Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/101

 fight for immediate political demands, to conduct "the economic struggle against the employers and the government" (this mass struggle "easily understood" by these masses naturally corresponds to an organisation "easily accessible" to the most untrained youth). Others, far removed from "gradualness," began to say: We can and must "bring about a political revolution," but there is no reason whatever for building a strong organisation of revolutionists that would train revolutionists for the stalwart and stubborn struggle, in order to bring this revolution about. All we need do is to snatch up the "easily understood" wooden club, the acquaintance with which we have already made. Speaking, without metaphor, it means—we must organise a general strike, or we must stimulate the "spiritless" progress of the labour movement by means of "excitative terror." Both these tendencies, the opportunist and the "revolutionary," bow to the prevailing primitiveness; neither believe that it can be eliminated, neither understand our primary and most imperative practical task, namely, to establish an organisation of revolutionists capable of maintaining the energy, the stability and continuity of the political struggle.

We have just quoted the words of B-v: "The growth of the labour movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations." This "valuable remark of a close observer" (Rabocheye Dyelo's comment on B-v's article) has a two-fold value for us. It proves that we were right in our opinion that the principal cause of the present crisis in Russian Social-Democracy is that the leaders "ideologists," revolutionists, Social-Democrats) lag behind the spontaneous rising of the masses. It shows that all the arguments advanced by the authors of the Economic Letter in Iskra, No. 12, by B. Krichevsky, and by Martynov, about the dangers of belittling the significance of the spontaneous elements, about the drab every-day struggles, about the tactics-process, etc., are nothing more than a glorification and defence of primitive methods. These people, who cannot pronounce the word "theoretician" without a contemptuous grimace, who describe their genuflections to common lack of training and ignorance as "sensitiveness