# Political Agitation and the "Class Point of View"

Let us begin with an example.

Readers probably remember the uproar caused by the report of the Oryol Gubernia Marshal of the Nobility, M. A. Stakhovich, at the missionary congress on the necessity of legally recognizing freedom of conscience. The conservative press, headed by *Moskovskiye Vedomosti*{92}, is raging and fuming against Mr. Stakhovich, at a loss for how to vilify him, accusing nearly all the Oryol nobility of state treason for re-electing Mr. Stakhovich as marshal. And this election is indeed an instructive phenomenon, acquiring to a certain degree the character of a noblemen's demonstration against police arbitrariness and outrage.

Stakhovich – *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* assures us – "is not so much a marshal of the nobility as Misha Stakhovich, a merry fellow, the life of the party, a windbag..." (1901, No. 348). So much the worse for you, gentlemen defenders of the cudgel. If even merry-making landowners have begun to speak of freedom of conscience, then truly there is no counting the abominations perpetrated by our priests together with our police. – "...What concern is it of our 'intellectual' frivolous crowd, which spawns and applauds the likes of Messrs. Stakhovich, for our holy of holies, the Orthodox faith, and for our cherished attitudes toward it?"... Again: so much the worse for you, gentlemen defenders of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality. Fine indeed must be the ways of our police autocracy if it has so saturated even religion with the spirit of the lock-up that the "Stakhoviches" (who have no firm convictions whatsoever in religious matters, but are interested, as we shall see below, in the durability of religion) are imbued with complete indifference (if not hatred) toward this notorious "national" holy of holies! – ..."They call our faith a delusion!! They mock us because, thanks to this 'delusion,' we fear and flee sin, uncomplainingly fulfill our duties, however burdensome they may be, because we find strength and fortitude to endure grief and privation and shun pride in success and happiness"... Here is the crux of the matter! The holy of holies of Orthodoxy is dear because it teaches one to "uncomplainingly" endure grief! What a profitable holy of holies this is, indeed, for the ruling classes! When society is so arranged that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and power, while the masses constantly endure "privation" and bear "burdensome duties," it is entirely natural for the exploiters to sympathize with a religion that teaches one to "uncomplainingly" endure earthly hell for the sake of a heavenly paradise, supposedly. In the heat of zeal, *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* begins to let things slip. And they have let slip to such a degree that they have inadvertently spoken the truth. Listen further:... "They do not even suspect that, thanks to that same 'delusion,' they, Messrs. Stakhovich, eat heartily, sleep peacefully, and live merrily."

Holy truth! Precisely so, precisely thanks to the enormous spread of religious "delusions" among the masses of the people, "sleep peacefully" both the Stakhoviches, and the Oblomovs, and all our capitalists who live by the labor of these masses, and even *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* itself. And the more enlightenment spreads among the people, the more religious prejudices are displaced by socialist consciousness, the nearer will be the day of the proletariat's victory, which will deliver all oppressed classes from their enslavement in contemporary society.

But, having let slip on one point, *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* got off too cheaply on another interesting question. They are clearly deluded in thinking that the Stakhoviches "do not suspect" the indicated significance of religion and demand liberal reforms simply out of "frivolity." Such an explanation of a hostile political tendency is indeed childishly naive! And that Mr. Stakhovich in this instance appeared precisely as the herald of an entire liberal tendency – this was best proven by *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* itself: otherwise, why launch a whole campaign against a single report? Why speak not of Stakhovich, but of the Stakhoviches, of the "intellectual crowd"?

This delusion of *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* is, of course, a self-interested delusion. *Moskovskiye Vedomosti*, naturally, is more unwilling than unable to apply the class point of view to the analysis of the liberalism it detests. There is nothing to say about unwillingness. But the inability is of great general interest to us, for this sin is committed by very many revolutionaries and socialists. It is committed by the authors of the letter in No. 12 of *Iskra*, who accuse us of departing from the "class point of view" because we, in our newspaper, strive to follow all manifestations of discontent and protest among the liberals; – and by the authors of *Proletarskaya Borba* and certain pamphlets of the *Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Biblioteka*{93}, who imagine that our autocracy is the autocratic domination of the bourgeoisie; – and by the Martynovs, who call us away from an all-sided exposure campaign (i.e., from the broadest political agitation) against the autocracy toward a preferential struggle for economic reforms (to give something "positive" to the working class, to put forward on its behalf "concrete demands" for legislative and administrative measures "promising certain tangible results"); – and by the Nadezhdins, who ask in perplexity, apropos of our correspondence on statistical conflicts: "good Lord, is this organ not intended for the Zemstvo people?"{94}

All these socialists forget that the interests of the autocracy coincide only under certain circumstances and only with certain interests of the propertied classes, and moreover often not with the interests of all these classes in general, but with the interests of individual strata of them. The interests of other strata of the bourgeoisie, as well as the more broadly conceived interests of the entire bourgeoisie, of the entire development of capitalism in general, necessarily engender a liberal opposition to the autocracy. If, for example, the autocracy guarantees the bourgeoisie the possibility of applying the crudest forms of exploitation, then, on the other hand, it places thousands of obstacles to the broad development of productive forces and the spread of enlightenment, thereby arousing against itself not only the petty but sometimes even the big bourgeoisie; if the autocracy guarantees (?) the bourgeoisie protection from socialism, then, on the other hand, this protection necessarily transforms, given the lack of rights of the population, into such police outrage as to revolt each and every one. What the result of these opposing tendencies is, what the correlation of conservative and liberal mood or tendency in the bourgeoisie is at a given moment – this cannot be deduced from a couple of general propositions; it depends on all the peculiarities of the socio-political situation at the given moment. To determine this, it is necessary to know this situation in detail, to attentively follow all and sundry clashes with the government on the part of any social stratum whatsoever. It is precisely by virtue of the "class point of view" that a Social-Democrat is not permitted to remain indifferent to the discontent and protests of the "Stakhoviches." Yet the aforementioned socialists, both by their reasoning and by their activity, demonstrate their indifference to liberalism, thereby revealing a failure to understand the fundamental propositions of the *Communist Manifesto*, that "gospel" of international Social-Democracy. Recall, for example, the words that the bourgeoisie itself provides material for the political education of the proletariat through its struggle for power, through the clashes of its individual strata and groups, etc.{95} Only in politically free countries does this material come to the proletariat of its own accord (and even then only partially). In slave-ridden Russia, however, we Social-Democrats must actively work to deliver this "material" to the working class, i.e., we must take upon ourselves the task of all-sided political agitation, of a nationwide exposure campaign against the autocracy. And this task is especially urgent in periods of political ferment. It must be remembered that in a year of political animation the proletariat can learn, in terms of revolutionary education, more than in several years of calm. That is why the tendency of the indicated socialists, consciously or unconsciously, to narrow the scope and content of political agitation is especially harmful.

Further, recall the words about communists supporting every revolutionary movement against the existing order. These words are often understood too narrowly, without extending them to support for the liberal opposition. It should not be forgotten, however, that there are epochs when every clash with the government on the basis of progressive social interests, however petty it may be in itself, can, under certain conditions (and our support is one of these conditions), flare up into a general conflagration. Suffice it to recall the scale of the social movement that grew in Russia from the clash of students with the government on the basis of academic demands, or in France from the clash of all progressive elements with the militarists on the basis of a single court case decided through forgery{96}. That is why it is our direct duty to explain to the proletariat, to broaden, and, through the active participation of workers, to support every liberal and democratic protest, whether it arises from a clash of Zemstvo people with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or of noblemen with the department of police Orthodoxy, or of statisticians with the pompadours{97}, of peasants with the "Zemstvo," of sectarians with the police sergeants, and so on and so forth. Whoever wrinkles his nose contemptuously at the paltriness of some of these clashes or the "hopelessness" of the attempt to fan them into a general conflagration does not understand that all-sided political agitation is precisely the focus in which the urgent interests of the political education of the proletariat coincide with the urgent interests of all social development and of the entire people, in the sense of all its democratic elements. It is our direct duty to intervene in every liberal question, to define our own, Social-Democratic, attitude toward it, to take measures to ensure that the proletariat actively participates in the resolution of this question and compels it to be resolved in its own way. Whoever shuns such intervention in practice (whatever his intentions may be) yields before liberalism, surrendering into its hands the cause of the political education of the workers, ceding the hegemony of the political struggle to such elements as are, in the final analysis, the leaders of bourgeois democracy.

The class character of the Social-Democratic movement must be expressed not in narrowing our tasks to the immediate and nearest needs of the "purely workers'" movement, but in guiding all aspects and all manifestations of the great liberation struggle of the proletariat, that sole truly revolutionary class of contemporary society. Social-Democracy must always and unswervingly extend the influence of the workers' movement to all spheres of the social and political life of contemporary society. It must guide not only the economic struggle of the workers, but also the political struggle of the proletariat; it must not for a single moment lose sight of our ultimate goal, must always propagandize, protect from distortions, and further develop the proletarian ideology – the teaching of scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. We must tirelessly struggle against every bourgeois ideology, no matter what fashionable and glittering uniforms it may don. The socialists we have named above depart from the "class" point of view also because and insofar as they are indifferent to the task of struggling against the "critique of Marxism." Only blind people can fail to see that this "critique" has taken root most rapidly in Russia and has been most triumphantly seized upon by Russian liberal publicism precisely because it is one of the elements of the emerging bourgeois (now consciously bourgeois) democracy in Russia.

As regards the political struggle in particular, it is precisely the "class point of view" that demands that the proletariat push forward every democratic movement. Workers' democracy, in its political demands, differs from bourgeois democracy not in principle, but only in degree. In the struggle for economic emancipation, for the socialist revolution, the proletariat stands on a fundamentally different basis and stands alone (the small producer will come to its aid only insofar as he is passing or preparing to pass into the ranks of the proletariat). In the struggle for political emancipation, however, we have many allies, toward whom it is impermissible to remain indifferent. But while our allies from bourgeois democracy, in fighting for liberal reforms, will always look backward, trying to arrange matters so that they may, as before, "eat heartily, sleep peacefully, and live merrily" at others' expense, the proletariat will go forward without looking back, to the very end. When some Messrs. R. N. S. (the author of the preface to Witte's memorandum){98} haggle with the government over the rights of a powerful Zemstvo or over a constitution, we shall fight for a democratic republic. Let us only not forget that in order to push another, one must always keep one's hand on that other's shoulder. The party of the proletariat must know how to catch every liberal at the very moment when he is about to move an inch, and compel him to move a yard. And if he resists – then we shall go forward without him and over him.

*Iskra* No. 16, February 1, 1902. Printed according to the text of the newspaper *Iskra*