Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/18

 Zarya's "inclination to predict a rupture between the Mountain and the Gironde in international Social-Democracy."

A bold assertion! B. Krichevsky, have you heard the fact long ago noted, that it is precisely the extensive participation of the "academic" stratum in the Socialist movement in recent years that has secured the rapid spread of Bernsteinism? And what is most important—on what does our author base his opinion that even "the most pronounced Bernsteinists" stand on the basis of the class struggle for the political and economic emancipation of the proletariat? No one knows. This determined defence of the most pronounced Bernsteinists is not supported by any kind of argument whatever. Apparently, the author believes that if he repeats what the pronounced Bernsteinists say about themselves, his assertion requires no proof. But can anything more "shallow" be imagined than an opinion of a whole tendency that is based on nothing more than what the representatives of that tendency say about themselves? Can anything more shallow be imagined than the subsequent "homily" about the two different, and even diametrically opposite, types, or paths, of party development? [Rabocheye Dyelo, pp. 33–35.] The German Social-Democrats, you see, recognise complete freedom of criticism, but the French do not, and it is precisely the latter that present an example of the "harmfulness of intolerance."