The Daily Worker Newspaper, April 10, 1926, Page 10

Democracy and the Popularist Movement in China (Written in 1912) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:—The article below was written by Lenin in July, 1912, in the Petersburg Bolshevik paper, Nevskaya Zvezda. Lenin com- pares the Chinese Revolutionary Democratic rifbve- ment with that of the Russian “Narodniki” (Popu- lists). This article is still of immense value, if only for showing the difference between the ideas of Snn-Yiat-Sen and Revolutionary Soicalism. It remains a brilliant example of the Communist ap- ” proach to the Chinese National-Emancipation Move- ment. The existence of a Chinese Communist Party is not only foretold, but the present Comin- tern policy of support to the revolutionary strug- gle of Kuomintang is pre-determined. Lenin’s esti- mation of Sun-Yat-Sen must of course be viewed in the light of present history and Sun-Yat-Sen’s new orientations: his faith in the new, Chinese proletariat and in the U. S. S. R. as an ally, his fight against imperialism, his revolutionary work J with the Communists during the last few years, etc. With the growth of the proletariat Sun-Yat- Sen began to interest himself in Marxism. He also studied Lenin’s works. The appearance of this article for the first time in English is very timely on the anniversary of Sun-Yat-Sen’s death, which occurred on the eve of mass revolutionary struggles. It is especially timely as the radical changes that have taken place in Chfna during the last year—the strengthening of Sun-Yat-Sen’s Party in the South and the appearance of the proletariat on the political arena for the first “time—add weight to Lenin’s conceptions—Enc Verney.) HE article by the acting president of the Chi- nese Republic, Sun-Yat-Sen, which we take from the Brussels socialist paper, Le Peuple, is of exceptional interest for us Russians. An old adage says: “Things seem clearer from afar.” Sun-Yat-Sen is an extremely interesting witness “from afar,” for being a man with an European education he is apparently totally un- acquainted with Russia. . Yet this European- trained -representative of militant and victorious Chinese democracy, which has won itself a repub- lic, confronts us with purely Russian problems. These problems moreover, are presented quite independently of Russia, of Russian experience, of Russian literature. His resemblance to a Rus- sian Populist is so great that it amounts to an absolute identity in basic conceptions and in a number of separate expressions. Things seem clearer from afar. The program of great Chinese democracy which is indeed rep- resented in Sun-Yat-Sen’s article, compels us and gives us a convenient opportunity to view once more the problems of correlation between democ- racy and Populism in the modern bourgeois revo- lutions of Asia, from the aspect of new world events. This is one of the most important prob- lems which faced Russia in the revolutionary epoch commencing from 1905. And it has not only confronted Russia, but the whole of Asia, as may be seen from this program of the acting president of the Chinese Republic, particularly if we view this platform in the light of the de- velopment of revolutionary events in Russia, Turkey, Persia and China. Russia in many and im)ivery substantial respects undoubtedly repre- sents an Asiatic state and, at that, one of the most barbaric, mediaeval and disgracefully back- ward of Asiatic states. j Russian bourgeois democracy bears the imprint of the Populist movement beginning with its far off and solitary forerunner Hertzen, and ending with its mass representatives, members of the Peasants’ Union of 1905, and the “Trudovik” deputies (Right 8S. R.’s—Trans.) of the first three Dumas 1906-1912. We now see that the bourgeois democracy of China bears the identical imprint of the Populist movement. Let us see from the example of Sun-Yat-Sen what is the “social significance” of the ideas engendered by the profound revolutionary movement of hun- dreds of millions of people who are now definitely drawn into the current of universal capitalist civilization. Every line of Sun-Yat-Sen’s program is imbued with a militant, sincere, democratie spirit. There is full comprehension of the inadequacy of a “race” revolution. ;‘Dhere is not one iota of anti- political reasoning, or even neglect for political liberty nor e¥eh" the admittance of the idea of ma ee compatibility of Chinese autocracy with; Chinese “social reform,” with Chinese constitutional transformations, ete. There are genuine demo- cratic conceptions, with the demand for a repub- lic. There is a direct presentation of the ques- tion of the position of the masses, the question of the mass*struggle; there is warm sympathy for the toiling masses and the exploited, belief in the legitimacy of their cause and in their strength. We see a really great ideology of a really great people, which is not only.able to,lament. its cen- turies-old,slavery, not, only able to dream of free- dom and equality, but.also to FIGHT against the perpetual oppressors. of China. One cannot but compare the acting, president of the republic in this barbaric, dead, Asiatic China with the various presidents of republics in Europe, in America, in the countries of advanced culture. There the presidents of republics are almost without exception business men, agents or puppets in the hands of the bourgeoisie, rotten thru and thru, stained from head to foot with filth and blood, not the blood of Mandarins and Chinese emperors, but the blood of workers, who in the name of progress and civilization have been shot for striking. There the presidents are representatives of a bourgeoisie which long ago disowned the ideals of its youth, which hag pros- tituted itself to the last degree, sold itself en- tirely to the millionaires and milliardaires, to feudal landowners who have become bourgeois, ete... 2. Here we see the Asiatic acting president of the republic—a revolutionary democrat, full of no- bleness and of the heroism belonging to that class which does not go down hill but up hill, which does nto fear the future but believes in it and self-sacrificingly fights for it—a class which hates the past and is capable of casting off the deadening rot of this all-destroying past—a class that does not cling to the preservation and res-|+ toration of the past for own privileges. ,_,Does not this mean, then, that the materialistic est has decayed and that light is only shining from the mystic, religious East? No, it is just the contrary. This means that the East has definitely stepped on to the path of the West, that fresh hundreds of millions of people will henceforth participate in the struggle for ideals that the West has already achieved. It igs the Western bourgeoisie that has decayed, and its grave-digger—the proletariat—is already stand- ing by. But in Asia there is still a bourgeoisie capable of representing a sincere, militant, con- sistent democracy, a worthy comrade of the great teachers and great workers of the end of the eighteenth century in France. The chief representative or the most important social support of the Asiatic bourgeoisie—a bour- geoisie still capable of historically-progressive work,—is the peasant. Side by side with the lat- r there is already a liberal bourgeoisie whose representatives, such as Yuang-Shi-Kai, are more capable of treachery than of anything else: yes- terday they feared the emperor and fawned be- fore him ; afterwards, when they saw the force and felt the victory of revolutionary democracy, they betrayed the emperor, and tomorrow they will betray the democrats for the sake of a deal with some old or new “constitutional” emperor. Without a high and sincerely democratic en- thusiasm which ignites the toiling masses and renders them capable of performing miracles, such as can be seen in every phrase of Sun-Yat- sen’s program, the real liberation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible. . But» with the Chinese Populists thig militant democratic ideology is combined firstly with so- cialist dreams, with the hope of escaping the path of Chinese capitalism, of averting capital- ism, and secondly with the planning and preach- ing of a radical agrarian reform: It is just these two ideological-politieal tendencies which repre- sent the element that goes to make up the Popu- list movement in the specific meaning of the term, i.e., as distinct from democracy and supple- mentary to democratic theory. _ What is the origin and significance of these tendencies? Chinese democracy could not overthrow the old order in China and win a republic without the sake of guarding its tremendous spiritual and revolutionary ‘elan: of| proved it in detail in the third ee Ee ° 2 a|pointed this out in the “Po ‘ , e By Lenin the masses. Such an etan persupposes and en- genders the sincerest sympathy for the position of the toiling masses, and the most fervent hate for their oppressors and exploiters. And in Europe and America from which the advanced Chinese, in fact all-Chinese who have experienced this elan, have culled their ideas of emancipation, the next thing on the program is already libera- tion from the bourgeoisie, i.e. socialism. Hence the inevitable sympathy of the Chinese democrats for socialism, hence their subjective socialism. ‘They are subjectively socialists, because they are against the oppression ,and. exploitation of the masses, .But the. objective conditions of China, of, this; backward, agrarian, semi-feudal country, urgently confront, the half-milliard of the Chinese people with, only one. definite } torically-peculiar form of. this oppression and. this exploitation, namely feudalism. Feudali: is based on the prevalence of agrarian life and of primitive economy; the origin of the feudal ex- ploitation of the Chinese peasant was his attach- ment to the land in one form or another; the po- litical expressions of this exploitation were the feudal landowners, all together and each one,|' separately, with the emperor as head of the system. And the result is that from the subjectively- socialist ideas and programs of a Chinese demo- crat, in reality we get a program “of change of all bloody foundations” only of “real estate,” a program for the abolition only of feudal exploi- tation. Therein lies the substance of Sun-Yat-Sen’s Populist conceptions, of his progressive, militant, revolutionary program of bourgeois-democratic agrarian transformations and of his supposed socialist theory. This theory, if we regard it from the point of view of a doctrine, is the theory of a petty bour- geois “socialist,” of a socialist reactionary. This so, because the chimera that China can “avert” capitalism, that iti China the:“socal-revo:- lution” is easier’ becatise “of het Wadkwafariess, etc., is quite reactionary. And Sun-Yat-Sen with inimitable, one might say maidén naivete him- self smashes to atoms his reactionary Populist theory, recognizing what life makes one recog- nize, namely: that “China is on the eve of a gigantic industrial (i.e. capitalist) development,” that. in China “commerce” (i.e. capitalism) is ex- panding in tremendous dimensions, that “in 50 years’ time we will have many Shanghais,” i. e. a huge number of centers of capitalist wealth and of proletarian need and poverty. But the question naturally arises—does Sun- Yat-Sen defend, on the basis of his reaction economic theory, a really reactionary agrair program? -That indeed is the whole gist of question, the most interesting point before which plumed and castrated liberal quasi-Marxism often pulls up short. ‘ That is just the point; he does not defend such an agrarian program on this basis. That is just what comprises the dialetics of social rela- tions in China—the fact ‘that the Chinese demo- crats, sincerely sympathizing with socialism in Europey have turned it into a reactionary theory and on the basis of this reactionary theory of “averting” capitalism, they conduct a purely cap- italist, maximum-capitalist agrarian program. What does the “economic revolution,” about which Sun-Yat-Sen speaks so fervently and con- fusedly at the commencement of the article, really amount to? It amounts to the transfer of rents to state, ie. the nationalization of land by mea of_a kind of single tax after the spirit of George. There is absolutely nothing else rea in the “economic revolution” proposed and preached by Sun-Yat-Sen. The difference between the value of the land in an out-of-the-way peasant farm and in-Shanghai is a difference in the dimensions of the rent. To make the “increase in value” of land become the “property of the people” means transferring rents, ie. property on land to the state, or in other words, means nationalizing the land. Is such a reform possible within the frame- work of capitalism? It is not only possible, but it represents the purest, most highly consistent and ideologically perfected capitalism. Marx verty of Philosophy,” volume of “Oap- ce | or eetestataeoeos eee st th de foi mé : Ja dis co} rey for sp sp me