Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/81
LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
grow and become as strong as it is. Our wiseacres, however, at a moment when the crisis within Russian Social Democracy is wholly due to the fact that we have not a sufficient number of trained, developed and experienced leaders to guide the elemental ferment of the masses, cry out with the profundity of fools, "It is a bad business when the movement does not proceed from the depths."
"A Committee of students is no good, it is not stable." Quite true. But the conclusion that should be drawn is that we need a committee of professional revolutionaries, no matter whether it be a student or a worker who is capable of training himself to be a professional revolutionary. The conclusion you draw, however, is that the working class movement should not be pushed on from outside! In your political naivite you do not observe that you are playing into the hands of our economists and amateurs. Permit me to enquire in what does the "pushing on" of the workers by the students consist? Solely in the fact that the student brings to the worker the fragments of political knowledge he possesses, the crumbs of Socialist ideas he has managed to acquire (for the main intellectual diet of the present-day student, legal Marxism, can furnish only the A. B. C., only the crumbs of knowledge). Such "pushing on from outside" can never be too excessive; on the contrary, there has so far been too little, all too little of it in our movement; we have stewed far too much in our own juice; we have bowed ourselves
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