rights are granted only as a special favour (migration,[*] for example), and whom any Jack-in-office can order about as if they were workhouse inmates. And the Social-Democrats unreservedly associate themselves with the demand for the complete restoration of the peasants' civil rights, the complete abolition of all the privileges of the nobility, the abolition of bureaucratic tutelage over the peasants, and the peasants' right to manage their own affairs.

In general, the Russian communists, adherents of Marxism, should more than any others call themselves SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS, and in their activities should never forget the enormous importance of DEMOCRACY.**

In Russia, the relics of medieval, semi-feudal institutions are still so enormously strong (as compared with Western Europe), they are such an oppressive yoke upon the proletariat and the people generally, retarding the growth of political thought in all estates and classes, that one cannot but insist on the tremendous importance which the struggle against all feudal institutions, absolutism, the social estate system, and the bureaucracy has for the workers. The workers must be shown in the greatest detail what a terribly reactionary force these institutions are, how they intensify <"fnp290">

* One cannot help recalling here the purely Russian feudal arrogance with which Mr. Yermolov, now Minister of Agriculture, objects to migration in his book Crop Failures and the Distress of the People. Migration cannot be regarded as rational from the standpoint of the state, he says, when the landlords in European Russia still experience a shortage of labour. And, indeed, what do the peasants exist for, if not to work and feed the idle landlords and their "high-placed" servitors?
** This is a very important point. Plekhanov is quite right when he says that our revolutionaries have "two enemies: old prejudices that have not yet been entirely eradicated, on the one hand, and a narrow understanding of the new programme, on the other." See Appendix III (p. 326 of this volume. --Ed.).

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the oppression of labour by capital, what a degrading pressure they exert on the working people, how they keep capital in its medieval forms, which, while not falling short of the modern, industrial forms in respect of the exploitation of labour, add to this exploitation by placing terrible difficulties in the way of the fight for emancipation. The workers must know that unless these pillars of reaction[*] are overthrown, it will be utterly impossible for them to wage a successful struggle against the bourgeoisie, because so long as they exist, the Russian rural proletariat, whose support is an essential condition for the victory of the working class, will never cease to be downtrodden and cowed, capable only of sullen desperation and not of intelligent and persistent protest and struggle. And that is why it is the direct duty of the working class to fight side by side with the radical democracy against absolutism and the reactionary social estates and institutions -- a duty which the Social-Democrats must impress upon the workers, while not for a moment ceasing also to impress upon them that the struggle against all these institutions is necessary only as a means of facilitating the struggle against the bourgeoisie, that the worker needs the achievement of the general democratic demands only to clear the road to victory over the working people's chief enemy, over an institution that is purely democratic by nature, capital, which here in Russia is particularly in- <"fnp291">

* A particularly imposing reactionary institution one to which our revolutionaries have paid relatively little attention, is our bureaucracy, which de facto rules the Russian state. The bureaucracy being made up mainly of middle-class intellectuals are profoundly bourgeois both in origin and in the purpose and character of their activities; but absolutism and the enormous political privileges of the landed nobility have lent them particularly pernicious qualities. They are regular weathercocks, who regard it as their supreme task to combine the interests of the landlord and the bourgeois. They are Judushkas[93] who use their feudal sympathies and connections to fool the workers and peasants, and employ the pretext of "protecting the economically weak" and acting as their "guardian" against the kulak and usurer to carry through measures which reduce the working people to the status of a "base rabble," handing them over to the feudal landlords and making them all the more defenceless against the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy are most dangerous hypocrites, who have imbibed the experience of the West-European champion reactionaries, and skilfully conceal their Arakcheyev[94] designs behind the fig-leaves of phrases abeut loving the people.

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clined to sacrifice its democracy and to enter into alliance with the reactionaries in order to suppress the workers, to still further impede the emergence of a working-class movement.

<"p292"> What has been said is, I think, sulficient to define the attitude of the Social-Democrats towards absolutism and political liberty, and also towards the trend which has been growing particularly strong of late, that aims at the "amalgamation" and "alliance" of all the revolutionary groups for the winning of political liberty.[95]

This trend is rather peculiar and characteristic.

It is peculiar because proposals for "alliance" do not come from a definite group, or definite groups, with definite programmes which coincide on one point or another. If they did, the question of an alliance would be one for each separate case, a concrete question to be settled by the representatives of the uniting groups. Then there could be no special "amalgamation" trend. But such a trend exists, and simply comes from people who have cut adrift from the old, and have not moored to anything new. The theory on which the fighters against absolutism have hitherto based themselves is evidently crumbling, and is destroying the conditions for solidarity and organisation which are essential for the struggle. Well then, these "amalgamators" and "alliance advocates" would seem to think that the easiest way to create such a theory is to reduce it to a protest against absolutism and a demand for political liberty, while evading all other questions, socialist and non-socialist. It goes without saying that the bottom will inevitably be knocked out of this na&iumlve fallacy at the very first attempts at such unity.

But what is characteristic is that this "amalgamation" trend represents one of the last stages in the process of transformation of militant, revolutionary Narodism into politically radical democracy, a process which I have tried to outline above. A durable amalgamation of all the non-Social-Democratic revolutionary groups under the banner mentioned will be possible only when a durable programme of democratic demands has been drawn up that will put an end to the prejudices of the old Russian exceptionalism. Of course, the Social-Democrats believe that the formation of such a democratic party would be a useful step forward; and their anti-Narodnik activity should further it, should

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further the eradication of all prejudjces and myths, the grouping of the socialists under the banner of Marxism and the formation of a democratic party by the other groups.

The Social-Democrats, who consider essential the independent organisation of the workers into a separate workers' party, could not, of course, "amalgamate" with such a party, but the workers would most strongly support any struggle waged by the democrats against reactionary institutions.

The degeneration of Narodism into the most ordinary petty-bourgeois radical theory -- of which (degeneration) the "friends of the people" furnish such striking testimony -- shows what a tremendous mistake is made by those who spread among the workers the idea of fighting ahsolutism without at the same time explaining to them the antagonistic character of our social relations by virtue of which the ideologists of the bourgeoisie also favour political liberty -- without explaining to them the historical role of the Russian worker as a fighter for the emancipation of the whole working population.

The Social-Democrats are often accused of wanting to monopolise Marx's theory, whereas, it is argued, his economic theory is accepted by all socialists. But the question arises; what sense is there in explaining to the workers the form of value, the nature of the bourgeois system and the revolutionary role of the proletariat, if here in Russia the exploitation of the working people is generally and universally explained not by the bourgeois organisation of social economy, but by, say, land poverty, redemption payments, or the tyranny of the authorities?

What sense is there in explaining to the worker the theory of the class struggle, if that theory cannot even explain his relation to the employer (capitalism in Russia has been artificially implanted by the government), not to mention the mass of the "people," who do not belong to the fully established class of factory workers?

How can one accept Marx's economic theory and its corollary -- the revolutionary role of the proletariat as the organiser of communism by way of capitalism -- if people in our country try to find ways to communism other than through the medium of capitalism and the proletariat it creates?

Obviously, under such conditions to call upon the worker to fight for political liberty would be equivalent to call-

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ing upon him to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the progressive bourgeoisie, for it cannot be denied (typically enough, even the Narodniks and the Narodovoltsi did not deny it) that political liberty will primarily serve the interests of the bourgeoisie and will not ease the position of the workers, but . . . will ease only the conditions for their struggle . . . against this very bourgeoisie. I say this as against those socialists who, while they do not accept the theory of the Social-Democrats, carry on their agitation among the workers, having become convinced empirically that only among the latter are revolutionary elements to be found. The theory of these socialists contradicts their practice, and they make a very serious mistake by distracting the workers from their direct task of ORGANISING A SOCIALIST WORKERS' PARTY.[*]

It was a mistake that arose naturally at a time when the class antagonisms of bourgeois society were still quite undeveloped and were held down by serfdom, when the latter was evoking the unanimous protest and struggle of the entire intelligentsia, thus creating the illusion that there was something peculiarly democratic about our intelligentsia, and that there was no profound gulf between the ideas of the liberals and of the socialists. Now that economic development has advanced so far that even those who formerly denied a basis for capitalism in Russia admit our having entered the capitalist path of development -- illusions on this score are no longer possible. The composition of the "intelligentsia" is assuming just as clear an outline as that of society engaged in the production of material values: while the latter is ruled and governed by the capitalist, among the former the fashion is set by the rapidly growing <"fnp294">

* There are two ways of arriving at the conclusion that the worker must be roused to right absolutism: either by regarding the worker as the sole fighter for the socialist system, and therefore seeing political liberty as one of the conditions facilitating his struggle; that is the view of the Social-Democrats or by appealing to him simply as the one who suffers most from the present system, who has noting more to lose and who can display the greatest determination in fighting absolutism. But that would mean compelling the worker to drag in the wake of the bourgeois radicals, who retuse to see the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat behind the solidarity of the whole "people" against absolutism.

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horde of careerists and bourgeois hirelings, an "intelligentsia" contented and satisfied, a stranger to all wild fantasy and very well aware of what they want. Far from denying this fact, our radicals and liberals strongly emphasise it and go out of their way to prove its immorality, to condemn it, strive to confound it, shame it . . . and destroy it. These na&iumlve efforts to make the bourgeois intelligentsia ashamed of being bourgeois are as ridiculous as the efforts of our petty-bourgeois economists to frighten our bourgeoisie (pleading the experience of "elder brothers") with the story that it is moving towards the ruin of the people, towards the poverty, unemployment and starvation of the masses; this trial of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists is reminiscent of the trial of the pike, which was sentenced to be thrown into the river. Beyond these bounds begin the liberal and radical "intelligentsia," who pour out innumerable phrases about progress, science, truth, the people, etc., and who love to lament the passing of the sixties, when there was no discord, depression, despondency and apathy, and when all hearts were aflame with democracy.

With their characteristic simplicity, these gentlemen refuse to understand that the cause of the unanimity that then prevailed was the then existing material conditions, gone never to return: serfdom pressed down everybody equally -- the serf steward who had saved a little money and wanted to live in comfort; the enterprising muzhik, who hated the lord for exacting tribute, for interfering in and tearing him from his business; the proletarianised manor-serf and the impoverished muzhik who was sold into bondage to the merchant; it brought suffering to the merchant manufacturer and the worker, the handicraftsman and the subcontractor. The only tie that linked all these people together was their hostility to serfdom; beyond that unanimity, the sharpest economic antagonism began. How completely one must be lulled by sweet illusions not to perceive this antagonism even today when it has become so enormously developed; to weep for the return of the days of unanimity at a time when the situation demands struggle, demands that everyone who does not want to be a WILLING or UNWILLING myrmidon of the bourgeoisie shall take his stand on the side of the proletariat.

If you refuse to believe the flowery talk about the "interests

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of the people" and try to delve deeper, you will find that you are dealing with the out-and-out ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie, who dream of improving, supporting and restoring their ("people's" in their jargon) economy by various innocent progressive measures, and who are totally incapable of understanding that under prevailing production relations the only eflect such progressive measures can have is to proletarianise the masses still further. We cannot but be grateful to the "friends of the people" for having done much to reveal the class character of our intelligentsia and for having thereby fortified the Marxist theory that our small producers are petty bourgeois. They must inevitably hasten the dissipation of the old illusions and myths that have so long confused the minds of Russian socialists. The "friends of the people" have so mauled, overworked and soiled these theories that Russian socialists who held them are confronted with the inexorable dilemma of either revising them, or abandoning them altogether and leaving them to the exclusive use of the gentlemen who announce with smug solemnity, urbi et orbi, that the rich peasants are buying improved implements, and who with serious mien assure us that we must welcome people who have grown weary of sitting at the card tables. And in this strain they talk about a "people's system" and the "intelligentsia" -- talk, not only with a serious air, but in pretentious, stupendous phrases about broad ideals, about an ideal treatment of the problems of life! . . .

The socialist intelligentsia can expect to perform fruitful work only when they abandon their illusions and begin to seek support in the actual, and not the desired development of Russia, in actual, and not possible social-economic relations. Moreover, their THEORETICAL work must be directed towards the concrete study of all forms of economic antagonism in Russia, the study of their connections and successive development; they must reveal this antagonism wherever it has been concealed by political history, by the peculiarities of legal systems or by establised theoretical prejudice. They must present an integral picture of our realities as a definite system of production relations, show that the exploitation and expropriation of the working peolple are essential under this system, and show the way out of this system that is indicated by economic development.

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This theory, based on a detailed study of Russian history and realities, must furnish an answer to the demands of the proletariat -- and if it satisfies the requirements of science. then every awakening of the protesting thought of the proletariat will inevitably guide this thought into the channels of Social-Democracy. The greater the progress made in elaborating this theory, the more rapidly will Social-Democracy grow; for even the most artful guardians of the present system cannot prevent the awakening of proletarian thought, because this system itself necessarily and inevitably entails the most intense expropriation of the producers, the continuous growth of the proletariat and of its reserve army -- and this parallel to the progress of social wealth, the enormous growth of the productive forces, and the socialisation of labour by capitalism. However much has still to be done to elaborate this theory, the socialists will do it; this is guaranteed by the spread among them of materialism, the only scientific method, one requiring that every programme shall be a precise formulation of the actual process; it is guaranteed by the success of Social-Democracy, which has adopted these ideas -- a success which has so stirred up our liberals and democrats that, as a certain Marxist has put it, their monthly magazines have ceased to be dull.

In thus emphasising the necessity, importance and immensity of the theoretical work of the Social-Democrats, I by no means want to say that this work should take precedence over PRACTICAL work,* -- still less that the latter should be postponed until the former is completed. Only the admirers of the "subjective method in sociology," or the followers of utopian socialism, could arrive at such a conclusion. Of course, if it is presumed that the task of the socialists is to seek "different" (from actual) "paths of development" for the country, then, naturally, practical work becomes possible only when philosophical geniuses discover and indicate these "different paths"; and conversely, once these paths are discovered and indicated theoretical work ends, and the work of those who are to direct the "fatherland" along the "newly-discovered" "different paths"

* On the contrary, the practical work of propaganda and agitation must always take precedence, because, firstly, theoretical work only [cont. onto p. 298. -- DJR] supplies answers to the problems raised by practical work, and, secondly the Social-Democrats, for reasons over which they have no control, are so often compelled to confine themselves to theoretical work that they value highly every moment when practical work is possible.

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begins. The position is altogether different when the task of the socialists is to be the ideological leaders of the proletariat in its actual struggle against actual and real enemies who stand in the actual path of social and economic development. Under these circumstances, theoretical and practical work merge into one aptly described by the veteran German Social-Democrat, Liebknecht, as:

Studieren, Propagandieren, Organisieren.[*]

You cannot be an ideological leader without the above mentioned theoretical work, just as you cannot be one without directing this work to meet the needs of the cause, and without spreading the results of this theory among the workers and helping them to organise.

Such a presentation of the task guards Social-Democracy against the defects from which socialist groups so often suffer, namely, dogmatism and sectarianism.

There can be no dogmatism where the supreme and sole criterion of a doctrine is its conformity to the actual process of social and economic development; there can be no sectarianism when the task is that of promoting the organisation of the proletariat, and when, therefore, the role of the "intelligentsia" is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary.

Hence, despite the existence of differences among Marxists on various theoretical questions, the methods of their poiitical activity have remained unchanged ever since the group arose.

The political activity of the Social-Democrats lies in promoting the development and organisation of the working-class movemeot in Russia, in transforming this movement from its present state of sporadic attempts at protest, "riots" and strikes devoid of a guiding idea, into an organised struggle of the WHOLE Russian working CLASS directed against the bourgeois regime and working for the <"fnp298">

* Study, propaganda, organisation. --Ed.

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expropriation of the expropriators and the abolition of the social system based on the oppression of the working people. Underlying these activities is the common conviction of Marxists that the Russian worker is the sole and natural representative of Russia's entire working and exploited population.[*]

Natural because the exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature, if we leave out of account the moribund remnants of serf economy; but the exploitation of the mass of producers is on a small scale, scattered and undeveloped, while the exploitation of the factory proletariat is on a large scale, socialised and concentrated. In the former case, exploitation is still enmeshed in medieval forms, various political, legal and conventional trappings, tricks and devices, which hinder the working people and their ideologists from seeing the essence of the system which oppresses the working people, from seeing where and how a way can be found out of this system. In the latter case, on the contrary, exploitation is fully developed and emerges in its pure form, without any confusing details. The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle has to be waged against the bourgeois class. And this struggle, aimed at satisfying his immediate economic needs, at improving his material conditions, inevitably demands that the workers organise, and inevitably becomes a war not against individuals, but against a class, the class which oppresses and crushes the working people not only in the factories, but everywhere. That is why the factory worker is none other than the foremost representative of the entire exploited population. And in order that he may fulfil his function of representative in an organised, sustained struggle it is by no means necessary to enthuse him with "perspectives"; all that is needed is simply to make him understand his position, to make him understand the political and economic structure of the system that oppresses him, and the necessity and inevitability of class antagonisms under this system. This position of the factory worker <"fnp299">

* Russia's man of the future is the muzhik -- thought the representatives of peasant socialism, the Narodniks in the broadest sense of the term. Russia's man of the future is the worker -- think the Social-Democrats. That is how the Marxist view was formulated in a certain manuscript.

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in the general system of capitalist relations makes him the sole fighter for the emancipation of the working class, for only the higher stage of development of capitalism, large scale machine industry, creates the material condition and the social forces necessary for this struggle. Everywhere else, where the forms of capitalist development are low, these material conditions are absent; production is scattered among thousands of tiny enterprises (and they do not cease to be scattered enterprises even under the most equalitarian forms of communal landownership ), for the most part the exploited still possess tiny enterprises and are thus tied to the very bourgeois system they should be fighting: this retards and hinders the development of the social forces capable of overthrowing capitalism. Scattered, individual, petty exploitation ties the working people to one locality, divides them, prevents them from becoming conscious of class solidarity, prevents them from uniting once they have understood that oppression is not caused by some particular individual, but by the whole economic system. Large-scale capitalism, on the contrary, inevitably severs all the workers' ties with the old society, with a particular locality and a particular exploiter; it unites them, compels them to think and places them in conditions which enable them to commence an organised struggle. Accordingly, it is on the working class that the Social-Democrats concentrate all their attention and all their activities. When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organisations are formed among the worker to transform the workers' present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle -- then the Russian WORKER rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARlAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES along the straight road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.

The End