Our Revolution
#PUBLICATION NOTE
This edition of Our Revolution has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Lenin, Fourth English Edition, Volume 33, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.
#INTRODUCTION NOTE
This is an article in two parts dictated by Comrade Nikolaj Lenin in Gorki, Russia on the 16th and 17th of January, 1923. It was first published in the Pravda, Volume 12, Number 117 (30th of May, 1923).
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#OUR REVOLUTION
#CONCERNING SUHANOV'S NOTES
#Nikolaj Lenin
#16th and 17th of January, 1923
#★
#1
I have lately been glancing through Suhanov's notes on the revolution. What strikes one most is the pedantry of all our small-bourgeois democrats and of all the heroes of the Second International. Apart from the fact that they are all extremely faint-hearted, that, when it comes to the minutest deviation from the German model, even the best of them fortify themselves with reservations — apart from this characteristic, which is common to all small-bourgeois democrats and has been abundantly manifested by them throughout the revolution, what strikes one is their slavish imitation of the past.
They all call themselves Marxists, but their conception of Marxism is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics. They have even absolutely failed to understand Marx's plain statements that, in times of revolution, the utmost flexibility1 is demanded, and have even failed to notice, for instance, the statements Marx made in his letters — I think it was in 1856 — expressing the hope of combining a peasant war in Germany, which might create a revolutionary situation, with the working-class movement2 — they avoid even this plain statement and walk around and about it like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.
Their conduct betrays them as cowardly reformists, who are afraid to deviate from the bourgeoisie, let alone break with it, and, at the same time, they disguise their cowardice with the wildest rhetoric and bragging. But what strikes one in all of them, even from the purely theoretical standpoint, is their utter inability to grasp the following Marxist considerations: up to now, they have seen capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe follow a definite path of development, and cannot conceive that this path can be taken as a model only mutatis mutandis, only with certain amendments (quite insignificant from the standpoint of the general development of world history).
Firstly — the revolution connected with the imperialist First World War. Such a revolution was bound to reveal new features, or variations, resulting from the war itself, for the world has never seen such a war in such a situation. We find that, since the war, the bourgeoisie of the wealthiest countries have to this day been unable to restore «normal» bourgeois relations. Yet our reformists — small bourgeois who make a show of being revolutionaries — believed, and still believe, that normal bourgeois relations are the limit (thus far shalt thou go and no farther). And even their conception of «normal» is extremely stereotyped and narrow.
Secondly, they are complete strangers to the idea that, while the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but, on the contrary, presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development. For instance, it does not even occur to them that, because Russia stands on the borderline between the developed countries and the countries which this war has for the first time definitely brought into the orbit of social development — all the Eastern, non-European countries — it could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish its revolution from those which took place in the Western European countries, and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.
Infinitely stereotyped, for instance, is the argument they learned by rote during the development of Western European Social-Democracy, namely, that we are not yet ripe for socialism, that, as certain «learned» «excellencies» among them put it, the objective economic premises for socialism do not exist in our country. It does not occur to any of them to ask: but what about a people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created during the imperialist First World War? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for further social development that were somewhat unusual?
«The development of the productive forces of Russia has not attained the level that makes socialism possible.» All the heroes of the Second International, including, of course, Suhanov, beat the drums about this proposition. They keep harping on this incontrovertible proposition in a thousand different keys, and think that it is the decisive criterion of our revolution.
But what if the situation, which drew Russia into the imperialist world war that involved every more or less influential Western European country and made it a witness of the eve of the revolutions maturing or partly already begun in the East, gave rise to circumstances that put Russia and its development in a position which enabled us to achieve precisely that combination of a «peasant war» with the working-class movement suggested in 1856 by no less a Marxist than Marx himself as a possible prospect for Prussia?
What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of social development in a different way from that of the Western European countries? Has that altered the general line of development of world history? Has that altered the fundamental relations between the fundamental classes of all the countries that are being, or have been, drawn into the general course of world history?
If a definite level of culture is required for socialist construction (although nobody can say just what that definite «level of culture» is, for it differs in every Western European country), why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers' and peasants' government and the council system, proceed to overtake the other nations?
#16th of January, 1923
#2
You say that social development is necessary for socialist construction. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of social development in our country as the expulsion of the feudal lords and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?
Napoleon, I think, wrote: «On s'engage et puis [...] on voit.» Rendered freely this means: «First engage in a serious battle, and then see what happens.» Well, we did first engage in a serious battle in November 1917, and then saw such details of development (from the standpoint of world history, they were certainly details) as the Brest peace, the New Economic Policy, and so on. And now, there can be no doubt that, in the main, we have been victorious.
Our Suhanovs, not to mention Social-Democrats still farther to the Right, never even dream that revolutions could be made otherwise. Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Eastern countries, which possess much vaster populations and a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display even greater distinctions than the Russian revolution.
It need hardly be said that a textbook written on Kautskyite lines was a very useful thing in its day. But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history. It would be timely to say that those who think so are simply fools.