Course on
Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 3b
Lenin
Socialist-Revolutionaries, Narodniks, and other Adventurists
Our pattern is as follows: There are ten parts, one part per
week. In each part there may be up to four items. The main post is given first.
The others can be used as alternatives, if preferred, or as additional reading.
The whole arrangement is designed to suit study circles who would meet once a
week to discuss these texts.
In this case we have gone in reverse chronological order. The
third and last downloadable linked item in this part is from the earlier,
pre-revolutionary period, where Lenin is denouncing the “Revolutionary
Adventurism” of the “Socialist Revolutionaries”, and in particular is denouncing terrorism.
Like Marx and Engels before him, and like the SACP of today,
Lenin was faced with false revolutionaries who pretended to be more
revolutionary than the communists but who were really something else again. The
communists are referred to in this pamphlet as “revolutionary
Social-Democrats”.
In this Russian case the false revolutionaries were the
petty-bourgeois “Socialist-Revolutionaries” (SRs) and their antecedents, the
sentimental “Narodniks”. Both of these types of pseudo-revolutionary are likely
to spring up in any revolutionary situation. In general, they represent the
strong desire of the ruling class to reappear in a new guise, to steal the very
revolution that they have provoked, and therefore to continue their rule in a
new form. This is especially the case in a transition, like Russia’s at the
time, from a monarchy, to a republic.
The terrorist SRs called themselves “critics” and they called
their revolutionary opponents (i.e. Lenin and the RSDLP) “orthodox”. This is
like the liberals and anarchists of today in South Africa who denounce the SACP
as “Stalinists” or “vanguardists”, or even as “yellow communists”, while
imagining themselves to be free-thinkers.
This document was written in a typical situation, similar to
Swaziland today, where there is a dying monarchical autocracy and a large but
very poor peasantry, all festering in the dregs of feudalism. There is a
dangerous “absence of ideology and
principles”. Among other important things, Lenin writes:
“Let the agrarian
programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries serve as a lesson and a warning to
all socialists, a glaring example of what results from an absence of ideology
and principles, which some unthinking people call freedom from dogma.
“When it came to
action, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not reveal even a single of the three
conditions essential for the elaboration of a consistent socialist programme: a
clear idea of the ultimate aim; a correct understanding of the path leading to
that aim; an accurate conception of the true state of affairs at the given moment
or of the immediate tasks of that moment.
“They simply obscured
the ultimate aim of socialism by confusing socialisation of the land with
bourgeois nationalisation and by confusing the primitive peasant idea about
small-scale equalitarian land tenure with the doctrine of modern socialism on
the conversion of all means of production into public property and the
organisation of socialist production. Their conception of the path leading to
socialism is peerlessly characterised by their substitution of the development
of co-operatives for the class struggle.”
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Revolutionary Adventurism, 1902, Lenin
(8645 words)
Further
reading:
Guerrilla Warfare, 1906, Lenin (3917
words)
Marxism and Insurrection, 1917, Lenin
(2101 words)
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