to life," reveal in practice a failure to understand our most imperative practical task. To laggards they shout: Keep in step! don't run ahead! To people suffering fro In a lack of energy and initiative in organisational work, from lack of "plans"' for wide and bold organisational work, they shout about the "tactics-process"! The most serious sin we commit is that we degrade our political and our organisational tasks to the level of immediate, "palpable," "concrete" interests of the every-day economic struggle; and yet they keep singing to us the old song: Give the economic struggle itself a political character. We say again: This kind of thing plays as much "sensitiveness to life" as was displayed by the here in the popular fable who shouted to a passing funeral procession. May you never get to your destination.[1]
Recall the matchless, truly "Narcissus'"-like superciliousness with which these wiseacres lectured Plekhanov about the "workers' circles generally" [sic!] being "incapable of fulfilling political tasks in the real and practical sense of the word, i. e., the sense of expedient and successful practical struggle for political demands" [Rabocheye Dyelo's Reply, p. 24.] There are circles and circles gentlemen! Circles of "kustars,"[2] of course, are incapable of fulfilling political tasks and never will be, until they realise the primitiveness of their methods and abandon it. If besides this, these amateurs are enamoured of their primitive methods, and insist on writing the word "practical" in italics, and imagine that practicality demands that their tasks he degraded to the level of understanding of the most backward strata of the masses, then they are hopeless, of course, and certainly cannot fulfil general political tasks. But circles of heroes, like those formed by Alexeyev and Myshkin, Khalturin and Zhelyabov, are able to fulfil political tasks in the genuine and most practical sense of the term, because their passionate preaching meets with response among the spontaneously awakened masses, because their seething energy rouses a corresponding and sustained energy among the revolutionary class. Plekhanov was a thousand times right not only when he pointed to this revolutionary class, not only when he proved that its spontaneous awakening was inevitable, but also when he set the "workers' circles" a great and lofty political task. But you refer to the mass movement that has sprung up since that time in order to
100
