Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/67
LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
organizations of the Social Democrats being identical. In Russia, however, the yoke of autocracy at first glance effaces all distinctions between a Social Democratic organization and a workers' union, since all workers’ unions and all circles are prohibited, and since the chief manifestation and weapon of the economic struggle of the workers—the strike—is regarded as a crime (and sometimes even as a political crime!). Conditions in our country therefore strongly "impel" the workers who are conducting the economic struggle to engage in political questions. They also "impel" the Social Democrats to confuse trade unionism with Social Democracy (and our Krichevskys, Martynovs and their like, who speak enthusiastically of the first kind of impulsion, fail to observe the "impulsion" of the second kind). And indeed, just picture to yourselves people who are 99%, immersed in "the economic struggle against the masters and the government." Some of them during the whole course of their activity (four to six months) never once come up against the necessity for a more complex organization of revolutionaries; others, perhaps, come across the fairly widely dispersed Bernstein literature, from which they convince themselves of the profound importance of "the course of the gray, daily struggle." Others, finally, will be carried away, perhaps, by the seductive idea of showing the world a new example of "close and organized contact with the proletarian struggle"—contact between the trade union and Social Demo-
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