From Narodnism to Marxism

An article written by Lenin, in which he exposed the class essence of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and provided theoretical guidance for the proletarian movement. The article was originally published in Vperyod, No. 3, January 11 (24), 1905. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 9 of the second edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

On May 5, 1904, the Revolutsionnaya Rossiya newspaper published the draft program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which disguised itself as a socialist party under the banner of Marxism. On Sunday, January 9, 1905, more than 140,000 workers in Petersburg went to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar, but they were brutally suppressed by the Tsar’s army, killing and injuring thousands of people, which is known as “Bloody Sunday”. This atrocity of the Tsarist government aroused the anger of workers all over the country. Protests, strikes were held in Petersburg, Moscow, and all over the country. In January 1905 alone, 440,000 workers went to strike, more than the total number of strikes in the past 10 years. This event led to the beginning of the first bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia.

Lenin pointed out that the common movement of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie against the autocratic system should not make us forget the antagonistic class interests between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party stood on the class position of the bourgeoisie and represented the extreme left wing of the Russian bourgeois democracy. He also analyzed the draft program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party from three aspects: They didn’t understand Marxism and make theoretical revisions to it; there were remnants of Narodnism in their views of peasant and land issues; they didn’t understand the nature of the coming Russian bourgeois democratic revolution.

Firstly, the draft program revised Marxism. For example, “the theory of the favorable and unfavorable relation between the positive and negative sides of capitalism” brought the old Russian subjectivism into Marxism. For example, they exaggerate the role of intellectuals, as if intellectuals can choose a relatively smooth path for their motherland and become some kind of supra-class judges of capitalism.

Second point is the arguments on the issue of peasants. Obviously, the draft program of the Socialist Revolutionaries does not see the fact that there are not only proletarians, but also petty bourgeoisie engaged in labor and exploitation under the capitalist system, and that the peasant bourgeoisie is dominant among the working peasants. Lenin raised an urgent political question that he would soon face up to: who exploits whom?

Is it the view that revolutionary intellectuals, who are self-appointed socialists, make use of peasants’ labor to oppose the principle of bourgeois private ownership, or is it the social talk of revolutionary intellectuals that bourgeois private owners and workers’ peasants make use of in order to oppose socialism? Lenin was convinced that the peasants used the socialist rhetoric of Narodnik-democratic intellectuals for their own benefit. However, the conscious proletariat supported the progressive and revolutionary demands of the bourgeois working peasants. The real purpose of socialism was not bourgeois democracy’s illusion of equal use of land. Lenin pointed out that the rural proletarians, with the bourgeois peasantry should oppose the survivals of serfdom, against the autocracy, the priests, and the landlords; with the urban proletariat should oppose the bourgeoisie in general and should oppose the bourgeois peasantry in particular. This was the stand point of the land program adopted by the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. It strived for democracy with the peasant bourgeoisie and socialism with the urban proletarians. It would be wise for the poor peasants to master this slogan and reject the flashy slogans of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Thirdly, although the draft program of the Socialist-Revolutionaries abandoned the views of Narodniks who were against political freedom, it still contained the remnants of Narodnism when analyzing the Tsarist autocratic system and the attitudes of various classes towards it.

Finally, Lenin expounded on the theoretical fundamentals of Marxism and the immediate revolutionary aims of the R.S.D.L.P.. The ambiguity within the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ Draft Program was the inevitable result of confusion between Narodnism and Marxism. Only Marxism can provide a scientific, correct and increasingly practically confirmed analysis of the relationship between the struggle for democracy and the struggle for socialism. There were also bourgeois-democrats and working-class democrats in Russia. The RSDLP should expose the illusions of bourgeois-democrats and their ignorance of their own essence. The conscious elements of the working-class should also support bourgeois-democrats, oppose the remnants of serfdom and autocratic system and fight against them without forgetting its class independence and for its own class aim of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.