Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/46

 struggle as bow to its spontaneity, to its lack of purpose. While recognising the political struggle (it would be more correct to say: the political desires and demands of the workers), which arises spontaneously from the labour movement itself, it absolutely refuses independently to work out a specifically Social-Democratic policy corresponding to the general tasks of Socialism and to contemporary conditions in Russia. Farther on we shall show that Rabocheye Dyelo commits the same error.

We have dealt at such length with the little-known and now almost forgotten leading article in the first number of Rabochaya Mysl because it was the first and most striking expression of that general stream of thought which afterwards found the light of day in innumerable streamlets. V. I. was absolutely right when, in praising the first number and the leading article of Rabochaya Mysl, he said that it was written in a "sharp and provocative" style [Listok Rabotnika, Nos. 9–10, p. 49]. Every man with convictions, who thinks he has something new to say, writes "provocatively" and expresses his views strongly. Only those who are accustomed to sit between two stools lack "provocativeness"; only such people are able to praise the provocativeness of Rabochaya Mysl one day, and attack the "provocative polemics" of its opponents the next.

We shall not dwell on the Special Supplement to Rabochaya Mysl (below we shall have occasion on a number of points to refer to this work, which expresses the ideas of the Economists more consistently than any other) but shall briefly mention the Manifesto of Self-Emancipation of the Workers' Group [March, 1899, reprinted in the London Nakanunye [On the Eve], No. 7, June, 1899]. The authors of this manifesto quite rightly say that "the workers of Russia are only just awakening, are only just looking around, and instinctively clutch at the first means of struggle that come to hands." But from this correct observation, they draw the same incorrect conclusion that is drawn by Rabochaya Mysl, forgetting that instinct is that unconsciousness (spontaneity) to whose aid the Socialists must come; that the "first means of struggle that come to their hands" will always be in modern society, the trade union means of struggle, and the "first ideology that comes to hand" will be bourgeois (trade union) ideology. Similarly, these authors do