Hossam el-Hamalawy's Library tagged Liberals →  View Popular

The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners. Their party, the Cadets, supported the distribution of the crown and monastery lands among the peasants, but agreed to the compulsory expropriation of the landlords’ estates only on condition that fair prices were paid to the landlords

Karl Marx, who had been living in London for over fifteen years,
followed the struggle of the Irish with great interest and sympathy. He
wrote to Frederick Engels on November 2, 1867:
“I have done my best to bring about this demonstration of the English
workers in favour of Fenianism.... I used to think the separation of
Ireland from England impossible. I now think it inevitable, although after
the separation there may come federation....” Reverting to the same
subject in a letter dated November 30th of the same year, Marx wrote:
“The question now is, what shall we advise the English workers? In my
opinion they must make the repeal of the Union [the abolition of the union
with Ireland] (in short, the affair of 1783, only democratised and adapted
to the conditions of the time) an article of their
pronunziamento. This is the only legal and therefore only possible
form of Irish emancipation which can be admitted in the programme of an
English [workers’]
party.”^[2] And Marx went on to show that what the Irish needed was Home
Rule and independence of Britain, an agrarian revolution and tariffs
against Britain.

It is simply a question of the reactionary landlords trying to
scare the Liberals.

Mr. Malover’s article is called “The Duma and Society”. By
society is here understood, in accordance with the old Russian use of the word,
a handful of liberal government officials, bourgeois intellectuals, bored
rentiers and similar haughty, self-satisfied, and idle members of the public,
who fancy themselves the salt of the earth, proudly call them selves the
“intelligentsia”, create “public opinion”, etc., etc.

The Left parties are really Left, and deserve that name, only insofar as they
express the interests and reflect the psychology, not of
“society”, not of a bunch of whining intellectualist trash,
but the lower strata of the people, the proletariat and a certain section of the
petty bourgeois masses, both urban and rural. The Left parties are those whose
audiences are never indifferent to social and political problems any
more than a hungry man can be indifferent to the problem of a crust of
bread. “The campaign against the Duma” of those Left parties is a
reflection of a definite tendency among the lower strata of the people, it is
an echo of a certain—what shall we call it?—mass irritation with the
self-satisfied Narcissuses who are infatuated with the dung-heaps about them.