V. I.

Lenin

I

The Trudovik conference of which we have already spoken and
which was reported in several newspapers (among others, in Rech of
March 28), is of special importance from the standpoint of making clear
party alignments in the elections to the Fourth Duma. After the bloc of
moderate liberals (the Cadets and “independent Progressists”) and after
the resolutions of the working-class democrats about their tactics in the
elections, it only remained for the Trudoviks to “define themselves” in
order to complete the picture.

By now all classes of Russian society, as represented by all
political parties of any importance and worthy of attention, have defined
their position in the election campaign. For the bourgeois parties,
particularly those that have found a “permanent” place for themselves
under the June Third regime, the elections are primarily an occasion for an
intensified publicity drive, but for working-class democrats, for Marxists,
the main task in the election campaign is to explain to the people
the nature of the various political parties, what views
are advocated and who advocates them, what are the real and vital
interests behind each party, which classes of society shelter
behind each party label.

From this point of view we shall have to deal with the conference of
the Trudoviks repeatedly , and in the interests of the working
class, our special attention must be devoted to the fundamental question
indicated above. The Black Hundreds, the Right parties, and the
liberals (the Cadets) all ignore this question, or else they
misinterpret its presentation and solution in a thousand ways, not be cause
of any lack of understanding or because of the malice of individuals, but because the class interests of the land owners
and the bourgeoisie compel them to misrepresent the essence of the
peasants’ and workers’ parties.

On the other hand, the Trudoviks, a mainly peasant party, do not try to
evade the question, say, of what distinguishes liberalism from democracy,
but their answer to it is a wrong one. Nor is it possible to give a proper
answer to the question when approached from the peasant point of view,
i.e., that of the small proprietor. It is only from the point of view of
the wage-earner that the question is settled —this is borne out
not only by theory and science, but also by the experience of all
European countries, by the entire economic and political history of the
European parties, particularly in the nineteenth century.

Observe, for one thing, what the liberals say of the Trudoviks and what
the Trudoviks say of themselves. The liberal Rech , chief organ of
the Cadet Party, says that the Trudoviks suffered most from the change in
the electoral law effected on June 3, 1907, and that their tactics “cannot
in any way differ perceptibly” from the tactics of the Cadets; for the
Cadets, if you please, can “repeat” and do repeat practically everything
said by the Trudoviks. “Lastly,” writes Rech , “election
agreements with the Trudoviks may perhaps turn out to be necessary in
isolated places only, and in few such places at that.”

Consider this statement, and you will see that it is the statement of a
liberal bourgeois, whom the law of June 3 deprived of his leading position
(which he enjoyed under the law of December 11, 1905 [2] ), but at the same time gave him a by no means insignificant
place in the opposition, segregated from democracy. You don’t
matter much, Messrs. Trudoviks, and we are not taking you seriously—that
is what the Rech statement really amounts to. Why do they not
matter? Because the law of June 3 has made them powerless in the elections.

From the standpoint of any democrat, and particularly from the
standpoint of any worker, the parties that matter are not those that enjoy
a monopoly or privileges under the given electoral law, but those that
represent the large masses of the population, especially of the toiling and
exploited population. As it happens, however, it is precisely from these masses that the law of June 3 protects the liberal
bourgeois—and that is why they do not matter to him. The liberal lawyers
and journalists want seats in the Duma, the liberal bourgeois want to share
power with the Purishkeviches, that is what they really want. As for the
development of the independent political thought of the peasant masses, the
development of their initiative as a class, this is something the liberal
does not want; more, it constitutes an outright danger to him. The liberals
need voters, they need a crowd that would trust and follow them (in order
to compel the Purishkeviches to make room), but they fear the political
independence of the crowd.

Why, then, are they not afraid of the Trudoviks who, as an
“independent” party particularly close to the peasantry, i.e., to the
vast majority of the population, are not liberals but representatives of bourgeois democracy? For the very reason that the
Trudoviks are democrats insufficiently independent in their
relations with the liberals, lacking the ability to fight the
liberals for influence over the masses! We must not tire of dwelling
hundreds of times on this most important problem of contemporary politics
in Russia if we take these politics seriously, conscientiously, as a matter
of principle, and not in the fraudulent (or liberal) sense of chasing after
Duma seats. As long as Russia’s political transformation along democratic
lines remains the historical task of the present epoch, the entire crux of the problem of this transformation will inevitably consist in
the necessity for very broad, the broadest possible, masses of the
population to become conscious democrats, i.e., emphatic, consistent and
determined opponents of liberal narrow-mindedness, half-heartedness and
cowardice. And no worker can claim to be a class-conscious worker if he has
not realised that he cannot be a consistent fighter for the abolition of
wage slavery, unless he is fully aware of and works for this
political task of our times.

When the liberals, the Cadets, say that their “tactics” do not in any
way “differ perceptibly” from Trudovik tactics, it is a case of
unmitigated ignorance or shameless lying. The political history of Russia
for the past decade teems with hundreds and thousands of refutations of
this lie. Russia’s most recent history provides proof based on our

Russian experience showing that the difference between the
liberals and the peasant democrats is immeasurably deeper than any question
of “tactics”; this difference has always and invariably come to the
surface during the past, say, eight years, despite the fact that the course
of events has often given rise to the most drastic changes in “tactics”;
this difference goes much deeper than any “programmes”, for a programme
expresses simply what the advanced representatives of a given class
think of the tasks and position of their class. Not the opinions
of advanced individuals, but the actions of the millions, have shown us the
root difference between the present-day economic and political
condition of the liberal bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the
bourgeois-democratic peasantry on the other. Hence the fundamental
difference between their class interests in regard to the “forces
in control” of Russia today. Hence the fundamental difference between them
on all points of departure and in the entire scope of political activity.

Both the liberal and the Trudovik may be under the illusion that they
hold the same political opinions, for both are “against
Purishkevich”. But probe just a little below these opinions of
political leaders, down to the class position of the masses, and
you will find that in real life the liberal bourgeoisie shares
political privileges with the Purishkeviches, and their controversy is
only over the question whether the Purishkeviches are to hold
two-thirds of these privileges and the Milyukovs one third, or the other
way round. Take “real life”, take the economic position of the
present-day Russian peasantry as a stratum of small proprietors in
agriculture, and you are sure to find that it is by no means a question of
dividing political privileges, by no means a question of political
privileges at all, but that even the word “ life ” must be written
in inverted commas, for the very existence of the Purishkeviches means
death from starvation for millions of such petty proprietors.

Modern Russia has two bourgeoisies. One is the very narrow stratum of
ripe and overripe capitalists who, in the person of the Octobrists and
Cadets, are actually concerned with sharing the present political
power, the present political privileges, with the Purishkeviches. The word
“present” in this case be must be given a rather broad meaning, so as to include, for instance, the privileges which the law of June 3, 1907,
safeguards today, and the privileges which the law of December 11, 1905,
safeguarded yesterday.

The other bourgeoisie is the very wide stratum of petty and in part
medium proprietors, who have not yet matured but are energetically
endeavouring to do so. They are mostly peasants who in the present era of
Russian history are by no means actually confronted with the
question of privileges, but with the question of how not to starve to death
because of the Purishkeviches. This is a question that concerns
the very foundations of the power of the Purishkeviches in general, the
sources of all power held by the Purishkeviches.

The entire history of Russia’s political emancipation centres around
the struggle between these two bourgeois tendencies. Behind all the
thousands upon thousands of fine words about liberty and equality, about
“equalitarian” distribution of the land and “Narodism”, is the struggle
between these bourgeois tendencies, The result of the struggle will
inevitably be a Russia that is completely bourgeois and painted entirely or
predominantly in one of these two “colours”. It is clear that this
struggle is by no means with out significance for the wage-worker; quite
the contrary, if he is a class-conscious wage-worker he most vigorously
interferes in this fight, doing his utmost to get the peasant to follow him
and not follow the liberal.

This also underlies the problems which the Trudovik conference could
not help touching upon. We shall deal with those in greater detail in later
articles. For the time being, we shall confine ourselves to a brief summary
of what has been said. The question of the Trudoviks and the Cadets is one
of the most important questions of Russia’s political emancipation. There
is nothing more banal than to reduce this question to one of the
“strength” of this or that party in the June Third system or of the
“advantage” to be derived from different agreements in elections based on
this system. On the contrary, the particular questions of agreements,
second ballots, etc., can, from the standpoint of the wage-worker, be
settled correctly only if the class roots of both parties, the
bourgeois democrats (Trudoviks) and the bourgeois liberals (Cadets,
“Progressists”, etc.), have been understood.

II

The conference of the Trudoviks raised a number of highly
interesting and instructive political questions. We are now in possession
of a splendid commentary on its decisions—Mr. V. Vodovozov’s article on
“The Election Programme of the Trudovik Group” in No. 13 of the
St. Petersburg weekly Zaprosy Zhizni , [3] whose closest contributors include Messrs. Kovalevsky
and Blank. Mr. Vodovozov’s commentary is “splendid”, not from our point
of view, of course, but because it correctly represents the views and
aspirations of the Trudoviks. Everyone interested in the role of the
democratic social forces in Russia must pay due attention to
Mr. Vodovozov’s article.

“ The Trudovik group,” he writes, “proceeds from the belief that at the present historical moment the interests of the
peasantry, the working class and the working intelligentsia, far from
contradicting each other, are practically identical; therefore, one party
could fully take care of the interests of these three classes of
society. But, owing to the force of historical conditions, the working
class found its representation in the Social-Democratic Party, and that is
why the Trudovik group necessarily had to become primarily the political
representative of the peasantry. And such it has been.”

Here we see at a glance the fundamental mistake shared by all the
Narodniks, including those who are the most “left”. They proceed from a
“belief” which contradicts all the maxims of economic science and the
entire experience of countries which have gone through epochs resembling
the present epoch in Russia. They cling to these “beliefs” even when the
experience of Russian history compels them to admit that in our country,
too, these beliefs are refuted by the course of events.

The Trudoviks’ second phrase contradicts their first. If one party
could have taken care of the interests both of the working class and the
peasantry, what could have given rise to a separate party of the working
class? Since such a party was created and became consolidated during a
particularly important and particularly crucial period of Russian history
(1905), and since even the Trudoviks have to admit that the working class
“found” its party “owing to the force of historical conditions”, this,
consequently, means that the “beliefs” of the Trudoviks have been related by “the force
of historical conditions”.

If the Trudoviks have turned out to be a party of the peasantry, although, according to their own beliefs, they ought not to be a
party only of the peasantry, their beliefs must be wrong, must be an
illusion. And it is the same sort of illusion as the one entertained by
all bourgeois-democratic parties of Europe in the period of the
struggle against feudalism and absolutism. In one form or another, the idea
of a “non-class party” dominated, but the “force of historical
conditions” invariably refuted this idea and shattered this illusion. The
attempts or efforts to include different classes in “one party” have
always been characteristic of bourgeois democracy at the time when it had
to look for its main enemy in the past, not in the future—when it saw its
enemy in the feudal lords, not in the proletariat.

The claim to “encompass” various classes makes the Trudoviks akin to
the Cadets. The latter, too, want to be a party standing above classes , they also insist that the interests of the working class, the
peasantry and the working intelligentsia are “practically identical”. And
when they speak of the working intelligentsia, they include the Maklakovs
too! The class-conscious workers will always combat the various concepts of
parties that stand above classes, against every attempt to gloss over the
gulf between the class of wage-workers and the class of the petty
proprietors.

The Trudoviks resemble the Cadets in sharing bourgeois illusions as to
the possibility of fusing the different classes. The difference between
them lies in the class to which the particular party will be drawn
under the influence of events, against the wishes of that party and
sometimes in spite of the ideas entertained by some of its members. The
Trudoviks have been taught by history to keep closer to the truth, to call
themselves a peasant party. The Cadets continue to call themselves
democrats, although in actual fact they are counter-revolutionary liberals.

Unfortunately, the Trudoviks are far from being aware of the latter
truth—so much so that in the official decisions of their conference they
failed to give any characterisation of the Cadets. All we read in
the official resolutions is that agreements should be concluded “ in the first place with the Social-Democrats, and subsequently with the
Constitutional-Democrats”. This is insufficient. The question of election
agreements can be settled correctly, consistently, and in a principled
manner, only if there exists complete clarity as to the class
nature of the parties concluding the agreement, as to what constitutes
their fundamental divergence, and on what points their interests
temporarily coincide.

These matters are dealt with only in Mr. Vodovozov’s commentary. Rech , which noted and discussed that article, took
care to leave its readers entirely in the dark with regard to
these very points . In our opinion, these points ought to be dwelt
on with all due attention.

“ The Trudovik group,” writes Mr. Vodovozov, “is fully aware that the
present regime in Russia is a regime of absolutism and arbitrary rule; that
is why it has emphatically disapproved of all the actions and steps taken
by the Constitutional-Democratic Party to proclaim urbi et orbi [1] that in Russia we have a constitutional regime, and why it has assumed a
negative attitude to the solemn receptions given to the representatives of
the British and French Parliaments as a demonstration of Russian
constitutionalism. The Trudovik group has never doubted that only a radical
and profound revolution in the entire political and social system can lead
Russia on to the highroad of proper and sound development; that is why it
has been in sympathy with all expressions of such convictions in our public
life. It is this conviction that has implied the existence of a deep gulf
between it and the Constitutional-Democratic Party....” Further on the
author repeats the same idea about “the peaceful evolutionism of the
Cadets and Cadet tactics produced by this evolutionism”, “owing to which
the Trudoviks have always been farther removed from the
Constitutional-Democrats than from the Social-Democrats”.

It is obvious why the Cadet Rech was obliged to take care to
withhold these reflections from its readers. For these reflections
represent a clearly expressed desire to draw a line between democratism and
liberalism. The line is unquestionably there, but Mr. Vodovozov, although
he speaks of a “deep gulf”, has a very shallow conception of this line. According
to him, the difference, at bottom, is one of tactics and of the appraisal
of the situation: the Trudoviks are in favour of a radical revolution,
while the Cadets are peaceful evolutionists; according to the Trudoviks the
regime in Russia is one of absolutism, according to the Cadets we have,
thank God, a constitution. Such differences may exist between the Right and
the Left wings of the same class.

Are these all the differences there are between the Trudoviks and the
Cadets? Has not Mr. Vodovozov himself admitted that the Trudoviks are a
party of the peasantry? If we take the class position of the
peasantry in relation, say, to Purishkevich and Purishkevichism, are there
no features that distinguish this position from that of the liberal
bourgeoisie?

If there are no such distinguishing features, then there is no profound
difference between the Trudoviks and the Cadets even in their attitude to
feudalism and absolutism. If there are such distinguishing features, then
it is the difference of Class interests , and not the difference of
“opinion” on absolutism and the Constitution or on peaceful evolution,
that must be stressed.

The Trudoviks want to be more radical than the Cadets. That is very
good. But their radicalism would be more consistent and profound if they
had a clear idea of the class essence of the liberal-monarchist
bourgeoisie, if they plainly referred in their platform to the
counter-revolutionary liberalism of the Cadets.

It is therefore in vain that Mr. Vodovozov tries to “justify” himself
by pleading external obstacles owing to which, he claims, the Trudoviks
“were obliged to draft a resolution in which the most essential points
were concealed behind a reference, one not very intelligible to most
readers, to the ‘platform of the Trudovik group’, which is hardly
accessible to them”. But, to begin with, the Trudoviks were not obliged to
confine themselves to the arena fenced off by such obstacles; by confining
themselves to this arena, they, just like our liquidators, are betraying
how little they differ from the Cadets. Secondly, it was always possible,
no matter what the arena, to formulate the class essence of the Cadet
liberalism and its counter-revolutionary nature.

Thus we see that the vacillations of the Trudoviks between the Cadets
and the Social-Democrats are not fortuitous, but the result of very
profound and fundamental conditions, those under which the peasantry has to
live. The intermediary position of aloofness from the direct fight between
the bourgeois and the proletarian nourishes illusions about a party that
stands outside or above classes. What brings the Trudoviks and the Cadets
close to one another are the common bourgeois prejudices characteristic
both of the big and the small proprietor. Hence, as bourgeois democrats,
the Trudoviks lack consistency even in their struggle against the
foundations of the power of the Purishkeviches.

The task of the class-conscious workers is to help rally the forces of
the peasant democracy, those who are least dependent on the liberals and
least liable to yield to their influence, those who are most consistent and
determined. Such is the condition of the vast mass of the peasantry that
the striving for “a radical and profound revolution”, as formulated by
Mr. Vodovozov, has extremely strong, widely ramified and deep-seated roots.

---
Notes:
[1]
Far and wide— Ed .

[2]
The law of December 11 (24), 1905, convening the “legislative” State
Duma was published by the tsarist government during the height of the
Moscow armed uprising. The law ensured a tremendous majority of landlords
and capitalists in the Duma. The First Duma, elected on the basis of the
law of December 11, 1905, was a Cadet Duma.

[3]
Zaprosy Zhizni ( Demands of Life )—a weekly magazine published in St. Petersburg from 1909 to 1912. Among its contributors were
Cadets, Popular Socialists, and Menshevik-liquidators.