[288] Cf. _Outlines of Our Social Economy_, in particular pp. 202-5,
338-41.
[289] Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] has given detailed proof of the striking
similarity between the position of the Russian 'populists' and the views
of Sismondi in his essay _On the Characteristics of Economic
Romanticism_ (1897).
[290] _Outlines of Our Social Economy_, p. 322. Friedrich Engels
appraises the Russian situation differently. He repeatedly tries to
convince Nikolayon that Russia cannot avoid a high industrial
development, and that her sufferings are nothing but the typical
capitalist contradictions. Thus he writes on September 22, 1892: 'I
therefore hold that at present industrial production necessarily implies
big industry, making use of steam power, electricity, mechanical looms
and frames, and lastly the manufacture of the machines themselves by
mechanical means. From the moment that railways are introduced in
Russia, recourse to all these extremely modern means of production
becomes inevitable. It is necessary that you should be able to mend and
repair your engines, coaches, railways and the like, but to do this
cheaply, you must also be in a position to make at home the things
needing repair. As soon as the technique of war has become a branch of
industry (armour-plated cruisers, modern artillery, machine guns, steel
bullets, smokeless gun powder, etc.) a big industry that is
indispensable for the production of such items has become a political
necessity for you as well. All these items cannot be made without a
highly developed metal industry which on its part cannot develop unless
there is a corresponding development of all other branches of
production, textiles in particular' (Marx-Engels to Nikolayon, St.
Petersburg, 1908, p. 75). And further in the same letter: 'So long as
Russian industry depends on the home market alone, it can only satisfy
the internal demand. The latter, however, can grow but slowly, and it
seems to me that under present conditions of life in Russia it is even
bound to decrease, since it is one of the unavoidable consequences of
high industrial development that it destroys its own home market by the
same process which served to create it: by destroying the bases of the
peasants' domestic industry. Yet peasants cannot live without such a
domestic industry. They are ruined as peasants, their purchasing power
is reduced to a minimum, and unless they grow new roots in new
conditions of life, unless they become proletarians, they will only
represent a very small market for the newly arising plants and
factories.
'Capitalist production is a phase of economic transition, full of
inherent contradictions which only develop and become visible to the
extent that capitalist production develops. The tendency of
simultaneously creating and destroying a market is just one of these
contradictions. Another is the hopeless situation that will ensue, all
the sooner in a country like Russia which lacks external markets than in
countries more or less fit to compete in the open world market. These
latter can find some means of relief in this seemingly hopeless
situation by heroic measures of commercial policy, that is to say by
forcibly opening up new markets. China is the most recent market to be
opened up for English commerce, and it proved adequate for a temporary
revival of prosperity. That is why English capital is so insistent on
railroad building in China. Yet railways in China mean the destruction
of the entire foundation of China's small rural enterprises and her
domestic industry. In this case, there is not even a native big industry
developed to compensate for this evil to some extent, and hundreds of
millions will consequently find it impossible to make a living at all.
The result will be mass emigration, such as the world has never yet
seen, and America, Asia and Europe will be flooded with the detested
Chinese. This new competitor on the labour market will compete with
American, Australian and European labour at the level of what the
Chinese consider a satisfactory standard of living, which is well known
to be the lowest in the whole world. Well then, if the whole system of
production in Europe has not been revolutionised by then, that will be
the time to start this revolution' (ibid., p. 79).
Engels, though he followed Russian developments with attention and keen
interest, persistently refused to take an active part in the Russian
dispute. In his letter of November 24, 1894, i.e. shortly before his
death, he expressed himself as follows: 'My Russian friends almost daily
and weekly bombard me with requests to come forward with my objections
to Russian books and reviews which not only misinterpret but even
misquote the sayings of our author (Marx). My friends assure me that my
intervention would suffice to put matters right. Yet I invariably and
firmly refuse all such proposals because I cannot afford to become
involved with a dispute held in a foreign country, in a tongue which I,
at least, cannot read as easily and freely as the more familiar W.
European languages, and in a literature which is at best accessible to
me only in fortuitous glimpses of some fragments, and which I cannot
pursue anything like systematically enough in all its stages and details
without neglecting my real and serious work. There are people everywhere
who, once they have taken up a certain stand, are not ashamed to have
recourse to misinterpreting the thoughts of others and to all kinds of
dishonest manipulations for their own ends, and if that is what has
happened to our author, I am afraid they will not deal more kindly with
me, so that in the end I shall be compelled to interfere in the dispute,
first to defend others, and then in my own defence' (ibid., p. 90).
[291] We might mention that the surviving champions of 'populist'
pessimism, and Vorontsov in particular, to the last remained loyal to
their views, in spite of all that happened in Russia--a fact that does
more credit to their character than to their intelligence. Referring to
the 1900 and 1902 crises, Vorontsov wrote in 1902: 'The doctrinaire
dogma of the Neo-Marxists rapidly loses its power over people's minds.
That the newest successes of the individualists are ephemeral has
obviously dawned even on their official advocates.... In the first
decade of the twentieth century, we come back to the same views about
economic development in Russia that had been the legacy of the 1870's'
(Cf. the review _Political Economics_, October 1902, quoted by A. Finn
Yenotayevski in _The Contemporary Economy of Russia 1890-1910_, St.
Petersburg, 1911, p. 2.) Even to-day, then, this last of the 'populist'
Mohicans deduces the 'ephemeral character', not of his own theory, but
of economic reality. What of the saying of Barrère: 'Il n'y a que les
morts qui ne reviennent pas'.
_CHAPTER XXI_