Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/82

population that desire to listen to a Democrat; for he who forgets that "the Communists support every revolutionary movement," that we are obliged for that reason to emphasize general democratic tasks before the whole people, without for a moment concealing our Socialistic convictions, is not a Social-Democrat. He who forgets his obligation to be in advance of everybody in bringing up, sharpening and solving every general democratic question, is not a Social-Democrat.

"But everybody agrees with this!"—the impatient reader will exclaim—and the new instructions given by the last congress of the League to the Editorial Board of Rabocheye Dyelo says: "All events of social and political life that affect the proletariat either directly as a special class or as the vanguard of all the revolutionary forces in the struggle for freedom should serve as subjects for political propaganda and agitation." [Two Congresses, p. 17, our italics.]

Yes, these are very true and very good words and we would he satisfied if Rabocheye Dyelo understood them, and if it refrained from saying in the next breath things that are the very opposite to them. Surely, it is not sufficient to call ourselves the "vanguard," it is necessary to act like one; we must act in such a way that all the other units of the army shall see us, and be obliged to admit that we are the vanguard. And we ask the reader: Are the representatives of the other "units" such fools as to take merely our word for it when we say that we are the "vanguard"?

Just picture to yourselves the following: A Social-Democrat comes into the "unit" of Russian educated radicals, or liberal constitutionalists, and declares to them: We are the vanguard; "at the present time we are confronted by the problem of—how to give as far as possible to the economic struggle itself a political character." The radical, or constitutionalist, if he is at all intelligent (and there are many intelligent men among Russian radicals and constitutionalists), would only laugh at such a speech, and would say (to himself, of course, for in the majority of cases they are experienced diplomats):

 

Well, your "vanguard" must be composed of simpletons! It does not even understand that it is our task, the task of the progressive representatives of bourgeois democracy to give to the economic struggle of the workers a political character. Why, we too, like all the West-European bourgeoisie, are striving to draw the workers into politics, but only into trade-union politics and not into Social-Democratic politics. Trade-union politics are precisely bourgeois politics of the working class and the "vanguard's" formulation of its tasks is the formula for trade-union politics. Let them call them-

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