V. I.

Lenin

Letus begin with an illustration.

Thereader will remember the sensation that was creat ed by the speech
delivered by M. A. Stakhovich, Marshal of the Nobility of Orel Gubernia,
at a missionary congress, in the course of which he urged that freedom oj conscience be recognised by law. The conservative press, led by
Moskovskiye Vedomosti , is conducting a furious cam paign against
Mr. Stakhovich. It cannot find names vile enough with which to call him
and almost goes so far as to accuse the entire Orel nobility of high
treason for having re-elected Mr. Stakhovich as Marshal. Now, this
re-election is indeed very significant and to a certain degree it bears
the character of a demonstration of the nobility against police tyranny
and outrage.

Stakhovich,says Moskovskiye Vedomosti , “is not so much
Marshal of the Nobility, as the oh, so gay Misha Stakh ovich, the life and
soul of the party, the clever conver sationalist...” (No. 348, 1901). So
much the worse for you, gentlemen, defenders of the bludgeon. If even our
jovial landlords begin to talk about freedom of conscience, then the
infamies of the priests and the police must verily be without number....

“Whatdoes our ’intellectual’, frivolous crowd that instigates and
applauds the Stakhoviches care for the affairs of our sacred orthodox
faith and our time-honoured attitude towards it?”... Once again, so much
the worse for you, gentlemen, champions of the autocracy, the orthodox
faith, and the national essence. A fine system indeed our police ridden
autocracy must be, if it has permeated even religion with the spirit of the prison-cell, so that the “Stakhoviches”
(who have no firm convictions in matters of religion, but who are
interested, as we shall see, in preserving a stable religion) become
utterly indifferent (if not actually hostile) to this notorious
“national” faith. "... They call our faith a delusion!!
They mock at us because, thanks to this ’delusion’, we fear and try to
avoid sin and we carry out our obligations uncomplainingly, no matter how
severe they may be; because we find the strength and courage to bear
sorrow and privations and forbear pride in times of success and good
fortune...." So! The orthodox faith is dear to them because it
teaches people to bear misery “uncomplainingly”. What a
profitable faith it is indeed for the governing classes! In a society so
organised that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and power, while
the masses constantly suffer “privations” and bear “severe obligations”, it is quite natural for the exploiters
to sympathise with a religion that teaches people to bear
“uncomplainingly” the hell on earth for the sake of an alleged
celestial paradise. But in its zeal Moskovskiye Vedomosti became
too garrulous. So garrulous, in fact, that unwittingly it spoke the truth. We read on: "... They do not suspect that if they, the
Stakhoviches, eat well, sleep peacefully, and live merrily, it is thanks
to this ’delusion’.”

Thesacred truth! This is precisely the case. It is because religious
“delusions” are so widespread among the masses that the
Stakhoviches and the

Oblomovs,” [1] and all our capitalists who live by the labour of the masses, and even
Moskovskiye Vedomosti itself, “sleep peacefully”. And the more education spreads among the people, the more will religious
prejudices give way to socialist consciousness, the nearer will be the day
of victory for the proletariat —the victory that will emancipate all
oppressed classes from the slavery they endure in modern society.

Buthaving blurted out the truth on one point, Moskovskiye Vedomosti disposed, far too easily, of another interesting point. It
is obviously mistaken in believing that the Stakhoviches “do not
realise” the significance of religion, and that they demand liberal
forms out of sheer “thoughtlessness”. Such an interpretation
of a hostile political trend is too childishly näive. The fact that
in this

instance Mr. Stakhovich came forward as advocate of the entire liberal
trend was proved best of all by Moskovskiye Vedomosti itself;
otherwise, what need was there for waging such a campaign against a single
speech? What need was there for speaking, not about Stakhovich, but about
the Stakhoviches, about the “intellectual crowd”?

Moskovskiye Vedomosti’s error was, of course, deliberate. That
paper is more unwilling than it is unable to analyse the liberalism it
bates from the class point of view. That it does not desire to do so goes
without saying; but its inability to do so interests us very much more,
because this is a complaint that even very many revolutionaries and
socialists suffer from. Thus, the authors of the letter published in
No. 12 of Iskra , who accuse us of departing from the “class
point of view” for striving in our newspaper to follow all
manifestations of liberal discontent and protest, suffer from this
complaint, as do also the authors of Proletarskaya Borba [2] and of several pamphlets in “The Social-Democratic

Library”, [3] who imagine that our autocracy represents the absolutist rule of the
bourgeoisie; likewise the Martynovs, who seek to persuade us to abandon
the many-sided campaign of exposure (i.e., the widest possible political
agitation) against the autocracy and to concentrate our efforts mainly
upon the struggle for economic re forms (to give something
“positive” to the working class, to put forward in its name
“concrete demands” for legislative and administrative measures
“which promise certain palpable results”); likewise, too, the
Nadezhdins, who, on reading the correspondence in our paper on the
statistical conflicts, ask in astonishment: “Good Lord, what is
this—a Zemstvo paper?”

Allthese socialists forget that the interests of the autocracy coincide
only with certain interests of the proper tied classes, and only under
certain circumstances; frequently it happens that its interests do not
coincide with the interests of these classes, as a whole, but only with
those of certain of their strata. The interests of other bourgeois strata
and the more widely understood interests of the entire bourgeoisie, of the development of capitalism as a whole, necessarily give
rise to a liberal opposition to the autocracy. For instance, the autocracy
guarantees the bourgeoisie opportunities to employ the crudest forms of exploitation,
but, on the other hand, places a thousand obstacles in the way of the
extensive development of the productive forces and the spread of
education; in this way it arouses against itself, not only the petty
bourgeoisie, but at times even the big bourgeoisie. The autocracy
guarantees (?) the bourgeoisie protection against socialism, but since the
people are deprived of rights, this protection is necessarily transformed
into a system of police outrages that rouse the indignation of the entire
people. What the result of these antagonistic tendencies is, what relative
strength of conservative and liberal views, or trends, among the
bourgeoisie obtains at the present moment, cannot be learned from a couple
of general theses, for this depends on all the special features of the
social and political situation at a given moment. To determine this, one
must study the situation in detail and carefully watch all the conflicts
with the government, no matter by what social stratum they are
initiated. It is precisely the “class point of view” that
makes it impermissible for a Social-Democrat to remain indifferent to the discontent and the protests of the
“Stakhoviches”.

Thereasoning and activity of the above-mentioned socialists show that
they are indifferent to liberalism and thus reveal their incomprehension
of the basic theses of the Communist Manifesto , the “Gospel” of international Social-Democracy. Let us recall, for
instance, the words that the bourgeoisie itself provides material for the
political education of the proletariat by its struggle for power, by the
conflicts of various strata and groups within it, etc. [4]

Only in politically free countries has the proletariat easy access to this
material (and then only to part of it). In enslaved Russia, however, we
Social-Democrats must work hard to obtain this “material” for
the working class, i.e., we must ourselves undertake the task of
conducting general political agitation, of carrying on a public exposure
campaign against the autocracy. This task is particularly imperative in
periods of political ferment. We must bear in mind that in one year of
intensified political life the proletariat can obtain more revolutionary
training than in several years of political calm. For this reason the
tendency of the above-mentioned socialists consciously or unconsciously to restrict the scope and content of political’
agitation is particularly harmful.

Letus recall also the words that the Communists support every
revolutionary movement against the existing system. Those words are often
interpreted too narrowly, and are not taken to imply support for the
liberal opposition. It must not be forgotten, however, that there are
periods when every conflict with the government arising out of progressive
social interests, however small, may under certain conditions ( of which our support is one ) flare up into a general
conflagration. Suffice it to recall the great social movement which
developed in Russia out of the struggle between the students and the
government over academic demands, [5] or the conflict that arose in France between all the progressive elements
and the militarists over a trial in which the verdict had been rendered on
the basis of forged evidence. [6]

Hence, it is our bounden duty to explain to the proletariat every liberal
and democratic protest, to widen and support it, with the active
participation of the workers, be it a conflict between the Zemstvo and the
Ministry of the Interior, between the nobility and the police
régime of the Orthodox Church, between statisticians and the
bureaucrats, between peasants and the “Zemstvo” officials,
between religious sects and the rural police, etc., etc. Those who
contemptuously turn up their noses at the slight importance of some of
these conflicts, or at the “hopelessness” of the attempts to
fan them into a general conflagration, do not realise that all-sided
political agitation is a focus in which the vital interests of political
education of the proletariat coincide with the vital interests of social
development as a whole, of the entire people, that is, of all its
democratic elements. It is our direct duty to concern ourselves with every
liberal question, to determine our Social-Democratic attitude towards it,
to help the proletariat to take an active part in its solution and to
accomplish the solution in its own, proletarian way. Those who refrain
from concerning themselves in this way (whatever their intentions) in
actuality leave the liberals in command, place in their hands the
political education of the workers, and concede the hegemony in the
political struggle to elements which, in the final analysis, are leaders
of bourgeois democracy.

Theclass character of the Social-Democratic movement must not be
expressed in the restriction of our tasks to the direct and immediate
needs of the “labour movement pure and simple”. It must be
expressed in our leadership of every aspect and every manifestation of the
great struggle for liberation that is being waged by the proletariat, the
only truly revolutionary class in modern society. Social-Democracy must
constantly and unswervingly spread the influence of the labour movement to
all spheres of the social and political life of contemporary society. It
must lead, not only the economic, but also the political, struggle of the
proletariat. It must never for a moment lose sight of our ultimate goal,
but always carry on propaganda for the proletarian ideology —the
theory of scientific socialism, viz., Marxism—guard it against
distortion, and develop it further. We must untiringly combat any and
every bourgeois ideology, regardless of the fashionable and striking garb
in which it may drape itself. The socialists we have mentioned above
depart from the “class” point of view also because, and to the
extent that, they remain indifferent to the task of combating the
“criticism of Marxism”. Only the blind fail to see that this
“criticism” has taken root more rapidly in Russia than in any
other country, and has been more enthusiastically taken up by Russian
liberal propaganda than by any other, precisely for the reason that it is
one of the elements of the bourgeois (now consciously bourgeois) democracy
now information in Russia.

Itis particularly in regard to the political struggle that the
“class point of view” demands that the proletariat give an impetus to every democratic movement. The political demands of
working-class democracy do not differ in principle from those of
bourgeois democracy, they differ only in degree. In the struggle for
economic emancipation, for the socialist revolution, the proletariat
stands on a basis different in principle and it stands alone (the small
producer will come to its aid only to the extent that he enters, or is
preparing to enter, its ranks). In the struggle for political liberation,
however, we have many allies, towards whom we must not remain
indifferent. But while our allies in the bourgeois-democratic camp, in
struggling for liberal reforms, will always glance back and seek to adjust
matters

so that they will be able, as before, “to eat well, sleep peace
fully, and live merrily” at other people’s expense, the proletariat
will march forward to the end, without looking back. While the confreres
of R. N. S. (author of the preface to Witte’s Memorandum) haggle
with the government over the rights of the authoritative Zemstvo, or over
a constitution, we will struggle for the democratic republic. We will not
forget, however, that if we want to push someone forward, we must
continuously keep our hands on that someone’s shoulders. The party of the
proletariat must learn to catch every liberal just at the moment when he
is prepared to move forward an inch, and make him move forward a yard. If
he is obdurate, we will go forward without him and over him.