On this basis of the fusing together of the different social classes, all concept of class society is rejected, under the abstract term “national”. In addition, all class distinction, in relation to the nature of the state, and of democracy is obliterated. The Narodniks put forward such notions, in the 1890's, as polemicised against by Lenin. The Narodnik conception was of a “non-class” state that simply pursued the national interest. Victor Chernov put forward this idea, so as to justify a bourgeois-defencist position in WWI. On this basis, the defence was not of a Russian bourgeois state, or bourgeois-democracy, but simply of an abstract “democracy”, devoid of any class character.
But, for the Bolsheviks, the class character of the state, and consequently, the class character of the democracy being fought for, was of prime and determining concern. That is why they adopted a revolutionary-defeatist position, until such time that Russia became a workers' state, and what was being defended was not the sham of bourgeois-democracy, but direct, soviet democracy.
At the heart of this is the difference between the Stalinist stages theory, and the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, as well as the difference between the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The former assumes bourgeois-democracy, the latter assumes soviet democracy. The former assumes that the proletariat has not become ruling-class, and established a workers' state, the latter assumes it has, and as Trotsky sets out, there are clear distinctions between these two situations.
In 1917, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev continued to support the position that both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had developed of The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry. In other words, given the huge numerical strength of the peasantry, the belief was that any revolution would rest heavily upon the peasants. The workers would support the peasants, in the struggle to carry through the basic tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the agrarian revolution that is always a fundamental part of it. The bourgeois-democratic revolution clears away all of the obstacles that stand in the way of capitalist development.
In conditions where Russia was still a largely rural economy, and still developing industrial economy, Lenin explained, for example, in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy, why its was only by such development that it could move forward towards Socialism.
“And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class.”
Even after the revolution, Lenin noted that Russia was still, overwhelmingly, characterised by the same backward agriculture, by the preponderance of small, independent commodity producers, and so on, so that these basic tasks of industrial development, still existed. In Left-Wing Childishness, he notes,
“At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”.”
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