p The struggle for dialectics and materialism and for their creative development was also required for the battle which Lenin was then waging against the Leftist trends which claimed to represent the revolutionary wing of the working-class movement, the revolutionary mainstream of social thought. Lenin said these trends were “vulgar revolutionism" and showed that petty-bourgeois reformism and pettybourgeois revolutionism were internally akin to each other, and that this was most clear in the working-class movement at the turning points of history. Lenin wrote: “Every specific turn in history causes some change in the form of petty-bourgeois wavering, which always occurs alongside the proletariat, and which, in one degree or another, always penetrates its midst.

p “This wavering flows in two ‘streams’: petty-bourgeois reformism, i.e., servility to the bourgeoisie covered by a cloak of sentimental democratic and ‘Social’-Democratic phrases and fatuous wishes; and petty-bourgeois revolutionism—menacing, blustering and boastful in words, but a mere bubble of disunity, disruption and brainlessness in deeds. This wavering will inevitably occur until the taproot of capitalism is cut."  [204•7 

p Analysing the epistemological roots of “vulgar revolutionism”, Lenin showed that subjective idealism was its methodological basis. He stressed that the swing towards subjective idealism was most characteristic of bourgeois ideology in the epoch of imperialism. Philosophy was faced with the great task of giving a scientific explanation of the active role of human consciousness and men’s conscious practical activity on the basis of the objective laws of nature and society. Diverse schools of bourgeois philosophy, the subjective idealists most prominently, did a motley round-dance about these questions. As the old metaphysical notions were collapsing, they claimed to be warring against all dogmas, but actually sought to deny scientific knowledge every objective reference-point, extolled randomness, and encouraged the 205 arbitrariness of bourgeois thinking which was unable to get at the truth. Under the cover of the same struggle against ossified dogmas in literature and art, these men insisted on a complete expulsion of all ideas and enshrined absurdity as “freedom of art”. These were the products of the disintegration which emanated from the rotting social system. In face of new advances in science and defending itself against these all along the line, the reactionaries took cover behind the shield of subjective idealism and declared the objective uniformities discovered by science to be the subjective notions of the scientists concerned.

p Imperialism, the final stage in the development of capitalism, is marked by an aggravation of its most profound contradictions, the germination of socialist revolution, and convulsive attempts by reaction to slow down the revolutionary process. One such attempt was the revival of subjective-idealist views in philosophy and science. By then, the vast productive forces awakened by capitalism were stimulating the development of technical and scientific thought. Improved technology and machinery, in particular, meant fresh demands upon research, new instruments for the researcher and fresh opportunities for experiment. The advance of science, physics in particular, had reached a point at which the old, mechanistic views, which no longer agreed with the new scientific data, were being broken up. This was evidence of the boundless potentialities of the human mind in gaining a knowledge of objective reality. The reactionaries, for their part, claimed that this merely showed the ability of the human mind to create a “picture of the world”, without ever getting at the objective truth.

p The bourgeois sermon of subjective idealism, backed up with false references to scientific achievements, necessarily had an effect on the vacillating petty-bourgeois elements, who had joined the working-class movement and were inclined to “vulgar revolutionism”. They held that if the time came to act, everything depended on the subjective factor. They refused to consider the objective uniformities, believing that everything depended on the notions of men. They denied there were any uniformities at all. The revival of subjective idealism in scientific theories gave “vulgar revolutionism" something like a methodological basis. Bakunin and his followers were unable to find any other theoretical “substantiation”, except neo-Hegelianism. Theorists who had fallen under the influence of bourgeois subjective-idealist views were inclined to take an “extreme Leftist" stand in politics, and, for example, demanded the recall of workers’ deputies from the State Duma and opposed the use of parliamentary forms of struggle.

p Lenin gave a profound critique of the urge to revive subjective idealism. He exposed the reactionary political substance of this trend and showed its epistemological roots, giving a deep analysis of the development of scientific thought and the philosophical problems facing natural science, physics in particular.

p Throughout his life, Lenin carried on a struggle against every expression of subjectivism in the development of social thought and against any departures towards subjective idealism. He began his struggle with a critique of subjective sociology and Narodnik socialism.

p The sociology propounded by the “friends of the people" (N. K. Mikhailovsky and others) was based on the subjective-idealist outlook and a denial that economic relations had the crucial role to play in social relations. These men were loudest in talking about the people on every possible occasion but hardly anyone had so debased the importance of the people in history as the advocates of subjective sociology, because they brought to the fore individuals, “heroes” who were contrasted with the faceless crowd.

p The epigones of Narodnik socialism advocated the ideas of pettybourgeois revolutionism, which is the opposite of the proletarian revolutionary approach. They tended to isolate the peasants from the workers, the peasant movement from the working-class movement, and regarded the peasant movement as being a truly socialist movement, with the peasant commune being the basic unit of socialist society.

p They failed to understand that capitalism, already developing in Russia, was a natural stage in the evolution of class society, and denied Marx’s great discovery, the worldwide historical importance of the proletarian class struggle.

p Lenin and the Bolsheviks carried on a persistent fight against any attempt to return to the petty-bourgeois theories of social thought, which tended to minimise the role of the people in the historical process, or extolled heroes or spontaneous movements, and rejected organisation and a conscious approach.

p The effort to bring a high level of organisation and consciousness to the masses is the struggle for proletarian leadership of the working people, the peasantry in the first place, for the ideological and political influence of the working-class party on these masses, and against petty-bourgeois socialism.

p The struggle carried on by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party against every form of petty-bourgeois socialism is of tremendous international importance. In 1920, Lenin wrote: “Little is known in other countries of the fact that Bolshevism took shape, developed and became steeled in the long years of struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter and, in all essential matters, does not measure up to the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle."  [206•8  In 1905, Lenin explained why this petty-bourgeois revolutionism was so tenacious in Russia. He wrote: “Russia’s backwardness naturally accounts for the firm footing that various obsolete socialist doctrines gained in our 207 country. The entire history of Russian revolutionary thought during the last quarter of a century is the history of the struggle waged by Marxism against petty-bourgeois “Narodnik socialism."  [207•9  This applied especially to petty-bourgeois, “Narodnik socialism”, because there remained the individual farming peasants with their backward socio-economic relations.

p At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, Lenin urged the Party to work so as to make the proletariat the leader of the peasantry in the coming revolution.

p The struggle against petty-bourgeois, “Narodnik socialism" was not a short-lived episode. The Bolsheviks carried on a great historical struggle to win over the toiling peasantry, and to establish an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, so as to provide correct quidance for the revolutionary energy the peasantry had been accumulating over the centuries. Otherwise it was impossible to create the revolutionary tide that could sweep away first tsarism, and then, after a regrouping of the forces, the power of the capitalists as well.

p Throughout his life, Lenin continued with tireless energy to fight against every expression of subjectivism, subjective idealism and voluntarism in the working-class movement, against the attempts of these most harmful trends to camouflage themselves as Marxism, and against every effort to push the revolutionary movement into adventurism and so inevitable defeat.

p At various stages of the revolutionary process, Lenin’s Party carried on a relentless fight against the “Otzovists”, the “Left Communists”, the Trotskyites and others who loved to use ultra-Leftist catchwords, and showed these to be essentially capitulationist.

p Much importance attaches to the struggle carried on by Lenin and the Party against Trotskyism, which has always covered up its capitulationist substance by means of Leftist and ultra-Leftist catchwords. The Trotskyites were seeking to wind up the construction of the new society and contrasted the building of socialism in the USSR and the interests of the world revolution. They denied the possibility of building socialism in one country and demanded that the revolution should be exported and the world revolutionary process stimulated by military means. They claimed that concentration on the various aspects of economic construction allegedly tended to narrow down the field of vision and weaken one’s revolutionary sense. Their “broad” revolutionary outlook boiled down to ceaseless chatter about the world revolution, a rejection of economic and, consequently, of political efforts to build up socialism, and capitulation to imperialism. Lenin exposed the Trotskyite capitulationists and stressed the importance of Soviet economic construction for the advance of the world revolutionary process, and the 208 strengthening of the economic might of the Soviet Union, showing that these opened up real prospects for the emancipation movement.

p Lenin fought against petty-bourgeois Leftism not only within the Bolshevik Party but also in the world communist movement, exposing expressions of Leftism in foreign Communist parties like the denial of parliamentary forms of struggle, underestimation of communist activity in the trade unions, neglect of the struggle for reforms, absolutisation of armed forms of class struggle, etc. He said these Leftist relapses amounted to an “infantile disorder" and taught the Communists to see its dangers and to take timely measures to cure it, so as not slide into empty talk and sectarianism, in isolation from the masses and the true revolutionary cause. “The greatest, perhaps the only danger to the genuine revolutionary is that of exaggerated revolutionism, ignoring the limits and conditions in which revolutionary methods are appropriate and can be successfully employed. True revolutionaries have mostly come a cropper when they began to write ‘revolution’ with a capital R, to elevate ‘revolution’ to something almost divine, to lose their heads, to lose the ability to reflect, weigh and ascertain in the coolest and most dispassionate manner at what moment, under what circumstances and in which sphere of action you must act in a revolutionary manner, and at what moment, under what circumstances and in which sphere you must turn to reformist action. True revolutionaries will perish (not that they will be defeated from outside, but that their work will suffer internal collapse) only if they abandon their sober outlook and take it into their heads that the ’great, victorious, world’ revolution can and must solve all problems in a revolutionary manner under all circumstances and in all spheres of action. If they do this, their doom is certain."  [208•10 

p Lenin showed up the petty-bourgeois nature of Left opportunism, and proved that Leftism had its social roots in the petty-bourgeois, the petty proprietor, who had “gone wild" from the horrors of capitalism, whose revolutionism was unstable and superficial, and who lacked proletarian self-control, organisation, discipline and steadfastness. Lenin wrote: “Revolutionary phrase-making, more often than not, is a disease from which revolutionary parties suffer at times when they constitute, directly or indirectly, a combination, alliance or intermingling of proletarian and petty-bourgeois elements, and when the course of revolutionary events is marked by big, rapid zigzags."  [208•11 

p The Communist Party, which Lenin founded, and the whole world communist movement have developed and have been tempered in implacable struggle on two fronts: against Right-wing opportunism, revisionism and liquidationism, and also against “Left”-wing opportunism, dogmatism and sectarianism. Social thought was unable to advance 209 without overcoming these obstacles in its way. Right-wing and “Left”-wing opportunism tended to drive social thought and the revolutionary cause into a dead end.

p Today, the task is to merge the revolutionary forces in a single tide not only within the boundaries of individual countries, but on a worldwide scale, considering the broad sweep of the national liberation movement, which is at root a peasant movement. The conjunction of this movement with the struggle carried on by the socialist system, the greatest achievement of the world working class, and with the struggle carried on by labour against capital in the capitalist countries is an earnest of success for the world revolutionary process as a whole.

p Today, with fresh contingents, including those in the agrarian countries, joining the world revolutionary process, the danger of a revival of various petty-bourgeois revolutionary ideas in contrast to the proletarian revolutionary approach and scientific communism is a very real one. The imperialist bourgeoisie insists on the contrast in order to exert an influence on the national liberation movement in its own interests, and to separate it from the struggle of the international working class and the world socialist system for the construction of a new society.

p Such theories may well spread whenever there is a possibility for the petty-bourgeois sections to increase their influence. Lenin stressed that “economic relations which are backward, or which lag in their development, constantly lead to the appearance of supporters of the labour movement who assimilate only certain aspects of Marxism, only certain parts of the new world outlook, or individual slogans and demands, being unable to make a determined break with all the traditions of the bourgeois world outlook in general."  [209•12 

p Lenin indicated the way of struggle for the working class, which marches at the head of all the working people, and explained the importance for a victory in this struggle of a solid political organisation of the working class and the establishment of a mass proletarian party. The Marxist-Leninist Party, equipped with a scientific revolutionary theory, carrying the working class with it, and rallying the peasantry and all the other sections of the working people round the working class, is a key factor in the historical process on the eve of the socialist revolution and in the period of thansition from capitalism to socialism, when working-people’s movements cease to be spontaneous and when the importance of their organisation and consciousness is multiplied a hundredfold. That is the only way to rouse the great social energy of the masses, the architects of history.

Lenin’s exposure of the methodological basis of “Left”-wing and Right-wing opportunist trends is of tremendous importance for social 210 thought, and will continue to be meaningful so long as the capitalists and the petty-bourgeois sections continue to exist. Lenin achieved this by taking a creative approach to materialist dialectics and analysing the dialectics of human cognition and of nature and society.