“Left-Wing” Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality
In this article, Lenin criticized left communists for their petty-bourgeois revolutionary empty revolutionary talk on the domestic and foreign policies. It was written on May 5, 1918, and published in Pravda issue No.88, 89 and 90 on May 9, 10 and 11, 1918. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 34 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.
After the victory of the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party skillfully used the revolutionary tactic of compromise and signed the “Brest Peace Treaty” with Germany and its allies. In March 1914, the Forth All Russia Congress of Soviets formally approved this Treaty. However, “Left communists” represented by Bukharin and others opposed the Treaty. Lenin wrote this article in order to unify the inner-party ideology and smoothly carry out develop domestic economy. He criticized the wrong views and tactics of left communists on a series of domestic and foreign issues and expounded the policy guidelines of utilizing state capitalism in the socialist economic construction.
His main points were: (1) To sign “Brest Peace Treaty” is correct: the Bolshevik Party adhered to the science of Marxist strategy and tactics and was good at estimating the comparison of powers to avoid fighting against a group of imperialists at the same time when its power was weak at a seriously critical time. The “left communists” did not understand the significance of estimating the comparison of powers at all. By swapping the question of avoiding war at present for the question of avoiding war "forever ", the empty phraseology of the “Left” about the war issue was nothing more than the childish enthusiasm of a hardened, frenzied man, which, objectively, was an instrument of imperialist provocation, helping the imperialists to lure the Soviet republics into battles that were clearly against their interests. As far as its objective function was concerned, it was the tool of imperialism to provoke. It helped the imperialists induce the Soviet Republic to enter into a battle that was obviously against them.
History has proved that those who advocated the signing of the peace treaty, the workers and the exploited peasant masses who were in favor of it were absolutely right.
(2) Russia’s economic policy aimed achieving transition to socialism through from state capitalism. There were five economic components in Russia: patriarchal, i.e., to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming; small commodity production (this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain); private capitalism; state capitalism and socialism. For the great majority of those tilling the land were the small commodity producers. It was petty-bourgeois capitalism that dominated. Based on Russia’s current economic situation, the construction of socialism had to go through what state capitalism and socialism have in common, that is, the accounting and control of the production and distribution of products, and the use of state capitalism to oppose the disintegration and laxity of small private owners. Lenin argued that since workers controlled the state power, state capitalism was capitalism that the state could control and regulate, which was much higher than Russia’s small-scale peasant economy at that time. Compared with the reality of the Soviet society, it would be a progress and the most reliable way of proceeding towards socialism.
When the working class has learned to organize large-scale production on a national scale, along state capitalist lines, it would hold all the trump cards, and the consolidation of socialism would be assured. The “Lefts” described this as a “compromise”. This meant they simply did not know the reality of the economic components in Russia and did not understand the economic task of socialist construction.
(3) Socialized mass production and the dictatorship of the proletariat were two necessary conditions for socialism. Lenin regarded Germany as a model for state capitalism, and vividly compared Germany and Soviet Russia to two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. They respectively reflected two conditions for socialism: Germany realized economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions, while Russia realized political conditions. The Russian proletariat is more advanced than England and Germany in terms of its political system and the power of its workers’ power, but it lags behind the most backward countries in Western Europe in terms of organizing decent state capitalism and in terms of its material and production readiness to “implement” socialism. Therefore, we must learn from the German state capitalism and follow it. We must learn from the first-class experts of capitalism the ability to organize trust-like mass production. Only those who knew that socialism could not be established or implemented without learning from the trust organizers were qualified as communists. Lenin opposed the abstract opposition between “capitalism” and “socialism”. He stressed that under Soviet power, state capitalism represented the “threshold” of socialism, the condition of its firm victory.