Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/50

 recognition by medical science of all kinds of treatment of diseases with the necessity for adopting a certain definite method of treatment for a given disease. The point is, however, that Rabocheye Dyelo, while suffering from a disease which we have called subservience to spontaneity, refuses to recognise any "method of treatment" for that disease. Hence, it made the remarkable discovery that "a plan of tactics contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism" [No. 10, p. 18], that tactics are "a process of growth of party tasks, which grow with the party" [( p. 11), Rabocheye Dyelo's italics]. The latter remark has every chance of becoming a celebrated maxim, a permanent monument to the tendency of Rabocheye Dyelo. To the question: Whither? a leading organ replies: Motion is a process of alteration in the distance between starting point and destination. This matchless example of profundity is not merely a literary curiosity (if it were, it would not be worth dealing with at length), but the programme of the whole tendency, i. e., the programme which R. M. (in the Special Supplement to Rabochaya Mysl) expressed in the words: "That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is the one that is going on now." It is the tendency of unbounded opportunism, which passively adapts itself to spontaneity.

"A plan of tactics contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism!" But this is a libel on Marxism; it is like the caricature of it that was presented to us by the Narodniks in their fight against us. It means putting restraint on the initiative and energy of class-conscions fighters, whereas Marxism, on the contrary, gives a gigantic impetus to the initiative and energy of Social-Democrats, opens up for them the widest perspectives and, if one may so express it, places at their disposal the mighty force of millions and millions workers "spontaneously" rising for the struggle. The whole history of international Social-Democracy seethes with plans advanced first by one and then by another political leader; some confirming the far-sightedness and correct political and organisational insight of their authors and others revealing their short-sightedness lack of political judgment. At the time when Germany was passing one of the most important turning points in its history—the time of the establishment of the Empire, the opening of the Reichstag, the granting of universal suffrage, Liebknecht had one plan for Social-Democratic policy and work, and Schweitzer had another.