Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/94

 Democratic revolutionists, and the workers, no matter how strenuously and self-sacrificingly they may fight the police and the troops, no matter how revolutionary they may act, will prove to be merely the rearguard of bourgeois democracy, and not the vanguard of Social~Democracy. Take, for example, the German Social-Democrats, whose weak sides alone our Economists desire to emulate. Why is it that not a single political event takes place in Germany without adding to the authority and prestige of Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of others in their revolutionary estimation of any event and in their championship of every protest against tyranny. It does not soothe itself by arguments about the economic struggle bringing the workers up against their own lack of rights, and about concrete conditions fatalistically impelling the labour movement on the path revolution. It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life. In the matter of Wilhelm's refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not yet managed to convince the Germans that this in fact a compromise with liberalism!); in the question of the law against the publication of "immoral" publications and pictures; in the question of the government's influencing the election of the professors, etc., etc., everywhere Social-Democracy is found to be ahead of all others, rousing political discontent among all classes, rousing the sluggards, pushing on the laggards and providing a wealth of material for the development of the political consciousness of political activity of the proletariat. The result of all this is that even the avowed enemies of Socialism are filled with respect for this advanced political fighter and sometimes an important document from bourgeois and even from bureaucratic and Court circles makes its way by some miraculous means into the editorial office of Vorwaerts.

This, then, is the explanation of the seeming "contradiction" that passes the understanding of Rabocheye Dyelo to such an that it raises its arms and cries: "Masquerade"! Is it not a shocking thing: We, Rabocheye Dyelo, place the mass labour movement as the cornerstone (and printed in heavy type!); we warn all and sundry against belittling the significance of the spontaneous movement; we desire to give the economic struggle itself, itself, itself, a political character; we desire to maintain close and organic contact with the proletarian struggle! And yet we are told that we are