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

90V. I. LENINbourgeoisie will play a reactionary role, and so on” (that’s just as hehas it: “and so on”!). “Hence was deduced the inevitability of thedictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which would contradictthe whole trend of economic development.”This tirade is wholly Vekhist. This “Marxism” is all ofthe Brentano, Sombart or Struve variety. 50 The standpointof its author is the standpoint of a liberal as distinct froma bourgeois democrat. For a liberal is a liberal preciselybecause he does not visualise, his mind does not accept,any other course of bourgeois development than the one alreadyin process, i.e., the one led by the landowners, whomake “concessions” to the bourgeoisie. A democrat is ademocrat precisely because he sees another way and fightsfor it, the way led by the “people”, i.e., the petty bourgeoisie,the peasantry and the proletariat, but he does not seethat this way too is bourgeois. In the “Summing up” of thisliquidationist book Maslov forgot all about the two linesof bourgeois development, about the strength of the bourgeoisieof the American type (in its Russian equivalent:a bourgeoisie that grows out of the peasantry, on a soilswept clean of landlordism by revolutionary means), aboutthe weakness of the bourgeoisie of the Prussian type (enslavedby “landowners”); he forgot that the Bolsheviks havenever spoken of the “inevitability” of “dictatorship”, but ofits necessity for the victory of the American path; he forgotthat the Bolsheviks deduced “dictatorship” not from theweakness of the bourgeoisie, but from the objective, economicconditions making possible two lines of development ofthe bourgeoisie. In its theoretical aspect the tirade quotedis a sheer mass of confusion (which Maslov himself repudiatesin the second volume of the Agrarian Question); inits practical political aspect it is liberalism, an ideologicaldefence of extreme liquidationism.Now see how an unsound position on the main economicquestion leads to unsound political conclusions. Here isa quotation from Martov’s article “Whither Next?” (GolosSotsial-Demokrata No. 13): “In contemporary Russia noone can say definitely just now whether in a new politicalcrisis favourable objective conditions will be created fora radical democratic revolution; we can only indicate thespecific conditions under which a revolution of this kind