methods to be "the most widely applicable," when Social-Democrats have other, generally speaking, not less "widely applicable" means?
Long, long ago (a year ago! …) Rabocheye Dyelo wrote:
The masses begin to understand immediate political demands after one, or at all events, after several strikes; immediately the government sets the police and gendarmerie against them [No. 7, p. 15, August, 1900].
This opportunist theory of stages has now been rejected by the League, which makes a concession to us by declaring: "There is no need whatever to conduct political agitation right from the beginning, exclusively on an economic basis." [Two Congresses, p. 11.] This very repudiation of part of its former errors by the League will enable the future historian of Russian Social-Democracy to discern the depths to which our Economists have degraded Socialism better than any number of lengthy arguments! But the League must he very naïve indeed to imagine that the abandonment of one form of restricting politics will induce us to agree to another form of restriction! Would it not be more logical to say that the economic struggle should be conducted on the widest possible basis, that it should he utilised for political agitation, hut that "there is no need whatever" to regard the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle?
The League attaches significance to the fact that it substituted the phrase "most widely applicable method" by the phrase "a better method," contained in one of the resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Jewish Labour League (Bund). We confess that we find it difficult to say which of these resolutions is the better one. In our opinion both are bad. Both the League and the Bund fall into error (partly perhaps unconsciously, owing to the influence of tradition) concerning the economic, trade-unionist interpretation of politics. The fact that this error is expressed either by the word "better" or by the words "most widely applicable" makes no material difference whatever. If the League had said that "political agitation an economic basis" is the most widely applied (and not "applicable") method it would have been right in regard to a certain period in the development of our Social-Democratic movement. It Would have been right in regard to the Economists and to many (if not the majority) of the practical Economists of 1898–1901 who have applied the method of political agitation (to the extent that they applied it at all) almost exclusively on an economic basis. Political agitation on such lines was recognised, and as we have seen,
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