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48 elections the Mensheviks were totally defeated, having obtained 0.7 million votes (1.4 millions if the vote of Trans-Caucasia be added) as against 9 million votes obtained by the Bolsheviks.

We carry on the struggle against the labor aristocracy in the name of the working masses, in order to gain them over to our side; and we do battle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to achieve the same object. To forget this most elementary and self-evident truth would be stupid. But the German “Left” Communists commit just this stupidity when, because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary heads of the Trade Unions, they jump, by some inexplicable mental process, to the conclusion that it is necessary to abandon these organizations altogether! They refuse to work in them! They invent new invented working-men’s unions! This is an unpardonable blunder, and one by which the Communists render the greatest service to the bourgeoisie. Our Mensheviks, like all opportunist, social-chauvinist Kautskian leaders of Trade Unions, are nothing more nor less than the “agents of the bourgeoisie in the labor movement” (as we always express it), or “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” according to the excellent and highly expressive summary of the followers of Daniel De Leon in America. Not to work within the reactionary Trade Unions means to leave the insufficiently-developed or backward working masses to the influence of reactionary leaders, agents of the bourgeoisie, labor aristocrats—“bourgeoisified workers.” (See Engels’ letter to Marx in 1852, concerning British workers.)

It is just this absurd “theory” of non-participation by Communists in reactionary Trade Unions that demonstrates most clearly how light-mindedly these “Left” Communists regard the question of influence over the “masses,” how they contradict their own outcries about the “masses.” In order to be able to help the “masses” and to win their sympathy, confidence and support, it is necessary to brave all difficulties, attacks,