Page:Left-Wing Communism.djvu/24

22 revolutionary class by its own bitter experience learns to understand—that victory is impossible without a knowledge both of how to attack and of how to retreat correctly. Of all the shattered opposition and revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks effected the most orderly retreat, with the least damage to their "army." They, more than any other, preserved the nucleus of their party, suffered the fewest splits—in the sense of deep, irremediable splits—felt the least demoralization, and were in the best position to renew work on a large scale efficiently and energetically. The Bolsheviks only attained this by mercilessly exposing and throwing out the revolutionists of phrases, who did not wish to understand that it was necessary to retreat, that it was obligatory upon them to learn how to work legally in the most reactionary parliaments, in the most reactionary trade-unions, co-operatives, workmen's insurance and similar organizations.

At first the revival was exceedingly slow; after the events in the Lena mines in 1912, somewhat more rapid. Overcoming immense difficulties, the Bolsheviks drove back the Mensheviks, whose role as bourgeois agents in the working-class movement was perfectly understood by the whole bourgeoisie after 1905, and who, therefore, were supported by that class against the Bolsheviks. But the latter would never have succeeded as they did if they had not pursued the right tactics of co-ordinating illegal forms of work with obligatory utilization of all "legal possibilities." In the most reactionary Duma the Bolsheviks won the whole labor vote.

Legal parliamentarism, in the conditions of an extremely reactionary "parliament," renders most useful service to the revolutionary party, to the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik deputies go to penal servitude. In the emigrant press, all shades, all distinctions of social-imperialism, social-chauvinism, social-patriotism, consistent and inconsistent internationalism, pacifism and the revolutionary negation of pacifist illusions, find full expression.