Lenin and the “Democratic Revolution”
Nasser Paydar
Although Russian society embarked on its capitalist development process later than Western Europe and societies such as England or France, by the beginning of the 20th century it had passed important stages in the development of this mode of production. Out of the country’s total population of 125 million, more than 10 million were employed workers. The working-class population exceeded 50 million. Nearly one million workers worked in industrial centres with 500 or more workers alone. The land reform of 1861 had paved the way for the widespread development of capitalism. Capital advances in various fields were advancing rapidly. The number of factories, which had not yet reached 1,000 units by the mid-1860s, exceeded 10,000 by the end of the 19th century. The history of the labour movement and the beginning of large-scale strikes in the centres of work and production dates back to 1870, and the final years of this decade witnessed the occurrence of large-scale strikes, such as the famous Petersburg spinning strike. The peasants formed a large population, but the vast majority of them were poor and destitute peasants. A large section of these peasants was also made up of semi-workers or seasonal sellers of labour power. The remnants of serfdom existed in some places. The predatory tsarist tyranny raged everywhere and in all corners of human life, in order to protect the exploitation of workers by capital as much as possible, to defend the interests of the capitalist class and all the laws and restrictions that protect wage slavery. At the same time, it was the protector of the interests of the feudal lords and the brutal exploitation of the peasants by the feudal lords.
The Russian working class was dealing with this situation, and on this basis, the correct strategy for its work was to combine its daily struggle against capitalist exploitation with the war against dictatorship, oppression, disenfranchisement, and deprivation of freedom. To show effective sensitivity to the struggles of the exploited peasantry against feudal oppression or any social protest of the subordinate masses, and, most importantly, to dig and pave the way for its own soviet, conscious, and anti-wage labour organization in the midst of the broad class and social struggle of the day. To link everything to the real war against capitalism and to make society at the widest level a training ground for the exercise of power against the system of wage slavery, against every form of exploitation, every form of libertarianism, oppression, and the tyranny of the tsar. The revolution in the early years of the twentieth century should have been considered by the Russian working class as the centre of intersection of all these campaigns and a rapid turn of preparation, solutions, and capabilities for rushing into the war against capitalism. The intellectuals of the Russian proletariat should have examined the revolutionary conditions of those days from this perspective and followed these expectations when the revolution occurred:
The Tsarist regime will be overthrown and the structure of any government over society and the workers will be in disarray. The remnants of feudalism will disappear. The vast mass of poor peasants will expropriate the feudal lords and kulaks with the power of their councils and under the umbrella of the proletariat’s support. Instead of clinging to the declining small-scale private property, they will take the path of joining the workers’ councils and fighting against the capitalist system. The working masses will organize themselves in their own nationwide and anti-wage-labour councils. They will make these councils a means of exercising united class power against the capitalists and the capitalist system. With the help of these councils and by marshalling their fighting power as widely and powerfully as possible, they will begin to block the channels of surplus value production and allocate the largest part of the annual social product to food, clothing, housing, health, education, treatment and welfare of citizens. They will make social and welfare facilities free and non-negotiable on the widest possible scale. They should make the complete elimination of sexual, ethnic and racial discrimination their agenda, implement unconditional political freedoms, freedom of the press, freedom of association and protest, plan efforts to further promote Marxian knowledge and anti-wage labour knowledge among the broad masses of the class, set the horizon of Councils and socialist socialization before their movement, and make preparing for this socialization the subject of their daily campaign and the preoccupation of their lives. It will certainly be said that defining the history of a hundred years ago with a long list of today’s musts is only wishful voluntarism. What was done that day is what could have been done, and what has not been implemented was beyond the realm of possibility!! If such talk is not the same as blind determinism and fatalism, then what is? This view of history is not only a sketch of the critical, class and revolutionary anatomy of history, not only a blocking of any criticism of past mistakes and radical and class lessons from history, but in addition to all this, it is also a pure endorsement of the occurrence of many preventable disasters, avoidable failures and even crimes and atrocities of the ruling classes in the slaughter of the exploited and subordinate masses. In the light of this view “what is real is rational”, what has happened during these hundred years of the global workers’ movement is right!! It had to happen; it was inevitable and destined.
In this perspective, there is basically no room for class struggle. The Russian working class could have done a lot at that time and in the following years that it did not do under the pressure of the leaders’ perversions and reformist policies of the left or right. The workers should have seen the revolution in this way. How successful they would have been and how much they had the ability to fight for these victories is a secondary issue, not the primary one. The fundamental issue was this orientation and the mobilization of maximum force to achieve any degree of success in this direction. Let us suppose that the workers had taken this path but had failed, even in this case the interpretation of the failure would have been that the realization of those goals required much greater preparation, awareness, and readiness. The opposite of the story was that the working masses were left to wander aimlessly. A situation in which even their greatest victories became the foundation stone of the worst defeats. Something that actually happened and successive generations of people will have to pay the price for years to come. The Russian Revolution of 1905 failed, but the fact is that even if it had not happened, the Russian working class would not have achieved much with the twisted versions of Lenin and Bolshevism and would not have left any stone unturned to improve the situation in its subsequent struggles against capitalism.
According to what Lenin said, the workers’ movement had to make a revolution in order to create the conditions for the growth and domination of capitalism in Russia! “Marxists certainly believe that the Russian revolution has a bourgeois aspect. What does this mean? That is, those democratic reforms in the political regime and those social and economic reforms that have become necessary for Russia not only do not in themselves provide the conditions for the collapse of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system, but on the contrary, for the first time they really prepare the ground for the broad and rapid development of European, not Asian, capitalism and for the first time make possible the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class” (Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution)
The theory that the working class should become the standard-bearer of the development of the capitalist mode of production! In general, and independently of which society or which historical conditions are being discussed, it is a theory that can be discussed in all respects!! The importance of the issue increases when this same statement later becomes the strategy and theoretical support of a narrative of revolution and the strategy of class struggle for the world labour movement!! It is from this time onwards that the discourse of a bourgeois or democratic revolution led by the proletariat begins to be spoken of and becomes the policy of the movements. Let us get to the heart of the matter. Why should the proletariat shoulder the historical task of the bourgeoisie!! Worse still! Why should it shoulder this role in conditions where the earth and sky are the beacons of the exploitation, power, oppression and rule of the bourgeoisie. The answer to this question, as far as we can tell from the literature of the supporters of this view, is only one thing. That the bourgeoisie, at a certain period of history, entered a phase of its class existence in which it lost its capacity to be revolutionary and, out of fear of the proletariat, was ready to compromise with monarchy, religion, feudalism and pre-capitalist reaction in general. It feared the former more than the latter and, in this regard, blocked the way to the realization of “democratic freedoms” or “civil rights of citizens” or other similar arguments that are put in this direction. Let us not forget that we must distinguish between what Lenin formulated and what later, following him, became the plan and content of the strategy and practice of the labour movement. As far as Lenin is concerned, at least on the surface, the discussion is about the conditions in which the bourgeoisie is not yet the dominant political class, while the proponents of “Leninism” have even extended this theory to the program of work and the policy of the proletariat’s struggle in the conditions of the complete establishment of capitalism and after many years of undisputed economic and political dominance of the bourgeoisie!! Our discussion is temporarily about the main source of the opinion or points that Lenin himself has put forward in this passage. First of all, it must be said that the bourgeoisie, not only in Russia but throughout its entire historical existence and not in the 1900s onwards, but for decades before, although it was not yet the dominant political or even economic class of today’s societies, it had completely lost all capacity for companionship, harmony and integration with the working class and the lower masses. The discussion is not only about the appeasement and compromise of this class with the monarchy, the church and the institutions of feudal power, but also about history and the fundamental relations between social classes in the process of historical changes. Perhaps Marx’s explanations about the analogy between the German bourgeoisie on the one hand and England and France on the other, and in this regard, comparing the German March Revolution of 1848 with the English Revolutions of 1648 and the French Revolutions of 1789, are somewhat illuminating. Marx says:
The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions. There were revolutions with a European model. These revolutions were not the victory of a particular social class over the old political order. They were the declaration of political order for the new European community. In these revolutions, the bourgeoisie gained victory, but the victory of the bourgeoisie at that time was the victory of a new social order. The victory of nationality over qualification, competition over class, the division of property over the priority of the eldest male child, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, the victory of lordship over the land over the lordship of the land over the owner, enlightenment over superstitions, family over surname, industry over laziness, civil law over privileges that originated in the Middle Ages, the revolution of 1648 was the victory of the 17th century over the 16th century and the revolution of 1789 was the victory of the 18th century over the 17th century. These revolutions were more than expressing the needs of the parts of the world that happened in those places, they expressed the needs of the whole world in the form that existed at that time” (Bourgeois and counter-revolution).
The real source of the characteristics that Marx lists for the two European revolutions above lies in one place. In both revolutions, the bourgeoisie was not yet faced with a hostile social force called the proletariat and with a specific battleground for this class in the social arena. There were populations of wage slaves, who in some countries, such as England, Italy, France, Spain or the Netherlands, fought against their employers in scattered workshops and sometimes at the level of a city or a region, in some cases they revolted, put forward political demands and demanded important transfers. The workers did all these things, but in the arena of the ongoing social and class struggles within society, where the new and the old society stood face to face, a field in which the economy, civilization, law, politics, culture, democracy, science and bourgeois thought lined up against the monarchy, autocracy, the church and all the manifestations of the feudal system, in this all-encompassing social struggle, they did not yet constitute a force hostile to the bourgeoisie, nor did they even represent different demands and expectations. The proletariat was in such a position in those conditions. It defined part of a vast mass movement of which the bourgeoisie was at the head and spoke. Within this movement it does not yet see a clash between its demands and those proposed by the representatives of the capitalist class, it does not yet have a different narrative of rights and freedoms and the content of economic or political and social developments. The history of the class struggle has not given rise to this split and distinct alignment. An important movement in history is advancing towards victory, of which the bourgeoisie is the standard-bearer and what it says is generally agreed upon by the other masses of the movement, including the proletariat.
This period inevitably followed its decline with the victory of the above revolutions or, in fact, with the change in historical conditions corresponding to the characteristics and arrangement of the forces supporting their occurrence. In the March Revolution of 1848, the bourgeoisie of Germany faced a different situation. For the obvious reason that the threshold of the second half of the nineteenth century was seriously different from that of France sixty years earlier, and especially from that of England 200 years earlier. At this time, the proletariat of France and the bourgeoisie of this country not only did not have common words or battles, but in most of the daily conflicts and most obviously in the June Revolution, they pointed the hottest weapons at each other. In Germany, too, although the working class did not have the power and position of its French counterpart, its relationship with the bourgeoisie was not of the type of relationship between the working masses of France and the bourgeoisie of 1789. The proletariat did not put forward any strange demands and expectations, but the German bourgeoisie saw the workers’ achievement of even these demands as a fatal threat to the establishment of their power, property, and position. Marx says in this regard:
“The German bourgeoisie had grown so sluggishly, so cowardly, so slowly that at the terrible moment of its confrontation with feudalism and autocracy, it found itself face to face with the proletariat and all those sections of urban society which were subordinate to the ideas and interests of the proletariat. With this class at its back, the bourgeoisie saw before it an enemy called Europe. The Prussian bourgeoisie, like the French bourgeoisie of 1789, was not a class representing the whole of the new society against the old society of monarchy and aristocracy; it had been reduced to the level of a group as clearly distinguished from the people as from the monarchy. Happy to confront each of them, indecisive against each of its opponents individually, because it always saw the other before or behind it. Inclinator to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representative of the old society from the beginning, because it saw itself as belonging to the old society. He did not represent a new society against the old society, but pursued his own interests, he sat at the helm of a revolution within the old society, not because the people were behind it but because the people were driving it forward, he was at the head of a movement, not because he was the pioneer of a new social era but simply because he represented the old vices” (ibid.).
Let us return to Lenin’s theory of democratic revolution by carefully examining what Marx points out about the difference between the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems that Lenin, referring to these differences or the difference in the position of the bourgeoisie in these different periods, concludes that in Russian society or in general in the era he is discussing, it is the turn of the proletariat to take on the historical task of the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century!! His grave mistake also lies precisely here. Lenin forgets that the fall of the bourgeoisie into the abyss that Marx depicts in the case of the German bourgeoisie does not mean that the proletariat must revive the historical role of the bourgeoisie of previous periods!! This narrative of the revolution and the strategy and policy of the workers’ movement in it are unfortunately part of the theoretical foundations of the same disastrous misrepresentations that have disarmed the international working class against the system of wage slavery for many years. The proletariat is not going to become the viceroy of the bourgeoisie and take on the responsibility of carrying out the historical mission of this class!! It is not going to fight for the victory of a revolution that was once the agenda of the bourgeoisie!! The proletariat will not be allowed to view the revolution, civil and social rights, political freedoms and the like with the same content and theme that the bourgeoisie once did. For the bourgeoisie, the revolution pursued the replacement of feudal property with capitalist property and the establishment of a political, civil and social order commensurate with the requirements of profitability and self-expansion of capital. The bourgeoisie was the standard-bearer of the nationality and type of civilization, rights, politics and order that would declare its own interests and the interests of capital appreciation as the general social interests. It portrays capitalist society as the final abode of history and instils the exploitation, oppression and absolute disenfranchisement of the proletariat as the very right, freedom, law and clear text of human values. Why should the proletariat, under the name of carrying out a democratic revolution, assume the historical role of such a class and the mission of the victory of the revolution of this class? Isn’t it because the proletariat is the standard-bearer of the liberation of humanity and is responsible for preparing a revolution that must bring about a world free of exploitation, classes, class society and the end of any separation of man from himself, his work and the product of his work, triumphing over the existing world? If this is so, which it must be, why should it even characterize this or that step, this or that phase of its revolutionary strategy with a representative of the role of the bourgeoisie? It will certainly be said that the reason is that the economic and social conditions and the arrangement of class forces of the day are not sufficient to realize socialism and eliminate capitalism. Very well! It is absolutely true that Russia in 1900 did not witness the establishment of the conditions and the arrangement of class forces necessary for the immediate abolition of wage slavery. There is no doubt about this, but why should the proletariat not, within the same conditions and at the same level of the arrangement of forces of the day, set about organizing its own all-Russian anti-wage labour soviet movement? Why should it not take refuge on the roof of this movement’s power? Why should it not pump its anti-wage labour narrative of revolution and freedom, social rights, and the future horizon of human life into the veins of the social protests of the era? Why should it not evaluate and practice the revolution of the day as a completely organic and homogeneous part of the process of the anti-capitalist struggle and for the abolition of wage labour. The fact is that Lenin’s theory of democratic revolution faces all these reasons. The gist of his statement is that the bourgeoisie is unable to lead the anti-feudal revolution due to fear of the proletariat, therefore the proletariat, which has brought the bourgeoisie to this day, must roll up its sleeves and, in front of the peasants and the discontented masses, directly begin to play the role of the same frightened, compromising, cowardly, and incapable revolutionary class!! When Marx compared the revolutions of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, he came to the conclusion above all that the first two centuries were the period of the bourgeoisie’s field against the old feudal and medieval world, and the last century, on the contrary, will be the period of the proletariat’s onslaught, the period of the campaign of the standard-bearer force of human liberation against capitalism. It was in this context that he said:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century can draw its inspiration only from the text of the future, not from the past. It cannot fulfil its specific task until it completely abandons any superstitious belief in the past. Previous revolutions needed to recall the historical events of past eras in order to be able to conceal their true content. In order to clarify its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century had to [lay down the dead so that the dead may take it up]; there the word prevailed over the content, and here the content over the word.” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
The above sentences show Marx’s particular seriousness and precision in describing the aspects of distinguishing the revolutions of the 19th century from those of previous periods. The basis of this distinction is certainly the expression of the historical life of the proletariat. The presence of this class in the revolutionary movement means that the revolution must derive its inspiration from the text of the future, that is, from the socialism of the abolition of wage labour. It must abandon any superstitious faith in the past, including faith in the narrative of revolution and law, rights, and freedom as envisioned by the bourgeoisie. It must avoid recalling old events and, in this regard, repeating what the bourgeoisie once did. Only in this way will the mission of changing the objectivity of existence and liberating man be realized and its true content clarified. Lenin’s theory of democratic revolution ignores all these facts and becomes the cornerstone of a narrative of revolution and the role of the proletariat that will trap the labour movement in the wilderness of captivity in capitalist solutions for a long history. Let us also add that the problem with Lenin’s theory is not limited to this. The content of his call is not only that the proletariat should become the representative of the bourgeoisie to bring about a revolution with the prospect of realizing political freedoms and civil rights and the democratic expectations of the masses, he puts the finishing touch on the distortion of the narrative of the role of the proletariat and claims that the working class must make a revolution in order to provide all the necessary conditions for the widest, most effective and most complete development of the capitalist mode of production!! The meaning of this very clear statement is only one thing. The proletariat, while still being the proletariat, must temporarily and for a while change its role with the bourgeoisie in order to bring upon itself and its movement and revolution all the calamities that the capitalist class and the capitalist system bring upon it.
Lenin brings this discussion forward at a time when Russian society has witnessed the greatest worker uprisings and strikes in years. A few months after the date of this discussion, in just one year, 3 million workers have stopped the wheels of work and production throughout the country, in all large and small industries. More importantly and fundamentally, several million workers, with spontaneous initiative and reference to the fruitful experiences of class struggle, organize themselves within their councils. For many years, these workers have been fighting capitalist exploitation and fighting against the dictatorship, oppression, and crimes of capital. The working masses are knocking on the threshold of a revolution from within this long campaign, and now at this point they hear from the most radical figure of Russian Social Democracy that the fundamental axis of their revolutionary mission is to ensure the greatest possible dominance of the capitalist system and the complete supremacy of the bourgeoisie as a class!! It is not a bad thing to remember that the program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, sometime before this date, emphasized the dominance of the capitalist mode of production in Russian society. A program that Lenin himself was involved in formulating. Nevertheless, he called on the 50 million working people of society and the 10 million workers fighting against wage slavery to make a revolution and with their revolution consolidate the foundations of the rule of the entire bourgeoisie and the capitalist system!! Let’s listen to the rest of his speech.
“It follows from these principles that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything other than the further development of capitalism is a reactionary idea. In societies like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism itself as from the insufficient development of capitalism. Therefore, the broadest, freest, and most rapid form of development of capitalist production is the undisputed interest of the working class. The bourgeois revolution is precisely the development which sweeps out of its way the remnants of the old system, or the remnants of serfdom (which include not only absolutism but also monarchy), with the utmost certainty, and prepares the way for the most rapid, freest, and most extensive development of capitalism in the most complete manner.” (Ibid.)
The statement that “in societies like Russia, the working class suffers as much from the insufficient development of capitalism as it does from capitalism itself” is not consistent with any homogeneous class logic or perspective with the anti-capitalist understanding of the working class. This argument can be based on two assumptions. The first assumption is that the further development of capitalism will definitely bring with it a desirable level of political growth, general welfare, civil rights, and improvement in the social status of the working masses!! And the second assumption is that the more capitalist production develops and expands, the proletariat will impose greater welfare, social opportunities, and civil or political rights on this system by resorting to its class struggle and power. The source of the first assumption lies in the inversions of the bourgeoisie. Capital and the intellectual representatives of the capitalist class have such a false idea instilled in the minds of the workers. The second assumption also implies that the proletariat, at least in societies like Russia at that time, should on the one hand prepare for the further development of capitalist relations and on the other hand impose some of its demands on the bourgeoisie with the whip of class struggle!! Leaving aside all this, the question arises: what has happened to the bourgeoisie that it has even lost the mood for the development of capital accumulation and the development of the capitalist mode of production?!! And the proletariat should demand the further growth of capitalism like “The bowl is hotter than the soup.”!!
Expecting that the working class of a society on the verge of a revolution and in conditions where it is supposed to be the main arena, the tribune and the manifesto house of the revolution, will listen to these kinds of words from the mouth of its most radical leaders! To believe these words, to want to adhere to them and at the same time to keep alive in its head the horizon of preparing, preparing and decorating the class ranks for the war against the system of wage slavery! This is an unreasonable and idealistic expectation. The working masses who must make a revolution in order to pave the way for the fastest, freest, most extensive and most complete growth of capitalism as much as possible!! Workers who suffer and suffer from the lack of development of capitalism much more than the existence of this system!! Why and with what calculations do they take the path of destruction of capitalism!! Let us add a point here. The democratic revolution had the greatest position and importance in Lenin’s assessments. This revolution is the axis for linking all actions, stances, policymaking and horizon-building in the discussions of his day!! The struggle against the compromises of the Russian big bourgeoisie is recommended so that the democratic revolution may triumph!! The working class must take the leadership of the revolution to guarantee its victory!! The solidarity of the workers and peasants must be achieved to be the support for the victory of the democratic revolution!! The “Party of Professional Revolutionaries” must emerge to lead the revolution to victory!! All roads lead directly to the democratic revolution, and this revolution, with all its importance, mission and destiny, is supposed to consolidate the foundation of capitalist power and the rule of the bourgeoisie!!
The proletariat must be a skilled rider of the revolution that has this horizon ahead of it!! And it must do this apparently for the reason that it must pave the way for socialism!! Lenin utters these words half a century after the issuance of the Communist Manifesto and utters them in a society that has 50 million working people and 10 million employed workers and in just one year 3 million workers have gone on strike in its factories. Does this mean exposing the current backwardness of Russian society? Absolutely not. It is not about denying the facts. However, expanding the conditions of capital accumulation and developing capitalism ever more freely, widely, faster and more fully is not only a guarantee for strengthening and equipping the class forces of the proletariat, not only does it not consolidate the ranks of its socialist revolution, not only does it not help in the field and exercise its stronger power against capitalism, which on the contrary makes the path of all these more uneven and blocked. If the unbridled growth of the productive forces and the unrelenting development of capital accumulation bring about the miracles intended by Lenin, the working class of Germany and other Western European countries should have conquered the last frontiers of communism many years ago. But the truth is something else. The working masses are determined to fight against exploitation, the disenfranchised, and the crimes of capitalism, which form the cornerstone of organizing and exercising class power against this system. It is in the heart of this struggle that revolutionary materialism and Marxian teachings can make the critique of bourgeois political economy their class consciousness. It is in the twists and turns of this struggle that the socialist council’s ability to organize society is established. These goals cannot be achieved in the endless paths of strengthening the yoke of wage slavery and strengthening the foundations of bourgeois power or capitalist rule. Lenin, with steadfast determination and endless enthusiasm, marched ahead of the Russian working masses to save the revolution of those days from the capture of the Russian big bourgeoisie. He took this path, but he did not pursue this work from the stronghold of the communist proletariat against wage labour, but only from the embankment of people’s communism and the revolutionization of the lower layers of the bourgeoisie.