4. The Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s fourth chapter is a polemical dissection of Bolshevism’s internal enemies within the working-class movement, arguing that the party’s strength was forged through two distinct but interrelated struggles: first against opportunism (which became social-chauvinism in 1914), and second against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, a semi-anarchist deviation that Lenin treats as the mirror-image of opportunism. The core claim is that these two monstrosities complement each other, each serving as a penalty for the other’s sins, and that Bolshevism’s historical merit lies in having waged a ruthless, uncompromising war against both simultaneously.
Lenin identifies the Socialist-Revolutionary Party as the principal Russian vehicle of petty-bourgeois revolutionism, attacking it on three fronts: its refusal to apply a Marxist, objective analysis of class forces before political action; its advocacy of individual terrorism, which Lenin rejects on grounds of expediency rather than principle (noting that Plekhanov, when still a Marxist, ridiculed those who condemned the terror of the French Revolution on principle); and its hypocritical sneering at German Social-Democratic opportunism while itself imitating the worst opportunist errors of that party on the agrarian question and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The chapter’s historical context spans from the Paris Commune to the first Soviet republic, with Lenin arguing that Marxism’s superiority over anarchism has been confirmed across this entire period.
The most substantial section concerns the struggle against ‘Left’ deviations within Bolshevism itself, particularly the 1908 dispute over participation in the reactionary Third Duma and the 1918 controversy over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin defends the 1905 boycott of the Bulygin Duma as correct because it accurately assessed an objective situation of rapidly developing revolutionary strikes leading to uprising, but condemns the mechanical application of this tactic in 1906 (a minor error) and 1907-08 (a serious one), arguing that the Bolsheviks could not have preserved the revolutionary party core without combining legal and illegal work. On Brest-Litovsk, Lenin deploys his famous bandit analogy: surrendering money and firearms to armed robbers to escape with one’s skin is a permissible compromise, entirely distinct from the Mensheviks’ and Socialist-Revolutionaries’ compromises with their own bourgeoisie against the revolutionary proletariat, which constituted actual complicity in banditry. The polemic is directed against ‘Left Communists’ like Bukharin and Radek, who had acknowledged their error by 1918, but also against the broader international tendency to reject compromises on principle as childishness. Lenin insists that a revolutionary leader must distinguish concrete cases of inexcusable, treacherous compromise from those forced by objective circumstances, and that anyone promising the workers cut-and-dried recipes for all contingencies is a charlatan.