Doug Nielson's List: Lenin: Building the Party by Tony Cliff

• In all religions not only the holy man, but also his ancestors are endowed with extraordinary piety.
• As he later recalled, he never again in his life read as much as during the years 1888–93.
• Lenin made it clear that he became a Social Democrat (a synonym at that time for a Marxist) in 1893
• “One cannot develop new views other than through polemics,”
• It was called A Dispute between a Social Democrat and a Populist, and most probably was a summary of Samara disputes presented in dialogue form. Unfortunately, the paper has been lost.

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• the Iskra period and the preparation for the second Congress – the years 1900–03
• it had been rather awkward for him to have to arrange this, but that he considered it necessary for the good of the cause.

  • Identifies his own capacity for info. control with the good of the cause.
• more pushy
• Wise as serpents
• harmless as doves
• entirely in your hands

  • remember that there you have an unreliable friend (and maybe even an enemy).
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/jul/16b.htm
• The loyalty declarations that appeared in the pages of Iskra in the winter of 1902–03
• Welded into a compact conspiratorial group of professional revolutionaries, they traveled from place to place wherever there were party committees, established contacts with their members, delivered illegal literature to them, helped to establish print shops and garnered the information needed by the Iskra. They penetrated into local committees, carried on their propaganda against “economism,” eliminated their ideological opponents and in this way subjected the committees to their influence.
• In addition, she organised the transportation of Iskra to Russia. This was an extremely onerous task.

  • Lenin read letters and paced
• The whole preparation of the 1903 Congress was in the hands of Lenin. “How Vladimir Ilyich longed for the Congress!” Krupskaya reminisced. [16] But despite all his persistence, and all the hard work, the Congress took on a completely unexpected shape. Instead of being a unity congress, it was a congress in which the Russian Marxists split radically into two separate trends and organisations – the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

• And we must take the same position on the question of the duration of parliaments. If in a burst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people chose a very fine parliament – a kind of chambre introuvable – then we would be bound to try to make of it a long parliament; and if the elections turned out unsuccessfully, then we would have to try to disperse it not in two years but if possible in two weeks. [17]

    

  Plekhanov’s statement precisely described the actual policies of the Bolsheviks, especially in 1917; he lived to bitterly regret his own words.
• he dictatorship has to be directed against the conservative ideas spread among the masses by the old system of society,
• “and by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party organisations”.
• those who only talk from those who do the work.
• We must not forget that every party member is responsible for the party, and that the party is responsible for every one of its members.
• “organised distrust.” That is true.
• How could Martov and Trotsky, who wholeheartedly supported Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, which proposed that absolute authority should be given to the Central Committee of the party, reject Lenin’s definition of party membership? To combine a strong centralist leadership with loose membership was eclecticism taken to an extreme.
• The harsh necessity for democratic centralism within the revolutionary working-class party is derived from the harsh imperatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
• Moreover, the leadership of a revolutionary party must provide the highest example of devotion and complete identification with the party in its daily life. This gives it the moral authority to demand the maximum sacrifice from the rank and file.

  • key
• Years earlier, Engels, in arguing against the anarchists, had said that the proletarian revolution demanded a very strong discipline, a strong authority.
• And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.
• Lenin gained a majority again in the 27th session, in which the Jewish Bund’s desire to be the sole organisation of Jewish workers, and to preserve its autonomy in the party, was defeated (by 41 votes to 5,
• Soon afterwards, the five Bund delegates walked out of the Congress. Then the two “economist” delegates also walked out, because the Congress decided that the Iskrist League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democrats Abroad should be the sole representative of the party abroad. Martov thus lost 7 votes at one blow, reducing his support to 20 votes, while Lenin kept his 24.
• after a month of deliberation
• Lenin saw the differences as a conflict between those who accepted the party spirit of appointment of officials on the one hand, and those accustomed to circle attitudes and “the old boy network,” a conflict that had a large personal element in it. He was not at all sure, at the time, whether this justified a split.
• Such arguments simply put the whole question on the plane of pity and injured feelings, and were a direct admission of bankruptcy as regards real arguments of principle, real political arguments
• “must learn to insist that the duties of a party member be fulfilled not only by the rank and file, but by the ‘people at the top’
• Why did Martov and his friends try to deny the actual inefficiency of the members of the old editorial board now removed by the Congress?
• Vera Zasulich
• However, Lenin was far too honest intellectually, too devoted to the cause, to sacrifice the needs of the organisation to his own sentiments. And so Vera Zasulich had to go. Those who were ready to subordinate the needs of the movement to secondary considerations were later to show themselves to be conciliators, not revolutionaries.
• One of Ilyich’s characteristic traits was his ability to distinguish disputes on principles from personal disputes
• While, on first acquaintance, Lenin was always ready to “fall in love” with a new collaborator, after a longer acquaintance, he would nearly always discern elements of weakness in him.
• His attitude toward a person tended to change radically, depending on whether at the time he was on his side or against him.
• his generosity of spirit and exceptional warmth,
• But only weak-nerved dilettantes from among “sympathisers” can be embarrassed by these conflicts, can shrug them off in despair or in scorn, as if to say “it is all a squabble!”
• I can detect nothing, absolutely nothing in these results that is injurious to the party, and absolutely nothing that is an affront or insult to the minority. [43]
• Six months after the Congress he could write: “The disagreements that divide the two wings at the present time for the most part concern, not questions of program or tactics, but only organisational questions”
• It really hurts and fills you with alarm for the work when you see the people at the head of it spending their time on something else. When you see that, you ask yourself: is our party doomed to perpetual splits over such trifles, are we incapable of waging the internal and the external struggle at the same time?
• On the eve of the second Congress, Krupskaya remembers: “Vladimir Ilyich was so overwrought that he developed a nervous illness called “holy fire”, which consists in inflammation of the nerve terminals of back and chest
• On the way to Geneva Vladimir Ilyich was very restless; on arriving there he broke down completely, and had to lie in bed for two weeks.”

  • Lenin two weeks in bed with nerves?
• In fact, after every conference, Lenin would go off, usually with Krupskaya, on long hiking or cycling expeditions.
• His self-discipline was so great that there were few indications of the surges of emotion that rocked him. Yet, in Krupskaya’s memoirs, there are constant references to weeks and months of nervous exhaustion.
• it was more than six months later that Lenin finally came to the conclusion that the split was justified and necessary. He stopped hesitating and came out firmly with the argument that the split was a reflection of the differences between the proletarian wing and the petty-bourgeois intellectualist wing of the party.

  • the proletarian wing and the petty-bourgeois intellectualist wing of the party.
• to distinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as a means of a technically highly developed form of production. The discipline and organisation which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.”
• But his status of life and his conditions of labour are not proletarian, and this gives rise to a certain antagonism in sentiments and ideas.
• The proletarian fights with the utmost devotion as part of the anonymous mass, without prospect of personal advantage or personal glory, doing his duty in any post he is assigned to with a voluntary discipline which pervades all his feelings and thoughts.

  • at those times when he really fights
• the Bolsheviks were from the beginning called the “hard ones,” and the Mensheviks the “soft,”
• Lenin concluded that the position taken by Martov and his supporters reflected capitulation before the individualism of the intellectuals.
• Hence the notion that the proletariat “is spontaneously drawn towards trade unionist consciousness” only, and that the Marxist intelligentsia has a central role to play in bringing class and political consciousness to the workers from outside. Now, two years later, in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, the proletarian elements in the party have to impose discipline on the intelligentsia.

  • you brought us socialist consciousness, so now act more like a worker
• fatalism and submissiveness versus willpower and action. Here the historical and the personal factors became enmeshed.
• centrism, which is a general term for very varied tendencies and groupings ranging from reformism to Marxism. One of the main characteristics of centrists is their obscuring of the need for a clear demarcation between the vanguard of the class and the mass, of the initiative of the minority and the routine of the majority. Centrism’s main drawback is its historical fatalism. Because it is so indefinite in nature, so lacking in clear, sharp character delineation, because it vacillates between Marxism and reformism, centrist groupings do not all move in the same direction. Some move leftwards toward Marxism and some rightwards toward reformism. In addition, lacking consistency as they do, centrists sometimes move to the left and then later veer to the right. In the process, differentiation takes place in the grouping itself, and splits ensue: Some sections move over completely to reformism, while others join the revolutionary wing of the labour movement.
• one faction tends to gather around itself and become the mouthpiece of a non-proletarian social group,
• the personal element may play a significant role in shaping policy within each group
• Everyone spoke of Lenin’s hardness, and Martov’s softness was no less talked about.
• The “parliamentary road to socialism” could not attract where parliament did not exist.
• In place of Lenin, they appointed Noskov, a conciliator, as their official foreign representative.
• He decided to invite Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Potresov to join the editorial board of Iskra. Lenin resigned in disgust.
• Lenin’s immediate reaction was to organise for the convening of a new Congress.
• “I am not a machine,” he replied, “and cannot do any work in the present disgraceful state of affairs.”
• called on Lenin to rejoin the board, and denounced his agitation for a new, third Congress to settle accounts with the Mensheviks.
• As we shall see later, during the years of reaction (1906–10), Lenin also lost the new highly qualified writers who joined the Bolsheviks at the time – Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Pokrovsky, Rozhkov, and Gorky.
• To add to Lenin’s difficulties, in the summer of 1904, all the leaders of the socialist movement outside Russia sided with Martov and the Mensheviks. Among these were Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and August Bebel.
• he built a completely new set of centralised committees, quite regardless of Rule 6 of the party statutes, which reserved to the Central Committee the right to organise and recognise committees.

  • screw the rules. Pleckanov threw out the decisions of the congress
• In December 1904, Lenin succeeded in establishing a newspaper of his own, Vperyod (Forward), which became the organ of Bolshevism.
• Bolsheviks always suffered from the fact that they had far fewer intellectuals and able journalists than the Mensheviks. The reverse side of the coin was that the Mensheviks fell victim to the illusion that their superiority in literary ability guaranteed their future influence in the labour movement.
• The Mensheviks were also having a difficult time. The factional fight damaged both wings of the RSDLP. Years later Martov wrote:
• In one district of Petersburg, the number of Menshevik circles was reduced from 15 or 20 at the beginning of 1904 to only four or five by December. [73]
• He was so absorbed in the struggle against the Mensheviks that, incredible as it may seem, during the whole of the year 1904, there are only three references in his writings to the Russo-Japanese war. The overwhelming dominant theme is the split with the Mensheviks.
• In my opinion, one of the principal causes of it is that there are no regular CC leaflets. Leadership by means of talks and personal contacts at a time of revolution is sheer utopianism. Leadership must be public. All other forms of work must be wholly and unconditionally subordinated to this form.
• Apparently, the CC members completely fail to understand the tasks of “keeping in the public eye.” Yet without that there is no centre, there is no party! They are working themselves to the bone, but they are working like moles, at secret rendezvous, at meetings with agents, etc., etc. It is a sheer waste of strength! ... The thing is to act, to act all the time openly, to stop being dumb. Otherwise we here, too, are completely cut off.
• when the 1905 Revolution came, he had a machine under his control. He had demonstrated in full measure the political, organisational, and administrative talent needed to build such an apparatus.
• There is no one to pour cheer into people, to raise key issues, no one capable of lifting them above the Geneva marsh into the sphere of more serious interests and problems.
• There was a total cleavage between the ideal of a coherent, efficient party structure as visualised in Lenin’s writings, and the ramshackle party organisation that existed.
• Unlike Marx and Engels, who lived in a period of expanding capitalism and hence did not emphasise party organisation, the immediacy of revolution for Lenin meant that party organisation was of cardinal importance.
• What will all the gossip and scandal mean which the whole émigré pack may circulate against you, once you answer them with your political economy?

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• “When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.”
• as an independent force we do not exist, and therefore our task consists in the support of the second force – the liberal bourgeoisie; we must encourage it, and on no account frighten it by putting forward the independent demands of the proletariat.
• In complete contrast, Lenin always relentlessly denounced the Russian liberal bourgeoisie as a counterrevolutionary force.
• What is needed here is not “negotiations,” but the actual mustering of force; not pressure on the Zemstvoists, but pressure on the government and its agents.
• The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie with us is much deeper than it was in 1789,
• The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners.
• conversion of the peasant into a Knecht
• Liberalism has already conclusively demonstrated its counterrevolutionary nature, its incapacity to lead the peasant revolution; the peasantry has not yet fully understood that it is only along the path of revolution and republic, under the guidance of the socialist proletariat, that a real victory can be won.
• But this sympathy for the revolutionary workers evaporated quickly. It soon became clear that a separation could not be made between the anti-Tsarist demands of the workers and their struggle to improve their conditions of life in opposition to the interests of the employers.
• eight-hour day.
• “constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.”
• cowardice
• This youthful experience undoubtedly did leave its imprint on Lenin’s attitude towards the liberals. It was early that he learned the value of all liberal chatter.

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• The experience of the Russian Revolution, like the experience of other countries, proves beyond doubt that where the objective conditions of a profound political crisis exist, the tiniest conflict, seemingly remote from the true birthplace of revolution, can act as a spark to kindle an upsurge in public feeling.
• He instructed them to tear up, unread, the leaflets that students were distributing, which included among their demands a struggle against Tsarism.
• They sent speakers to the district meetings of the assembly, and succeeded in introducing resolutions and amendments into the original text of the petition. It was actually the Menshevik Group that displayed this initiative.
• The result was a petition very different from the one originally envisaged by the leaders of the assembly.
• anuary a general strike of the whole of St. Petersburg
• On Sunday, 9 January, 200,000 Petersburg workers marched in an enormous but peaceful procession to the Tsar’s Winter Palace, headed by Father Gapon.
• January 9 would not have taken place if Gapon had not encountered several thousand politically conscious workers who had been through the school of socialism.
• “9 January 1905,
• Finally, however, the Petersburg Committee decided that the party members should take part in the 9 January procession.
• The attendance was pitiful; “only a small group, some 15 workers, no more, appeared at the rendezvous.”

  • iso at wto
• enin, however, realised from the beginning that the Gapon movement would outgrow the intentions of the Tsarist authorities.
• The legalisation of the working-class movement, they said, would definitely benefit us Social Democrats. It would draw certain sections of the workers into the movement, especially the backward sections: it would help to rouse those who would not soon, perhaps ever, be roused by a socialist agitator. And once drawn into the movement and having acquired an interest in their own future, the workers would go further.
• And knowledge of the masses can only be obtained by close contact with them. How could Ilyich pass by Gapon, who stood close to the masses, and had such influence over them?
• But, at the same time, they ought “to use every means to ensure Social Democratic influence and, if possible, leadership, in all the newly emerging or already existing legal and illegal trade unions.”
• nd lastly to ensure that these unions, under certain conditions, come into direct association with the party – however, without at all expelling non-party members from their ranks. [27]
• The initiative in establishing the Petersburg Soviet was taken by the Mensheviks, who, however, had no conception of the effect their creation would have in the long run. The Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, for their part, showed extreme hostility toward the soviet.
• (1) to invite the soviet to accept the RSDLP’s program and, when this was done, to recognise the leadership of the party and “ultimately dissolve in it”; (2) if the soviet refused to accept the program, to leave the soviet and expose the anti-proletarian nature of such organisations;
• The only question – and a highly important one – is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
• In this respect, too, I think it inadvisable to demand that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should accept the Social Democratic program and join the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It seems to me that to lead the political struggle, both the Soviet ... and the party are, to an equal degree, absolutely necessary.
• enlist to this end the participation of new deputies not only from the workers, but, first of all, from the sailors and soldiers,
• and thirdly, from the revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia ...
• It was not some theory, not appeals on the part of someone, tactics invented by someone, not party doctrine, but the force of circumstances
• “Soviets” and similar mass institutions are in themselves insufficient for organising an uprising.
• For the Mensheviks, who brought it into being, the Petersburg Soviet was neither an organisation of struggle for power, nor a governmental form. For them it was merely a “proletarian parliament,” an “organ of revolutionary self-administration,” and so on.

  • !!!

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• It was natural for Lenin, whenever he found the other Bolshevik leaders wanting, to try to establish direct contact with members of lower party committees who were more determined, less vacillating, and who he encouraged and promoted to higher positions in the faction. He had a very high regard for the committeeman. He prised men and women of action and resolution
• He did not regard the centralised party machine a fetish, or an end in itself, but as a means of increasing the activity, consciousness, and organisation of the vanguard sections of the working class.
• In contrast, the committeemen showed clear conservative and elitist characteristics,
• Stalin
• “All of Lenin is in that phrase.
• Lenin, who knew how to recruit, train, and keep the loyalty of the committeemen, had to oppose their conservatism during the revolution of 1905
• they had had to evolve a discipline, which now became an impediment.
• Allow every subcommittee to write and publish leaflets without any red tape (there is no harm if they do make a mistake; we on Vperyod will “gently” correct them). We must, with desperate speed, unite all people with revolutionary initiative and set them to work. Do not fear their lack of training, do not tremble at their inexperience and lack of development ...
• The only valid criterion for admitting workers into a committee must be the degree of their influence among the masses.
• Buttressing themselves with quotations from What Is to Be Done? they called for “extreme caution” in admitting workers into the committees and condemned “playing at democracy.”
• Lenin now formulated his conclusion in terms that were the exact opposite of those of What Is to Be Done? In an article called The Reorganisation of the Party, written in November 1905, he says bluntly: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic.”
• A few years later, in an article commemorating the 1905 Revolution, Lenin goes even further in expressing the view that capitalism itself inculcates a socialist consciousness in the working class.
• if we had not “exaggerated”
• it is our firm conviction that the actual struggle, and work within the ranks will convince all elements possessing vitality that Marxism is the truth, and will cast aside all those who lack vitality. And we do not for one moment doubt our strength, the overwhelming strength of Marxists, in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
• must attract to it, enlighten, and organise all who labour and are exploited, as stated in our program – all without exception: handicraftsmen, paupers, beggars, servants, tramps, prostitutes – of course, subject to the necessary and obligatory condition that they join the Social Democratic movement and not that the Social Democratic movement join them, that they adopt the standpoint of the proletariat, and not that the proletariat adopt theirs.
• We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.
• Lenin grasped better than anyone else the need for a centralised party organisation. However, he saw it not as an aim in itself, but rather as a lever to raise the level of activity and consciousness among the mass of the workers.

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• The mustering of an army
• it must be explained directly and openly to the masses what the practical conditions for a successful revolution are at the present time.
• The workers must learn from the capitalists’ knowledge and techniques, and from their own experience in struggle.
• But to achieve this the soldiers must be convinced of the readiness of the workers to seize victory even at the cost of their own lives.
• Lenin also carefully re-read everything Marx and Engels had written on military matters and insurrection. He was the only Russian émigré leader who reacted in this way to Bloody Sunday.
• He propagated the results of his studies amongst his comrades.
• When can a strike be timed? When the organisation or group calling it has influence among the masses of the workers involved and is able correctly to gauge the moment when discontent and resentment among them are mounting.
• “The success of both the Russian and the world revolution depends on two or three days’ fighting,”
• Thus, nothing could be more short-sighted than Plekhanov’s view, seized upon by all the opportunists, that the strike was untimely and should not have been started, and that “they should not have taken to arms.” On the contrary, we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine things to a peaceful strike and that a fearless and relentless armed fight was necessary.
• It is impossible to wage war consistently while rejecting the idea of victory. The Mensheviks believed that the Russian revolution would bring the liberal bourgeoisie to power.
• The revolutionary party has to decide on the exact day and the exact way of carrying out the insurrection, because it is a question of life and death for the working class.
• attack, not defence, must be the slogan of the masses; the organisation of the struggle will become mobile and flexible;

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• the only force capable of gaining “a decisive victory over Tsarism” is the people, i.e., the proletariat and the peasantry ... “The revolution’s decisive victory over Tsarism” means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
• If we are even in part, even for a moment, guided by the consideration that our participation may cause the bourgeoisie to recoil, we thereby simply hand over leadership of the revolution entirely under the tutelage of the bourgeoisie (while retaining complete “freedom of criticism”!) compelling the proletariat to be moderate and meek, so that the bourgeoisie should not recoil. [4]
• the democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of bourgeois social and economic relationships. [5]
• In the same book, Lenin makes it clear that the program of the revolution should be limited to reform within the framework of capitalism:
• the three fundamental conditions for consistent democratic reform, viz., a democratic republic (with complete equality and self determination for all nations), confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day.” [10]
• the subsequent government would not be a coalition of two independent forces, but would be led by the proletariat. In no uncertain terms, Trotsky argued that the revolution could not therefore confine itself to the carrying out of bourgeois democratic tasks, but must proceed immediately to carry out proletarian socialist measures:
• The history of capitalism is the history of the subordination of the country to the town. [16]
• The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement.
• There was another important element in Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, namely the international character of the coming Russian revolution. He believed that it would begin on a national scale, but could be completed only by the victory of the revolution in the more developed countries:
• Without the direct state support of the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialistic dictatorship.
• On s’engage, et puis ... on voit

  • On S'engage; Et Puis, On Voit
    
    That was a favorite saying of Napoleon’s. Later, Lenin adopted it as his own. Rendered in English it reads, “You commit yourself; and then, you see.
• The Bolsheviks claimed for the proletariat the role of leader in the democratic revolution. The Mensheviks reduced its role to that of an “extreme opposition.”
• In this algebra of revolution, the real value of the unknown or doubtful element in Lenin’s equation – how far the revolution would go beyond the minimum program – would be decided largely by the dynamic of the struggle itself.
• here were being grouped inflexible revolutionaries on the one side and, on the other, elements which were becoming more and more opportunist and accommodating. [25]

• Marx said:

    

  While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible ... it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent,

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• Generally speaking, it is reactionary to support small property because such support is directed against large-scale capitalist economy and, consequently, retards social development, and obscures and glosses over the class struggle. In this case, however, we want to support small property not against capitalism but against serf-ownership.
• If the aim of the agrarian revolution was to eliminate feudal relations, then not all the landowners’ land should be taken away from them, in particular, not the part used for capitalist farming and employing wage labour.

• “All land to the people!” [16]

    

  This must have made a big impression on Lenin, for Krupskaya goes on to relate:

    

  At the December conference in Tammerfors, Ilyich tabled a motion to drop completely from the program this point on the peasants’ land. In its place a paragraph was inserted on the support to be given to the revolutionary measures of the peasantry, including even confiscation of landowners’ estates and official, church, monastic, and crown lands.
• The peasant risings in South Russia in the spring of 1902 remained sporadic outbursts. One can therefore understand the restraint shown by the Social Democrats in drafting the agrarian program
• Such a tentative distinction was quite fallacious, because, in practice, the peasant mass movement could not be directed against particular categories of landlord estates, but only against landlordism in general. [20]
• Lenin went on from this to a further revision of the agrarian program, in which he raised the slogan of nationalisation of all the land.
• The strength of the peasant movement against the landowners also taught Lenin that in 1903 he had overestimated the extent to which capitalist development had taken hold in the countryside. Feudal relations were not mere remnants, as he had then assumed, but exercised great influence throughout the rural situation.
• The survivals of serfdom appeared to us then to be a minor detail, whereas capitalist agriculture on the peasant allotments and on the landlords’ estates seemed to be quite mature and well-established ... We rectified the mistake by substituting for the partial aim of combating the survivals of the old agrarian system, the aim of combating the old agrarian system as a whole. Instead of purging landlord economy, we set the aim of abolishing it.
• deep beneath the conservative shell there was in fact a revolutionary kernel. He refers with enthusiasm to the speech of the monarchist right-wing peasant Storchak to the Tsarist Duma:
• And he finishes: “But if His Majesty said that there should be justice and order, then, of course if I am sitting on 3 desiatins of land, and next to me there are 30,000 desiatins that is not order and justice.”

• An ignorant peasant ... is as innocent as a babe unborn and amazingly ignorant politically. The link between the monarchy and “order”, i.e., the disorder and injustice which protect the owners of 30,000 desiatins, is not clear to him [26]

    

  Storchak, and the deputies who at bottom share his views – the priest Titov, Andreichuk, Popov IV and Niktyuk – express the revolutionary temper of the peasant mass unconsciously, spontaneously, afraid themselves not only to speak out, but even to think out what their words and proposals imply.

  • !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• We ... say: All the land to those who work on it, and all power to the working people!”
• We have already paid for it 10 times over with blood, sweat, and money.”
• express the spirit of the peasants’ mass struggle outspokenly ... the speeches of the Trudovik peasants, who state their views forthrightly, [are] conveying the moods and aspirations of the masses with amazing precision and liveliness, mixing up programs (some speak of their sympathy with the Bill of the 42 peasants, others of sympathy with the Cadets), but all the more strongly expressing what lies deeper than any programs. [31]

• Comparing the speeches of the revolutionary peasants in the second Duma with those of the revolutionary workers, one is struck by the following difference: The former are imbued with a far more spontaneous revolutionary spirit, a passionate desire to destroy the landlord regime immediately, and immediately to create a new system. The peasant is eager to fling himself upon the enemy at once and to strangle him. [32]

    

  Lenin showed a remarkable freedom from dogmatism, and a feeling for the real heartbeat of the mass movement, even if it was to be found in the chest of a monarchist peasant!
• This line of argument influenced the Mensheviks’ attitude to the liberal party – the Cadets – on the one hand, and the peasant party – the Trudoviks – on the other.
• they want to draw the peasant and the urban petty bourgeois away from the liberals and muster them behind the proletariat, behind the vanguard, for the revolutionary struggle.
• Yes, on the agrarian question the stand of the “right” peasants in all three Dumas has been more left than the Cadets’, thereby proving that the monarchism of the muzhik is naiveté that is dying out, in contrast to the monarchism of the liberal businessmen, who are monarchists through class calculation.
• the Social Democratic Party deems it possible and necessary to enter into fighting agreements with these parties, while at the same time systematically exposing their pseudo-socialist character and combating their attempts to obscure the class antithesis between the proletarian and the small proprietor.
• He explains that there are two paths open to capitalist development in the Russian countryside
• we must support not bourgeois evolution of the landlord type, but bourgeois evolution of the peasant type. The former implies the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (remodeled on bourgeois lines), the least rapid development of productive force, and the retarded development of capitalism; it implies infinitely greater misery and suffering, exploitation and oppression for the broad mass of the peasantry and, consequently, also for the proletariat. The second type implies the most rapid development of the productive forces and the best possible (under commodity production) conditions of existence for the mass of the peasantry. The tactics of Social Democracy in the Russian bourgeois revolution are determined not by the task of supporting the liberal bourgeoisie, as the opportunists think, but by the task of supporting the fighting peasantry.
• There is nothing more erroneous than the opinion that the nationalisation of the land has anything in common with socialism, or even with equalised land tenure. Socialism, as we know, means the abolition of commodity economy. Nationalisation, on the other hand, means converting the land into the property of the state, and such a conversion does not in the least affect private farming on the land.
• The moral significance of nationalisation in the revolutionary epoch is that the proletariat helps to strike a blow at “one form of private property” which must inevitably have its repercussion all over the world.
• But land nationalisation, while part and parcel of the bourgeois revolution, can, depending on the balance of class forces, be a springboard in the struggle for socialism in the countryside.
• Throughout the development of the agrarian policy of the party, there are two central points in Lenin’s thinking: (1) the working class must lead the peasantry; (2) the workers’ party has to keep itself independent and clearly demarcated from the peasantry:
• Without the initiative and guidance of the proletariat the peasantry counts for nothing.
• He is unconsciously impelled into the fight against this position, into the fight for democracy, for the ideas of abolishing exploitation. On the other hand, he is a petty proprietor. In the peasant lives the instinct of a proprietor – if not of today, then of tomorrow. It is the proprietor’s, the owner’s instinct that repels the peasant from the proletariat, engendering in him an aspiration to become someone in the world, to become a bourgeois, to hem himself in against all society on his own plot of land, on his own dungheap.
• The Russian revolution can achieve victory by its own efforts, but it cannot possibly hold and consolidate its gains by its own strength. It cannot do this unless there is a socialist revolution in the West ... After the complete victory of the democratic revolution the small proprietor will inevitably turn against the proletariat; and the sooner the common enemies of the proletariat and of the small proprietors, such as the capitalists, the landlords and the financial bourgeoisie, and so forth are overthrown, the sooner will this happen. Our democratic republic has no other reserve than the socialist proletariat in the West. [55]

  • http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/ucong/1.htm
• Unfortunately, the contradiction between the consistent revolutionary kernel of Lenin’s policies in 1905 and afterwards and its bourgeois-democratic shell was to be a factor in the party crises and the paralysis of the Bolshevik leadership days and weeks after the February Revolution of 1917, before Lenin returned to Russia to counter his own “old Bolshevik” formulation.

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• When the bourgeois gentry and their uncritical echoers, the social-reformists, talk priggishly about the “education” of the masses, they usually mean something schoolmasterly, pedantic, something that demoralises the masses and instils in them bourgeois prejudices.

    

  The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political and especially revolutionary struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
• It is in this awakening of tremendous masses of the people to political consciousness and revolutionary struggle that the historic significance of January 22, 1905, lies.
• Just wait, 1905 will come again. That is how the workers look at things.
• t is the mortal blow struck at the former softness and flabbiness of the masses.
• there begins a period of direct political activity of the “common people”, who simply set to work without more ado to smash all the instruments for oppressing the people, seize power and take what was regarded as belonging to all kinds of robbers of the people – in short, when the intellect and reason of millions of downtrodden people awaken not only to read books, but for action, vital human action, to make history.
• has faith in the masses, in the action of the masses, in the legitimacy of their sentiments and the expediency of their methods of struggle
• the proletariat can generate fighting energy a hundred times greater than in ordinary, peaceful times.
• “that the political consciousness of the masses is the main force”
• Unbreakable ties with the mass of the workers,
• When Lenin talked about the fighting masses, he did not necessarily mean the majority of the working class.
• For it is absolutely indisputable that those who participated in the revolutionary movement throughout 1905 were the avowedly revolutionary minority:
• it was because the masses who were fighting were in a minority – they were nonetheless masses for being in a minority – that they did not achieve full success in their struggle.
• In January 1905, most workers thought that the Tsar could be spoken to like a decent person. “Bloody Sunday” opened the eyes of millions. In October, the same workers believed that to shake a fist at the Tsar would be enough to force him to grant concessions. The general strike of October proved to them that this was not so. The use of arms was the next step. But again this idea was not accepted by the majority of the working class. Only a minority of Moscow workers participated in the December armed uprising.
• It purges the consciousness of the advanced workers of routine, inertia, and irresolution. At the same time, it demands from the party, because of the sharp changes in direction the struggle takes, remarkable tactical skills and adaptability to the swiftly changing needs of the movement.

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• using the lull to muster new forces
• However, six months later, at the beginning of December, he revised his estimate of the situation.
• A revolutionary cannot accept the defeat of the revolution until objective facts leave no room for doubt. The revolutionaries are the last to leave the battlefield.

• The view that an economic crisis heightens the revolutionary struggle was generally accepted by Russian Marxists. The only exception was Trotsky, and he was proved absolutely right.

    

  After a period of big battles and defeats, a crisis has the effect of depressing rather than arousing the working class. It undermines the workers’ confidence in their powers and demoralises them politically. Under such conditions, only an industrial revival can close the ranks of the proletariat, pour fresh blood into its veins, restore its confidence in itself and make it capable of further struggle.
• Under the blows of lockouts, unemployment and poverty, the weary masses became definitely discouraged. Such was the material basis for the “achievements” of Stolypin’s reaction. The proletariat needed the resuscitative font of a new industrial resurgence to revive its strength, fill its ranks, again feel itself the indispensable factor in production and plunge into a new fight.
• “The recent All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party has led the party out on to the road,
• But his optimism was totally baseless
• Stalin described the situation
• The first to leave the sinking ship were the intellectuals. In March 1908, Lenin commented on “the flight of the intellectuals from the party,” and quoted a number of correspondents to support this statement.
• The main cause of the party crisis ... is the wavering intellectual and petty-bourgeois elements, of which the workers’ party had to rid itself; elements who joined the working-class movement mainly in the hope of an early triumph of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and could not stand up to a period of reaction. Their instability was revealed both in theory (“retreat from revolutionary Marxism”) ... and in tactics (the “whittling down of slogans”) as well as in party organisation.
• The wholesale flight of the intelligentsia. All that is left are workers’ circles and isolated individuals. The young, inexperienced worker is making his way forward with difficulty.”
• confusion and wavering among the Social Democrats who have remained loyal, dejection and apathy among fairly wide sections of the advanced proletariat, uncertainty as to the way out of this situation – such are the distinguishing features of the present position.
• n 1910 and early 1911, all Bolshevik members of the Central Committee working in Russia were arrested.
• The okhrana infiltrated almost all the party organisations and an atmosphere of suspicion and mutual distrust thwarted all initiative.
• “The ideal of the okhrana is being realised,” wrote an activist. “Secret agents are at the head of all the Moscow organisations.” The situation in Petersburg was not much better.
• In 1912, when the legal Bolshevik daily Pravda was founded in Petersburg, two police agents, Miron Chernomazov and Roman Malinovsky, were on the editorial staff, the former as an editor and chairman of the editorial board, the latter as contributing editor and treasurer. From Malinovsky, the police obtained a complete list of people who contributed donations to the paper and a complete list of subscribers. Malinovsky was also chairman of the Bolshevik group in the Duma, and a member of the Central Committee. Lenin admired him. “For the first time we have among our people in the Duma an outstanding workers’ leader.” [28] He used to call him abroad for the most confidential meetings, and revealed important secrets to him.
• Walking the Geneva streets, Lenin murmured, “I feel just as if I’d come here to be buried.”
• To lead an army in retreat is usually a far more difficult task than to lead one on the offensive.
• Of all the defeated opposition and revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks effected the most orderly retreat, with the least loss to their “army,” with its core best preserved, with the least significant splits (in point of depth and incurability), with the least demoralisation, and in the best condition to resume work on the broadest scale and in the most correct and energetic manner. The Bolsheviks achieved this only because they ruthlessly exposed and expelled the revolutionary phrase-mongers, those who did not wish to understand that one had to retreat, that one had to know how to retreat.
• In concrete terms, to retreat meant to withdraw from the field of the direct, open, revolutionary struggle, and instead “to work legally in the most reactionary of parliaments, in the most reactionary of trade unions, co-operative and insurance societies and similar organisations.”
• it would have very limited power and that the election process itself would be very undemocratic.
• Voters were to be divided according to social “estates,” with extremely limited representation for the workers, and there were to be many stages in the election process. The Bolsheviks came out in favour of an “active” boycott of the elections.
• The Boycott of the Bulygin Duma and Insurrection, written in August 1905. “As distinct from passive abstention, an active boycott should imply increasing agitation tenfold, organising meetings everywhere, taking advantage of election meetings, even if we have to force our way into them, holding demonstrations, political strikes, and so on and so forth.”
• When Lenin argued for an active boycott of the election to the Duma, he made it clear that the tactic was based on his assumption that the revolution was going to continue to gather momentum.
• He wrote, “An active boycott ... is unthinkable without a clear, precise, and immediate slogan. Only an armed uprising can be that slogan.” [51] After the defeat of the Moscow uprising in December 1905, he continued to argue in favour of the boycott, on the ground that the revolution had been halted only temporarily and a further uprising was not far off.
• In fact, he ignored faction discipline and voted with the Mensheviks.
• We were obliged to do – and did – everything in our power to prevent the convocation of a sham representative body. That is so. But since it has been convened in spite of all our efforts, we cannot shirk the task of utilising it.

  • key
• on the contrary, guided by the experience already provided by history, we shall entirely subordinate the struggle we wage in the Duma to another form of struggle, namely, strikes, uprisings, etc.
• Not one Bolshevik delegate supported Lenin. Instead they accused him of betraying Bolshevism.
• Whereas,
   (1) active boycott, as the experience of the Russian revolution has shown, is correct tactics on the part of the Social Democrats only under conditions of a sweeping, universal, and rapid upswing of the revolution, developing into an armed uprising, and only in connection with the ideological aims of the struggle against constitutional illusions arising from the convocation of the first representative assembly by the old regime;
   (2) in the absence of these conditions correct tactics on the part of the revolutionary Social Democrats call for participation in the elections, as was the case with the second Duma.
• Lenin was not concerned about the fact that he reached the conclusion that it was necessary to cease boycotting the Duma elections later than the Mensheviks. On the contrary, a “mistake” of this sort was no mistake at all. “The revolutionary Social Democrats must be the first to take the line of the most resolute, the most direct struggle ... and must be the last to adopt more circuitous methods of struggle.”
• But it is just because we cherish this concern for revolutionary traditions that we must vigorously protest against the view that by using one of the slogans of a particular historical period the essential conditions of the period can be restored.
• Lenin demanded from the Bolsheviks a readiness to face realities: “Since the accursed counterrevolution has driven us into this accursed pigsty, we shall work there too for the benefit of the revolution, without whining, but also without boasting.”
• To agree ... to participate in the third and fourth Dumas was a compromise, a temporary renunciation of revolutionary demands. But this was a compromise absolutely forced upon us, for the balance of forces made it impossible for us for the time being to conduct a mass revolutionary struggle, and in order to prepare this struggle over a long period we had to be able to work even from inside such a “pigsty”. History has proved that this approach to the question by the Bolsheviks as a party was perfectly correct.

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• Marxism is constantly referred to as a science, but as a guide to action, it must also be an art.
• To advance from theory to practice, from science to art, Lenin had to demonstrate the dialectical relation between them – what is common to both and what distinguishes one from the other.
• 60-70 per cent of the Bolsheviks) don’t know how to think, they only learn words by heart.” [3]
• without a special analysis of the conditions of that particular case becomes an empty phrase.
• At the same time a clear scientific understanding of the general contours of historical development of the class struggle is essential for a revolutionary leader. He will not be able to keep his bearings and his confidence through the twists and turns of the struggle unless he has a general knowledge of economics and politics.
• Theoretical scepticism is incompatible with revolutionary action. “The important thing is to be confident that the path chosen is the right one, this confidence multiplying a hundred-fold revolutionary energy and revolutionary enthusiasm, which can perform miracles.”

  • !
• Theoretical skepticism and revolutionary relentlessness are not compatible.
• Lenin believed in improvisation. But in order for this not to degenerate into simply the shifting impressions of the day, it had to be blended into a general perspective based on well thought out theory. Practice without theory must lead to uncertainty and errors. On the other hand, to study Marxism apart from the struggle is to divorce it from its mainspring – action – and to create useless bookworms. Practice is clarified by revolutionary theory, and theory is verified by practice. The Marxist traditions are assimilated in the minds and blood of men only by struggle.

  • !
• Lenin knew that no revolutionary organisation can survive without a permanently creative ideological labouratory. He always tried to find an eventual political use for his research. But while he was actually engaged in it, he did not hesitate to take months at a time off from practical politics in order to immerse himself in the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Nationale.
• The program of the party – its basic principles – takes as a point of departure the historical potentialities of the working class, i.e., it is derived from the material conditions of society in general, and from the position of the working class within it in particular. Strategy and tactics, however, take as their point of departure not the material world as such, but the consciousness of the workers. If consciousness – what Marx called the ideological superstructure – reflected the material base directly, then tactics and strategy could be derived directly from the party program. However, the derivation is in fact indirect, complicated, influenced by the traditions and experience of the workers, including the activities of the party itself. A revolutionary party in principle opposes the wages system, but tactically it is far from indifferent to the struggle of the workers for higher wages.
• Trotsky expressed the same idea very aptly when he said, “The fundamental Bolshevist prejudice consists precisely in the idea that one can only learn to ride when one is sitting firmly on a horse.” [15] Only in the struggle itself can one learn strategy and tactics. Again and again, Lenin quoted Napoleon: “On s’engage et puis ... on voit.” Rendered freely, this means, “First engage in a serious battle, and then see what happens.”
• In war, and especially in the class war in a revolutionary period, the unknowns, not only in the enemy camp, but also in one’s own, are so numerous that sober analysis has to be accompanied by daring improvisation based largely on intuition,
• Marxism differs from all other socialist theories in the remarkable way it combines complete scientific sobriety in the analysis of the objective state of affairs and the objective course of evolution, with the most emphatic recognition of the importance of the revolutionary energy, revolutionary creative genius and revolutionary initiative of the masses – and also, of course, of individuals, groups, organisations and parties that are able to discover an active contact with one or another class.

  • !
• He was well aware that a sober assessment of the real forces is necessary, and that the revolutionary party itself is a central factor in the balance of forces. The boldness of the party gives confidence to the workers, while irresoluteness may lead the masses into passivity and moods of depression. The only way to determine the balance of forces, and the willingness of the masses to struggle, is by action in which the party gives a lead.
• Too often it happens that, when history takes a sharp turn, even progressive parties are for a time unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and repeat slogans that were formerly correct but have now lost all meaning
• For the tactics and strategy of the party to fit its general principles, they must be clear and straightforward. For the masses to understand the politics of the revolutionary party they must not be overwhelmed by detail, distracting attention from the central core of party policy. The policy of the party must be expressed in a small number of simple and clear slogans.
• In the final analysis broad, principled politics are the only real, practical politics ... Anybody who tackles the partial problems without having previously settled general problems, will inevitably and at every step “come up against” those general problems without himself realising it. To come up against them blindly in every individual case means to doom one’s politics to the worst vacillation and lack of principle.
• n deciding a problem of strategy he began by clothing the enemy with his own resolution and far-sightedness. The tactical mistakes of Lenin were for the most part by-products of his strategic power.
• Every question “runs in a vicious circle” because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.
• he could see and point out to others what was most important, most necessary, and most essential. Those comrades who, like myself, were given the chance to observe Lenin’s activity and the working of his mind at close quarters, could not help but enthusiastically admire – yes, I repeat, enthusiastically admire – the perspicacity, the acuteness of his thought which rejected all that was external, accidental, superficial, and reached to the heart of the matter and grasped the essential methods of action.
• In principle, Lenin was right when he insisted on “bending the stick,” one day in one direction, another in the opposite. if all aspects of the workers’ movement had been equally developed, if balanced growth had been the rule, then “stick bending” would have a deleterious effect on the movement. But in real life, the law of uneven development dominates. One aspect of the movement is decisive at any particular time. The key obstacle to advance may be a lack of party cadres, or, on the contrary, the conservatism of the party cadres may cause them to lag behind the advanced section of the class. Perfect synchronisation of all elements would obviate the need for “bending sticks,” but would also render a revolutionary party or a revolutionary leadership superfluous.

  • “bending the stick,”
• His realistic imagination was rooted in deep theoretical understanding, a good memory, and creative thinking. It was nourished by occasional meetings with individuals who came to see him in exile.

• “What a painful thing is the ‘exceptionally complicated situation’ created by the revolution,” that’s how the bourgeois intellectual thinks and feels.

    

  “We squeezed ‘them’ a bit; ‘they’ don’t dare to lord it over us as they did before. We’ll squeeze again – and chuck them out altogether,” that’s how the worker thinks and feels.
• Once the decision on certain tactics has been taken, the revolutionary leader must show no hesitation; he must have supreme courage.
• But these people were afraid of taking upon themselves the burden of great political decisions.
• This was so peculiar a phenomenon that he always had to begin his action with a very small group of people, because only very few were bold enough to follow him right from the start.
• This was characteristic of the Mensheviks. In every crisis, they showed doubt, hesitation, and fear. A revolution, however, is the most ruthless method of solving social questions. And indecisiveness is the worst possible condition at a time of revolution.
• On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour ... The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.” Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast their sober views, their “closeness” to the “concrete”.
• “Every great action begins with a statement of what is.”
• A Marxist must, as the foundation of his policy, put only precisely and unquestionably demonstrated facts.” [31] He was always searching for the bridge from the actual to the possible. He was not afraid to look straight into the abyss between the greatness of the tasks facing the movement, and the actual poverty of the same movement. His feet were on the ground, but his head was in the sky.
• How can the revolutionary leadership learn from the masses and know what they think and feel, unless it forms an integral part of these masses, listening to them at their workplaces, in the streets, in their homes, in their eating places? To teach the masses, the leadership must learn from them. This Lenin believed and practised all his life.
• The need for a revolutionary party, as we have already pointed out, is a reflection of the unevenness of consciousness in the working class.
• Organisational independence and isolation from the most advanced section of the proletariat, on the other hand, is the road to sectarianism. Raising the advanced section to the highest possible level under the prevailing circumstances – this is the role of the really revolutionary party.
• The fighting party of the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence in a mistake, refusal to admit and correct a mistake out of a false sense of shame.
• We Social Democrats resort to secrecy from the Tsar and his bloodhounds while taking pains that the people should know everything about our party, about the shades of opinion within it, about the development of its program and policy, that they should even know what this or that Party Congress delegate said at the Congress in question.

  • !!!
• Open debate is even more vital and essential during a period of direct revolutionary struggle,
• Our party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built.
• Criticism within the limits of the principles of the party programme must be quite free (we remind the reader of what Plekhanov said on this subject at the second Congress of the RSDLP) not only at party meetings, but also at public meetings. Such criticism or such “agitation” (for criticism is inseparable from agitation) cannot be prohibited.
• Without a firm working-class base, all talk of democracy and discipline in the party is meaningless verbiage. At the same time, without party democracy, without constant self-criticism, development of a correct class policy is impossible.
• We defined it as: unity of action, freedom of discussion and criticism. Only such discipline is worthy of the democratic party of the advanced class.
• ... the proletariat does not recognise unity of action without freedom to discuss and criticise.”
• Real war is different from abstract war, says Clausewitz, because idealised conditions are never realised.
• Above all he understood the great importance of the genius of intuition supported by a clear scientific conceptual notion.
• In his reminiscences, M.N. Pokrovsky relates how the Bolsheviks sent a delegation, of which Pokrovsky himself was a member, to Lenin in 1908, asking him to give up his philosophical studies and return to practical politics. Lenin, however, refused.

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• In Moscow, the Mensheviks were very much to the fore in the revolutionary workers’ struggle. At a meeting of the Moscow Soviet on December 6, they enthusiastically supported a resolution for a general strike and armed uprising.
• At decisive moments one is forced to act firmly, with no time to analyze.”
• A few months later, Martynov was already recanting the “madness” of 1905!
• It was obvious to the committee that the proposal of union would be passed by a great majority at the party meetings of both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, for wherever the advocates of immediate unity spoke they were supported almost unanimously. Therefore the Bolshevik committee was forced to work out the terms of the union which they themselves were against.
• In April 1906, Lenin argued that the differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were becoming smaller in practice and that unity between them was more necessary than ever.
• Nachalo regarded the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies as organs of revolutionary local self-government, while Novaya Zhizn regarded them as embryonic organs of state power that united the proletariat with the revolutionary democrats.
• Lenin, however, was not deceived into thinking that the Mensheviks could be relied on completely, and did not wish to dissolve his faction in the united party.
• Lenin did believe that the pressure of events would ensure that the Mensheviks were pushed leftwards. He persisted in this belief even when, at the end of 1906, they entered into an election alliance with the Cadets, a move that he strongly condemned.
• He believed that “Menshevik comrades will ... go through the purgatory of blocs with the bourgeois opportunists and return to revolutionary Social Democracy.”
• What had happened to the democratic centralism so dear to Lenin? For years he had argued for the subordination of the lower organs of the party to the higher, and against the federal concept of the party.

  • ya
• In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, written February-May 1904, he had said that “the undoubted tendency to defend autonomism against centralism ... is a fundamental characteristic of opportunism in matters of organisation.”
• For Lenin, however, organisational methods were totally subordinate to political ends, and he was prepared to propose rules of organisation for the united party in 1906 quite different from those he had hitherto put forward.

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• He gave a new twist to the concept of party discipline.

    

  After the competent bodies have decided, all of us, as members of the party, must act as one man. A Bolshevik in Odessa must cast into the ballot box a ballot paper bearing a Cadet’s name even if it sickens him.
• He drew a distinction between the centrism of the Menshevik workers and the incurable professional centrism of many leaders.
• believed that the tightly knit group of hard-line Bolsheviks would be more effective in pulling over the centrist elements if they made up a faction in a united party than if they existed as a completely separate group.

  • This is apparently what his bending over backwards on organizational questions was all about.

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• At the party conference held in Finland in July 1907, eight of the nine Bolshevik delegates led by Bogdanov voted to go back to the policy of a boycott. Lenin voted with the Mensheviks, the Polish Social Democrats, and the Bundists to defeat the boycott.
• They refuse to admit that history has changed direction.
• A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries.
• The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another – all this is common knowledge.
• or that philosophy had any direct and necessary relation with political tactics.
• Before the 1905 Revolution, the economic doctrine of Karl Marx was the most important subject for discussion among socialists. During the revolution, its place was taken by Marxist politics. In the period of reaction after the revolution, Marxist philosophy inevitably came to the fore.
• and when the masses,
• and cannot see what kind of a new order is “taking shape”
• escape into the realm of philosophical speculation became the fashion.
• With politics apparently failing
• nothing in the traditions of the movement, none of its fundamentals, was immune from constant questioning.
• But this was a Menshevist illusion. The talent of party cadres for leadership could not be measured by the single yardstick of literary prowess.
• And Lenin kept hundreds of his cadres during the period of reaction, recruited a few more hundred and trained them – always preparing for the future.
• “Fideism” is defined by Lenin as “a doctrine which substitutes faith for knowledge, or which generally attaches significance to faith”

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• In an article entitled Blocs with the Cadets, written in November 1906, Lenin reacted: “The sanction of blocs with the Cadets is the finishing touch that definitely marks the Mensheviks as the opportunist wing of the workers’ party.”
• It is the illegal organisations that must judge whether the legalists are in actual fact pro-party, i.e., [we] specifically reject the “theory of equality”
• For Martov the underground was to be a mere skeleton apparatus, held in reserve for use in the event of a forced relapse into complete illegality. To Lenin, on the other hand, the leg – I activities were only a skeletal affair, whose purpose was to broaden the sphere of operations of the underground party.
• for without methodical judicious combination of legal and illegal work in the present situation that history has imposed upon us, the preservation and consolidation of the RSDLP is inconceivable.
• While Lenin was ready to expel the Otzovists from the Bolshevik faction, Martov, being basically a conciliator, was incapable of a relentless fight against the Liquidators, even though he opposed them.
• The new party must be a “nonpartisan party.” The Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries must play the role of propaganda bodies within the broad party.
• Obviously, under the political conditions prevailing in Russia, where even the party of the liberals, the Cadets, has no legal status, the formation of an open Social Democratic working-class party can only remain wishful thinking. The Liquidators repudiated the illegal party, but did not fulfill their obligation to found a legal party.
• For more than a year we have been telling the Liquidators: Stop talking and start founding your “legal political societies,” such as the “society for the defence of working-class interests,” and so on. Stop phrase-mongering and get down to work!
• Against the idea of a legal Labour Congress, Lenin put forward the supremacy of the illegal party.
• The Liquidators were in the forefront during the most desolate years. “They suffered less from police persecution,” writes Olminsky. “They had many of the writers, a good part of the lecturers and on the whole most of the intellectuals. They were cocks of the walk and they crowed about it.” The attempts of the Bolshevik faction, whose ranks were thinning every hour to preserve its illegal machine were dashed at each turn against hostile circumstances. Bolshevism seemed definitely doomed. “All of present-day development,” wrote Martov, “renders the formation of any kind of durable party-sect a pathetic reactionary utopia.”
• But when the fatigued and dispirited use journalism as their platform and announce that their flight is not a manifestation of fatigue, or weakness, or intellectual woolliness, but that it is to their credit, and then put the blame on the “ineffective,” “worthless,” “moribund,” etc., underground, these runaways then become disgusting renegades, apostates. These runaways then become the worst advisers for the working-class movement and therefore its dangerous enemies.

  • !

• And this three-person secretariat was serving a party that in 1907 had 46,143 members!

    

  The party full-timers were paid a pittance. “Those members of the party who gave their entire time to the party work got very small remuneration, sometimes as low as 3, 5, or 10 roubles, and never exceeding 30 roubles per month.” [25] By comparison, the average wage in 1903-05 was 28 roubles.
• During the revolution, this problem was largely solved by the donations of rich sympathisers.
• the budgets of the party organisation had increased enormously ... Membership subscriptions played only a very small part in this.
• With the assault of reaction, practically all the rich sympathisers deserted the party. Lenin’s golden touch in raising funds failed more and more frequently.
• “Besides, it is, of course, not a question of principle.”

• The trial itself is not now of great interest, as it was interrupted by a party congress that overturned the Menshevik majority and put Lenin in control. But Lenin’s behavior at the trial is very interesting, because it shows the relentless way in which he conducted a faction fight against the right wing of the party.

    

  As the trial opened, Lenin calmly acknowledged that he used “language impermissible in relations between comrades in the same party” [31], but he made absolutely no apology for doing so. Indeed, in fighting the Liquidationists and their allies in the movement, he never hesitated to use the sharpest weapons he could lay his hands on. Moderation is not a characteristic of Bolshevism.
• Although he was absolutely relentless, Lenin never bore grudges. The moment he saw a move by any of his political opponents toward rapprochement he would move to meet them. A case in point concerned Plekhanov.
• In 1908-09, Lenin saw a chance of reconstructing the party by sacrificing the ultra-leftist and attracting the anti-Liquidationist elements among the Mensheviks, that is, those who had not abandoned the idea of building up underground organisations. The leader of this group was Plekhanov.
• Lenin fought to overcome ultra-leftism in the Bolshevik faction and carried on a struggle against the Menshevik Liquidators. But no sooner had he expelled the Vperyodist Bolsheviks than a new source of opposition arose within the Bolshevik faction: the Conciliators or, as they called themselves, the “Party Bolsheviks”. The RSDLP was in tatters, and so exhausted that its members were calling for simple unity, a reconciliation between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and an end to all factionalism.
• However, the “unity” never became operational, not so much because of Bolshevik intransigence, but because the Mensheviks were not ready to carry out their part of the bargain. The January 1910 Plenum committed the Bolsheviks to have no dealings with the boycottists and the Mensheviks to sever their connections with the Liquidators. Lenin was easily able to carry out his part of the instruction, as he had already expelled Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and the other boycottists from the Bolshevik camp. However, the Mensheviks found it impossible to fulfil their obligation. The Liquidators’ attitude was far too prevalent in their ranks.
• “The Russian police at that time had a particular interest in supporting the Bolsheviks who stood for disunity. In order to prevent a united and therefore more dangerous Social Democracy, okhrana instructions were to concentrate on the arrest of the Conciliators.”
• The okhrana hoped that the split in Social Democracy would weaken the labour movement; Lenin reckoned that it would steel the workers’ revolutionary leadership. History has given its verdict; the secret police plot did not bear the hoped-for fruit.
• The fact that it took Lenin nearly a year to persuade the Bolshevik deputies to break away from the Mensheviks gives a very different picture from the commonly accepted one of Bolshevism as a totalitarian organisation under his dictatorship. In fact, Lenin had to fight again and again to convince his own members, one might even say, to colonise his own party.

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• He criticised in no uncertain terms a letter from a group of Social Democratic students who tried to belittle the importance of the movement because it was not related to any workers’ mass action.
• It is interesting to note that the demonstrations following the Lena massacre raised the slogan of a democratic republic from the outset, reflecting a much higher level of consciousness among the masses than had existed at the beginning of the 1905 Revolution, which started with a naïve petition to the Tsar. In April 1912 the Russian workers started where they had left off at the height of the revolution some seven years before.
• In no country of the world would it be possible, unless there were a revolutionary social situation, to rouse hundreds of thousands of workers to political action for the most varied reasons several times a year ...
• In order to fight “parliamentary cretinism” and to make it clear that the Duma had to be used as a platform for propaganda in the outside world and for nothing else, Lenin formulated a very clear set of rules for the behaviour of Bolshevik Duma deputies.
• For Bills introduced by the Social Democratic group in the Duma to fulfil their purpose, the following conditions are necessary.
• The parliamentary group is not a general staff (if I may be allowed to use a “military” simile) ... but rather a unit of trumpeters in one case, or a reconnaissance unit in another, or an organisation of some other auxiliary “arm”.
• .. the Bolsheviks regard direct struggle of the masses ... as the highest form of the movement, and parliamentary activity without the direct action of the masses as the lowest form of the movement.
• Malinovsky could not make the changes. Even when he skipped a paragraph or so, claiming this to be an accident due to confusion in the Duma, the original text written by Lenin was printed in full in the party daily, Pravda. Malinovsky proved himself an extremely useful Bolshevik agitator!
• Had there been no workers’ Bolshevik paper, our speeches would not have been known outside the walls of the Taurida Palace.
• Malinovsky, Badaev, Petrovsky, and Muranov were the metalworkers,
• All the Bolshevik deputies came from the shop floor – four metalworkers and two textile workers.
• neither the candidates nor the delegates electing them concealed the revolutionary programme for which they stood.
• It is for this very purpose that we are sending our deputy into the Duma, and we charge him and the whole Social Democratic fraction of the fourth Duma to make widely known our demands from the Duma tribune, and not to play at legislation in the state Duma ...
• The strike was completely political; no economic demands whatever were formulated.
• The strike movement continued to grow until the government was convinced that it could not deprive the workers of their right to vote and was forced to announce that new primary elections would be held in the works affected. Many factories and mills which had not participated before in the election of delegates were included in the new list. In consequence the elections of electors had to be annulled and new elections held after additional delegates had been elected. This was a great victory for the working class and particularly for the St. Petersburg proletariat, which had shown such revolutionary class-consciousness.
• The speeches of Bolshevik deputies and their notices of motions were also accompanied time and again by mass action. Indeed this was the main aim of their speeches and interpellations.

• Workers would call on me to ask all sorts of questions, especially on pay-days when money in aid of strikers was brought. Each worker who came with a contribution asked many questions. I had to arrange to supply passports and secret hiding-places for those who became “illegal,” help to find work for those victimised during strikes, petition ministers on behalf of those arrested, organise aid for exiles, etc. Where there were signs that a strike was flagging, it was necessary to take steps to instill vigor into the strikers, to lend the aid required and to print and send leaflets. Moreover, I was constantly consulted on personal matters. [20]

    

  Finally Badaev could say, “There was not a single factory or workshop, down to the smallest, with which I was not connected in some way or other.” [21]
• The meeting at which the election was held was attended by about 3,000 metalworkers. The Bolshevik list was adopted by an overwhelming majority, only some 150 casting their votes for the list sponsored by the Mensheviks.
• The present moment is therefore very opportune for withholding the working masses from revolutionary activity by introducing insurance legislation ... But on the other hand the Insurance Act will put large sums of money at the disposal of the insured ... and it is therefore very important that at the outset practical work should be so organised that the influence of the revolutionary party will be paralysed.
• The Bolsheviks made it their task to explain the exact terms of the legislation, so that workers could get the maximum benefit from it. They also aimed to develop activity to extend its application and increase the workers’ representation on the insurance body.
• They were financed by workers’ contributions (1-3 per cent of the wage) and by a grant from the employer equal to two-thirds of the total workers’ contribution.
• Pravda, the Bolshevik daily, concentrated its attack and exposure on the restrictions present in the management of the funds and called for total control by the workers, an end to financial contributions by the workers, and the shifting of the whole cost onto the employers.

  • !!
• s interest in the insurance campaign spread, the Bolshevik demands became quite specific: a central town fund, administration of the funds entirely by the workers, and transference of medical aid to the funds.
• The conference most earnestly warns the workers against all attempts to curtail or completely distort Social Democratic agitation by confining it to what is legally permissible in the present period of the domination of the counterrevolution; on the other hand, the conference emphasises that the main point of this agitation should be to explain to the proletarian masses that no real improvement in the workers’ conditions is possible unless there is a new victorious revolution.
• to carry on energetic propaganda for Social Democratic ideas in these organisational units and thus turn the new law, devised as a means of putting new chains and a new yoke upon the proletariat, into a means of developing its class consciousness, strengthening its organisation and intensifying its struggle for full political liberty and for socialism.
• Instead of Maklakov, the minister of the interior, being able to use the social insurance to stabilise the Tsarist regime, Lenin skilfully turned it into a means for mobilising hundreds of thousands of workers against the regime. Strikes and demonstrations were organised on the issue. A network of supporters of Bolshevism was formed around the funds.
• Lenin’s genius in immediately grasping the value of even the smallest issue, if it made it possible to arouse a large number of workers and unite them as an independent class, was shown very clearly in the work of the Bolsheviks on the funds.

  • !
• This became particularly evident after the outbreak of the war, when the Bolshevik Duma group was exiled to Siberia, the legal daily paper of the party was closed, and the insurance institutions became the only legal opening for the Bolsheviks. The story takes us beyond the scope of the present volume, but it is necessary in order to demonstrate the importance of Lenin’s skill in this respect.
• These committees were intended to involve workers in boosting production. As opponents of the war, the Bolsheviks called for a boycott of the committees, while the Mensheviks supported participation. Voprosy Strakhovaniya published what amounted to an open denunciation of the War Industry Committees:
• and therefore the funds have received a definite political colouring.”
• In Russian Poland and Latvia, attempts to build permanent organisations out of strike committees were much further advanced, and by 1900, some 20-40 per cent of the Jewish working population were unionised. The Bund, created in 1897, was largely supported by the strike committees and based its activities on them.

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• The advanced workers knew how to read and understand the paper.
• The circulation of Pravda was quite impressive, especially if one takes into account the illegal status of the party publishing it. It ranged between 40,000 and 60,000 a day, the higher figure achieved on Saturdays. This was a giant step from the original four copies of leaflets that Lenin wrote by hand and then copied carefully in printed letters.
• and the paper’s ideas found response among hundreds of thousands of workers.
• Put Pravdy must be circulated in three, four and five times as many copies as today. We must put out a trade union supplement, and have representatives of all trade unions and groups on the editorial board. Our paper must have regional (Moscow, Urals, Caucasian, Baltic, Ukrainian) supplements
• In contrast, in Lenin’s Pravda, more than 11,000 letters and items of correspondence from workers were published in a single year, or about 35 items per day.
• readers, most of whom are dispersed and separated from one another by the severe external conditions of Russian life, gain some idea how the proletarians of various trades and various localities are fighting, how they are awakening to the defence of working-class democracy.
• The workers’ newspaper is a workers’ forum. Before the whole of Russia the workers should raise here, one after another, the various questions of workers’ life in general and of working-class democracy in particular.
• Workers should, despite all the obstacles, again and again attempt to compile their own workers’ strike statistics. Two or three class-conscious workers could compile an accurate description of each strike, the time it begins and ends, the number of participants (with distribution according to sex and age wherever possible), the causes and the results of the strike. Such a description should be sent in one copy to the headquarters of the workers’ association concerned (trade union or other body, or the office of the trade union newspaper); a second copy should be sent to the central workers’ newspaper; lastly, a third copy should be sent to a working-class deputy of the state Duma for his information ... Only by getting down to business themselves will the workers – in time, after stubborn work and persistent effort – be able to help towards a better understanding of their own movement and thus ensure bigger successes for that movement.

  • !
• Lenin knew how to write very popular, short articles for Pravda. They were always factual, and every article centred on just one idea, which was argued out. He might repeat one theme again and again, but always using different angles, a different example, different stories. To give an impression of what his articles were like, two samples are reproduced here.
• In Russia there are 73 per cent of illiterates, exclusive of children under nine years of age.
• Among the U.S. Negroes, there were (in 1900) 44.5 per cent of illiterates.
• It is far more difficult to write in Marxist terms for the masses than it is to write for party cadres. For the latter, the argument can be developed analytically. For the former, it has to be based on the workers’ own experience, without using arguments that demand a knowledge of Marxism. Lenin excelled in writing for both kinds of audience.
• Truth is a great thing; it compensates for the deficiency of the writer who serves it.”

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