page 72

    The question of the attitude of the Social-Democrats, or working-class democrats, to the bourgeois democrats is an old and yet ever new question. It is old because it has been an issue ever since the inception of Social-Democracy. Its theoretical principles were elucidated in the earliest Marxist literature, in the Communist Manifesto and in Capital. It is ever new because every step in the development of every capitalist country produces a peculiar, original blending of different shades of bourgeois democracy and different trends within the socialist movement.

    In Russia, too, this old question has become particularly new at the present time. To make clear for ourselves how this question should be presented today, we shall begin with a brief excursion into history. The old Russian revolutionary Narodniks[32] held a utopian, semi-anarchist point of view. They considered the peasants in the village communes ready-made socialists. Behind the liberalism of the educated Russian society they clearly perceived the ambitious desires of the Russian bourgeoisie. They repudiated the struggle for political freedom on the grounds that it was a struggle for institutions advantageous to the bourgeoisie. The Narodnaya Volya members[33] made a step forward when they took up the political struggle, but they failed to connect it with socialism. The clear socialist approach to the question was even overshadowed when the waning faith in the socialist nature of our communes began to be renewed with theories in the spirit of V. V.[34] about the non-class, non-bourgeois nature of the Russian democratic intelligentsia. The result was that Narodism, which in the past had positively rejected bourgeois liberalism, began gradually to merge with the latter in a single

page 73

liberal-Narodist trend. The bourgeois-democratic nature of the movement among the Russian intellectuals, beginning with the most moderate, the uplift movement, and ending with the most extreme, the revolutionary terrorist movement, became more and more obvious with the rise and development of a proletarian ideology (Social-Democracy) and a mass working-class movement. But the growth of the latter was attended by a split among the Social-Democrats. A revolutionary and an opportunist wing of Social-Democracy became clearly defined, the former representing the proletarian tendencies in our movement, the latter the tendencies of the intelligentsia. Legal Marxism[35] soon proved in fact to be "the reflection of Marxism in bourgeois literature",[36] and, via Bernsteinian opportunism,[37] ended up in liberalism. On the one hand, the Economists in the Social-Democratic movement were carried away by the semi-anarchist conception of a labour movement pure and-simple; they regarded socialist support of the bourgeois opposition as a betrayal of the class point of view and declared bourgeois democracy in Russia to be a phantom.* On the other hand, the Economists of another shade, carried away by the selfsame idea of a labour movement pure and-simple, accused the revolutionary Social-Democrats of ignoring the social struggle against the autocracy which our liberals, Zemstvo men and uplifters wage.**

    The old Iskra pointed to elements of bourgeois democracy in Russia at a time when many did not yet perceive them. It demanded support for this democratic trend on the part of the proletariat (see Iskra, No. 2, on support of the student movement***; No. 8, on the illegal Zemstvo Congress; No. 16, on the liberal Marshals of the Nobility****; No. 18*****, on the ferment within the

page 74

Zemstvo[*] et al.). It constantly stressed the class, bourgeois nature of the liberal and radical movement and said of the vacillating Osvobozhdeniye people: "It is high time to under stand the simple truth that it is not political chicanery, not what the late Stepnyak[**] once called self-restriction and self-concealment, not the conventional lie of diplomatic mutual recognition that ensure a genuine (and not merely verbal) joint struggle against the common enemy, but actual participation in the struggle, actual unity in struggle. When the struggle of the German Social-Democrats against the military-police and feudal-clerical reaction really became one with the struggle of any genuine party which relied for support upon a definite class of the people (for instance, the liberal bourgeoisie), then joint action was instituted without any phrase-mongering about mutual recognition" (No. 26).[***]

    This approach to the question on the part of the old Iskra brings us directly to the present differences over the attitude of the Social-Democrats towards the liberals. These disputes, as we know, began at the Second Congress, which adopted two resolutions representing the points of view of the majority (Plekhanov's resolution) and of the minority (Starover's resolution[38]), respectively. The first resolution accurately defines the class character of liberalism, as a movement of the bourgeoisie, and brings to the fore the task of explaining to the proletariat the anti-revolutionary and anti-proletarian essence of the main liberal trend (the Osvobozhdeniye movement). While recognising the need for the proletariat's support of bourgeois democracy, this resolution does not resort to the politicians' mutual recognition device, but, in the spirit of the old Iskra, makes it a question of concerted struggle. "To

    Lenin is supposed to have ignored the birth of intellectualist democracy and the third element.

    Let us open Zarya,[39] No. 2-3[*], and take the "Review of Home Affairs" which is quoted in Starover's feuilleton. We read the heading of the third section, "The Third Element". Throughout this section we read about "the increase in the numbers and in the influence of such persons serving in the Zemstvos as doctors, technicians, and so on"; of "the unsubmissive economic development . . . which gives rise to the need for intellectuals, who are becoming increasingly numerous"; of "the inevitability of conflicts between these intellectuals and the bureaucrats and administration bigwigs"; of "the outright epidemic character of these conflicts lately"; of "the irreconcilability of autocracy with the interests of the intelligentsia generally". We read a direct appeal to these elements to rally "to the banner" of Social-Democracy. . . .

    Quite a pretty account, wouldn't one say? The newly discovered intellectualist democracy and the need for rallying it to the banner of Social-Democracy were "discovered" by that mischievous Lenin three years ago !

    Of course, the antithesis between the Zemstvo men and the bourgeois democrats had not yet been discovered at that time. But contraposing the two would be just as rational as saying, "Moscow Gubernia** and the territory of the Russian Empire". Both the Zemstvo people, who believe in qualified suffrage, and the Marshals of the Nobility are democrats, to the extent that they oppose autocracy and serfdom. Their democratism is limited, narrow, and inconsistent, just as any and all bourgeois democratism is in one or another degree limited, narrow and inconsistent. The editorial in Iskra, No. 77, analyses our liberals by dividing them into the following groups: (1) serf-owning landlords; (2) liberal landlords; (3) the liberal intelligentsia,

the Zemstvo people. Liberalism, of whatever kind, merits support by the Social-Democrats only to the extent that it actually opposes the autocracy. It is this support of all the inconsistent (i.e., bourgeois) democrats by the only really consistent democrat (i.e., the proletariat) that makes the idea of hegemony a reality. Only a petty-bourgeois huckster's idea of hegemony can conceive it as a compromise, mutual recognition, a matter of worded terms. From the proletarian point of view hegemony in a war goes to him who fights most energetically, who never misses a chance to strike a blow at the enemy, who always suits the action to the word, who is therefore the ideological leader of the democratic forces, who criticises half-way policies of every kind.[*] The new Iskra is sadly mistaken if it thinks that half-heartedness is a moral and not a politico-economic attribute of bourgeois democracy, if it thinks it possible and necessary to fix such a degree of half-heartedness up to which liberalism deserves only the scorpion's lash and beyond which it deserves agreements. This simply means "determining in advance the permissible degree of baseness". Indeed, ponder the meaning of these words: to make it the term of an agreement with the opposition groups that they recognise universal, equal, and direct suffrage by secret ballot means "to present them with the infallible reagent of our demands, the litmus-paper test of democracy, and to place the whole weight of the proletariat's valuable support on the scale of their political plans" (No. 78). How prettily this is put! And how one feels like saying to the author of these fine words, Starover: My dear friend, Arkady Nikolayevich, your fine words are wasted! Mr. Struve rendered Starover's infallible reagent ineffectual with a single stroke of the pen when he wrote universal suffrage into the programme of the Osvobozhdeniye League. And the same Struve has proved to us in deeds on more than one occasion that all these programmes are

    This naïve desire leads Starover to the great idea that supporting the anti-tsarist struggle of bourgeois who do not agree to universal suffrage means "bringing to nought the idea of universal suffrage"! Perhaps Starover will write us another pretty[*] feuilleton to prove that by supporting the monarchists in their struggle against the autocracy we are reducing to nought the "idea" of a republic? The trouble is that Starover's thoughts revolve helplessly in a vicious circle of terms, slogans, demands, and declarations, and overlook the only real criterion -- the degree of actual participation in the struggle. In practice, this inevitably results in varnishing the radical intelligentsia with whom an "agreement" is declared to be possible. With disdain for Marxism, the intelligentsia is declared to be the "motive nerve" (not the glib servant?) of liberalism. The French and Italian radicals are honoured with the designation of people to whom anti-democratic or anti-proletarian demands are alien, although everyone knows that these radicals have betrayed their platforms and misled the prole-

    Step leads to step. In addition to Party agreements (the only permissible ones, according to Starover's resolution), local agreements have appeared in various cities. Side by side with formal agreements, moral ones have appeared. It now seems that verbal recognition of "terms" and their "moral" binding force carries with it the title of a "reliable" and "real democrat", although every child understands that hundreds of Zemstvo windbags would make any verbal statements and even give the word of honour of a radical that they are socialists -- anything to keep the Social Democrats quiet.

  [32] Narodism (from the word narod -- people) -- a petty-bourgeois trend in the Russian revolutionary movement, which began to manifest itself in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. The Narodniks stood for the abolition of the autocracy and the transler of the landlords' lands to the peasantry. At the same time, they believed capitalism in Russia to be a fortuitous phenomenon with no prospect of development, and they therefore considered the peasantry, and not the proletariat, to be the main revolutionary force in Russia. They regarded the village commune as the embryo of socialism. With the object of rousing the peasantry to struggle against absolutism, the Narodniks "went among the people", to the village, but they found no support there. In the eighties and nineties the Narodniks adopted a policy of conciliatoriness to tsarism, expressed the interests of the kulak class, and waged a persistent fight against Marxism.    [p.72]

  ^[33] Narodnaya Volya members -- participants in the secret political organisation of the Narodnik terrorists called Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will), which came into being in August 1879 as a result of the split in the Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) secret society . The immediate aim of the Narodnaya Volya was the overthrow of the autocracy. Its programme called for the organisation of "a permanent representative assembly of the people" elected on the basis of universal suffrage, the proclamation of democratic liberties, transfer of the land to the people, and adoption of measures for transferring the factories and mills to the workers. The Narodnaya Volya members, however failed to and a way to the broad masses and took the path of political conspiracies and individual terrorism. Their terroristic struggle was not supported by the revolutionary movement of the masses, and this enabled the government to wreck the organisation by means of savage persecutions, death sentences, and provocations.
    After 1881 the Narodnaya Volya broke up. Abortive attempts to revive it were made repeatedly in the course of the eighties. Thus, in 1886 a terrorist group was formed, headed by A. I. Ulyanov (Lenin's brother) and P. Y. Shevyryov, which followed the tradi-

page 585

tions of the Narodnaya Volya. After the failure of the attempt to assassinate Alexander III the group was discovered and its active members were executed.
    While criticising their fallacious and utopian programme Lenin thought highly of the noble struggle of the Narodnaya Volya members against tsarism. In 1899, in "A Protest by Russian Social Democrats", he pointed out that "the members of the old Narodnaya Volya managed to play an enormous role in the history of Russia despite the fact that only narrow social strata supported the few heroes, and despite the fact that it was by no means a revolutionary theory which served as the banner of the movement". (See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 181.)    [p.72]

  ^[34] V. V. -- pseudonym of V. P. Vorontsov, one of the ideologues of liberal Narodism of the eighties and nineties of the past century.    [p.72]

  ^[35] Legal Marxism -- a bourgeois perversion of Marxism, which originated in the nineties of the past century among the bourgeois intellectuals. The "legal Marxists" tried to make the labour movement serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. While criticising the Narodniks and acknowleding the capitalist path of development the "legal Marxists" denied the inevitability of capitalism's down fall. They threw out of the Marxian doctrine its most important tenet, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.    [p.73]

  ^[36] See Lenin, "The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve's Book" (present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 333-507).    [p.73]

  ^[37] Bernsteinian opportunism -- an anti-Marxian trend in the international Social-Democratic movement which appeared in the late nineteenth century in Germany, so called from the name of the German Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein. The latter tried to revise the revolutionary teaching of Marx in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism.
    The followers of Bernstein in Russia were the "legal Marxists", the "Economists", the Bundists, and the Mensheviks.    [p.73]

  ^[38] Starover -- pseudonym of the Menshevik A. N. Potresov.    [p.74]

  ^[39] Zarya (Dawn ) -- a Marxist scientific and political magazine published in Stuttgart in 1901-02 by the Iskra Editorial Board. The following articles by Lenin appeared in this publication: "Casual Notes", "The Persecutors of the Zemstvo and the Hannibals of Liberalism ", the first four chapters of "The Agrarian Question and the 'Critics of Marx'" (under the heading of "Messrs. the 'Critics' on the Agrarian Question"), "Review of Home Affairs", "The Agrarian Programme of Russian Social-Democracy". Altogether four numbers (in three issues) appeared: No. 1, No. 2-3, and No. 4.    [p.77]