Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

HISTORICAL MEANING OF INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE IN RUSSIA379its forms were unrestrained, and the ideological shadow castby this process was great.”This truly “unrestrained” phrase-mongering is merelythe “ideological shadow” of liberalism. Both Martov andTrotsky mix up different historical periods and compareRussia, which is going through her bourgeois revolution,with Europe, where these revolutions were completed longago. In Europe the real political content of Social-Democraticwork is to prepare the proletariat for the strugglefor power against the bourgeoisie, which already holds fullsway in the state. In Russia, the question is still only oneof creating a modern bourgeois state, which will be similareither to a Junker monarchy (in the event of tsarism beingvictorious over democracy) or to a peasant bourgeois-democraticrepublic (in the event of democracy being victoriousover tsarism). And the victory of democracy in present-dayRussia is possible only if the peasant masses follow the leadof the revolutionary proletariat and not that of the treacherousliberals. History has not yet decided this question. Thebourgeois revolutions are not yet completed in Russia andwithin these bounds, i.e., within the bounds of the strugglefor the form of the bourgeois regime in Russia, “the real politicalcontent” of the work of Russian Social-Democratsis less “limited” than in countries where there is no strugglefor the confiscation of the landed estates by the peasants,where the bourgeois revolutions were completed long ago.It is easy to understand why the class interests of the bourgeoisiecompel the liberals to try to persuade the workersthat their role in the revolution is “limited”, that the struggleof trends is caused by the intelligentsia, and not by profoundeconomic contradictions, that the workers’ party must be“not the leader in the struggle for emancipation, but a classparty”. This is the formula that the Golosist liquidatorsadvanced quite recently (Levitsky in Nasha Zarya) and whichthe liberals have approved. They use the term “class party”in the Brentano-Sombart sense: concern yourself only withyour own class and abandon “Blanquist dreams” of leadingall the revolutionary elements of the people in a struggleagainst tsarism and treacherous liberalism.