V. I. Lenin

Comrades have brought several Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary and other publications from the South that
give us a glimpse of the “ideological life” on the other side of the barricades, in the other camp.
The Kharkov Mysi of Bazarov and Martov, Gryadushchy Dyen
run by Myakotin and Peshekhonov, Bunakov and Vishnyak, Potresov
and Grossman, Yuzhnoye Dyelo and Obyedineniye run by Balabanov, S. Ivanovich, Myakotin and
Peshekhonov—these are the names of the publications and of
some of their best-known contributors.

Even the few haphazard issues of the above-mentioned periodicals produce such a strong and full aroma that one
immediately feels that one is in the servants’ quarters. Educated intellectuals who imagine they are socialists
and call themselves such, saturated through and through with
bourgeois prejudices and fawning before the bourgeoisie—such, if we get down to brass tacks, is that
entire clique of writers There are many trends among them but they
have no serious meaning from the political point of view for they
differ only in the extent to which they are hypocritical or
sincere, crude or astute, clumsy or skilled in doing their
servants’ duties to the bourgeoisie.

I

The duty of a lackey involves wearing a tail-coat and white
gloves and possessing a civilised appearance and the relevant
manners. The lackey is permitted to possess a certain love for
the people; this, on the one hand, is inevitable because the
milieu that provides lackeys must be in needy circumstances; on
the other hand, it is even to the master’s advantage, for
it gives him an opportunity to “practise” his philanthropy, in the first place, of course, among those
“obedient” sections of the population from which servants, shop assistants and workers are drawn. The cleverer
and the better educated the classes that keep servants, the more
regularly and thoughtfully they pursue their policy, using their
lackeys to spy on the working people, to disunite the working
people by granting concessions to a certain part of them, to
strengthen their own position and to interest their “faithful servants” in increasing the master’s
wealth in the hope of receiving a rakeoff, etc., etc.

Love for the people is permitted the lackey only to a very
modest degree, of course, and only on the imperative condition
that he expresses humble and servile feelings in addition to his
readiness to comfort the working and exploited people. Let it be
said in parenthesis that Feuerbach gave a very neat answer to
those who defended religion as a source of comfort for people; to
comfort the slave, he said, is to the advantage of the slave-owner, while the real friend of the slaves teaches them
indignation and revolt, teaches them to cast off the yoke and does
not comfort them. The lackey paints and prettifies the artificial
flowers that serve to comfort the slaves who are fettered by
wage-slavery. Champions of the emancipation of people from
wage-slavery tear away the artificial flowers from the fetters
they decorate so that the slave can learn to hate his fetters more
consciously and more strongly, the quicker to throw them off and
reach out his hand for living flowers.

The necessity to combine a very moderate dose of love for the
people with a very big dose of obedience and, of protection of the
master’s interests that is specific to the position of the
lackey, inevitably produces the hypocrisy that is typical of the
lackey as a social type. Here it is a case of a social type and
not of the qualities possessed by individuals. A lackey may be the
most honest of men, an exemplary member of his family, an
excellent citizen but he is fatally doomed to hypocrisy because
the main feature of his trade is the combination of the interests
of the master whom he is “pledged to serve truly and faithfully” and those of the milieu from which servants are
recruited. If this problem, therefore, is studied from the
political point of view, i.e., from the point of view of millions
of people and the relations between millions, one must come to the
conclusion that the chief features of the lackey as a social type
are hypocrisy and cowardice. These qualities are inculcated by the
lackey’s trade, and they are the most important from the
point of. view of the wage-slaves and the mass of working people
in any capitalist society.

II

Educated intellectuals who call themselves Mensheviks, Social-Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries and what not want to
teach the people politics. They had, therefore, to touch upon the
fundamental issue of the entire period in which we are living—the conversion of the imperialist war into a civil
war. See how they argue on this point.

Mr. P. Yushkevich, writing in Obyedineniye, devotes a whole article to “Revolution and Civil War”. The class
of literature — if such it can be called—to which the article belongs may be judged from just the following two
statements of the author’s.

’Having as its objective a revolution that is in the interests of the majority and is carried out by that
majority, socialism has no grounds F!! to turn to methods [!!!] of
the civil war to which a minority that has seized power is fatally
doomed ....“The most advanced class of modern society, when
it has become sufficiently mature to understand in full its world
mission of emancipation and the tasks accompanying it, must throw
it (civil war) aside together with other things inherited from
historical barbarity ....”

A real gem , is it not ?

Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution the Russian bourgeoisie started seeking agreements and concluding agreements
with the foreign bourgeoisie against the working people of their
own country. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries
supported them. The same thing occurred in Finland at the
beginning of 1918. And it was the same in the North of Russia and
in the South at the beginning of 1918 when the
Constitutional-Democrats, Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries, in alliance with the Germans, tried to
crush the Bolsheviks. The same again in Georgia. The Germans gave
Krasnov money and arms. Then the Entente bourgeoisie bought over
the Czechoslovaks and Denikin and landed their troops in Murmansk,
Archangel, Siberia, Baku and Ashkhabad.

The world bourgeoisie—at first the German and then the
Anglo-French (often both together)—made war on the victorious proletariat of Russia. And, then comes this man who
calls himself a socialist, who has gone over to the side of the
bourgeoisie and who advises the workers “to throw aside” “civil war methods”. Is he not a Judas
Golovlyov [1] of the latest capitalist type?

I shall probably be told that Yushkevich is merely a rank-and-file bourgeois journalistic cooly, that he is not typical
of any party and they do not accept responsibility for him. That,
however, would not be true. In the first place the entire staff
and the trend followed by Obyedineniye show. that this particular sort of servility is typical of the entire
Menshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary brotherhood. In the second place
there is the example of L. Martov. This character is a most
prominent (and probably the most “Left”) of the
Mensheviks and also a highly respected member of the Berne
International who is in agreement with its ideological leader,
Karl Kautsky.

Take a look at Martov’s arguments. In the April 1919 issue of Mysi he writes about “world Bolshevism”. He
has a thorough knowledge of the literature of Bolshevism and about
Bolshevism. And this is what that author writes about civil
war:

“In the early days of the war I had occasion to write that the crisis it had called forth in the
working-class movement was primarily a ’moral crisis’, a crisis of the loss of mutual trust between different sections of
the proletariat and loss of the faith of the proletarian masses in
the old moral and political values. At that time I could not
imagine that this loss of mutual trust, this destruction of
ideological bonds that for the last decades had united not only
reformists and revolutionaries but had, at certain moments, united
socialists and anarchists and both of them with liberal and
Christian workers—1 could not imagine that this destruction
would lead to civil war between proletarians ....”

The italics belong to Mr. Martov. He stresses that here he is
appraising specifically civil war. It may even be that he is
stressing his full agreement with Kautsky who, in any case, argues
in the same way about civil war.

In this argument there is so much refined corruption, such an abyss of lies, deception of the
workers, and despicable betrayal of their interests, such a
hypocritical attitude to and defection from socialism that one is
amazed at the amount of servility the Kautskys and Martovs have
accumulated in the course of decades of “playing” with opportunism!

Firstly, when Kautsky and Martov pharisaically shed tears over
“civil war between proletarians” they are trying to hide their desertion to the side of the
bourgeoisie. Actually, the civil war is between the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie. There never has been in history, nor can
there be in a class society, a civil war of the exploited masses
against the exploiting minority in which some of the exploited
have not gone over to the side of the exploiters and fought with
them against their own brothers. Any literate person will admit
that a Frenchman who, at the time of the peasant uprising in
Vende in behalf of the monarchy and the landowners, had
bewailed the “civil war between peasants” would be a lackey of the monarchy, disgusting in his
hypocrisy. The Kautskys and Martovs are just such lackeys of the
capitalists.

The international bourgeoisie, powerful throughout the world,
are crushing the victorious workers of one country for having
defeated capital and have the following of some of the deceived,
uninformed, downtrodden workers; and such scoundrels as the
Kautskys and Martovs are shedding tears over “civil war
between proletarians”. These characters have to resort to
such disgusting hypocrisy since they cannot openly admit that they
are on the side of the bourgeoisie in the civil war between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie!

In the second place, Martov, like Kautsky and the entire Berne
International, knows full well that they enjoyed the sympathy of
the workers as socialists because they preached the necessity for
proletarian revolution. In 1902 Kautsky wrote about the possible
connection between revolution and war and said that the future
proletarian revolution would probably coincide with civil war to a
greater extent than former revolutions. In 1912 the entire Second
International solemnly declared in the Basle Manifesto that the
coming war would be connected with the coming proletarian
revolution. And when that war broke out the “revolutionaries” of the Second International turned
out to be lackeys of the bourgeoisie!

In November 1914 the Bolsheviks declared that the imperialist
war was likely to he transformed into a civil war. This proved to
be true. It is now a fact on a world scale. In speaking of world
Bolshevism, Martov is compelled to admit this fact. But instead of
honestly admitting his complete ideological failure, the collapse
of the views of all those who, with the contemptuous grimace of
the philistine rejected the idea of turning the imperialist war
into a civil war—instead of this Martov “points” hypocritically to the “proletarian masses” who are
supposed to have “lost faith in the old moral and political
values”!

The renegades are blaming the masses for their own treachery,
but the masses sympathise with the Bolsheviks and are everywhere
taking the revolutionary path. According to the “theory” of those who all their lives have sworn
loyalty to the revolution only to find themselves in the camp of
the bourgeoisie against the proletariat when the revolution came,
the masses are to blame for this.

In the third place, the two different theories that existed
before the war on the question of the internal struggle within
socialism were the following. Kautsky and Martov, like most of the
opportunists, regarded the reformists arid the revolutionaries as
two legitimate trends, essential wings of the movement of one
class. The divergence of these two trends was condemned. Their
rapprochement and merging at every grave moment in the proletarian
class struggle was recognised as inevitable. Champions of a split,
were accused of short-sightedness.

The Bolsheviks had a different view; they regarded the reformists as the vehicle of bourgeois influence among the
proletariat, an alliance with them was sanctioned as a temporary
evil in situations that were clearly not revolutionary, a break
and a split with them was considered inevitable whenever the
struggle took on a serious, sharpened form, especially at the
beginning of the revolution.

And who proved to be right?

The Bolsheviks.

Throughout the world the war caused a split in the working-class movement when the socialist-patriots went over to
the bourgeoisie. After Russia this was to be seen most clearly in
Germany, an advanced capitalist country. To defend the “ideological bonds” of the reformists and
revolutionaries today is tantamount to giving support to such
hangmen of working-class origin as Noske and Scheidemann, who
helped the bourgeoisie murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Lieb kriecht
and kill thousands of workers for their revolutionary struggle
against the bourgeoisie.

Endnotes

[1]
Judas Colovlyov —the nickname of Porfiry Golovlyov, a serf-owner,	hypocrite and blood-sucker in The Golovlyob Family, a novel by M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin.