Free Lenin: A Revolutionary Life by Christopher Read Page A

his writings. For example, he was prepared to accept Skaldin’s good faith, referring to him as ‘a bourgeois enlightener’ whose views were based on ‘the sincere belief that the abolition of serfdom would be followed by universal well-being and a sincere desire to help bring this about’. [SW 1 63 and 64] The writer whom Lenin used as his example of populist romanticism, Alexander Engelhardt, was also treated with some respect, being described as ‘much more talented than Skaldin and his letters from the country are incomparably more lively and imaginative’ and that his account was ‘replete with deft definition and imagery’. [SW 1 66] There was also an overtly ‘democratic element’ to Lenin’s thought at this time. In an article on Engels’ death written a few years before, he pointed out that Marx and Engels were democrats before they were socialists. In his 1898 article he also, as he continued to do, posited political freedom as the indispensable prerequisite for any further progress. He also reaffirmed it in an article of 1900 entitled ‘The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement’ which opens ‘Russian Social-Democracy has repeatedly declared the immediate task of a Russian working-class party to be the overthrow of autocracy, the achievement of political liberty.’ [SW 1 91] This created ambiguities over his position with respect to the second controversy of the time, that relating to so-called Economism which we will examine shortly.
    Before moving on to that we need to remember that, as was mentioned in Chapter One, it has been suggested that, in the polemic over the development of capitalism, Lenin, ironically, was championing ideas of the unavoidability of the capitalist stage abandoned by Marx, whereas the populist argument was closer to that of Marx himself. While this argument is ingenious and in many ways compelling, Lenin himself developed beyond such early assumptions. His most complete work of this period, The Development of Capitalism in Russia , written largely in 1896–7 and corrected in 1898, was published in 1899. Here the stress is not so much on whether Russia could avoid the capitalist stage. Lenin’s essential argument was that capitalism had already developed to such an extent in Russia that the issue was no longer a live one. Russia was already in the capitalist stage. Examining rural society Lenin identified the growth of capitalist traits. For example, there was greater differentiation of production – that is areas were becoming less self-sufficient and producing what the region was best at and trading it for what other regions were best at. In other words an incipient national market rather than a series of local market economies was developing. Further signs were a growing tendency to produce cash crops, that is crops for sale rather than local consumption; a growth of individual as opposed to communal proprietorship; growing class differentiation between rich (kulak), middle and poor peasants/labourers. All these were signs of the hold which capitalism had already taken on Russian society and economy. The debate was over. Russia was firmly on the capitalist path.
    Implicit in this was, of course, Lenin’s acceptance of the theory of stages. It is also clear that Lenin followed the Marxist tradition, as mentioned above, of admiring the constructive, modernizing aspects of capitalism when it came to overthrowing feudal relations. Without the development of capitalism, socialism was out of the question.
    This did not mean that Lenin took a rose-tinted view of capitalism. Indeed, the second controversy of the period showed exactly the opposite side of his view of capitalism. Other thinkers had taken the view that the nature of capitalism was such that it would almost automatically turn into socialism of its own accord. No revolutionary, especially political, transition would be needed. In European terms, Eduard Bernstein became the foremost advocate of this tendency known as