Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/90

that B-v. who (like every practitioner^[1] who does any thinking at all) has suffered much from our amateurishness, is unable on account of his addiction to economism, to find a way out of an intolerable situation. No! Society throws up a great many people capable of serving the "cause," but we do not know how to use them. In this respect the critical, transitional state of our organization may be described by the phrase: There are no people and there are masses of people. There are masses of people, because every year the working class and the most diverse sections of society throw up large numbers of discontented persons who desire to make their protest heard and, as far as lies in their power, to assist the struggle against absolutism, the intolerableness of which not everybody yet recognizes but which is being felt with growing acuteness by increasing numbers of people. Yet at the same time, there are no people, because there are no leaders, there are no political guides, there are no talented organizers capable of creating a wide and yet united and harmonious work which would find employment for all forces, even the most insignificant. "The growth and development of revolutionary organizations" has fallen behind the growth of the working class movement, as B-v. admits; but it has also fallen behind the growth of the general democratic movement among all sections of the population. (B-v. would very likely now admit that too). The scope of revolutionary work is too

1. ↑ i. e. an active revolutionary worker.—Trans.