Concerning Compromise
THE word compromise indicates in politics the renunciation, by virtue of an agreement with another party, of certain of one's claims. The idea that the crowd has of the Bolsheviks, and the idea promoted by the gutter press, is that the Bolsheviks consent never and with no one to any compromise.
This idea flatters us, as well as a part of the revolutionary proletariat, for it proves that even our enemies are compelled to recognise our fidelity to the fundamental principles of Socialism and of the revolution. But, truth to say, this idea does not correspond to reality. Engels was right when in his criticism of the Manifesto of the Blanquist Communists (1873) he mocked the latters' declaration: "No compromise!" That is but a phrase, said he, for it often happens that circumstances impose a compromise on a party in battle, and it is stupid to condemn oneself never "to accept payment of a debt by instalments." But the duty of a truly revolutionary party is not to proclaim an impossible renunciation of every sort of compromise, but to know throughout all compromises, in so far as such are inevitable, how to remain faithful to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary goal; to its duty of preparing for the revolution and of educating the mass whom it must lead to victory.
For instance, the fact of participating in the Third and Fourth Dumas was a compromise, a temporary abdication of revolutionary claims.[1] But it was a compromise that had to be, for at that time the correlation of forces provisionally excluded the possibility of carrying on a mass struggle. To prepare for that struggle one had to know how to work inside that farmyard that was the Duma. History has shown that the Bolsheviks well understood the issue in this case.
We are at present concerned not with a compromise forced upon us, but with a voluntary compromise.
Our party, like every other party, aspires to political power. Our aim is the dictatorship of the revolutionary proletariat. Six months of revolution have confirmed with extraordinary exactitude in the most forceful and startling manner, the justice and inevitability of that contention, precisely in the interests of the revolution.
- ↑ Formerly opposed by a fraction of the Bolsheviks.
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