21.11.2022, Aleksandrovskoe
Lenin’s article The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It of September 1917 is a call for the bourgeoisie that was then in power to demonstrate competence and to preserve the state, said philosopher, political scientist and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan on November 7 in his address on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The text of the address The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. Lenin’s Lessons was published in Issue 507 of the Essence of Time newspaper.
After the February Revolution of 1917, which was then called “Great,” the Russian bourgeoisie failed to demonstrate any competence, and by October 1917 it led the country to a collapse, the philosopher reminded. Unlike the Russian bourgeoisie, the French bourgeoisie after the French Revolution did demonstrate competence: it created a new army and defense industry, it prevented separatism, and it removed the borders between the estates giving new rights to majority. Kurginyan urged the Russian ruling class to show a similar efficacy.
Kurginyan explained that the situation of 1917 is relevant today as never before, and we should learn lessons from our history. He quoted some excerpts from Lenin’s work The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. Realizing that Russia was moving towards its collapse, Lenin in September 1917 wrote an article that essentially was “a plea of a strong person addressed to the bourgeois class, ‘Listen, win!’”
“They say, ‘The worse the better… Lenin rubbed his hands expecting the failure.‘ But Lenin in this article begged the bourgeoisie to win. And he was ready to offer it any help, not only intellectual but political as well,” the political scientist believes.
In his work, Lenin suggests, among other things, that banks should be nationalized, and he indicates that in this case “availability and accessibility of credit specifically to minor applicants like peasants would become very much higher.”
Kurginyan stressed that this measure along with other ones that Lenin proposed (nationalization of syndicates; lifting commercial confidentiality; forced association of industrialists, merchants, and businessmen on the whole in unions; forced association of the population in consumers societies or encouraging such association under control) are not socialist.
“These measures to not deny the essence of the bourgeois democratic authorities. They are not socialist. Other countries adopt them to withstand in a war, and the only reason why they are not adopted here [in the bourgeois Russia of 1917] is that they would have damaged unprecedented scandalous benefits of the capitalists,” the political scientist explains.
According to Kurginyan, Lenin was trying to help the bourgeois government at the expense of his own political ambitions, because for Lenin, the fate of the country was a priority, but not the seizing of the power.
“Lenin recommends this… He is not trying to round out anything, and he understands that if all this takes place then the Bolsheviks will not win. He is writing this in September, begging the state to show competence. He is absolutely ready to find himself afterwards in a democratic opposition in a democratic Duma, in a minority. The only thing he wants is for his Motherland to exist. And this is what every line of his work says,” the philosopher concluded.
“People whose methodology today is to implement everything Lenin spoke against are now trying to call this a plot against the country (‘the worse the better’),” Kurginyan added.
Although the era has changed, along with specific actions and algorithms, “the essence remains the same, and every word of this article, every its line is more relevant than ever before,” Kurginyan believes.
The Russian bourgeoisie in 1917 was unable to defend the state, and it failed, and the main historical lesson for the Russian bourgeois authorities today is not to follow it and to avoid the same mistakes, but rather to show political competence, as the French bourgeoisie did, in order to defend the country in the ongoing conflict with the West, Kurginyan believes.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
