On individualism and collectivism

A.V. Tsygankov’s article "What everything began with" was published in the newspaper "Moscow. Sadovoe Koltso" No. 2 (117),2006. In it comrade Tsygankov "has thrown on some profile" of our present society and introduced his view on what Russian communists should do nowadays. We don’t know if the whole editorial board of the newspaper or some comrades in Russia share Tsygankov’s point of view. Nevertheless we cannot agree with statements expressed in the given article.

In the very beginning Tsygankov rises an elaborate question: "Are modern Russian collectivists?" And writes further: "The question looks rhetoric, and the answer looks unambiguous – yes". First, we can’t understand why this question seemed rhetoric to Tsygankov and why the answer may be unambiguous here. For example, we don’t consider modern Russians collectivists and not even absolute individualists. It is impossible to take everybody and call them collectivists or individualists unambiguously. In fact, at certain historical moments in a country taken separately, the majority of its citizens may be either collectivists or individualists. But let me give details on it later.

Tsygankov writes further: "The Russian community is well-known to have existed up to the beginning of the XX century and even in the XX century under the name of "collective farm"; it is well-known... Nothing more is well-known exactly..." Let us not point if a collective farm is a community or not. From our point of view, equation of a collective farm to a community is, to be soft, not quite correct. Let’s note something else. The author is wrong in the following. In this or that way, much is known about the notorious communality and collegiality of Russian people. Take for example Lenin’s work "Capitalism development in Russia" where he gave a brilliant rebuff to all populists represented by Vorontsovs, Danielsky, etc. who tried particularly to show the communality of the Russian peasantry, its "national mentality" as it is called nowadays which would bring it, before other peoples or perhaps the only one, to Russian socialism. On the basis of irrefutable facts Lenin comes to the following conclusion: " The structure of socioeconomic relations within the peasantry (farmers and communal) shows us the existence of all the contradictions typical for any commodity economy and any capitalism: competition, struggle for economic independence, interjection of land (purchased and leased), concentration of manufacture in the hands of the minority, pushing the majority to the rows of proletariat, its exploitation by the minority, be trade capital and hiring of farm labourers. There is no economic phenomenon in peasantry which escapes this contradictive form specifically inherent to capitalist formation, i.e. which doesn’t express the struggle and discord of interests which doesn’t mean plus for somebody and minus for others... That is these contradictions which show us evidently and irrefutably that the formation of economic relation in the "communal" village is not a special form ("people’s manufacture, etc.) but a common petty bourgeois form" (the Complete Set of Works, vol. 3, p.164-165). As a result, the Russian communality is a myth of Russian nationalism like myths of German fascism. We agree with Tsygankov that a Russian cannot be a collectivist "by nature". But we add that there is no nation a particular feature of which is individualism or collectivism as well as there are no "the best" or "the worst" nations.

But why can’t some people break away from the individualism morass and why do others grow up to be collectivists? What is the reason? According to Tsygankov, the reason is in the "people themselves." But people may be either collectivists or individualists according to the circumstances", the author of the article states. We disagree emphatically with such opinion. When a communist states: "people are the matter" - by this way he puts a bold end to all his communism. That’s not scientific socialism but subjective idealism. Not people may be such-and-such "depending on circumstances" but people become such-and-such because of the circumstances, to be exact, the production relations dominating in this or that historical period. "To become" and "possibility to be" – that’s quite different. But we’ll note that later, too.

Further the author puts forward the following statement: "While the life is hard and dangerous the collectivist behaviour model comes forward; while the life is easy and pleasant being an individualist is more profitable. There is nothing strange or unnatural". And he continues: "So the Russians are not "genetic" collectivists. Their hard and dangerous life, their eternal struggle against enemies’ invasions and hunger threat made them collectivists, If these threats disappeared Russian inhabitants’ collectivism should fall into oblivion. That happened in the Soviet era".

According to these theses Tsygankov has painted all the Soviet history and modern situation in Russia amazingly. The alleged essence is that when life became good and fine during the Soviet era such Soviet individualists appeared everywhere like mushrooms after summer rains who took the most active part in the USSR destruction. The same is philosophizing on the topic "only hardships make people think..." (believe me, dear comrade Tsygankov, Marx and Engels have come to their great teaching not because of personal hardships) and addresses to a famous demagogue S.G. Kara-Murza, etc. In brief, we can’t agree with the above listed anyway.

Finally Tsygankov gave us a formula how to agitate to reach the victory. It proves to be necessary only to THOU but not to YOU citizens in leaflets and different agitation materials. Then the victory will be guaranteed. But we considered propaganda as a good and necessary matter but not determinative for the working people’s victory, we considered certain promises necessary for appearance of a revolutionary situation.

Now, let us determine our interpretation of "individualist" and "collectivist". What is individualism and collectivism? For each orthodox communist these are two margins of two consciences fighting eternally with each other in class societies: the bourgeois one, on one hand, and socialist, communist, on the other. What generates individualism, i.e. bourgeois capitalist conscience? Apparently, its birth was given by Lady Private Property herself and the very production relations within which Mr. Capital has got his dominating position. The robber capitalist, landowner or narrow-minded property owner peasant (of course, not a farm labourer and not a poor man), avid merchant, phrase-mongering intellectual, etc. infection – all these are revelations of one margin of the bourgeois conscience. It took place before the October Revolution; it was beginning to take place in the post-Stalin USSR and particularly came to blossom nowadays again. Why is collectivism one of the grounds of socialist, communist conscience? Socialist conscience is a proletarian conscience. In this or that way the proletariat is a class of collectivists as soon as it is an unprivileged class, it hasn’t got its own dear, untouchable private property. "Proletarians have nothing to lose except their chains!" That’s why, because of possessing nothing except his own manpower but not because of his hard life a worker carries this collective inception. Of course black sheep occur among proletarians, too. But the majority of the working class retains its socialist, collectivist nature even nowadays.

The bourgeois conscience aspires to penetrate workers’ environment hourly, minutely (with current possibilities, of course!). Further, why was collectivism and heroic enthusiasm so great and strong during the first three decades of the Soviet era? In our opinion, the reason was that proletarians and poor peasantry had taken all the state power in their hands for the first time in the human history that had resulted into private property annihilation and establishment of public property based on collective inceptions, of workers’ power recording and control over all production, into liberation from the capital yoke and landowners’ slavery. In fact the working people realized then that all this belonged to them, not to each of them separately but to all the oppressed and wretched. "The villeinage organization of public labour held on baculine discipline within extreme ignorance and timidity of working people being robbed and humiliated by a sprinkling of landowners. The capitalist organization of labour held on hunger discipline, and a great mass of working people in the most advanced, civilized and democratic republics in spite of all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy remained an ignorant and grubby mass of hired slaves or oppressed peasants robbed and humiliated by a sprinkling of capitalists. The communist organization of labour the first step to which is socialism would more hold on free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who had overthrown the yoke of either landowners or capitalists" (V.I. Lenin, the Complete Set of Works, vol. 39, p.14, my italics).

While there is no slavery, no merchants, no private property – there is no place for individualism. Even the most crusty intelligentsia member or kulak will inevitably join a collective and will have to accept collectivism. "As great, as inevitable are petty bourgeois lurches and hesitations of non-proletarian and semi-proletarians masses of working population behind, towards bourgeois "order", under the wing of bourgeoisie, however they can’t reject the moral authority of proletariat which does not only overthrow exploiters and suppresses their resistance but which also constructs new, higher public connection, public discipline: the discipline of conscious and united workers having no yoke and no power over them except the power of their own association, their own, more conscious, brave, consolidated, revolutionary, consistent vanguard" (the same, p.17, my italics). That’s how we look at the nature of the "collective" and the "individual".

Iskrovets [Spark Man], Ufa