Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/74

and how foreign to them is the conception that a Social Democrat must concern himself first and foremost with an organization of revolutionaries which shall be capable of guiding the whole proletarian struggle for emancipation. To talk of "the political emancipation of the working class" and the struggle against "Czarist despotism," and at the same time to write statutes like these, indicates a complete misunderstanding of what the real political tasks of the Social Democrats are. Not one of the fifty or so paragraphs reveals the slightest glimmer of understanding that the widest possible political agitation among the masses is necessary, dealing with every phase of Russian absolutism and every aspect of the various social classes in Russia. With such statutes not only political, but even trade union aims are impossible of fulfillment, for they require organization according to trade, and not the slightest reference is made to this in the statutes.

But most characteristic of all, perhaps, is the amazing top-heaviness of the whole "system," which attempts to unite every factory with the "committee" by a long string of uniform and ludicriously petty rules and a three-stage system of election. Bound by the narrow outlook of economism, the mind loses itself in details which positively reek of red tape and bureaucracy. In practice, of course, three-fourths of the clauses are impossible of application; moreover, a "conspiratorial" organization of this kind, with its central group in each