Attention will now be turned to the critique of the above position by the Russian Marxists.
Peter Struve, who in 1894 had given a thorough appraisal of Danielson’s book in an article entitled “On Capitalist Development in Russia,”234 also published in the same year a book in Russian, Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii [Critical Comments on the Problem of Economic Development in Russia],235 in which he criticizes the “Populist” theories from various angles. In terms of the question being dealt with here, however, Struve mainly restricts himself to countering Vorontsov’s and Danielson’s positions by showing that capitalism does not restrict its internal market—on the contrary, it expands it. Danielson’s error, which he has taken over from Sismondi, is in fact patently obvious, according to Struve. Both Sismondi and Danielson had only described one side of the capitalist destruction of the traditional forms of production—i.e. of small-scale enterprise. They could see only the resulting erosion of prosperity and the impoverishment of broad layers of the population. They had not noticed the significance of the other side of this economic process, which consisted in the elimination of the natural economy and the introduction of the commodity economy in its place in the countryside. This implies, however, that capitalism transforms new strata into purchasers of its commodities with every step through its continuous absorption of new layers of previously independent and self-sufficient producers into its own sphere. The course of capitalist development is thus the exact opposite of the one depicted by the “Populists” following the Sismondian paradigm: capitalism does not destroy its own internal market; instead it actually brings it into being, precisely through the proliferation of the money economy.
In particular, Struve refutes Vorontsov’s theory that surplus value cannot be realized on the internal market, as follows. He argues that Vorontsov’s theory is based upon the idea that a developed capitalist society consists only of entrepreneurs and workers. Danielson, too, operates under this assumption at all times. Struve states that it is of course impossible to conceive of the realization of the capitalist total social product from this standpoint. Vorontsov’s theory is also correct insofar as “it states the fact that neither the capitalists’ nor the workers’ consumption can realize the surplus value, so that the existence of ‘third parties’ must be presumed.”236 By contrast, Struve maintains that there are probably such “third parties” in every capitalist society. Vorontsov and Danielson’s conception is nothing but a fiction “that cannot advance our understanding of any historical process by a hair’s breadth.”237 There is no capitalist society, however highly developed, that consists purely of entrepreneurs and workers, argues Struve.
Even in England and Wales, of every 1,000 inhabitants who are capable of gainful employment, 543 are engaged in industry, 172 in commerce, 140 in agriculture, 81 in casual wage labor, and 62 in the Civil Service, the liberal professions, and the like.
Thus, even in the U.K., there are large numbers of “third parties,” and it is in fact they who, through their consumption, help to realize the surplus value that is not consumed by the entrepreneurs. Struve leaves it open whether consumption by these “third parties” is sufficient to realize all surplus value—in any case “the contrary would first have to be proved.”238 For a country as large as Russia, with its enormous population, this is surely not demonstrable. According to Struve, Russia is in fact in the fortunate situation of being able to dispense with external markets, and—here Struve borrows from the intellectual legacy of Professors Wagner, [Albert] Schäffle, and [Gustav von] Schmoller—in this it shares the same happy fate as the United States of America.
If the example of the North American Union proves anything, it is the fact that, under certain circumstances, capitalist industry can attain a very high level of development almost entirely on the basis of the internal market.239
This proposition is illustrated by a reference to the low level of industrial exports from the U.S. in 1882. Struve establishes the following proposition as a general thesis: “The vaster the territory, and the larger the population of a country, the less that country requires external markets for its capitalist development.” On this basis, Struve infers a more brilliant future for capitalism in Russia than in other countries—the exact opposite of the “Populist” position:
On the basis of commodity production, the progressive development of agriculture is bound to create a market wide enough to support the development of Russian industrial capitalism. This market is capable of indefinite expansion, in step with the economic and cultural progress of the country and the concomitant displacement of the natural economy. In this respect, capitalism enjoys more favorable conditions in Russia than in other countries.240
Struve paints a detailed and colorful picture of the way in which new markets are opened up for Russia in Siberia, Central Asia, Asia Minor, Persia, and the Balkans thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Struve does not notice that in his prophetic elation he has switched from the “indefinitely expanding” internal market to quite specific external markets. A few years later he was to be found on the side, in a political sense, too, of this sanguine Russian capitalism, whose liberal program of imperialist expansion he had already justified theoretically as a “Marxist.”
In fact, what comes across from Struve’s argumentation is merely a strong sense of optimism in relation to the unrestricted capacity for development of capitalist production. Actual economic justification for such optimism is rather meager in contrast. For Struve, “third parties” represent the main pillar of the accumulation of surplus value, but he omits to reveal with sufficient clarity what he understands this to mean; his references to British employment statistics in particular indicate that he has in mind the various private employees and public servants, members of the liberal professions—in short, the famous “grand public,” toward which bourgeois vulgar economists are in the habit of gesturing vaguely when they do not know which way to turn, and of which Marx said that it renders the economist “the service” of explaining things for which he can otherwise find no explanation. It is clear that when the consumption of capitalists and workers is referred to in a categorial sense, what is meant is not the entrepreneur as an individual, but rather the capitalist class as a whole, along with its appended strata of employees, public servants, members of the liberal professions, etc. All these “third parties,” who are certainly to be found in every capitalist society, are in economic terms mostly parasites on surplus value, to the extent that they do not also prove to be parasites on wages. These strata can only derive their means of purchase from the wages of the proletariat or from surplus value, or in the best of cases, from both, but as a general rule they should be regarded as parasites on surplus value. Their consumption is thus to be included in that of the capitalist class, and if Struve leads them back on to the stage through a back door, and introduces them as “third parties” to the capitalist in order to save the latter’s embarrassment and help him realize his surplus value, the wily profiteer will, with one glance at this general public, instantly recognize the train of leeches who first take the money out of his pocket, only to purchase his commodities with this same money. Struve’s “third parties” are thus of no use.
Equally untenable is Struve’s theory of the external market and its importance for capitalist production. Here Struve entirely follows the “Populists” in their mechanistic conception—itself derived from the kind of schema to be found in a textbook of any one of the professors—according to which a capitalist country first exploits its internal market as extensively as it can, and only turns to external markets when its internal one is completely or virtually saturated. On this basis Struve, following in the footsteps of Wagner, Schäffle, and Schmoller, also arrives at the vulgar notion that a country with “vast territories” and a large population can form a “self-contained whole” in terms of its capitalist production, and can make do with its internal market alone “indefinitely.”241 As a matter of fact, capitalist production is inherently world production, and from its infancy it begins to produce for the world market, which is precisely the opposite of what is ordained by the pedantic schema of German academic wisdom. In the U.K., its various pioneering branches, such as the textiles, iron, and coal industries, sought out markets in all countries and continents of the world long before the processes of the destruction of peasant ownership, the ruin of handicraft production and of the old forms of cottage industry had run their course. Try offering the German chemical or electrical engineering industries, for instance, the sage advice that, instead of producing for the five continents as they have in fact done since their emergence, they should first rather restrict themselves to the internal German market, which is massively supplied from abroad, because in so many other branches it has not yet been saturated by homegrown industries. Or try explaining to the German machine industry that it should not yet launch itself onto external markets, since German imports statistics show in black and white that a large part of Germany’s requirements for the products of this branch are met by external suppliers. Such complex interrelations of the world market, with its countless ramifications and with all the nuances of the international division of labor, are unintelligible from the standpoint of this schema of “external trade.” The industrial development of the U.S., which has now become a dangerous competitor to the U.K. on the world market and even within the U.K. itself, just as it is able to beat its German competitors on the world market and even within Germany itself in the electrical engineering industry, completely belies Struve’s deductions, which were in any case already obsolete when he noted them down.
Struve also endorses the crude conception of the Russian Populists, according to which the international interconnections of the capitalist world economy—with its historical tendency to form a homogeneous living organism with a social division of labor, which itself is based on the whole diversity of production worldwide in terms of natural wealth and conditions—are reduced in the main to the salesman’s mundane concern for his “market.” Struve accepts Wagner and Schmoller’s fiction of the three self-sufficient world empires (the U.K. and its colonies, Russia, and the U.S.), and thus completely ignores or artificially downplays the fundamental role of an unrestricted supply of capitalist industry with foodstuffs, raw and auxiliary materials, and labor-power—a supply that is just as much regulated through the world market as are the sales of finished commodities. The history of the British cotton industry alone, which encapsulates the history of capitalism as a whole, and whose arena spanned the five continents for the duration of the nineteenth century, makes a mockery at every step of these professors’ infantile notions, whose only real significance is to provide a convoluted theoretical justification for the system of protective tariffs.