V. I.

Lenin

One of Turgenev’s characters thus adapted a verse of the great German
poet:



Wer den Feind will versteh’n,



Muss im Feindes Lande geh’n 



that is, “To know your enemy you must go into the enemy’s
country” to get first-hand knowledge of his customs, manners, ways of
thinking and acting.

Marxists would do well to cast a glance at the comments made on the
commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Marx by
influential political organs in various countries, especially the liberal
amid “democratic” bourgeois newspapers, which combine the
possibility of influencing the masses of readers with the right to speak on
behalf of official, titular professorial scholarship.

We shall begin our review with Russkiye Vedomosti . This is the
most sedate (and dullest), the most scientific (arid farthest removed from
real life) of professorial newspapers. Its short article on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Karl Marx’s death (No. 51, March 1) is
written in a predominantly dry wooden tone—“objectivity”, as it
is called in the language of professors “ordinary” and “extraordinary”. The writer of the article tries to confine
himself to facts and trifling facts. As an impartial historian, he is
prepared to give Marx his due—at least as far as the past is
concerned, a past which is already dead and can be spoken of in a lifeless
way. Russkiye Vedomosti admits Marx to be a “remarkable
figure”, a “great man of science”, an “outstanding leader of the proletariat”, an organiser of the masses. But this
recognition applies to the past: today, says the newspaper, “new paths are really
necessary”, i. e., new paths for the labour movement and socialism
unlike the “old Marxism”. What these new paths are, the paper
does not say in so many words—that is too live a subject for
professors and too “injudicious” a theme for virtuosi in the
art of “tactful silence”. But broad hints are dropped:
“Many of his [Marx’s] constructions have been destroyed by scientific
analysis and the merciless critique of events. Among scientists there are
practically no adherents faithful to his system as a whole; Marx’s
spiritual child—German Social-Democracy—has deviated a good
deal from the revolutionary path which the founders of German socialism had
mapped out.” As you see, the writer leaves very little unsaid in his
desire to rectify Marx in the revisionist way.

Another influential paper, Rech , the organ of a political
party, which plays first fiddle in the concert of Russian liberalism, gives
a much more lively appraisal of Marx. The tendency is, of course, the same
as in Russkiye Vedomosti , but whereas there we saw a preface to a
fat volume, here we have political slogans that are the immediate guide for
many a speech from the parliamentary rostrum, in dealing with all current
events and topics of the day. The article “Karl Marx and
Russia” (No. 53, March 2) is written by the notorious renegade
Mr. Izgoev, a specimen of those Russian intellectuals, who between the ages
of twenty-five and thirty “try to pose as Marxists”, between
thirty-five and forty play at being liberals, and after that end up as
Black Hundreds.

Mr. Izgoev deserted the Social-Democrats for the liberals (as he
himself has declared and as that arch-renegade Mr. Struve said of him) just
when the revolution, after its first staggering successes, entered a
difficult period of a long and hard struggle against the growing
counter-revolution. Indeed, Mr. Izgoev is highly typical in this
respect. He is splendid at making it clear who stands to gain by
professorial affectation in appraising Marx, and whose work this
official “scholarship” is doing. “Marx the tactician of
political intrigue,” Izgoev thunders, “was a considerable
hindrance to Marx the great scientist, and caused him to commit many
mistakes.” The chief mistake, of course, was that in addition to the
correct, reasonable “evolutionary Marxism” accepted by the “majority” (the majority of philistines?) there was born
a mischievous, unscientific, fantastic revolutionary Marxism,
“adulterated by home-brewed Narodism”. What our liberal
especially resents is the role of this Marxism in the Russian
revolution. Would you believe it—they go to the length of talking of
a dictatorship of the proletariat to carry out this very same
“bourgeois revolution”, or even of a “dictatorship of the
proletariat and the peasantry—which is absolutely fantastic in the
mouth of Marxists”. “No wonder that revolutionary Marxism in
the form in which it was adopted in Russia by the Bolsheviks of all shades
has completely failed.”... “They are having to think of establishing
an ordinary ‘bourgeois’ [the ironical quotation marks are Mr. Izgoev’s]
constitution.”

There you have an ideologically ready-made and politically mature Octobrist,
who is quite convinced that it is Marxism and revolutionary tactics that have
failed, and not the Cadet tactics of compromise, betrayal, and treachery!

To proceed. From the Russian we shall pass to the German press, which
operates in a free atmosphere, face to face with a legal socialist party,
and which expresses its views in dozens of daily newspapers. The
Frankfurter Zeitung , one of the wealthiest, most widely read and
most “democratic” bourgeois newspapers in Germany, devotes a
big leading article to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marx’s death
(No. 76, March 16, New Style, evening edition). The German “democrats
at once take the bull by the horns. “One can understand the
Social-Democratic press having honoured its teacher on this day in numerous
articles,” we are told. “But Marx has been recognised as a
great man even in an influential national liberal paper, although with the
usual reservations. Yes, of course, he was great, but he was a great
corrupter.”

This newspaper, representing the pick of that brand of Black-Hundred
ideology known as European liberalism, explains that it does not in the
least question Marx’s personal honesty, but that his theories have
caused incalculable harm. By introducing the conception of determinism and
objective law in the sphere of social phenomena, by denying the
significance of morality and the relative conditional nature of our
knowledge, Marx founded an anti-scientific utopia and a real “Church” of his sectarian disciples. But his most harmful
idea is—the class struggle. Herein lies all the evil! Marx
treated seriously the old aphorism about two nations , [1] about the existence of two nations within every civilised nation— a
nation of “exploiters” and a nation of “exploited” (the newspaper puts these unscientific terms in deadly ironical quotation
marks). Marx forgot the clear, obvious truth that is plain to all healthy
people, namely, that in social life “the aim is not struggle but
agreement”. Marx “tore the nation asunder, for he hammered it
into the heads of his people that there was nothing in common between them
and the rest of the people, that they were deadly enemies”.

“ What could be more natural,” the newspaper asks, “than that Social-Democracy, agreeing as it does with many of the
bourgeoisie on a number of practical issues, should seek closer alignment
with them? But that does not happen precisely because of Marxist
theory. Social-Democracy has condemned itself to isolation. For a time it
seemed as though a fundamental change was going to take place in this
respect. It was when the revisionists began their campaign. But it turned
out to be a mistake, and the difference between the revisionists and
ourselves consisted, among other things, in that we understood this mistake
while they did riot. The revisionists believed, and still believe, that it
is possible somehow to keep to Marx and yet become a different party. Vain
hopes. Marx has either to be swallowed whole or completely rejected. A
half-hearted course is of no rise here.”...

Quite right, gentlemen of the liberal fold! You do some times come out
with the truth by accident.

“... So long as Social-Democracy honours Marx it will not be able to
rid itself of the idea of the class struggle and of all those other things
that make living with it so difficult.... The scientific world is agreed
that not one of the politico-economic theories of Marxism has been proved
true.”...

Well, well, gentlemen. You have admirably expressed the essence of
bourgeois science, of bourgeois liberalism, and its entire policy. You have
grasped the fact that Marx cannot be swallowed piecemeal. This is something
that the Izgoevs and the Russian liberals have not yet understood. But even
they will, before long.

And here, in conclusion,is Journal des Débats , the conservative organ of the bourgeois republic. In its issue of March

15, it writes, on the occasion of the anniversary, that the socialists,
those “wild equalitarians”, preach the cult of their great men,
that the chief evil of the teachings of Marx, who “hated the bourgeosie”, is the theory of the struggle of classes . “He preached to
the working classes not temporary conflicts alternating with periods of
truce, but a holy war, a war of extermination, of expropriation, a war for
the promised land of collectivism.., a monstrous utopia."...

The bourgeois papers write well when stung to the quick. Life becomes a
more cheerful thing when you see this growing ideological unity among the
liberal enemies of the proletariat all over the world, for this unity is
one of the guarantees of the unification of the millions of the
international proletariat, which will win for itself its promised land,
come what may.

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Notes:
[1]
These two words are given by Lenin in English.—Ed.