V. I.

Lenin

[ SEE ALSO: “ VII. The Congress Summed Up ”] “ There are signs,” writes Rech today, “that the
brilliant success of the opposition has revived old illusions that seemed to
have been buried, and threatens to turn the revolutionary movement back to the
path of Blanquism, from which the reasonable ’Minority’ of the Russian
Social-Democratic Party made such strenuous efforts to divert it after the
unsuccessful ’armed uprising’ last December.”

This is a valuable admission which the Russian workers would do well to ponder
over. Why does the bourgeoisie insult certain Social-Democrats by slapping them
on the back and calling them reasonable? Because they have made strenuous
efforts to divert the movement from the path of Blanquism, from the
“December” path. Is it true that the December struggle was a
manifestation of Blanquism? No, it is not. Blanquism is a theory which
repudiates the class struggle. Blanquism expects that mankind will be
emancipated from wage slavery, not by the proletarian class struggle, but
through a conspiracy hatched by a small minority of intellectuals. Was there
such a conspiracy, or anything like one, in December? No, there was not. It was
the class move ment of vast masses of the proletariat who resorted to the purely
proletarian weapon of struggle, the strike, and won over to its side the masses
of semi-proletarians (railwaymen, post-office employees, etc.), peasants (in the
South, the Caucasus, the Baltic Provinces) and town petty bourgeoisie (Moscow),
who had never before been seen on the Russian political scene. The bourgeoisie
wants, by using the bogy of “Blanquism”, to belittle, discredit and
slander the people’s struggle for power. The bourgeoisie stands to gain if the
proletarians and peasants fight only for concessions from the old regime.

The Right Social-Democrats use the word “Blanquism” merely as a
rhetorical device in their polemics. The bourgeoisie converts this word into a
weapon against the proletariat: “Workers, be reasonable! Fight for the
extension of the powers of the Cadet Duma! Pull the chestnuts out of the fire
for the bourgeoisie, but don’t dare to think of such madness, anarchism,
Blanquism, as fighting for complete power for the people!”

Are the bourgeois liberals telling the truth when they say that the Right
Social-Democrats have made strenuous efforts to divert the movement from the
path and the methods of October and December? Unfortunately, they are. Not all
the Right Social-Democrats realised that this is what their tactics meant, but
actually this is what they did mean. Insisting on participation in the Duma
elections virtually meant supporting the Cadets, who had been burying the
revolution and had described the revolutionary struggle as an “old
illusion”. All of the Unity Congress’s three resolutions of major
importance in principle, adopted by the Right Social-Democrats against the
bitter opposition, of the Left Social-Democrats, i.e., the agrarian programme,
the resolution on the State Duma and the resolution on armed uprising bear
obvious marks of the efforts of the “reasonable section of the
Social-Democratic Party” to divert the revolutionary movement from the
path of October-December. Take the vaunted “municipalisation”. True,
as a result of our pressure, Maslov’s original proposal for municipalisation
was undoubtedly pushed leftward. “Confiscation” was substituted for
“alienation”; his proposal now allows for the division of the land;
a clause was inserted pledging support for the “revolutionary actions of
the peasantry, including confiscation”, etc. But for all that,
municipalisation, even if a castrated municipalisation, is
there. Municipalisation means transferring the landed estates to democratic
Zemstvos. The revolutionary peasants will not agree to this. They quite rightly
do not, and will not, trust the Zemstvos, even if they are democratic, so long
as this local democracy exists side by side with an undemocratic central
authority. They will quite rightly reject the proposal to transfer the land to
the local and central authorities before the whole, absolutely the whole,
administration is elected by, accountable to, and subject to recall by, the people. But this condition, in spite of the struggle of
the Left Social-Democrats, was rejected by the Congress. Instead of voting
for transferring the land to the people when all state authorities are
elected by the people, the Congress voted in favour of transferring the
land to elect ed local bodies. On what grounds? On the grounds that the
idea of seizing power should not be in the programme:

that it was necessary to have guarantees against restoration. But the fear lest
the revolutionary peasants seize power is a purely Cadet fear of peasant
revolution.

As for a guarantee against restoration in the real sense of the word, there can
only be one: a socialist revolution in the West. Without this, nothing in the
world can guarantee us against restoration of the undemocratic central
authority, so long as capitalism, and the always unstable, always wavering, small
commodity producer, exist. Consequently, instead of idly dreaming about relative
guarantees against restoration, we should be thinking about carrying our
revolution through to the end. At the Congress, however, the Right Social-Democrats
thought that they had found a guarantee against restoration by adopting a
programme that looks very much like a compromise with restoration: we shall
guarantee ourselves against restoration of the undemocratic central authority if
we say nothing in our agrarian programme about the necessity of completely
democratising this authority.

Take the resolution on the Duma. The Congress adopted it when the Cadets had
already achieved their election victories. And in spite of our protests, the
Congress in its resolution speaks of a Duma of people’s representatives in
general and not of the present Cadet Duma. The Right Social-Democrats did not
wish to indicate the two-faced nature of this Duma; it did not warn the
workers about the counter-revolutionary role which the Cadet Duma is
trying to play; it re fused to say plainly and definitely that the socialist
workers should march with the peasant and revolutionary democrats against the
Cadets. It expressed the desire to have a Social-Democratic parliamentary
group, without troubling to think whether we have a parliament, or whether we
have any Social-Democratic members of parliament.

Take the third of the above-mentioned resolutions. It starts with an
ultra-revolutionary phrase, but nevertheless it is permeated with scepticism, if not hostility, towards the October-December
struggle. It says nothing at all about the necessity of taking into account the
historic experience that the Russian proletariat and the Russian people
acquired at the end of 1905. Nor does it admit that very definite forms of
struggle arose out of historical necessity in the past, and are arising again
now. We have indicated, only in very brief and general outline, the main defects
of the resolutions over which the struggle was waged at the Congress. We shall
yet return to these subjects again more than once. The party of the proletariat
must carefully discuss and review these resolutions in the light of the new
facts that are provided by the Cadet Duma and the rapidly unfolding panorama of
the new revolutionary upswing. The party of the proletariat must learn to
examine very critically the resolutions of its representatives. And the
unanimous chorus of praise coming from the bourgeois press for the reasonable,
well-behaved Russian Social-Democrats clearly indicates to the proletariat that
the Party must be suffering from some malady.

We must, and will, cure this malady.

---
Notes: