Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/87

 compel the legal and conservative press to speak openly of it. This was the case in the seventies and even in the fifties. How much broader and deeper are now the strata of the people willing to read the illegal underground press, and to learn from it "how to live and how to die," to use the expression of the worker who sent a letter to Iskra [No. 7]. Political exposures are as much a declaration of war against the government as economic exposures are a declaration of war against the employers. And the wider and more powerful this campaign of exposure will be, the more numerous and determined the social class which has declared war in order to commence the war will be, the greater will be the moral significance of this declaration of war. Hence, political exposures in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for disintegrating the system we oppose, the means for diverting from the enemy his casual or temporary allies, the means for spreading enmity and distrust among those who permanently share power with the autocracy.

Only a party that will organise real all-national exposures can become the vanguard of the revolutionary forces in our time. The word "all-national" has a very profound meaning. The overwhelming majority of the non-working class exposers (and in order to become the vanguard, we must attract other classes) are sober politicians and cool business men. They know perfectly well how dangerous it is to "complain" even against a minor official, let alone against the "omnipotent" Russian government. And they will come to us with their complaints only when they see that these complaints really have effect, and when they see that we represent a political force. In order to become this political force in the eyes of outsiders, much persistent and stubborn work is required to increase our own consciousness, initiative and energy. For this, it is not sufficient to stick the label "vanguard" on "rearguard" theory and practice.

But if we have to undertake the organisation of the real all-national exposure of the government, then in what way will the class character of our movement be expressed?—the over-zealous advocates of "close organic contact with the proletarian struggle" will ask us. The reply is: In that we Social-Democrats will organise these public exposures; in that all the questions that are brought up by the agitation will be explained in the spirit of Social-Democracy, without any deliberate or unconscious distortions of Marxism; in the fac that the party will carry on this universal political agitation,