V. I.

Lenin

1) Because that trend in our social thought which goes by the name of
“Socialist-Revolutionary” is in fact moving away, and has
indeed moved away, from the only international theory of revolutionary
socialism existing today, i.e., from Marxism. In the great split of
international Social-Democracy into an opportunist wing (or,
“Bernsteinian”) and a revolutionary wing, this trend has taken up an
entirely indefinite and impermissibly irresolute position between two
stools. Basing itself solely on the bourgeois and opportunist criticism of
Marxism, it has pronounced the latter to have been “shaken”
( Vestnik Busskoi Revolutsii , No. 2, p. 62), and promised, on its
part, to “revise” Marxism anew, in its own way, but has done
nothing whatever to fulfil this ominous promise.

2) Because the Socialist-Revolutionary trend helplessly yields to the
dominant tendency in Russian social and political thought which should be
termed liberal Narodism. Repeating the error of the Narodnaya Volya and of
old Russian socialism in general, the Socialist-Revolutionaries fail to
see the sheer flabbiness and internal contradictions of this tendency;
their independent creative contribution to Russian revolutionary thought
is restricted to tacking revolutionary phrases on to the old testament of
liberal Narodnik wisdom. Russian Marxism was the first to under mine the
theoretical foundations of liberal Narodism, to lay bare its bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois class con tent, and to have waged and continue to wage war
against it, undeterred by the desertion of a swarm of critical
(=opportunist) Marxists to the enemy camp. But the stand the Socialist-Revolutionaries have been holding in this war is (at
best ) one of hostile neutrality; here again they have seated
themselves between two stools, between Russian Marxism (from which they
have borrowed only a few paltry shreds) and quasi-socialist liberal
Narodism.

3) Because the Socialist-Revolutionaries, owing to their above-mentioned
complete lack of principle in questions of international and Russian
socialism, do not understand or do not recognise the only really
revolutionary principle, that of the class straggle. They do not
understand that only a party which fuses socialism with the
Russian working-class movement being engendered with increasing
force and on an increasing scale by the growth of Russian capitalism can
be really revolutionary and truly socialist in Russia today. The attitude
of the Socialist-Revolutionaries towards the Russian working-class
movement has always been that of dilettante spectators, and when, for
instance, that movement contracted the illness of “economism”
(as a consequence of its amazingly rapid growth) the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, on the one hand, gloated over the mistakes made
by people who were working at the new and difficult task of rousing the
masses of the workers, and, on the other hand, put a spoke in the wheel of
revolutionary Marxism when it launched and victoriously carried through
the struggle against this “economism.” A half-hearted attitude
towards the working-class movement inevitably leads in fact to aloofness
from it, and owing to this aloofness the Socialist-Revolutionary Party has
no social basis whatever. It does not rely upon any social class, for the
term class cannot be applied to a group of unstable intellectuals who
qualify their vagueness and lack of principle as “broadness.”

4) Because by assuming a disdainful attitude towards socialist ideology
and seeking to rely simultaneously and in an equal degree upon the
intelligentsia, the proletariat, and the peasantry, the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party there by inevitably (whether it wants to or
not) leads to the political and ideological enslavement of the Russian
proletariat by Russian bourgeois democracy. A disdainful attitude towards
theory, evasiveness, and shilly-shallying with regard to socialist
ideology inevitably play into the hands of bourgeois ideology. As social strata comparable with
the proletariat, the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian peasantry can
serve as the mainstay only of a bourgeois-democratic movement. This is not only a consideration that stems necessarily from our
teachings as a whole (which regard the small producer, for instance, as
revolutionary only to the extent that he makes a clean break with the
society of commodity economy and capitalism and places himself at the
standpoint of the proletariat)—no, it is also an absolute fact which
is already beginning to make itself felt. At the moment of the political
revolution and on the day after this revolution, this fact will inevitably
make itself felt with still greater force. Socialist-Revolutionarism is
one of the manifestations of petty-bourgeois ideological instability and
petty-bourgeois vulgarisation of socialism, against which Social-Democracy
must and will always wage determined war.

5) Because the practical demands of the programme which the
Socialist-Revolutionaries have—I won’t say brought forward, but at
least—outlined have already quite clearly revealed the enormous harm
caused in practice by the unprincipled character of this trend. For
example, their agrarian minimum programme as outlined in No. 8 of
Revolutsionnaya Rossiya [1] (perhaps it would be more correct to say: scattered among the time-worn
premises of our Narodism?) in the first place misleads both the peasantry
by promising it a “minimum”—socialisation of the land—and the working class by giving it an entirely wrong impression
of the true nature of the peasant movement. Such frivolous promises only
compromise a revolutionary party in general; in particular they compromise
the teaching of scientific socialism concerning the socialisation of all
means of production as our ultimate aim. Secondly, by including the
support and development of co-operatives in their minimum programme, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries completely abandon the ground of revolutionary
struggle and degrade their so-called socialism to the level of the most
banal petty-bourgeois reformism. Thirdly, by opposing the demand of the
Social-Democrats for the abolition of all the medieval fetters that bind
our village commune, tie the muzhik to his allotment, deny him freedom of
movement, and unavoidably entail his humiliation as member of his social-estate, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries have shown that they have not been able even to
safeguard themselves against the reactionary doctrines of Russian
Narodism.

6) Because the Socialist-Revolutionaries, by including terrorism in their
programme and advocating it in its present-day form as a means of
political struggle, are thereby doing the most serious harm to the
movement, destroying the indissoluble ties between socialist work and the
mass of the revolutionary class. No verbal assurances and vows can
disprove the unquestionable fact that present-day terrorism, as practised
and advocated by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, is not connected in any way with work among the masses, for the masses, or together with
the masses; that the organisation of terroristic acts by the Party
distracts our very scanty organisational forces from their difficult and
by no means completed task of organising a revolutionary workers’
party; that in practice the terrorism of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries is nothing else than single combat , a
method that has been wholly condemned by the experience of history. Even
foreign socialists are beginning to become embarrassed by the noisy
advocacy of terrorism advanced today by our
Socialist-Revolutionaries. Among the masses of the Russian workers this
advocacy simply sows harmful illusions, such as the idea that terrorism
“compels people to think politically, even against their will”
( Revolutsionnaya Rossiya , No. 7, p. 4), or that “more
effectively than months of verbal propaganda it is capable of changing the
views ... of thousands of people with regard to the revolutionaries and
the meaning [!!] of their activity,” or that it is capable of
“infusing new strength into the waverers, those discouraged and
shocked by the sad outcome of many demonstrations” ( ibid. ),
and so on. These harmful illusions can only bring about early
disappointment and weaken the work of preparing the masses for the
onslaught upon the autocracy.