the authors of the letter do not agree with is not clear. Do they think that the workers will "not understand" the phrases "propertied classes" and "feudal-bureaucratic Zemstvo"? Do they think that stimulating the Zemstvo to abandon soft speeches and to speak firmly and resolutely is "over-estimating ideology"? Do they imagine that the workers can accumulate "forces" for the fight against absolutism if they know nothing about the attitude of absolutism towards Zemstvo? All this remains unknown. One thing alone is clear and that is that the authors of the letter have a very vague idea of what the political tasks of Social-Democracy are. This is revealed still more clearly by their remark: "Such also is Iskra's attitude towards the student movements" (i. e., also "obscures class antagonism"). Instead of calling upon the workers to declare by means of public demonstrations that the real centre of unbridled violence and outrage is not the students hut the Russian government [Iskra, No. 2],[1] we ought, no doubt, to have inserted arguments in the spirit of Rabochaya Mysl. And such ideas were expressed by Social-Democrats in the autumn of 1901, after the events of February and March, on the eve of a fresh student up-grade movement, which revealed that even in this sphere the "spontaneous" protest against autocracy is "outstripping" the conscious Social-Democratic leadership of the movement. The spontaneous striving of the workers to defend the students, who were being beaten up by the police and the Cossacks, is outstripping the conscious activity of the Social-Democratic organisations!
"And yet in other articles," continue the authors of the letter, "Iskra 'condemns' all 'compromises,' and 'defends,' for examples, the intolerant conduct of the Guesdists." We would advise those who so conceitedly and frivolously declare—usually in connection with the disagreements existing among the contemporary Social-Democrats—that the disagreements are not essential and would not justify a split, to ponder very deeply over these words. Is it possible for those who say that we have done astonishingly little to explain the hostility of the autocracy towards the various classes, and to inform the workers of the opposition of the various strata of the population towards autocracy, to work successfully in one organisation with those who say that such work is "compromise"—evidently compromise with the theory of the "economic struggle against the employers and the government"?
- ↑ See The Iskra Period, Book I, p. 70.—Ed.
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