Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
least helping to clear up the problem. The mistake made by
Messrs. V. V. and N.—on is that they bring in the foreign
market to explain the realisation of surplus-value: while
explaining absolutely nothing, this reference to the foreign
market merely conceals their theoretical mistakes; that is
one point. Another point is that it enables them, with the
aid of these mistaken “theories,” to avoid the need to explain
the fact of the development of a home market for Russian
capitalism.* The “foreign market” merely serves them as a
pretext for obscuring the development of capitalism (and,
consequently, of the market) inside the country—a pretext
all the more convenient in that it also relieves them of the
need to examine the facts which show that Russian capitalism
is winning foreign markets.**
The need for a capitalist country to have a foreign market
is not determined at all by the laws of the realisation of the
social product (and of surplus-value in particular), but,
firstly, by the fact that capitalism makes its appearance only
as a result of widely developed commodity circulation,
which transcends the limits of the state. It is therefore impossible
to conceive a capitalist nation without foreign trade,
nor is there any such nation.
As the reader sees, this reason is of a historical order.
And the Narodniks could not escape it with a couple of
threadbare phrases about “the impossibility of the capitalists
consuming surplus-value.” Had they really wanted to raise
the question of the foreign market, they would have had to
examine the history of the development of foreign trade, the
history of the development of commodity circulation. And
having examined this history, they could not have, of course,
depicted capitalism as a casual deviation from the path.
Secondly, the conformity between the separate parts of
social production (in terms of value and in their natural
form) which was necessarily assumed by the theory of the
* Mr. very correctly observes in the above-quoted
book: “Till now the cotton industry, which supplies the peasant
market, has been growing steadily, so that the absolute diminution
conceivable only theoretically” (pp, 214-215).
** Volgin, The Substantiation of Narodism in the Works of
Mr. Vorontsov, St. Petersburg, 1896, pp. 71-76. 39
Bulgakov
of popular consumption. . .” (which Mr. N.—on talks about) “. . .is
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