The 1860's, Lenin says, represented a period in which the feudal landlords suffered a series of defeats, and the liberal bourgeoisie were the beneficiaries of that defeat.
“Although “the clear light of the open class struggle” did not shine in Russia at that time, there was more light then than there is now, so that even those ideologists of the working people who had not the faintest notion of this class struggle, and who preferred to dream of a better future rather than explain the vile present, could not help seeing that liberalism was a cloak for plutocracy, and that the new order was a bourgeois order.” (p 285)
Its on this basis that the class nature of the Russian state is thereby defined by Lenin, as a capitalist state, irrespective of the fact that the political regime in Russia took the form of Tsarist autocracy, resting upon that same old semi-Asiatic landlordism and despotism.
“But although our democrats of that time knew how to denounce plutocratic liberalism, they could not understand it and explain it scientifically; they could not understand that it was inevitable under the capitalist organisation of our social economy; they could not understand the progressive character of the new system of life as compared with the old, feudal system; they could not understand the revolutionary role of the proletariat it created; and they limited themselves to “snorting” at this system of “liberty” and “humanity,” imagined that its bourgeois character was fortuitous, and expected social relations of some other kind to reveal themselves in the “people’s system.”” (p 285)
And, this same kind of “snorting” at “liberty” and “humanity” can be witnessed today amongst the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”, who align themselves with with those who would all too willingly undermine such liberty and humanity, in their reactionary drive backwards in history, to reverse the progressive achievements brought about by capitalist development. And, the consequence of their reactionary drive backwards, is also described by Lenin, in relation to the experience in Russia.
“And then history showed them these other social relations. The feudal landlords, not completely crushed by the Reform, which was so outrageously mutilated in their interests, revived (for a time) and showed vividly what these other than bourgeois social relations of ours were, showed it in the form of such unbridled, incredibly senseless and brutal reaction that our democrats caught fright, subsided, instead of advancing and remoulding their naïve democracy—which was able to sense what was bourgeois but was unable to understand it—into Social-Democracy, went backwards, to the liberals, and are now proud of the fact that their snivelling—i.e., I want to say, their theories and programmes—is shared by “the whole serious and respectable press.”” (p 285-6)
The assumptions about the inherently socialist nature of the peasant had been exposed. So had the idea that the development of the bourgeoisie and proletariat were somehow unnatural.
“... one would have thought that the facts could now be looked straight in the face and the admission be openly made that there had not been and were not any other social economic relations than bourgeois and moribund feudal relations in Russia, and that, therefore, there could be no road to socialism except through the working-class movement. But these democrats had learned nothing, and the naïve illusions of petty-bourgeois socialism gave way to the practical sobriety of petty-bourgeois progress.” (p 286)
No comments:
Post a Comment