Lenin says that the Russian Marxists should call themselves social-democrats, because they should never forget the importance of democracy. He quotes Plekhanov that the revolutionaries have “two enemies: old prejudices that have not yet been entirely eradicated, on the one hand, and a narrow understanding of the new programme, on the other.” (Note **, p 290)
And, we see the same today that, amongst the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” it is not only socialism, but also democracy that is subordinated to their “anti-imperialism”, as they associate with thoroughly reactionary regimes and movements. This is not the subordination of bourgeois-democratic demands to socialist demands, and the interests of the working-class that Lenin refers to, but simply a subordination of democracy to the interests of petty-bourgeois nationalism. And yet, in those countries where the “anti-imperialists” do subordinate democracy to the interests of petty-bourgeois nationalism, it is particularly relevant to defend and promote democracy, because it is here that the vestiges of precapitalist social forms and forces are strongest.
“In Russia, the relics of medieval, semi-feudal institutions are still so enormously strong (as compared with Western Europe), they are such an oppressive yoke upon the proletariat and the people generally, retarding the growth of political thought in all estates and classes, that one cannot but insist on the tremendous importance which the struggle against all feudal institutions, absolutism, the social estate system, and the bureaucracy has for the workers.” (p 290)
These old, precapitalist forms and institutions are reactionary, and hold back capitalist development. They impose on the workers a double oppression: that arising from capitalist exploitation, and that from these older forms. And, in holding back capitalist development, they also hold back the progressive developments it brings with it. As Marx put it in the Preface to Capital,
“But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.”
But, in addition, by the continuation of these older forms, and the denial of even bourgeois-democratic rights and freedoms, to workers, the task of emancipation, for the workers, is made much harder. Without basic bourgeois-democratic rights, such as free speech, a free press, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, and so on, the task of workers, even to defend themselves, and form themselves into a class for itself, is impossible.
“The workers must be shown in the greatest detail what a terribly reactionary force these institutions are, how they intensify the oppression of labour by capital, what a degrading pressure they exert on the working people, how they keep capital in its medieval forms, which, while not falling short of the modern, industrial forms in respect of the exploitation of labour, add to this exploitation by placing terrible difficulties in the way of the fight for emancipation. The workers must know that unless these pillars of reaction are overthrown, it will be utterly impossible for them to wage a successful struggle against the bourgeoisie, because so long as they exist, the Russian rural proletariat, whose support is an essential condition for the victory of the working class, will never cease to be downtrodden and cowed, capable only of sullen desperation and not of intelligent and persistent protest and struggle. And that is why it is the direct duty of the working class to fight side by side with the radical democracy against absolutism and the reactionary social estates and institutions—a duty which the Social-Democrats must impress upon the workers, while not for a moment ceasing also to impress upon them that the struggle against all these institutions is necessary only as a means of facilitating the struggle against the bourgeoisie, that the worker needs the achievement of the general democratic demands only to clear the road to victory over the working people’s chief enemy, over an institution that is purely democratic by nature, capital, which here in Russia is particularly inclined to sacrifice its democracy and to enter into alliance with the reactionaries in order to suppress the workers, to still further impede the emergence of a working-class movement.” ( 291-2)
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