Pravda No. 50, March 1, 1913 |
Published according to |
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968
First printing 1963
Second printing 1968
Translated from the Russian by Stepan Apresyan
Edited by Clemens Dutt
562 | |
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The chief thing in the doctrine of Marx is that it brings out the historic role of the proletariat as the builder of socialist society. Has the course of events all over the world confirmed this doctrine since it was expounded by Marx?
   
Marx first advanced it in 1844. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, published in 1848, gave an integral and systematic exposition of this doctrine, an exposition which has remained the best to this day. Since then world history has clearly been divided into three main periods: (1) from the revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune (1871); (2) from the Paris Commune to the Russian revolution (1905); (3) since the Russian revolution. Let us see what has been the destiny of Marx's doctrine in each of these periods.
   
At the beginning of the first period Marx's doctrine by no means dominated. It was only one of the very numerous groups or trends of socialism. The forms of socialism that did dominate were in the main akin to our Narodism: in comprehension of the materialist basis of historical movement, inability to single out the role and significance of each class in capitalist society, concealment of the bourgeois nature of democratic reforms under diverse, quasi-socialist phrases about the "people", "justice", "right", and so on.
   
The revolution of 1848 struck a deadly blow at all these vociferous, motley and ostentatious forms of pre-Marxian
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socialism. In all countries, the revolution revealed the various classes of society in action. The shooting of the workers by the republican bourgeoisie in Paris in the June days of 1848 finally revealed that the proletariat alone was socialist by nature. The liberal bourgeoisie dreaded the independence of this class a hundred times more than it did any kind of reaction. The craven liberals grovelled before reaction. The peasantry were content with the abolition of the survivals of feudalism and joined the supporters of order, wavering but occasionally between workers' democracy and bourgeois liberalism. All doctrines of non-cIass socialism and non-class politics proved to be sheer nonsense.
   
The Paris Commune (1871) completed this development of bourgeois changes; the republic, i.e., the form of political organisation in which class relations appear in their most unconcealed form, owed its consolidation solely to the heroism of the proletariat.
   
In all the other European countries, a more tangled and less complete development led to the same result -- a bourgeois society that had taken definite shape. Towards the end of the first period (1848-71), a period of storms and revolutions, pre-Marxian socialism was dead. Independent proletarian parties came into being: the First International (1864-72) and the German Social-Democratic Party.
OF THE DOCTRINE OF KARL MARX