even recommended by Rabochaya Mysl, and by the Self-Emancipation group! Rabocheye Dyelo should have strongly condemned the fact that useful economic agitation was accompanied by the harmful restriction of the political struggle, but instead of that, it declares the method most widely applied (by the Economists) to be the most widely applicable! It is not surprising, therefore, that when we describe these people as Economists, they can do nothing else but pour abuse upon us, and call us "mystifiers," "disrupters," "Papal Nuncios," and "slanderers,"[1] go complaining to the world that we have mortally offended them and declare almost on oath that "not a single Social-Democratic organisation is now tinged with Economism.[2] Oh, these evil, slanderous politicians! They must have deliberately invented this Economism, out of sheer hatred of mankind, in order mortally to offend other people!
What do the words "to give the economic struggle itself a political character," which Martynov uses in presenting the tasks of Social-Democracy, mean concretely? The economic struggle is the collective struggle of the workers against their employers for better terms in the sale of their labour power, for better conditions of life and labour. This struggle is necessarily a struggle according to trade, because conditions of labour differ very much in different trades, and, consequently, the fight to improve these conditions can only be conducted in respect of each trade (trade unions in the Western countries, temporary trade associations and leaflets in Russia, etc.). To give "the economic struggle itself a political character" means, therefore, to strive to secure satisfaction for these trade demands, the improvement of conditions of labour in each separate trade by means of "legislative and administrative measures" (as Martynov expresses it on the next page of his article, p. 43). This is exactly what the trade unions do and always have done. Read the works of the thoroughly scientific (and "thoroughly" opportunist) Mr. and Mrs. Webb and you will find that the British trade unions long ago recognised, and have long carried out the task of "giving the economic struggle itself a political character"; they have long been fighting for the right to strike, for the removal of all juridical hindrances to the co-operative and trade-union movement, for laws protecting women and children, for the im-
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