The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1926-04-10
Democracy and the Popularist Movement
in China By Lenin
By Lenin

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 liberia
ton from the bourgeoisie, lie. 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, semifeudal
country, urgently confront the halfmilliard of
the Chinese people with only one, definite his
tOricallypeculiar form of this oppression and kf
this exploitation, namely feudalism FeudalisIn
is based 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"
program for the abolition only of feudal exploit
tatiOn.
Therein lies the substance Of Sun-YatSens
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 petty bour-
geois Socialist" of a socialist reactionary This
is So because the chimera that China can
"avert" capitalism, that in China the Gsocal reye
luton" is easier BECAUSE ef her baekwaFdI7ess
ETC., is quite reactionary. And Sun-Yat-Sen with
inimitable, one might say maiden nGivete 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 lie. capitalist) development"
that in China commerce lie. capitalism is ex
panding in tremendous dimensions, that 'in so
years time we will have many Shanghais" / 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 reactonaSy
economic theory, a really reactioRary agrair b |
program? That indeed is the whole gist of e |
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 daIetics of social rela-
tons in China-the fact that the Chinese demo
Gratis, sincerely sympathzing with socialism in
Europe have turned it into reactionary theory
and on the basis of this reactionary theory of
"averting" capitalism, they conduct a purely cap
ltalist maximum-capitalst agrarian program.
What does the economic revolution" about |
which Sun atSen speaks SO fervently and con-
fusedly at the commencement of the article, |
really amount to?
1t amounts to the transfer of rents to the |
state, lie. the naturalization of land by mean |
Of a kind of single tax after the spirit of Herr
George. There is absolutely nothing else real |
in the economic revolution" proposed and |
preached by Sun-YatSen.
The difference between the value of the land in
an out-of-the-way peasant farm and in Shanghai
is difference in the dimensions of the rent To !
make the increase in value" of land become the
property of the people, means transferring rents,