Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/155

 for example. But at the present time we cannot imagine that the building we require can be put up without scaffolding.

Nadezhdin disagrees with this, and says: "Iskra thinks that people will gather around it and will organise, but they will find it more interesting to organise around something more concrete!" So! so! "They will find it more interesting to gather around something more concrete. …" There is a Russian proverb which says: "Don't spit into the well, you may want to drink out of it." But there are people who do not object to drinking from a well which has been spat into. What despicable things our magnificent, legal "critics of Marxism" and illegal admirers of Rabochaya Mysl have said in the name of this—something more concrete! See how restricted our movement is by our own narrowness, lack of initiative, and hesitation and yet this is justified by the traditional argument about "finding it more interesting to gather around something more concrete!" And Nadezhdin, who regards himself as being particularly sensitive to "life," who so severely condemns "armchair" authors, who (with pretensions to being witty) charges Iskra with a weakness for seeing Economism everywhere, and who imagines that he stands far above this discrimination between the "orthodox" and the "critics,"—fails to see that with this sort of argument he is playing into the hands of the very narrowness with which he is so indignant and that he is drinking from a well that has actually been spat into! The sincerest indignation against narrowness, the most passionate desire to raise those who worship this narrowness from their knees, is insufficient if the indignant one is swept along without sail or rudder as "spontaneously" as the revolutionists of the seventies, if he clutches at such things as "excitative terror," "agrarian terror," "sounding-the-tocsin," etc. Glance at this something "more concrete" around which he thinks it is "much easier" to rally and organise: 1. Local newspapers; 2. Preparations for demonstrations; 3. Work among the unemployed. It will be seen at the very first glance that all these have been seized upon at random. in order to be able to say something, for however we may regard them, it would be absurd to see in them anything especially adapted for the purpose of "rallying and organising." This very Nadezhdin a few pages further on says: "It is time we simply stated the fact that extremely petty work is being carried on in the localities, the committees are not doing a tenth of what they could do … the combining centres that we have at the present time are a pure