What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats

What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats

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 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 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 .

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 .” [32]

The Russian Social-Democrats are plucking from our countryside the imaginary flowers that adorn it, are combating 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.

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!

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats

(A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists)