Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/45

 the younger the Socialist movement is in any given country, the more vigorously must it fight against all attempts to entrench non-Socialist ideology, and the more strongly must it warn the workers against those bad counsellors who shout against "exaggerating the conscious elements," etc. The authors of the Economic Letter, in unison with Rabocheye Dyelo, declaim against the intolerance that is characteristic of the infancy of the movement. To this we reply: Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up the quicker, it must become infected with intolerance against all those who retard its growth by subservience to spontaneity. Nothing is so ridiculous and harmful as pretending that we are "old hands" who have long ago experienced all the decisive episodes of the struggle!

Thirdly, the first number of Rabochaya Mysl shows that the term "Economism" (which, of course, we do not propose to abandon because it has more or less established itself) does not adequately convey the real character of the new tendency. Rabochaya Mysl does not altogether repudiate the political struggle: The Benefit Society constitution, published in Rabochaya Mysl, No. 1, contains a reference to fighting against the government. Rabochaya Mysl believes, however, that "politics always obediently follow economics" (and Rabocheye Dyelo gives a variation of this thesis when, in its programme, it asserts that "in Russia more than in any other country, the economic struggle is inseparable from the political struggle"). If by politics is meant Social-Democratic politics, then the postulates advanced by Rabochaya Mysl and Rabocheye Dyelo are wrong. The economic struggle of the workers is very often connected with (although not inseparable from) bourgeois politics, clerical politics, etc., as we have already seen. If by politics is meant trade-union politics, i.e., the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for the alleviation of their distress, measures characteristic of their position, but which do not altogether change that position, i. e., which do not remove the subjection of labour to capital, then Rabocheye Dyelo's postulate is correct. That striving indeed is common to the British trade unionists, who are hostile to Socialism, to the Catholic workers, to the "Zubatov" workers, etc. There are politics and politics. We see, therefore, that Rabochaya Mysl does not so much deny the political