Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/92

 the task of actively intervening in every "liberal" question and defining his own Social-Democratic attitude towards such questions.

As the reader will remember, these polite expressions were uttered by Rabocheye Dyelo which in this way answers our charge that it "indirectly prepared the ground for converting the labour movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy." In its simplicity of heart Rabocheye Dyelo decided that this accusation was nothing more than a polemical sally, as if to say, these malicious doctrinaires can only think of saying unpleasant things about us; now what can be more unpleasant than being an instrument of bourgeois democracy? And so they print in heavy type a "refutation": "Nothing but downright slander" [Two Congresses, p. 30], "mystification" [p. 31] "masquerade" [p. 33]. Like Jupiter, Rabocheye Dyelo (although it has little resemblance to Jupiter) is angry because it is wrong, and proves by its hasty abuse that it is incapable of understanding its opponents' mode of reasoning. And yet with only a little reflection, it would have understood why a subservience to the spontaneity of the mass movement and any degrading of Social-Democratic politics to trade-union politics mean precisely to prepare the ground for converting the labour movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy. The spontaneous labour movement is able by itself to create (and inevitably will create) only trade unionisrn, and working-class trade-union politics are precisely working-class bourgeois politics. The fact that the working class participates in the political struggle and even in political revolution does not in itself make its politics Social-Democratic politics. Will Rabocheye Dyelo deny that? Will it at last openly and without equivocation explain its position on the urgent questions of the international and of the Russian Social-Democratic movement? Oh no, it never thinks of doing anything of the kind, because it holds fast to the trick, which might be described as telling it in "negatives": "It's not me; it's my horse; I'm not the driver." We are not Economists; Rabochaya Mysl does not stand for Economism; there is no Economism at all