First published: 1904 as Nashi Politicheskiya Zadachi Translated by: New Park Publications
To my dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod
The year which has just passed has been a year which has weighed heavily in the life of our Party.
It need only be recalled that at a time when the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world was looking hopefully towards our Party—our Party, to which history offers the great task of cutting the Gordian knot of world reaction—we Russian Social Democrats were apparently unacquainted with problems other than internal party squabbles about areas of competence, as though our only perspective was the likelihood of a split ... it really is a nightmare.
Tragically and heart-rendingly, we see many sections of our Party content to sink into organisational pettiness (while in the distance thuderclaps announce an imminent historical tempest). They begin to suspect the best and the oldest of our comrades, those in the front ranks of Social Democracy internationally; they accuse them of sinning against theory (though the accusers are quite incapable of defining these 'sins' concretely); they call for a crusade against one half of the party; they dissociate themselves from their political friends when the later propose conciliation with the 'oppositional' wing, and in short they are ready to declare implacable war, not only on the active 'conciliators,' but also on all those who, without taking up this role, move among the 'conciliators'.
It is in this truly nightmarish atmosphere that we have spent the whole year. The split several times appeared inevitable. We all felt the horror of the situation; almost all of us were aware of the criminal nature of such a split. But which of us could escape from the steel grip of History?
The sharpest phase is over. Now the partisans of Party unity can look forward with assurance. The few fanatical splitters who not long since made an impression with their 'intransigence' are today meeting with marked opposition among their allies of yesterday.
It is clear that our Party is at a turn in its internal evolution, a turn which we believe involves its revolutionary action as a whole. This turn should bring sufficient calm to create favourable conditions for a concentration of all our working capacity on tasks common to the whole Party. This calm, to which all healthy elements in the Party aspire, means the death as an organisational force of what has come to be known as the 'minority'.
We, as representatives of this 'minority', view this perspective without regret; for this death, strange as it may at first seem, is an integral part of our plans. Not for a single instant has our object been to swing the Party onto the side of its 'minority'. Such an operation would have stood in contradiction to the very meaning of the word (a party in its entirety cannot belong to its own 'minority'), and more importantly still, to the tasks which required the formation of this 'minority'.
What has just been said may at first glance—but only at first glance—seem paradoxical.
In fact, the 'minority', the non-official part of an official party, has fought against a very definite regime within the Party; a regime produced by absolutely fantastic views about how to develop an organisation like ours. According to this position, the Party cannot develop just by eliminating the most progressive currents and tendencies tactically and organisationally, but must go by the following method: the Central Committee (or the Central Organ or the Party Council), which is given the responsibility of leading and
co-ordinating the Party of the proletariat, logically draws new tactical and organisational deductions from known premises. This purely rationalist conception engenders a rigidity which provides it with its own sanctification, along the lines that all interference by elements thinking 'otherwise' is a pathological phenomenon, a sort of abscess on the organisation which requires operation by a skilful surgeon and the use of a scalpel.
Neither in this preface nor in the book which follows will I go into the various episodes of this organisational muddle which has been going on now for almost a year. There is already on this subject a whole literature of which we have no need, and which has dulled the senses of the whole Party. For us, in the present situation, only one thing matters: for the 'minority' to gain the freedom of the city; and as the campaign has been waged in the name of principles, that the same should apply to all future organisational tendencies. The latest statement to date from the Central Committee seems to draw a balance sheet of the upheaval which has taken place in the Party's thinking and (if we have understood the authors' intentions aright) to represent the decisive step towards a real unification. Let us hope that this statement will really consign the behaviour and method of the 'state of siege' to the archives.
But the end of this regime in the Party at the same time means the organisational death of our 'minority'—or to be more precise, a small section of it, placed in particularly favourable circumstances—has subjected the Party's political practice to a re-examination, in the search for new tactical roads. Its organisational demise does not signal the liquidation of the discoveries it has been able to make in this field. Quite the contrary. We are convinced that the destruction of the historical wall which separated the two halves of the Party will permit us to concentrate all our forces on re-founding our Party practice and will lead to a common solution to the new problems of tactics which are posed today and will certainly arise as we grow politically.
This book is presented as an attempt to draw comrades' attention (which has been almost completely blunted by scholastic debates on the organisational questions) to the problems of political tactics on which the whole fate of our Party depends.
But these problems do not constitute the sole content of this book.
The painful internal frictions of the year which has just passed only exposed certain practices of 'internal policy' which have not stood the test; but basic prejudices—related to and arising out of these practices—still dominate many sectors of our Party's thinking. We do not doubt that these prejudices will in the end die away, but our duty is to work actively for their disappearance.
This is why I thought it right to devote a section of this book to Comrade Lenin's latest opus, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in which some of these prejudices are to some extent systematised. Let me admit that I carried out this part of my work without the least pleasure. Up until the appearance of this opus, Comrade Lenin could say nothing worthwhile to defend his position, since the position adopted was altogether desperate. Having said that, we were not expecting such a poverty of thinking. My first reaction, after reading it, was to say: let us just carry on with the problems we have on the agenda. But on reflection—and the essential part of this reflection is explained above—I believed it was indispensable to make our position more explicit; it is impossible to leap over the aggravating state of consciousness in the Party.
Naturally the reader who considers himself completely free from bureaucratic and 'Jacobin' organisational prejudices can limit himself to the first two parts of this book.
In the months during which it was written (and it was written bit by bit) the thought that this was not the right moment stayed my hand more than once.
At a time when Tsarism in its death agony endeavors to appease the bourgeois Nemesis—Japan—burning on its altar the wealth and living forces of the martyred Russian nation; when below, in the depths of the people, is invisibly but irreversibly unleashed the molecular process by which there accumulates the revolutionary anger that will, perhaps tomorrow, burst forth into the light of day in all its initial elemental vigour, bearing off where it passes, as spring torrents bear away all dikes, not only the police barriers but also all the constructions of our ant-like organisational work; at this time when only one science seems correct to us, the science of insurrection; when one art alone finds its raison d'etre, and that is the art of the barricades—at such a time, what is the point in fighting organisational prejudices? Or in unravelling theoretical sophisms, writing about new tactical questions, or looking for new forms in which the autonomous action of the proletariat can develop, at such an unprecedented time in history? Spontaneous revolutionary sentiment indignantly protests:
'This is not the moment!'
'Yes it is,' replies the confident voice of social-democratic consciousness.
And this is the voice that carries the day.
It is the right moment, it is always the right moment!
We know not the day nor the hour; and every day, every hour, every minute which separates us from the decisive day, it is our duty to use. We must subject ourselves to self-criticism, prepare ourselves politically so that our part in the coming decisive events will be worth of the great class to which we have linked our fate as revolutionaries: the proletarian class. We know not the day nor the hour. And if, against all attacks, the autocracy managers to put off the hour of its death; if a new period of 'calm' is established, sweeping from the political scene the oppositionist and revolutionary groups which appeared during the period of upsurge, we, the Social Democrats, will remain at our posts in the ranks of the proletariat and carry out our great task. And neither the reaction nor the revolution will be able to turn us away from our historic tasks.
Of course, when these decisive events come—even if they come tomorrow—we, as communists, as pioneers of the new socialist world, will know how to carry out our revolutionary duty towards the old bourgeois world. We will fight on the barricades. We will conquer for it the freedom which it is impotent to gain without us.
But, even when these events arrive, we as communists neither wish to nor can forget or reject our proletarian tasks. It is to these tasks that we must subordinate our revolutionary tactics, not only on the chequer-board of every-day politics, but also on the eve of the explosion of the revolution and during the storm of revolution itself. We have to look forward, not only beyond the criminal head of Tsarism, but further still, over the top of the revolutionary barricades, beyond the smoking ruins of the Peter and Paul fortress, towards our own destiny; the irreconcilable fight of the proletariat against the whole bourgeois world.
"E pur si muove!—‘It’s still moving!’
Under a hail of terrible blows from an enemy armed to the teeth, right in the midst of political difficulties against which no other detachment of our international army has had to fight, constantly pulled away from its course by powerful undercurrents, Russian Social Democracy ‘is still moving,’ progressing, going forward, not just as the party of Russia’s liberation, but also as the Party of the proletariat.
The principled conciliation of revolutionary-democratic and socialist tasks—expressing two independent historical currents—and the tactical co-ordination of these tasks on the basis of their reconciliation: this is the enigma which the destiny of Russian society has placed before our Party.
The Russian revolutionary movement as a whole has never abandoned the field of struggle between these two tendencies. They are the direct cause for the first serious organisation, Zemlya y Volya, splitting in two. The thinking of revolutionary populism flailed desperately about in the grip of the fundamental contradiction. It never emerged from it. Only Marxism was able to do so while it took up the revolutionary task on which populism had come to grief.
‘The Russian revolutionary movement will triumph as a workers’ movement or it will not triumph at all.’ We understood this idea at the outset, and we have made it the content of our revolutionary practice. But this exhausts only one side of the question. The other can be formulated as follows: the Russian revolutionary movement must, when it has triumphed as a workers movement, be transformed without delay into a process of political self-determination of the proletariat: otherwise Russian Social Democracy as such is an historical aberration.
Putting the workers forward as the main revolutionary force, and making the revolution their political schooling: here lies the source of all differences, the focus of all the internal troubles which up to now have so seriously wracked our Party. The first publication of the first Social Democratic group, Socialism and Political Struggle, already raised this problem, and resolved it, in this way giving Russian Social Democracy its theoretical right to existence.
The first document advocating the idea of a single Social Democratic force in Russia, the Manifesto of the First Congress, endeavored to give a programmatic formulation to the Marxist reconciliation of the basic ‘antinomy’ of the Russian revolutionary movement. ‘Taking as the supreme task for the whole Party,’ says the Manifesto, ‘the conquest of political freedom, Social Democracy marches towards the goal which the first leaders of Narodnaya Volya had already clearly set themselves. But the ways and means chosen by Social Democracy are different. This choice is determined by the fact that it wishes consciously to be and to remain the class movement of the organised working masses.’ It could not have been better put. Social democracy ‘wishes consciouslyto be and to remain the class movement of the proletariat’; this subjective ambition, not yet carried out politically, gives it the starting point from which it can evaluate and criticise, judge and condemn, adopt or reject ‘all means and all paths’ of struggle for political freedom. Social Democracy is still far from having taken the road of independent proletarian politics: the content of its work, yesterday and today, is still totally determined by the ‘supreme task’ among the immediate tasks of the Party, the ‘conquest of political freedom.’ But both yesterday and today, Social Democracy consciously wishes ‘to be and to remain’ the class party of the proletariat, that is, to be and to remain precisely a Social Democratic Party.
This is the tribute which a section of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia has paid and continues to pay to the class doctrine of the international revolutionary proletariat, to Marxism, which for them answers above all the ‘democratic’ and not the ‘proletarian’ question, namely, ‘where are the forces to be found which are capable of taking up the struggle against the autocracy’; to Marxism which has however already placed its political consciousness under the control of the class interests of the proletariat by thrusting the intelligentsia towards the proletariat, the champion of the fight for political freedom.
If we recall the past and consider the changes of currents and tendencies and the bitter struggle between them, in which some ‘revolutionary’ observers have tried to discern a symptom of the ‘decomposition of our Party,’ it can be noted with a profound feeling of moral and political satisfaction that the alternating of mutually exclusive tendencies has, in general, always been dominated by the same directing idea: Social Democracy ‘consciously wishes to be and to remain the class movement of the organised working masses.’ Without any doubt, Social Democracy has more than once moved away from this goal in some of its statements; but in general these indisputably heretical statements have been the result of the aspirations of a young, as yet unconsolidated Party, to resolve the contradiction between the colossal importance of the revolutionary goal and the limitations of the revolutionary means, even if this meant that the problematic of basic tasks had to suffer.
The existence of the objective conditions for this ‘self-limiting’ behaviour, which potentially implies giving in politically, was indisputably to result in the development of its own internal logic, leading those who were yesterday partisans of the proletarain cause to detach themselves from it today and go over to the enemy camp: this phenomenon is precisely the result of the simplifying methodology of ‘Economism’ (of which we shall speak again further on). But what we wish to establish immediately is: that the decisive criterion in our internal party struggles has been the class struggle of the proletariat, and the leitmotif of those internal struggles has always been to reproach various adversaries with ‘objectively betraying the proletariat to the advantage of bourgeois democracy.’
Starting from just this standpoint, the pamphlet On Agitation (which in our literature inaugurated the period of ‘Economism’) accuses the propagandists of Social Democracy of limiting their action to separating conscious workers from the mass: ‘European history,’ this pamphlet says, ‘shows that when the conditions of a mass workers’ movement come to maturity, but the real representatives of their interests keep away, the masses of workers find themselves other leaders,not theoriticians but practitionsers who will lead them at the expense of constituting themselves as a class.’
The Iskra tendency, which replaced ‘Economism,’ marched under the following banner: ‘…Every cult of spontaneity in the workers movement,’ writes for example the author of What Is To Be Done? popularising the theses of Axelrod and Plehkanov, ‘means thereby a strenghtening of the ideology of he bourgeoisie over the workers.’ The same author mentions that Iskra has more than once accused Rabocheye Dyelo ‘indirectly preparing the ground for the transformation of the workers’ movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy.’ Finally, Comrade Axelrod, giving in his two ‘pamphlets’ his evaluation of the political situation of our Party, states that if Comrade Lenin’s so-called ‘plans’ were carried out, we would at best have a revolutionray political organisation of the democratic bourgeoisie trailing behind it the working masses of Russia. (Iskra No 57)
Moreover, it must be borne in mind that in each case similar accusations come from both sides. The ‘propagandists’ accuse the ‘Economisits’ of limiting themselves to arousing the workers without giving them socialist consciousness, and so of just turning them into cannon fodder for the interests of the bourgeoisie. The ‘Economists’ accuse Iskra of trying to detach the ‘political’ dimension from the ‘economic’ situation, and thus of taking the class character away from the workers’ struggle. Finally, Lenin finds no other way of compromising his present adversaries (Axelrod and his political friends) in the eyes of the Party, than to accuse them of ‘opportunism’ on organisational questions, an opportunism which cannot be reconciled with the class interests of the proletariat and signifies the introduction into our Party of the seeds of bourgeois individualism.
It would nonetheless be completely mistaken to think that these ‘stereotyped’ accusations simply neutralise each other, or worse still, that they represent only an expression of agreed Party phraseology. In the absence of such a ‘stereotype’, the struggle between the two currents would inevitably have led to a split in our Party. As Bakunin wrote: ‘It is absurd to worry about whether communion should be carried out in two kinds or not, when what is at issue is throwing Christianity as a whole out of the window.’ Only the possibility of appealing to a superior authority recognised by both sides, the class interests of the proletariat, makes it impossible to regulate all conflicts ‘by internal means.’
If therefore the fundamental criterion by which all tendencies operate in our Party has always been basically all the same, that is, the class interests of the proletariat, on the other hand the method of evaluation does not always correspond to this criterion, far from it, and its primitivism, better than anything else, characterises the primitivism of our political experience. Each new tendency casts the previous one into anathema. For the bearers of new ideas, each preceding period seems no more than a gross deviation from the correct path, an historical aberration, a sum of errors, the result of a fortuitous combination of theoretical mystifications.
The author of the pamphlet On Agitation considers that the ‘first steps of the Russian Social Democrats were wrong.’ His aim is to liquidate this period of tactical errors. The author of What Is To Be Done? goes back precisely to the period of ‘Economism’ seems to him to be only the index of a temporary and accidental decline, in relation to the situation which would have existed if the intervention of the police had not stopped the work of the group of Comrade Lenin’s friends.
Of course, certain people such as Comrade Axelrod, have always been able to see things from the historical point of view, even in what concerns the complex question of the internal development of the Party. But they have always been isolated. Whole tendencies have behaved towards each other in an almost ‘metaphysical’ way, mutually excommunicating each other. The so-called ‘minority’ in fact represents the first case in which the spokesman of a new tendency have tried consciously to establish themselves, not on the corpses, but on the shoulders of their predecessors, by considering themselves in the perspective of the whole development of the Party. And this is a good sign: both for the ‘minority’ and for the whole Party. And the representatives of the ‘minority’ are the spokesmen of the progressive tendencies of this maturation.
Naturally it is pointless to stress that the historical standpoint of Marxists has nothing to do with the ‘historicist-conservative’ standpoint to which, according to Marx, History, like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, shows only its posterior. This outlook as a whole gets entangled totally in the problematic of empirical-casual necessity, the logical consequence of which is political quietism. Marxists, on the other hand, adopt the standpoint of dialectic necessity which is always active and revolutionary, which explains not only every new situation in relation to the previous one, but is also able to show, in each of them, on the one hand the elements of development and movement, on the other the elements of immobilisation and reaction. This standpoint of dialectical materialism as against the historicist-conservative standpoint, does not deprive us of the right to judge and to take sides, but contrary to the idealist standpoint, demands that our judgement be based on the internal tendencies of development itself, and find in it forces capable of overcoming the internal contradictions, and of supplying the theoretical ‘evaluation’ which sees us into the future.
It is just as necessary to apply this method to the development of the internal tendencies in the Party as to the development of bourgeois society as a whole. It is necessary to be a Marxist not only in ‘external politics’ but also in ‘internal politics.’ In the first case the general conclusions of Marxism are already worked out and can be taken as models. In the second case they can be worked out by the constant application of the dialectical method…
This is very difficult for a young Party like ours. We do not mean by this that in old Parties, like the German party, all the leaders are philosophically developed politicians—far from it—but controversies, struggles, mistakes, and disillusionment have there subjected the collective thinking to a dialectical polishing. This wisdom, which has grown up to some extent spontaneously, often hinders the elaboration of new political methods, but at the same time preserves the Party from the application of tactical procedures which represent a ‘violation’ of its Party traditions.
Our Party has for almost a year now been in a period of stagnation. The question ‘What Is To Be Done?’ is posed to all thinking comrades. For all those concerned with this problem, it is clear that the causes of the stagnation are very deep, that the Party has to overcome a sort of organic malady. But the question ‘What Is To Be Done?’ cannot be resolved ‘by abstract reason,’ It can only be posed and resolved in a given historical perspective. What do we represent? What have we inherited from the past? We must give a reply to these questions. But this means that before resolving the questions of our immediate future, we must glance back over the recent past: the period of ‘Economism’ and the old Iskra.
The evolution of the ‘Marxist’ intelligentsia ‘Economism’ , ‘Criticism’, ‘Idealism’, ‘Social-Revolutionism’
The ‘Economists’ found themselves faced with a politically virgin proletariat, and this determined their simplified political methodology. The Western socialist parties had had to liberate the proletariat from its political subjugation to the left wing of the bourgeoisie under whose leadership it had already fought more than once: but the many political tasks relating to such a situation did not exist at all for our ‘Economists’. When the revolutionary wing of our bourgeoisie had, under the influence of the complete historical decomposition of purely democratic ideology, lost the ability to reply to the prophetic question: What is to be done now? They were obliged, given the historical situation in Russia, to adopt socialism as the starting point in the struggle for democracy. But it is precisely because socialism had absorbed all the elements of revolutionary democracy that it lost the capacity for opposing these elements, and thus developing its real political nature. The absence of competition from the radical bourgeoisie for influence over the proletariat, for a time enabled it to rest content with the crudest tactical methods, and fostered twisted, simplified ideas about the perspective of the political development of the working class, to which was opposed the notion of a ‘single reacting mass.’ In this view the working class would develop gradually, methodically, with mathematical regularity, day after day, from the simple to the complex, and starting with the demand for boiling water to make tea, reach the demand for the transfer of all factories into the hands of productive workers.
Such a simplistic system of ideas, and the tactics in keeping with it, were incapable of strengthening class consciousness, either in the Marxist intelligentsia or among the revolutionary elements of the proletariat. Such a system was unable to supply them with the means of political counter-pressure to radical democracy. And if, at the beginning of the century, during the upsurge, a radical-democratic movement full of initiative had existed alongside Social Democracy, it would have had every chance of unseating our Party. Attention has several times been drawn to this. A second fact is also beyond dispute. A bourgeois-radical organisation cannot rise up all at once just by revolutionary inspiration alone. To show itself to be armed at the critical moment, it would have to have armed itself in the preceding period: but it could only do so by fighting, directly or indirectly, against Social Democracy. The existence of a bourgeois-revolutionary party, influencing the intelligentsia and the proletariat at the same time (or at least actively endeavoring to do so), would have made any simplification of the tasks of a socialist party—a simplification bearing the hallmark of Economism—completely impossible. If Russian Marxism had not found a proletariat lying politically fallow, with no-one having staked a claim to it, it could not have resolved the question so easily, by demanding this fallow without further ado as its own domain; it would have had to show, and show politically, that this really was itsfield; it would have been obliged, by the very logic of political competition, to oppose its socialist class policy to democratic policy.
In this sense, history has more than once facilitated our Party’s first steps. But as nothing is given free, even the ‘ease’ of our first gains has become the cause of political fragility. The ‘Economists’, by their political practice, themselves gave rise to and provoked their own political adversaries; but as a result of what we have explained above, they made not the slightest effort to put the masses on their guard against them. Still more, they did not even believe they could possibly come into existence. Nonetheless they did emerge. However primitive the tactical methods of ‘Economism’ may have been, however inadequate was the action it undertook for the objective of opposing the proletarian masses to the State in all its aspects (that is, all its class aspects as well as all aspects ‘above class’), it all the same proved to be a powerful weapon for leading the masses to confront the domination of the colossal apparatus of police repression. Awakening broad layers of the proletariat, the ‘Economists’ made it the main reservoir of revolutionary energy.
This could not fail to bring about a whole string of consequences. Bourgeois ‘society’ is politically linked to the revolutionary masses through the revolutionary intelligentsia, the most sensitive layer within it. It is the barometer of the degree of political awakening of ‘the people.’ And the wave of student movements has never been so high. On its crest appeared some heroic, audacious figures in whom society, gripped by mixed feelings of hurt and pride, recognised its own children. The democratic movement began its march, and in successive waves, from left to right, poured into the political river. The right wing of the democratic movement at once revealed what it was based on: the influential elements in the zemstvo opposition. Riding the waves of the zemstvo intelligentsia appeared a figure who was not in the least heroic. Society’s feelings towards him were ambivalent, made up of self-satisfaction (‘That’s our man!’) and the congenital mistrust of the shop-keeping class.
This political process, in which some went to extremes—one section on the gallows at Schlusselberg, another in the quiet provincial streets of Stuttgart (‘far from the field of action of the Tsarist police and censors’)—this political process did not of course take place mechanically, but required and engendered a whole series of ideological developments in and through which the political groupings of the intelligentsia involved took shape and were consolidated. This feverish changing of philosophical docntriens and theoretical conceptions, which has taken place during the last fifteen years, is subject to the general logic of human thought and knowledge. But alongside this logic is another, much more dominating and intransigent, the logic of political interest. This last subjects the former to itself and imposes its will and its law on it.
The starting point for the ideological awakening of broad layers of the intelligentsia, after the lethargy of the 1880s, was marked by the introduction of the idea of ‘economic materialism’ into our legal literature. Marxism arrived, acquired letters after its name and took possession of a vast territory to which in reality it had no historical right. But finally, since Marxism was the irreplaceable weapon for struggling against populism, which had become totally reactionary, and also gave an overall theoretical justification for their natural penchant for Europeanising Russian social life, the intelligentsia, and in particular its increasingly strong right wing, freed itself, at first timidly and then with more and more assurance, from the proletarian-revolutionary conclusions of Marxism. ‘Self-liberation’ appeared in the form of ‘a pitiless re-examination of dogma’ and the ‘pulverisation of Marxism,’ as the late Mikhailovsky maliciously put it. But this effective process of ‘pulverisation,’ whatever the idealists of the postivist or ‘metaphysical’ schools think of it, was in fact determined not by the theoretical incapacity of the doctrine, but by social reasons which Marxism alone can explain.
It has already been said above that our Party, after absorbing all the active elements of the democratic movement, had deprived itself of the possibility of coming into opposition with it, which predetermined its primitivism over a long period. But ‘chase nature away and it comes galloping back’: this divisions between proletarian and bourgeois-democratic elements, which ought to have ‘concentrated’ the class energy of the socialist movement, began to develop it along the lines of a single general doctrine: vulgar Marxism. Moreover, it was not as if the socialist elements had begun to separate from the bourgeois-democratic elements, but rather the latter who under the slogan of ‘criticism’ began actively to purge their thinking of all the class elements of Marxism. Revolutionary doctrine lost its class edge. It was systematically, half-instinctively, half-consciously, blunted by socialist doctrinarism, either within the formal framework of Marxism, or in the form of open ‘criticism,’ when this framework in turn became too cramped.
Marxism, we have said, took over sections of society to which it really had no claim: but was this the case? Is it not rather that these elements took over Marxism to serve their momentary goals? Today it is not necessary to be especially clear-sighted to reply to this question. What Marxism really meant for the objectives of the Russian democratic movement is clearly shown to us by our ‘idealists’ of today, the ‘critics’ of yesterday and the ‘Marxists’ of the day before. Mr. P.G. [Struve—ed.], one of the authors of Problems of Idealism, recognises that Marxism has the merit of having ‘supplied a new popular programme which is clear and practical.’ The same author declares on the previous page that ‘socialism as such could not (in Chernyshevsky’s time) and cannot now, give a clear popular programme.’ In other words, Marxism is recognised as having no merits except where it is not socialism. But what meaning does Marxism have without socialism?
Mr. P.G.’s answer is straight to the point: ‘The enormous merit [author’s emphasis] of Russian Marxism’ is ‘ to have shown scientifically the historical necessity of capitalism in Russia,’ that is, to ‘justify it as an historical necessity.’ In other words, Marxism has freed the conscience of the intelligentsia from the duty of protecting anyone or anything from capitalism; Marxism has enabled them to fight for the Europeanisaiton of the social structure; ...
PanavPaul