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

SOME SOURCES OF THE PRESENT IDEOLOGICAL DISCORD91will become inevitable. Until history decides this questionof the future as it was decided for Germany in 1871, the Social-Democratsmust not relinquish the aim of meeting theinevitable political crisis with their own revolutionary solutionof the political, agrarian and national problem (ademocratic republic, the confiscation of landed estates, andthe full right of self-determination). But they must go forwardto meet the crisis which will settle once and for allthe question of the ‘German’ or ‘French’ consummation ofthe revolution, not stand and wait for the advent of thecrisis.”True. Splendid words paraphrasing the resolution of theParty Conference of December 1908. This formulation is infull accord with Maslov’s words in the second volume ofthe Agrarian Question and the tactics of the Bolsheviks.There is a decided difference between this formulation andthe standpoint expressed in the famous exclamation thatthe “Bolsheviks at the Conference of December 1908 decidedto push in where they had had one licking already.” 51We can “go forward with our revolutionary solution of theagrarian question” only together with the revolutionarysections of the bourgeois democracy, i.e., only with the peasantry,not with the liberals, who are satisfied with “concessionsfrom the landowners”. To go forward to confiscationtogether with the peasantry—there is nothing but a verbaldifference between this formulation and the principle:to go forward to a dictatorship of the proletariat and thepeasantry. But Martov, who came so close to the standpointof our Party in Golos No. 13, does not hold to this positionconsistently but constantly deviates towards Potresov andCherevanin, not only in the liquidationist book The SocialMovement but in the same issue, No. 13. In the same article,for instance, he defines the task of the moment as the“struggle for a legal labour movement, including one forwinning the legalisation of our own existence [of the Social-DemocraticParty!”. To say that means making a concessionto the liquidators: we want to strengthen theSocial-Democratic Party, utilising all legal possibilitiesand all opportunities of open action; the liquidators wantto squeeze the Party into the framework of a legal and open(under Stolypin) existence. We are fighting for the revolu-