Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/111

 hunt for Socialists, but of the kind in which Socialists will hunt for adherents. In a word, our task is to fight down the tares. It is not our business to grow wheat in flower-pots. By pulling up the tares, we clear the soil for the wheat. And while the old-fashioned folk are tending their flower-pot crops, we must prepare reapers, not only to cut down the tares of to-day, but also to reap the wheat of to-morrow.

Legalisation, therefore, will not solve the problem of creating a trade-union organisation that will be as public and as extensive as possible (but we would be extremely glad if the Zubatovs and the Ozerovs provided even a partial opportunity for such a solution—to which end we must fight them as strenuously as possible!). There only remains the path of secret trade-union organisation; and we must offer every possible assistance to the workers, who (as we definitely know) have already adopted this path. Trade-union organisations may not only be of tremendous value in developing and consolidating the. economic struggle, but may also become a very useful auxiliary to the political, agitational and revolutionary organisations.

In order to achieve this purpose, and in order to guide the nascent trade-union movement in the direction the Social-Democrats desire, we must first fully understand the foolishness of the plan of organisation with which the St. Petersburg Economists have been occupying themselves for nearly five years. That plan is described in the Rules of a Workers' Fund, of July, 1897 [Listok Rabotnika, Nos. 9 and 10, p. 46, in Rabochaya Mysl, No. 1], and also in the Rules for a Trade Union Workers' Organisation, of October, 1900 [special leaflet printed in St. Petersburg and quoted in Iskra, No. 1]. The fundamental error contained in both these sets of rules is that they give a detailed formulation of a wide workers' organisation and confuse the latter with the organisation of revolutionists. Let