Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/75
LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
factory, will render the work of the gendarmes extraordinarily easy. Our Polish comrades have already passed through a similar phase in their own movement, when everybody was extremely enthusiastic about the organization of workers' funds; but these ideas were very quickly abandoned when it was found that the funds only provided rich harvest for the gendarmes. If we are out for wide workers' organizations, and not for wide arrests, if our purpose is not to provide satisfaction for the gendarmes, we must endeavor to leave these organizations absolutely loose and unformulated … But will they then be able to function? Well, let us examine what the functions are: ". . . . . . to observe all that is going on in the factory and keep a record of events" (§2 of the Statutes). Must that really be formulated? Could not the purpose be better served by correspondence conducted in the illegal papers and without setting up special groups? ". . . . to lead the struggle of the workers for the improvement of their workshop conditions" (§3 of the Statutes). Here again formulation is not required. Any agitator with any intelligence at all can gather what the demands of the workers are in the course of ordinary conversation and transmit them to a narrow—not a wide—organization of revolutionaries to be embodied in a leaflet; ". . . . To organize a fund . . . . to which contributions of two copeks per rouble should be made (§9) . . . . to give the contributors monthly reports on the funds" (§17) "… to expel members who
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