Liberal and Marxist Conceptions of the Class Struggle

This is Lenin’s short comment on the conception of liberal class struggle which was advocated by Russian liquidationists. It was written in May 1913 and published in Prosveshcheniye issue No.5. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 23 of the second revised edition of the Complete Works of Lenin.

From 1905 to 1907, after the defeat of the first bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia led by the proletariat, the Tsarist autocratic government with Stolypin as the chairman of the Council of Ministers brutally suppressed revolutionaries, the masses of workers and peasants.

Frightened by the counter-revolutionary violence, Menshevik faction intended to liquidate the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party at the cost of abandoning the Party’s principles and tactics in exchange for legal status. They thus embraced “liquidationism” and advocated bourgeois liberal policies among the workers. This was why Lenin repeatedly wrote articles to criticize it. A liquidationist A. Yermansky responded to this criticism with insults and fierce attacks. Against this background, Lenin wrote this article to further reveal and criticize the errors of the liquidationism. Lenin showed the basic ideological differences between Marxists and the abolitionists: the liquidationists disguised Marxism with liberalism and mistook the liberal views for Marxism and refuted revolutionary views on the class struggle. Class struggle is a fundamental issue of Marxism. All class struggles are political struggles. Only when class struggle involves the state power—the very essence of politics, can it be fully developed to a “national” class struggle.

The bourgeois liberals dared not deny class struggle and were ready to admit the class struggle within the political scope. However, they tried to narrow down, weaken and understate the concept of class struggle. They wanted to blunt its edge and limit class struggle to minor issues rather than an issue of the state power. It was just from this standpoint that, A. Yermansky distorted the Marxist concept of class struggle by advocating a liberal views and advocated a mistaken view on this fundamental theoretical and general-principle question. Lenin argued that the liquidationists ignored to the issue of state power since they lost the ability to observe social phenomena from a revolutionary point of view.

This proved that they mistook the concept of class struggle of Marxism for that of liberalism. This is what A. Yermansky was trying to cover up. This was also the ideological basis of all the debates between the Marxists and liquidationists. During the period of Stolypin reactionism, this article played an important role in uniting and educating the cadres and the masses and helped overcoming the abolitionists’ negative influence on the proletarian revolution.