Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

NOTES3977576777879Socialist-Revolutionaries—members of the Socialist-RevolutionaryParty, a petty-bourgeois party in Russia, which arose at the end of1901 and beginning of 1902 as a result of the merger of variousNarodnik groups and circles. The Socialist-Revolutionaries wereoblivious to the class differences between the proletariat and pettyproprietors, glossed over the class differentiation and contradictionswithin the peasantry and negated the leading role of the proletariatin the revolution. The views of the Socialist-Revolutionaries werean eclectic mixture of the ideas of Narodism and revisionism. TheBolshevik Party exposed their attempts to masquerade as socialists,carried out a determined struggle against them for influence overthe peasantry and showed the danger to the working-class movementof their tactics of individual terrorism.The fact that the peasantry, to which the Socialist-Revolutionariesappealed, was not a homogeneous class determined their politicaland ideological instability and organisational disunity andtheir constant waverings between the liberal bourgeoisie and theproletariat. As early as the first Russian revolution (1905-07) theRight wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party broke away andformed the legal Trudovik Popular Socialist Party whose outlookwas close to that of the Cadets, and the Left wing formed the semianarchistLeague of Maximalists. The majority of Socialist-Revolutionariesadopted a social-chauvinist position during the FirstWorld War.O.C.-ists—See Note No 31. p. 164Nota-Bene—pen-name used by Bukharin. p. 165Towards the end of 1916 and early in 1917 Lenin devoted much ofhis time to intensive research on the problem of the state, studyingthe works of Marx and Engels and other sources. His copious notes,comments and conclusions were recorded in a notebook, the famousBlue Notebook, under the general heading “Marxism and the State”.In a letter to Alexandra Kollontai dated February 4 (17), 1917 hewrote: “I’m working on an article (have already prepared nearly allthe material) on the Marxist position on the state.” The article wasmeant for No. 4 of Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, and Lenin had apparentlydrawn up the plan for it. However, the article was not writtenat the time. The materials collected for it were made the basis ofLenin’s celebrated The State and Revolution, written in the summerof 1917. p. 166See Note No 31. p. 167Liquidators—exponents of an opportunist trend that spread amongthe Menshevik Social-Democrats after the defeat of the 190-07Revolution.The liquidators demanded the dissolution of the illegal revolutionaryworking-class party. They urged the workers to abandon therevolutionary struggle against tsarism and intended to establish abroad opportunist party, which would renounce revolutionary slo-