Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/59

 This is perfectly true. The following assertion in the same document is also true:

This again is perfectly true.

In Legien's pamphlet we find it noted that the gathering of "leaders"—whom he had brought together to hear his paper and who styled themselves trade union leaders and officials-burst out laughing—burst out laughing when they heard this. The idea struck them as ridiculous that one can, and must, create illegal revolutionary organisations at a time of crisis, as was done at the time of the Exceptional [Anti-Socialist] Law. And Legien, a most devoted watchdog of the bourgeoisie, beat his breast and exclaimed: "To disrupt organisations in order that questions may be decided by the masses is a purely anarchist thought. I have not the least doubt that this is an anarchist idea."

"True," exclaimed the chorus (Ibid., p. 37) of flunkeys of the bourgeoisie, who styled themselves leaders of the S.D. organisations and of the working class.

Here we have an instructive object lesson. Leaders have been so depraved and stupified by activity under bourgeois legality that they are incapable of even grasping the thought of the necessity for any other form of organisation; they cannot see the need for illegal organisations for directing the revolutionary struggle. Men have come to such a pitch that they imagine that legal unions sanctioned by the police are organisations which cannot be surpassed; they imagine that during a time of crisis these unions can be preserved to supply the [revolutionary] directing force! Here you have a concrete instance of the manner in which opportunist dialectics work out in practice. Thus, the ordinary growth of legal unions and the simple