V. I.

Lenin

“ We are accustomed to think,” says the leading article in
Rech , “that Marxists admit the Cadets to be a democratic party,
although they affix the offensive label of ‘bourgeois’” (i.e.,
bourgeois-democratic).

It would be hard to imagine crasser political ignorance on the part of
“educated people” who read Marxist literature. The question inevitably
arises: does not calculation sometimes make people simulate ignorance?

Since 1906 we have explained hundreds and thousands of times that the
Cadets are not democrats but a liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. In
the spring of 1907 formal decisions adopted by Marxists from all parts of
Russia and familiar to every politically-educated person confirmed this and
stated for all to hear that the Cadets were a party of the
liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, that their democracy was “hypocrisy”, and
that the Cadets were followed by a section of the petty bourgeoisie “only
by force of tradition [a blind habit of clinging to the customary, to the
old ] and because it was simply deceived by the liberals ” [1]

These ideas have since been reaffirmed and elaborated hundreds and
thousands of times.

But the Cadets assert, as if nothing had happened, that they are “in
the habit of thinking” that Marxists consider them democrats! There is
none so deaf as he who will not hear.

The liberals differ from the conservatives (Black Hundreds) in that
they represent the interests of the bourgeoisie, which needs
progress and a fairly well organised legal system, the observance of
legality, of the constitution, and a guarantee of some degree of political
liberty.

But this progressive bourgeoisie dreads the democracy and the movement
of the masses even more than it dreads reaction. Hence the liberals’
perpetual tendency to make concessions to the old, to compromise with it,
to defend many fundamental mainstays of the old order. And all this makes
for the complete impotence of liberalism, for its timidity,
half-heartedness and eternal vacillations.

Democrats represent the broad mass of the population. A democrat is not
afraid of the movement of the masses but believes in it. In Russia the
democrats are represented by the Trudoviks and Left “Narodniks” in
general. The Marxists call them bourgeois democrats, not at all
because they want to “offend” them, but because no redivision of the land
and no democratic changes in the state are sufficient to remove
the rule of capital, of the bourgeois system.

The policy of the worker democrats is clear. We recognise agreements
with the liberals against the Rights only at the second stage of the
elections, and only where it is impossible together with the democrats to
defeat the liberals. We fight side by side with all bourgeois democrats as
long as they are true to their democratic principles.

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Notes:
[1]
Lenin is quoting the resolution of the Fifth (London) Congress of the
R.S.D.L.P. “On the Attitude to Non-Proletarian Parties” (see The C.P.S.U. in Resolutions and Decisions of Its Congresses, Conferences and Plenary Meetings of the Central Committee , Part One, 1954, p. 164,
Russ. ed.).