Lenin on the World Revolution

1923

6 January 1923

About the co-operatives

Pravda No. 115 and 116

Lenin, Works, Volume 33, page 460:

... we must admit that our whole conception of socialism has undergone a fundamental change. The fundamental change consists in the fact that we used to emphasise and had to emphasise the political struggle, the revolution, the conquest of power, etc. Today, on the other hand, the emphasis has changed so much that it has shifted to peaceful organisational 'cultural work'. I would say that the emphasis for us is shifting to mere cultural work, if it were not for international relations, we would not have the duty to fight for our positions on an international scale.

16 January 1923

On our revolution (On the occasion of N. Sukhanov's note)

Lenin, Works Volume 33, pages 462 - 465

On Our Revolution

( complete text )

I

These days I am leafing through Sukhanov's notes on the revolution. The pedantry of all our petty-bourgeois democrats and of all the heroes of the Second International is particularly striking. Quite apart from the fact that they are extraordinarily cowardly, that even the best of them hide behind reservations as soon as the slightest deviation from the German model is involved - quite apart from this characteristic of all petty-bourgeois democrats, which has been displayed in abundance throughout the revolution, their slavish imitation of the past is striking.

They all call themselves Marxists, but they are incredibly pedantic in their understanding of Marxism. They have absolutely failed to grasp the decisive aspect of Marxism: its revolutionary dialectic. They have absolutely failed to grasp even Marx's direct indications that the greatest elasticity is necessary in times of revolution and, for example, have not even noticed the indications in Marx's correspondence, as far as I remember, from 1856, when Marx expressed the hope that a peasant war in Germany, which could bring about a revolutionary situation, would unite with the labour movement (Marx/Engels, Volume 29, page 47).

Indeed, they avoid even this direct reference and skirt around it like a cat around a bush.

In their whole behaviour they show themselves to be cowardly reformists who are afraid to move away from the bourgeoisie or even to break with it, and who at the same time disguise their cowardice by unrestrained phrase-mongering and boasting. But even from a purely theoretical point of view, their complete inability to grasp the following lines of thought of Marxism is striking. For up to now they have seen a certain path of development of capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe. And now they cannot imagine that this path can only be regarded as a pattern mutatis mutandis [with appropriate changes - ed.], not otherwise than with certain corrections (which, from the point of view of world history, are quite insignificant).

Firstly, a revolution connected with the first imperialist world war. In such a revolution, new features or features modified by the war had to appear, because never before has there been such a war in the world, under such conditions. We still see today that the bourgeoisie of the richest countries is incapable of establishing 'normal' bourgeois conditions after this war, but our reformists, small bourgeois who pose as revolutionaries, were and are of the belief that normal bourgeois conditions form the (not to be exceeded) limit, whereby they understand this 'norm' in an extremely standardised and limited way.

Secondly. They are completely unfamiliar with the idea that, given the general regularity of development throughout world history, individual stages of development that represent a peculiarity of either the form or the sequence of development are by no means to be ruled out, but on the contrary are to be assumed. It does not occur to them, for example, that Russia, which stands on the border between the civilised countries and the countries finally incorporated into civilisation for the first time by this war, the countries of the whole East, the non-European countries - that Russia could and must consequently exhibit certain peculiarities which naturally lie on the general line of the development of the world, but which distinguish the Russian revolution from all the preceding revolutions of the Western European countries and bring with them certain partial innovations in the transition to the countries of the East.