p "The bourgeoisie" (and consequently capitalism, is it not so, Mr. Tikhomirov? ), "historically, has played a most revolutionary part,” we read in the Communist Manifesto.

p "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ’natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ’cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation....

p "The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

p "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of 189 production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind....

p "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidcdness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

p "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

p "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the 190 urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West....

p "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"^^147^^

p That is how Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "revolutionaries by logic and by feeling”, understand capitalism. And how do intelligent and educated conservatives understand it?

p Almost in the same way. "Joint-stock undertakings" (the highest phase of capitalist development, is it not, Mr. Tikhomirov?) ..."have their historic mission,” we read in one of Rodbertus’ letters to R. Meyer, "they are destined to complete the work of God’s hands, to pierce isthmuses where the Almighty forgot or did not consider it opportune to do so, to link under the sea or over the sea lands which it separates, to burrow through high mountains, etc., etc. The pyramids and the Phoenician stone constructions cannot be compared with what will yet be done by joint-stock capital”, etc.^^148^^

p Such is the general cultural and historical significance of capitalism. But what is its influence, particularly on the workers, their intellectual make-up, their moral habits?

p What workers did capitalism have to deal with at the beginning of its development? "What the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be guessed,” we read in Engels’ work about English weavers. "Shut off from the towns ... so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns for work—the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the yeomen.... They regarded their squire ... as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour, as this patriarchal relation involved.... In short, the English industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the fashion still to be found here and there in 191 Germany,  [191•*  in retirement and seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in their position in life. They could rarely read and far more rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the ’superior’ classes. But intellectually, they were dead" (listen, Mr. Tikhomirov); "lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind. They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution  [191•** ” (i.e., capitalism, Mr. Tikhomirov) "they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time. The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men....” This industrial revolution in England tore the workers out of their "apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind" and "drew them into the whirl of history".  [191•*** 

p Those words are from Engels, whom bourgeois economists accuse of having painted the condition of the workers in the pre-capitalist period in too bright colours and given too gloomy a description of their condition in the period of capitalism. Such accusations abound, for instance, in Bruno Hildebrand’s Die Nationalokonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft.

p But what are the West and its pseudo-sages to us, as Mr. Aksakov would say; let us listen to Moses and the prophets, let us read Bakunin himself.

p "From the Renaissance and the Reformation right up to the Revolution, the bourgeoisie" (thanks to rising capitalism, Mr. Tikhomirov, or not? ) "in Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain and Holland, if not in Germany, was the hero and the representative of the revolutionary genius of history. Out of it came most of the free thinkers in the eighteenth century, the religious reformers in the preceding two centuries and the apostles of human emancipation, among these also the German figures of 192 the last century. The bourgeoisie alone, leaning, of course, on the mighty arm of the people who had faith in it, carried out the revolution in 1789 and 1793. It proclaimed the fall of the royal power and of the Church, the fraternity of the peoples, the rights of man and of the citizen. Those are its rights; they are immortal! "  [192•* 

p In view of these immortal services of West European capitalism, Mr. Tikhomirov, the man of the East, cannot renounce his Slavophile scorn for the West, and yawning lazily, he says that this road of development was nevertheless not the best "that could have been imagined”. In all the history of the bourgeoisie he sees but the "mass of evils" and the "mechanical union of the workers”. For him this “union” contains the whole significance of "large-scale production”. Talking about slavery he still mentions the increase in the productivity of labour that it led to, but when he goes on to capitalism he does not even hint at "the gigantic means of production conjured up”, which were alone capable of preparing the victory of the proletariat! He has not the slightest idea of the influence of capitalism on the development of philosophy, public and private law, the philosophy of history, natural science and literature. And yet there can be no doubt of that influence and there was a time when Russian writers understood the influence of class relations in society (and what, if not capitalism, created the class relations in contemporary society? ) on the course of development of learning in general and of philosophical thought in particular. "Political theories, and indeed, all philosophical doctrines generally, have always been created under the extremely powerful influence of the social position of their authors, and every philosopher represented one of the political parties struggling at that time for domination over that society to which the philosopher belonged,” says Chcrnyshevsky  [192•** .... " Philosophical systems are permeated through and through with the spirit of the political parties to which the authors of the systems belonged.” Or does Mr. Tikhomirov presume that the political and philosophical systems of the epoch of capitalism are inferior to the corresponding systems of the Middle Ages? Does he think that the theories which characterise capitalism were worse than those which he himself can “imagine”? In that case, let him “imagine” as many of them as he pleases, let him go on ignoring the history of West European culture! In this disagreement of the editor of Vestnik Narodnoi Voli with the 193 West, the former loses very much and the latter absolutely nothing. It is not Mr. Tikhomirov, however, who must be considered as the initiator of this discord. On this question our author only repeats what was said in various articles by Mr. V. V. who in general is inclined, as we know, to narrow down the cultural and historical significance of Western capitalism and, on the contrary, to exaggerate the corresponding influence of the present Russian “authority”, which "has no serious opponent in society" and therefore "need not fear the factors of progress against which the West European governments waged a continuous war".  [193•*  Examine attentively the volume The Destinies of Capitalism in Russia, which is full of endless repetitions and therefore quite bulky, and you will not find any indications of the significance of capitalism other than references to the "socialisation of labour" which is in turn identified with the "union of the workers" and the development in them of some feelings or others with which Mr. V. V. sympathises. And this narrow and one-sided appreciation is wholly adopted by Mr. Tikhomirov in his article; on it he bases what he expects "from the revolution"! Our author has forgotten, it appears, the fine piece of advice which Lassalle gave to one of his opponents: "study, study, but not from newspaper articles."

p Russian writers are not content with their absurdly narrow philosophy of the history of capitalism. They themselves analyse this form of production and, so to speak, their own intelligence shows them the contradictions inherent in it. But what contradictions! They are not solved by historical dialectics through the old social form being replaced by a new one which has grown within the former as a result, apparently, of the very logical development of the principle underlying it. They are not the contradictions whose historical meaning was thus expressed by Goethe:

p Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage.^^152^^

p They are contradictions which have no historical meaning whatever, and which are only the result of the attitude of the petty-bourgeois observer to the object of his study, an attitude which may be described by the words: "Measure ten times before cutting your cloth.” It is a kind of eclecticism which sees a good and a bad side in everything, encourages the former and condemns the latter and sins only by not seeing any organic link between the “bright” and “darkening” features of a given historical epoch. Capitalism could have said to such critics 194

p Feuerbach’s words: "You condemn my defects, but note that my good qualities are conditioned by them.” In this case the Russian writers apply to the historical categories the method of Proudhon, who saw it as the task of dialectics to point out the good and the evil sides of every economic category. "Il veut etre la synthese,” Marx wrote about him, "il est une erreur composée."^^153^^

p Proudhon is said to have been once Bakunin’s pupil. Did he not get this method, which he shares with many Russian critics of capitalism, from the one common teacher?

p A brilliant representative of this method of “composite error” can again be seen in the same Mr. Tikhomirov, who, having shown the good side of capitalism, the union of the workers, immediately goes on to show its shady sides. We have already seen how far his “praise” of capitalism corresponds to reality. It is not surprising that the reproach he makes turns out to be completely unfounded.

p "Capitalism, together with the mechanical union of the workers, develops competition among them, which undermines their moral unity...."

p Apparently Mr. Tikhomirov wants to “imagine” a way of transition to socialism in which competition would be unknown. Leaving aside the question of the role of competition in the existence of the economic category known as the exchange value, which brings the labour of various specialists to the common denominator of simple human labour, without the understanding of which conscious communist tendencies would be unthinkable, let us give attention to the evil side of competition which our author points out. Here we will first of all note that only what exists in reality, not in Mr. Tikhomirov’s sympathies and “expectations”, can be “undermined”. Was there moral unity of the workers during the pre-capitalist period? We already know there was not. In the most flourishing period of guild production there was "moral unity" among workers of one association or, at most, of one branch of labour within quite restricted local limits; but the idea of the worker as such, the consciousness of the unity of the whole of the productive class never existed.  [194•*  Capitalism undermined, disrupted, removed the 195 “moral unity” of patented specialists and set up in its place the moral unity of “working men of all countries,” a unity which it achieved by means of competition. Why, then, does Mr. Tikhomirov thus attack competition? We have already seen that in his opinion history- has some kind of independent, abstract “movement towards the socialist system”; given such a “movement” one can with impunity “criticise” all the motive powers and springs which first compelled progressive mankind “to face with sober senses, their real conditions of life, and their relations with their kind”.

p Capitalism "tends to keep the workers at a much lower level of development than is possible according to the general condition of culture".

p This sentence seems to have been taken in full from the minutes of the Eisenach Congress of the German Katheder Sozialisten, in whose opinion the social question comes to the question of raising the workers to a higher "level of development”. But the Katheder Sozialisten know what they are demanding, although, in spite of all their efforts, they have not yet decided how to attain their demands. They understand the epoch-making and revolutionary significance of the modern proletariat and they want to undermine that significance with their palliatives and to impose on the workers Rodbertus’ motto: "monarchisch, national, social.” By a higher level of development they understand a somewhat higher and better guaranteed wage, far greater narrow-mindedness and incomparably less responsiveness in the working class. They know that the "iron law" of wages^^154^^ is the death sentence for modern society and are not against sweetening this law to repeal the sentence. They foresee that, if affairs remain in their present condition, the proletariat will soon take everything, and that is why they are doing their utmost to force the proletariat to barter its impending birthright for a mess of pottage. They want a bourgeoisie without any proletariat. But what does Mr. Tikhomirov want? In which of the historical periods previous to capitalism did the working class have a higher level of development than at present? Was it in the ancient world, the epoch of slavery, or in the Middle Ages, the epoch of serfdom? Or is Mr. Tikhomirov comparing bourgeois society with the “future”, socialist society? If so, then, of course, he is nght in the sense that the social system of the "future historic 196 epoch" will bring man’s development into greater conformity with the productive forces created by civilisation. But, not to mention that to accuse capitalism of not being socialism means not to understand the historical genesis of socialism, we will point out to Mr. Tikhomirov that by force of habit he has got mixed up in his terminology. It is obvious that socialist society is unthinkable without people who work, but it can be said in all probability that there will be no workers under socialism; for a worker presupposes capitalist employers, landowners, etc., just as the slave presupposed the slave-owner and the serf the feudal lord. What Mr. Tikhomirov says boils down in this case to the amazing proposition that the modern workers are at a lower level of development than the workers in a society in which there are no workers at all.

p Or is Mr. Tikhomirov comparing the condition of the workers in capitalist society with their condition under the social relationships "that can be imagined" as transitional steps to socialism? If so, let him “imagine” such relationships; we will read his imaginings with great interest. But he should not be too much infatuated with fiction, he should not forget that one must distinguish between the degree and the type of culture, and that if the degree of material culture of the present-day proletariat is not very high, it is nevertheless a culture of a much higher type than any which existed before. We are not even speaking of the intellectual and moral culture of this class, which is much higher in its development than the productive classes of all preceding periods. Mr. Tikhomirov should devote serious attention to this development, which cannot be replaced either by primitive forms of land tenure and production or by strict discipline instituted by this or that “Committee” in the revolutionary organisations of raznochintsi.

p "In exactly the same way" capitalism "directly disaccustoms the workers from any control over the general course of production, etc."

p Capitalism could answer this unexpected accusation with the Russian saying: "You’re welcome to the best we have.” It cannot teach the workers control "over the general course of production" for the simple reason that it does not know any such control itself. Industrial crises are conditioned, among other things, precisely by this lack of control. But, we ask, can such control be imagined outside socialist society? Let Mr. Tikhomirov prove that it can, and then we will enter into greater details with him. Now we will only repeat that to accuse capitalism of not being socialism means to accuse history of not having started immediately by putting into practice the 197 Manifesto of the Communist Party instead of its "movement towards the socialist system".

p This dispute about the significance of Western capitalism may appear completely unwarranted to many readers. It is Russia we are interested in, not the West, they will say; why spend so much time on an appraisal of the historical development of the West? Even if Mr. Tikhomirov has overlooked some things, and got mixed up in a thing or two over this question, what relation has that to our domestic matters?

The most direct relation. Mr. Tikhomirov “criticises” Western capitalism for the completely definite practical purpose of working out a programme for the Russian social-revolutionary party. He “expects” certain blessings "from the revolution”, on the basis, by the way, of his appraisal of West European history. If his appraisal is correct, then his expectations are grounded; if, on the contrary, this appraisal reveals complete ignorance of the history of the West and of the methods of contemporary philosophical and historical criticism, then his very " expectations" prove to be completely unfounded. That is why I have devoted many pages to unravelling this confusion which found so comfortable room in two pages (238 and 239) of the second issue of Vestnik. When we have dealt with it, we can go on to Russian questions.