Last year the Russian working class celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. The same workers who would condemn the celebration of 1776 by the American workers thought the celebration of the Decembrist uprising right and proper and to a limited extent joined in the celebration. Yet the Decembrist uprising of 1825 in Russia was an uprising of a few nobles and generals. If it had succeeded it would have developed a capitalist government or, more properly speaking, a liberalized feudal government where capitalism could develop more freely.
Again there is the French revolution. It also was a bourgeois revolution. Its leaders outlawed the labor unions, It created the government that rules France to-day in the interest of capitalism and imperialism. Yet not only do the conscious French workers commemorate the revolution of 1789, but even the workers of other countries commemorate it, build upon its achievements and draw revolutionary inspiration and lessons from it.
"We are trying to bring up our youth in the spirit of the deepest respect for the outstanding representatives of the great French revolution," declared Zinoviev in his lectures on the "History of the Russian Communist Party." "We understand their class character. We know that while the revolution sent a monarch to the guillotine, it also enforced laws against labor unions. Nevertheless, these representatives of the great bourgeois revolution were the first shock troops of struggling humanity; they broke thru the dams of feudalism and thereby opened the way to the spring floods of the proletarian revolutions."
The rejection of the heritage of the first American revolution is one of the signs of what Lenin named "infantile leftism." There is a tendency on the part of an immature left wing to "throw out the baby with the bath." To throw out the dirty water of parliamentary opportunism, it dumps out the baby as well—the participation in parliamentary campaigns. Reacting against opportunist platforms, it rejects partial demands altogether. Rejecting the bunk with which the American revolution of 1776 has been surrounded and the uses to which it is put in breeding chauvinism, rejecting also the reactionary slogan of the petty bourgeois liberals—"Back to 1776"—it renounces its revolutionary in-
