Compromise
In the context of revolutionary politics, compromise is the act of lessening or otherwise changing one's demands or methods for a limited time to achieve greater success than possible without compromising. Communists must make compromises or retreats from their demands and tactics in accordance with the developments and changes in the class struggle of their country. Failure to make temporarily compromises results in the weakening of the revolutionary movement or its total destruction.
A notable example of a compromise was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, in which Soviet Russia was forced to concede land to the imperialist Central Powers in the First World War in exchange for peace and the opportunity to rebuild its country from years of conflict. In his work "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Vladimir Lenin used the analogy of a victim surrendering their belongings to bandits in exchange for their survival to describe the nature of the Brest-Litovsk peace. This sort of compromise is distinguished from the compromises made by opportunists and revisionists such as social democrats, in which they omit revolutionary principles to aid the interests of the bourgeoisie.[1]
References
- ↑ Vladimir Lenin (1920). "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Ch. IV "The Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled". Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
"Imagine that your car is held up by armed bandits. You hand them over your money, passport, revolver and car. In return you are rid of the pleasant company of the bandits. That is unquestionably a compromise. “Do ut des” (I “give” you money, fire-arms and a car “so that you give” me the opportunity to get away from you with a whole skin). It would, however, be difficult to find a sane man who would declare such a compromise to be “inadmissible on principle”, or who would call the compromiser an accomplice of the bandits (even though the bandits might use the car and the firearms for further robberies). Our compromise with the bandits of German imperialism was just that kind of compromise."