Lenin discusses the achievements and challenges of the October Revolution, emphasizing the significant progress made in dismantling feudal and bourgeois structures in Russia. He asserts that the revolution has addressed issues such as serfdom, women's rights, and national oppression more effectively than previous bourgeois revolutions. Despite acknowledging mistakes and setbacks in building the Soviet state, Lenin expresses confidence in the proletarian revolution's potential to overcome imperialism and establish a socialist economy through the New Economic Policy, which aims to transition from state capitalism to socialism while maintaining production incentives.
Today is the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, which saw the working class seize power for the first time ever. We are republishing a lesser-known article by Lenin, which outlines the theory of permanent revolution in relation to the Russian Revolution.
This text was published on 18 October 1921 in Pravda, at that time the official organ of the Russian Communist Party.
At the time of the article’s publication, the Bolsheviks had just changed from a policy of war communism to the ‘New Economic Policy’.
The NEP saw a loosening of direct state control over the distribution of resources in favour of state-regulated market relations, particularly in the rural economy.
This move to ‘state capitalism’, to borrow the term used by Lenin in the article, was viewed as a temporary retreat in order to restabilise the economy – devastated after seven years of continuous war – and thereby safeguard the future of the revolution.
While Lenin uses the term state capitalism, it is important to note that Russia was still, in its fundamentals, a planned economy, with the main levers of economic development – the banks, large industry, land, foreign trade, etc. – in the hands of the workers’ state.
For more information on the New Economic Policy, see Rob Sewell and Alan Woods’ In Defence of Lenin, and Ted Grant’s Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution.
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This article by Lenin is an excellent exposition of how the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the Russian Revolution – uprooting the remnants of feudalism, serfdom, and medievalism, and establishing genuine democracy – were deeply intertwined with its socialist tasks.
As Lenin observes:
“We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a “by-product” of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities.“We have always said that reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said – and proved it by deeds – that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the socialist revolution.”
This is – as plain as day – a recognition by Lenin of Leon’s Trotsky theory of permanent revolution, which Lenin was completely won over to in the course of the Russian Revolution.
For that very reason, this text is a clear refutation of Stalinist ‘two-stage’ theory, and any attempts by proponents of Stalinism to claim that Lenin favoured such a programme.
This stagist ‘theory’ posits the exact opposite: that in countries where bourgeois-democratic tasks remain unresolved, the socialist tasks must be left to the indefinite future, in favour of focussing on a ‘pure’ democratic programme.
In practice, this policy led to the shipwreck of countless revolutionary struggles, from the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 to the Indonesian national liberation struggle in the 1960s.
Editor’s note: Two dates are given in some places. This is due to the fact that before February 1918, Russia used a different calendar to the rest of the world.
Paragraphs have been shortened from the original text in Lenin’s Collected Works. Subheadings have also been added for readability.
The fourth anniversary of October 25 (November 7) is approaching.
The farther that great day recedes from us, the more clearly we see the significance of the proletarian revolution in Russia, and the more deeply we reflect upon the practical experience of our work as a whole.
Very briefly and, of course, in very incomplete and rough outline, this significance and experience may be summed up as follows.
Bourgeois-democratic tasks
The direct and immediate object of the revolution in Russia was a bourgeois-democratic one, namely, to destroy the survivals of medievalism and sweep them away completely, to purge Russia of this barbarism, of this shame, and to remove this immense obstacle to all culture and progress in our country.
And we can justifiably pride ourselves on having carried out that purge with greater determination and much more rapidly, boldly and successfully, and, from the point of view of its effect on the masses, much more widely and deeply, than the great French Revolution over one hundred and twenty-five years ago.
Both the anarchists and the petty-bourgeois democrats (i.e., the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who are the Russian counterparts of that international social type) have talked and are still talking an incredible lot of nonsense about the relation between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist (that is, proletarian) revolution.
The last four years have proved to the hilt that our interpretation of Marxism on this point, and our estimate of the experience of former revolutions were correct.
We have consummated the bourgeois-democratic revolution as nobody had done before. We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall, and knowing too that (in the last analysis) struggle alone will determine how far we shall advance, what part of this immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, and to what extent we shall succeed in consolidating our victories.
Time will show. But we see even now that a tremendous amount – tremendous for this ruined, exhausted and backward country – has already been done towards the socialist transformation of society.
Let us, however, finish what we have to say about the bourgeois-democratic content of our revolution. Marxists must understand what that means. To explain, let us take a few striking examples.
The bourgeois-democratic content of the revolution means that the social relations (system, institutions) of the country are purged of medievalism, serfdom, feudalism.
What were the chief manifestations, survivals, remnants of serfdom in Russia up to 1917? The monarchy, the system of social estates, landed proprietorship and land tenure, the status of women, religion, and national oppression.
Vladimir Lenin addressing soldiers in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, 5 May 1920
Take any one of these Augean stables, which, incidentally, were left largely uncleansed by all the more advanced states when they accomplished their bourgeois-democratic revolutions one hundred and twenty-five, two hundred and fifty and more years ago (1649 in England); take any of these Augean stables, and you will see that we have cleansed them thoroughly.
In a matter of ten weeks, from October 25 (November 7), 1917 to January 5, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, we accomplished a thousand times more in this respect than was accomplished by the bourgeois democrats and liberals (the Cadets) and by the petty-bourgeois democrats (the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries) during the eight months they were in power.
Those poltroons, gas-bags, vainglorious Narcissuses and petty Hamlets brandished their wooden swords – but did not even destroy the monarchy! We cleansed out all that monarchist muck as nobody had ever done before.
We left not a stone, not a brick of that ancient edifice, the social-estate system (even the most advanced countries, such as Britain, France and Germany, have not completely eliminated the survivals of that system to this day!), standing.
We tore out the deep-seated roots of the social-estate system, namely, the remnants of feudalism and serfdom in the system of land ownership, to the last.
“One may argue” (there are plenty of quill-drivers, Cadets, Mensheviks, and Socialist-Revolutionaries abroad to indulge in such arguments) as to what “in the long run” will be the outcome of the agrarian reform effected by the Great October Revolution.
We have no desire at the moment to waste time on such controversies, for we are deciding this, as well as the mass of accompanying controversies, by struggle.
But the fact cannot be denied that the petty-bourgeois democrats “compromised” with the landowners, the custodians of the traditions of serfdom, for eight months, while we completely swept the landowners and all their traditions from Russian soil in a few weeks.
Take religion, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities. These are all problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The vulgar petty-bourgeois democrats talked about them for eight months.
In not a single one of the most advanced countries in the world have these questions been completely settled on bourgeois-democratic lines. In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution.
We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have granted all the non-Russian nationalities their own republics or autonomous regions.
We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie and the dull-witted and frightened petty bourgeoisie in every other country in the world without exception.
All this goes to make up the content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. A hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty years ago the progressive leaders of that revolution (or of those revolutions, if we consider each national variety of the one general type) promised to rid mankind of medieval privileges, of sex inequality, of state privileges for one religion or another (or “religious ideas ”, “the church” in general), and of national inequality.
They promised, but did not keep their promises. They could not keep them, for they were hindered by their “respect” – for the “sacred right of private property”. Our proletarian revolution was not afflicted with this accursed “respect” for this thrice-accursed medievalism and for the “sacred right of private property”.
But in order to consolidate the achievements of the bourgeois-democratic revolution for the peoples of Russia, we were obliged to go farther; and we did go farther.
We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a “by-product” of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities.
We have always said that reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said – and proved it by deeds – that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the socialist revolution.
Incidentally, the Kautskys, Hilferdings, Martovs, Chernovs, Hillquits, Longuets, MacDonalds, Turatis and other heroes of “Two and-a-Half” Marxism were incapable of understanding this relation between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolutions.
The first develops into the second. The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first. The second consolidates the work of the first. Struggle, and struggle alone, decides how far the second succeeds in outgrowing the first.
The Soviet system is one of the most vivid proofs, or manifestations, of how the one revolution develops into the other.
The Soviet system provides the maximum of democracy for the workers and peasants; at the same time, it marks a break with bourgeois democracy and the rise of a new, epoch-making type of democracy, namely, proletarian democracy, or the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Reverses and mistakes
Let the curs and swine of the moribund bourgeoisie and of the petty-bourgeois democrats who trail behind them heap imprecations, abuse and derision upon our heads for our reverses and mistakes in the work of building up our Soviet system.
We do not forget for a moment that we have committed and are committing numerous mistakes and are suffering numerous reverses. How can reverses and mistakes be avoided in a matter so new in the history of the world as the building of an unprecedented type of state edifice!
We shall work steadfastly to set our reverses and mistakes right and to improve our practical application of Soviet principles, which is still very, very far from being perfect.
But we have a right to be and are proud that to us has fallen the good fortune to begin the building of a Soviet state, and thereby to usher in a new era in world history, the era of the rule of a new class, a class which is oppressed in every capitalist country, but which everywhere is marching forward towards a new life, towards victory over the bourgeoisie, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the emancipation of mankind from the yoke of capital and from imperialist wars.
Imperialist wars
The question of imperialist wars, of the international policy of finance capital which now dominates the whole world, a policy that must inevitably engender new imperialist wars, that must inevitably cause an extreme intensification of national oppression, pillage, brigandry, and the strangulation of weak, backward, and small nationalities by a handful of “advanced” powers – that question has been the keystone of all policy in all the countries of the globe since 1914.
It is a question of life and death for millions upon millions of people. It is a question of whether 20,000,000 people (as compared with the 10,000,000 who were killed in the war of 1914-18 and in the supplementary “minor” wars that are still going on) are to be slaughtered in the next imperialist war, which the bourgeoisie are preparing, and which is growing out of capitalism before our very eyes.
Propaganda poster ‘Comrade Lenin is Sweeping Waste of The Earth’ c. 1920
It is a question of whether in that future war, which is inevitable (if capitalism continues to exist), 60,000,000 people are to be maimed (compared with the 30,000,000 maimed in 1914-18).
In this question, too, our October Revolution marked the beginning of a new era in world history. The lackeys of the bourgeoisie and its yes-men – the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, and the petty-bourgeois, allegedly “socialist”, democrats all over the world – derided our slogan “convert the imperialist war into a civil war”.
But that slogan proved to be the truth – it was the only truth, unpleasant, blunt, naked and brutal, but nevertheless the truth, as against the host of most refined jingoist and pacifist lies. Those lies are being dispelled. The Brest peace has been exposed. And with every passing day the significance and consequences of a peace that is even worse than the Brest peace – the peace of Versailles – are being more relentlessly exposed.
And the millions who are thinking about the causes of the recent war and of the approaching future war are more and more clearly realising the grim and inexorable truth that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace […] which inevitably engenders imperialist war, that it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution.
Let the bourgeoisie and the pacifists, the generals and the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists and the philistines, the pious Christians and the knights of the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals vent their fury against that revolution.
No torrents of abuse, calumnies and lies can enable them to conceal the historic fact that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the slaves have replied to a war between slave-owners by openly proclaiming the slogan: “Convert this war between slave-owners for the division of their loot into a war of the slaves of all nations against the slave-owners of all nations.”
For the first time in hundreds and thousands of years that slogan has grown from a vague and helpless waiting into a clear and definite political programme, into an effective struggle waged by millions of oppressed people under the leadership of the proletariat.
It has grown into the first victory of the proletariat, the first victory in the struggle to abolish war and to unite the workers of all countries against the united bourgeoisie of different nations, against the bourgeoisie that makes peace and war at the expense of the slaves of capital, the wage-workers, the peasants, the working people.
This first victory is not yet the final victory, and it was achieved by our October Revolution at the price of incredible difficulties and hardships, at the price of unprecedented suffering, accompanied by a series of serious reverses and mistakes on our part.
How could a single backward people be expected to frustrate the imperialist wars of the most powerful and most developed countries of the world without sustaining reverses and without committing mistakes!
We are not afraid to admit our mistakes and shall examine them dispassionately in order to learn how to correct them. But the fact remains that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the promise “to reply” to war between the slave-owners by a revolution of the slaves directed against all the slave-owners has been completely fulfilled – and is being fulfilled despite all difficulties.
We have made the start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown.
Gentlemen, capitalists of all countries, keep up your hypocritical pretence of “defending the fatherland” – the Japanese fatherland against the American, the American against the Japanese, the French against the British, and so forth!
Gentlemen, knights of the Second and Two-and a-Half Internationals, pacifist petty bourgeoisie, and philistines of the entire world, go on “evading” the question of how to combat imperialist wars by issuing new “Basel Manifestos” (on the model of the Basel Manifesto of 1912).
The first Bolshevik revolution has wrested the first hundred million people of this earth from the clutches of imperialist war and the imperialist world. Subsequent revolutions will deliver the rest of mankind from such wars and from such a world.
Economic development
Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice.
It is in this most important and most difficult task that we have sustained the greatest number of reverses and have made most mistakes. How could anyone expect that a task so new to the world could be begun without reverses and without mistakes!
But we have begun it. We shall continue it. At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correcting a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country without committing such mistakes.
Painting of Vladimir Lenin byIsaak Brodsky
The difficulties are immense. But we are accustomed to grappling with immense difficulties. Not for nothing do our enemies call us “stone-hard” and exponents of a “firm line policy”.
But we have also learned, at least to some extent, another art that is essential in revolution, namely, flexibility, the ability to effect swift and sudden changes of tactics if changes in objective conditions demand them, and to choose another path for the achievement of our goal if the former path proves to be inexpedient or impossible at the given moment.
Borne along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we expected to accomplish economic tasks just as great as the political and military tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm.
We expected – or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration – to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state.
Experience has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary – state capitalism and socialism – in order to prepare – to prepare by many years of effort – for the transition to communism.
Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism.
Otherwise we shall never get to communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That is what experience, the objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us.
And we, who during these three or four years have learned a little to make abrupt changes of front (when abrupt changes of front are needed), have begun zealously, attentively and sedulously (although still not zealously, attentively and sedulously enough) to learn to make a new change of front, namely, the New Economic Policy.
The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd “businessman”, a punctilious wholesale merchant – otherwise it will never succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet.
Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism.
A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism.
Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs. Wholesale trade economically unites millions of small peasants: it gives them a personal incentive, links them up and leads them to the next step, namely, to various forms of association and alliance in the process of production itself.
We have already started the necessary changes in our economic policy and already have some successes to our credit; true, they are small and partial, but nonetheless they are successes.
In this new field of “tuition” we are already finishing our preparatory class. By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analysing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes.
We shall go through the whole “course”, although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked.
No matter at what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be – despite disaster, famine and ruin – we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its goal.
N. Lenin
October 14, 1921
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