p What I said above about attacks, reproaches and accusations was not an empty phrase. It is still quite a short time since the Emancipation of Labour group came into existence, and yet how many objections we have had to listen to, the only cause for which was an obstinate refusal to examine the substance of our programme; how many misunderstandings have been caused only by the desire to ascribe to us thoughts and intentions which never entered our heads! By more or less veiled hints, avoiding "direct blows”, not mentioning our names but using our expressions and twisting and distorting our thoughts, some have directly and others indirectly represented us as dried-up bookworms and dogmatists ready to sacrifice the people’s happiness and welfare to the orderliness and harmony of the theories which they have hatched in their studies. And the theories themselves have been branded as a kind of imported commodity which it is just as dangerous for Russia to spread there as to import English opium to China. The time came long ago to put an end to this confusion of conceptions, to clear up these more or less sincere misunderstandings!

p I begin with what is most important.

p In the first chapter of my pamphlet I said a few words deriding revolutionaries who are afraid of “bourgeois” economic progress and who inevitably arrive at the "amazing conclusion that Russia’s economic backwardness was a most reliable ally of the revolution and that stagnation was to be blazoned as the first and only paragraph of our minimum programme”. I said that the Russian anarchists, Narodniks and Blanquists could become "revolutionary in substance and not in name alone" only if they "revolutionised their own heads and learned to understand the course of historical development and led it instead of asking old mother history to mark time while they laid new, straighter and better beaten roads for her".  [124•* 

p At the end of the third chapter I endeavoured to convince my readers that "to bind together in one two so fundamentally different matters as the overthrow of absolutism and the socialist revolution, to wage revolutionary struggle in the belief that these two elements of social development will coincide in the history of our country means to put off the advent of both".  [125•*  I further expressed the thought that "the rural population of today, living in backward social conditions, is not only less capable of conscious political initiative than the industrial workers, it is also less responsive to the movement which our revolutionary intelligentsia has begun....” "And besides,” I continued, "the peasantry is now going through a difficult, critical period. The previous ’ancestral foundations’ of its economy are crumbling, the ill-fated village commune itself is being discredited in its eyes, as is admitted even by such ’ancestral’ organs of Narodism as Nedelya; and the new forms of labour and life are only in the process of formation, and this creative process is more intensive in the industrial centres."

p From these and similar passages it was concluded that my comrades and I, convinced that the immediate future in our country belongs to capitalism, were ready to drive Russia’s working population into the iron embraces of capital and considered as “untimely” any struggle waged by the people for their economic emancipation.

p In his article "What Can We Expect from the Revolution?" Mr. Tikhomirov, describing the "curious role" of public figures whose programmes "have no link with life”, gives a particularly detailed picture of the "tragic situation" of socialists who think "that in order to work out the material conditions necessary to make the socialist system possible, Russia must necessarily go through the phase of capitalism”. Mr. Tikhomirov imagines the situation as simply desperate; in it

p Not a step but leads to horror!

p Our socialists have to "fuss about creating a class in whose name they wish to work, and for that they have to desire the speedy dismissal of the millions of working people who exist in reality but, having the misfortune not to be proletarians, have no role in the scientific scheme of social progress”. But the fall from grace of these pedants of socialism cannot be confined to the sphere of “fuss” and “desires”. Wer A sagt, muss auch B sagen! "Had he been consistent and placed the interests of the revolution above his own moral purity, the socialist should then have entered into a direct alliance with the knights of primitive 126 accumulation whose hearts and hands do not tremble at developing various ’surplus-values’ and uniting the workers in the all-saving situation of the beggarly proletarian.” The revolutionary is thus transformed into a supporter of the exploitation of labour, and Mr. Tikhomirov is very “timely” when he asks: "Where, then, is the difference between the socialist and the bourgeois? "

p I don’t know just what “socialists” the honourable writer has in view in this case. As we see, he has no liking for "direct blows”, and without mentioning his adversaries he merely informs the readers that "some other people" think this or that. The reader is completely unaware who those other people are and whether it is true that they think what Mr. Tikhomirov says they do. Neither do I know whether his readers share his horror of the position of the socialists whom he criticises. But the subject he touches upon is so interesting, the accusations which he brings against certain socialists so much resemble accusations made more than once against us, his whole programme and "what he expects from the revolution" are to such an extent determined by the negative solution of the question of capitalism that it is his article which must provide the occasion for as complete and comprehensive an elucidation of this question as possible.

p And so, “must” or "must not" Russia go through the “school” of capitalism?

p The answer to this question is of the highest importance for the correct posing of our socialist party’s tasks. It is therefore not surprising that it has for a long time claimed the attention of Russian revolutionaries. Until recent times the great majority of these were inclined to answer the question categorically in the negative. I also had my share of the general infatuation, and in the editorial of No. 3 of Zemlya i Volya I attempted to prove that "history is by no means a monotonous mechanical process”; that capitalism is a necessary predecessor of socialism only "in the West, where the village commune broke up as early as in the struggle against medieval feudalism”; that in our country, where the commune "constitutes the most characteristic feature of the peasantry’s relations to the land”, the triumph of socialism may be achieved in an entirely different way; collective ownership of the land may serve as the starting-point for the organisation of all aspects of the people’s economic life on socialist principles. "That is why,” I concluded, "our main task is to create a militant popular-revolutionary organisation to carry out a popular-revolutionary upheaval in the nearest possible future." ^^89^^

p Thus, as early as January 1879, I supported the very same proposition that Mr. Tikhomirov defends, true,

p Mit ein bischen anderen Worten,^^90^^

p now, in 1884, when he says that "beyond the mysterious line where the waves of history’s flood seethe and foam”, or, to put it more simply, after the fall of the present social and political system, "we shall find" not the reign of capitalism, as "certain people" maintain, but "the foundation of the socialist organisation of Russia”. The necessity for creating a "militant popular-revolutionary organisation" is relegated to the background by Mr. Tikhomirov and gives place to a conspiratorial organisation of our intelligentsia which is to seize power and thus give the signal for the popular revolution. In this respect his views differ as much from those I formerly held as the programme of Narodnaya Volya from that of Zemlya i Volya. But Mr. Tikhomirov’s mistakes about the economic side of the question are almost “identical” with those I made in the article mentioned. Consequently, in answering Mr. Tikhomirov I shall have to make frequent corrections to arguments which once appeared to me perfectly convincing and final.

Precisely because Mr. Tikhomirov’s standpoint is not distinguished by freshness or novelty I cannot confine myself to criticising his arguments, but must examine as fully as possible all that had already been said to support a negative answer to the question which now occupies us. Russian literature in the preceding decades gives us far more wealthy critical material than the article "What Can We Expect from the Revolution? "