V. I.

Lenin

The German statistical office has published some interesting data on the 1912 parliamentary (Reichstag) elections. It is
particularly instructive to compare the strength of the various parties in
the towns and villages .

German statistics, like those of most European states, regard all
inhabited centres having less than 2,000 inhabitants as villages, unlike
Russia which still retains the senseless, arbitrary distinction made by
officials and policemen, by which certain inhabited centres are “called”
towns irrespective of the number of inhabitants.

German statistics regard inhabited centres with a population of between
2,000 and 10,000 as small towns and those with 10,000 or more inhabitants
as big towns.

There proves to be a strikingly regular correlation between the
progressive nature of a party (“progressive” in the broadest
economic and political sense) and the increase in the strength of
that party in the towns and bigger inhabited centres in general.

Four groups of political parties in Germany stand out clearly in this
respect:

1) Social-Democrats—the only completely progressive and, in the best
sense of the word, “popular” mass party of wage-workers;

2) Progressive People’s Party—a petty-bourgeois democratic party,
something like our
Trudoviks [1] (only under conditions of a fully bourgeois and not a feudal society);

3) National Liberals—the party of the big bourgeoisie, the German
Octobrist-Cadet party;

4) all conservative parties, Black-Hundred landowners, clericals,
reactionary urban petty bourgeois and peasants (anti-Semites, “the Centre”, i.e., Catholics, conservatives proper,
Poles, and so on).

| | Social- Democrats | Progressists | National Liberals | All conser- vative par- ties | Fragmentary and unde- finded | Totals |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| In villages . . . . . . . | 19.0 | 8.8 | 12.8 | 58.6 | 0.8 | 100.0 |
| In small towns . . . . | 35.8 | 12.1 | 15.0 | 36.4 | 0.7 | 100.0 |
| In big towns . . . . . | 49.3 | 15.6 | 13.8 | 20.0 | 1.3 | 100.0 |
| All Germany . . . . | 34.8 | 12.3 | 13.6 | 38.3 | 1.0 | 100.0 |

Universal franchise exists in Germany. The above table shows clearly
that the German village, the German peasantry (like those of
all European, constitutional, civilised countries) are still, to
the present day, almost completely en slaved by the landowners and
priests, spiritually and politically.

In the German villages almost three-fifths (58.6%) of the votes go to
the conservative, i.e., landowner and priest, parties! Everywhere in Europe
the peasant was revolutionary when he fought against the feudals,
the serf-owners and landowners. Once the peasant had obtained his freedom
and a little piece of land he, as a general rule, made his peace
with the landowners and priests and became a reactionary.

The development of capitalism, however, begins in its turn to pull the
peasant out of the embraces of reaction and leads him to the
Social-Democrats. In 1912, the German Social-Democrats had already
obtained almost one-fifth (19%) of all rural votes.

The political picture in the German countryside today is, therefore,
the following. One-fifth for the Social-Democrats, one-fifth for the more or less “liberal” bourgeoisie and
three fifths for the landowners and priests. There is still quite
a lot to be done for the political education of the country side. By
ruining the small peasant and putting the screw on him, capitalism, one
might say, is knocking reactionary prejudices out of his head by force.

There is already a different picture in the small towns; the
Social-Democrats have overtaken the liberal bourgeoisie (35.8% of the votes
as compared with 27%) but have not quite caught up with the conservatives,
who obtained 36.4% of the votes. The small towns are the stronghold of the
urban petty bourgeoisie engaged mainly in commerce and manufacturing. The
petty bourgeoisie waver most of all and do not give a stable majority
either to the conservatives, or to the socialists or to the liberal
bourgeoisie.

in the big towns there has been a Social-Democratic victory. The
Social-Democrats have a following of half the population (49.3% of
the votes), as many as the conservatives and liberals combined
(15.6+13.8+20=49.4%). The conservatives here are supported by only
one-fifth of the population, the liberal bourgeoisie by
three-tenths and the Social-Democrats by a half . If we
were to take the biggest towns there would be an incomparably wider
predominance of Social-Democracy.

We know that towns in all modern states and even in Russia grow more
rapidly than villages, that the towns are centres of the economic,
political and spiritual life of the people and are the chief vehicles of
progress. The predominance of Social-Democracy in the towns gives a clear
demonstration of its significance as the party of the advanced masses.

Of Germany’s population of 65,000,000 only 25,900,000 people were
living in rural areas in 1912; 12,300,000 were living in small towns and
26,800,000 in the bigger towns. In recent decades, since Germany became a
completely capitalist state, relatively free and possessing a stable
constitution and universal franchise, the urban population has grown more
rapidly than that of the countryside. In 1882, only 18,900,000 of the
45,000,000 population lived in towns, i.e., 41.8%; in 1895 the total
population was 52,000,000, the urban population 26,000,000, i.e., 49.8%; in
1907 out of the 62,000,000 population, 36,000,000 lived in towns, i.e.,
58.1%. The population of the biggest towns, those with 100,000 or more
inhabitants, was in the same years 3,000,000 7,000,000 and 12,000,000
respectively, i.e., 7.4%, 13.6% and 19.1% of the total population. In the
course of twenty-five years the entire population has increased by 36.5%,
the

urban population by 89.6% and the population of the biggest towns by
254.4%.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the purely bourgeois parties in
present-day bourgeois Germany are supported by a minority of the
population. In 1912, the Social-Democrats obtained in the whole of Germany
more than one-third of the total number of votes cast (34.8%), the
conservatives (mainly the landowners and priests) somewhat less than
two-fifths (38.3%), and all the liberal-bourgeois parties only one-quarter of the votes cast (25.9%).

How is this to be explained? Why is it that in bourgeois Germany, in a
country in which capitalism is developing with particular rapidity, more
than sixty years after the revolution (the bourgeois revolution of 1848),
landowners’ and clerical parties and not purely bourgeois political parties
predominate?

The key to the explanation of this phenomenon was provided by Karl Marx
as far back as 1848—the German bourgeoisie, frightened of the
independence of the proletariat and seeing that the workers were using
democratic institutions for themselves and against the capitalists, turned its back on democracy, shamefully betrayed the liberty
that it had previously defended and began to fawn upon the landowners and
clericals. [2] We know that since 1005 the Russian bourgeoisie has been
developing these slavish political inclinations and these slavish political
ideas more zealously than the German bourgeoisie.