Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/125

 have one, and we ourselves will settle the question as to which of us are "average," as to who is higher and who is lower. But if you have no organisational ideas of your own, then all your chatter about "masses" and "average" is just simply boring. Try to understand that these questions about "politics" and "organisation" are so serious in themselves that they cannot he dealt with in any other but a serious way: We can and must educate workers (and university and high-school students) so as to enable them to understand us when we speak to them about these questions; and when you come to talk about these questions to us give us real replies to them, do not fall back on the "average," or on the "masses"; don't evade them by quoting adages or mere phrases.

In order to be fully prepared for his task, the working-class revolutionist must also become a professional revolutionist. Hence B-v is wrong when he says that as the worker is engaged for 11½ hours a day in the factory, therefore the brunt of all the other revolutionary functions (apart from agitation) "must necessarily fall mainly upon the shoulders of an extremely small intellectual force." It need not "necessarily" be so. It is so because we are backward, because we do not recognise our duty to assist every capable worker to become a professional agitator, organiser, propagandist, literature distributor, etc., etc. In this respect, we waste our strength in a positively shameful manner; we lack the ability to husband that which requires to be so carefully tended in order that it may grow. Look at the Germans: they have a hundred times more forces than we have. But they understand perfectly well that the "average" does not too frequently promote really capable agitators, etc., from its ranks. Hence, immediately they get a capable Workingman, they try to place him in such conditions as will enable him to develop and apply his abilities to the utmost: he is made a professional agitator, he is encouraged to widen the field of his activity, to spread it from one factory to the whole of his trade, from one locality to the whole country. He acquires