From the previous speech you could see how justified were comrade Popov's words about the fruitlessness of the present debate. You yourselves have been convinced of the complete lack of principle in Lieber's speech. I will only remind you that in our unsuccessful commission, voting against us and the Latvians for adopting the Polish project as the basis were 4 Mensheviks, 1 Bundist, and 2 Poles.

Thus, the Polish project was taken as the basis in the commission by those people who on principle stood furthest from the Poles. They did this in order to introduce amendments to the project in a Menshevik spirit – in order to make the resolution unacceptable to its authors! Lieber himself voted with the Mensheviks in this case (Lieber: "that's not true!") and in the voting on the permissibility of blocs with the Cadets. After this, his pathetic speeches about principles are simply ridiculous.

I fully understand the Poles when they sought to have their project taken as the basis. The details of our resolution seemed unnecessary to them. They wanted to limit themselves to two fundamental principles that genuinely unite us with them: 1) the class separation of the proletariat in everything concerning socialism from all bourgeois parties; 2) the combination of joint action by both social-democrats and petty-bourgeois democracy against treacherous liberalism. Both these ideas run like a red thread through the Bolshevik project as well. But the brevity of the Polish project left too much room for Menshevik loopholes. Through their amendments, they forced the very authors to vote against their own project as a whole. And at the same time, neither the Mensheviks nor the Bundists dared themselves to defend the Polish project "corrected" in this manner. The result was a complete collapse of all the commission's work.

Now what remains for all of us in general, and especially for our Polish comrades, is one thing: to attempt to take the Bolshevik project as the basis. If unacceptable amendments are also made to it, then the congress will have to be recognized as non-functional. But it is possible that on the basis of this project, which precisely analyzes all the main types of parties, it will be possible to achieve a decision sufficiently definite in the spirit of revolutionary social-democracy.

Against our project they object that it depicts parties in too much detail. Parties, they say, can split, regroup – and the entire resolution will prove worthless.

This objection is extremely unsound. We have depicted not small groups and not even individual parties, but large groups of parties. These groups are so large that rapid changes in their mutual relationships are far less possible than a complete shift from revolutionary decline to upsurge or vice versa. Take these groups and examine them closely. Reactionary and more or less progressive bourgeoisie – these are the invariant types in all capitalist countries. To these two invariant types we have added only two types: the Octobrists (occupying a position between the Black Hundreds and the Liberals) and the Labor groups. Can these types change rapidly? They cannot, unless our revolution undergoes such a radical turn as would in any case force us to radically revise not only our congress resolutions, but even our program.

Consider our programmatic demand for the confiscation of all landlord land. In no other country have social-democrats ever been able to support the confiscatory aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie. This would be charlatanism in an ordinary capitalist country. Here, in the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, this is a necessity. And one can be confident that the fundamental questions concerning the evaluation of the Labor parties will not need to be reconsidered before our programmatic demand for confiscation does.

I will further point out that, in order to avoid any misunderstandings and false interpretations of the left bloc, we precisely define the content of the struggle of the Labor parties. In fact, they struggle not against exploitation in general (as it seems to them themselves) and certainly not against capitalist exploitation (as their ideologists present the matter), but only against the feudal state and landlord land ownership. And the precise indication of this actual content of struggle immediately puts an end to all false ideas about the possibility of joint action by the workers' party and the peasantry in the struggle for socialism, in the struggle against capitalism.

Besides this, in our resolution we speak clearly of the "pseudo-socialist character" of the Labor parties; we call for decisive struggle against the obscuring of class antagonism between the small proprietor and the proletarian. We call for exposure of the hazy socialist ideology of the petty bourgeoisie. This must necessarily be said about petty-bourgeois parties. But this is all that need be said. The Mensheviks are profoundly wrong when they add to this a struggle against the revolutionarism and utopianism of the peasantry in the current revolution. This is precisely what emerges from their resolution. But such a thought objectively amounts to calling for a struggle against the confiscation of landlord land. The matter comes down to this because the most influential and widespread ideological-political currents of liberalism precisely declare confiscation to be revolutionarism, utopianism, and so forth. It is not by chance, but of necessity, that the Mensheviks have drifted over the past year from such principles to a practical refusal to defend confiscation.

You must not allow this, comrades! Dan remarked in one of his speeches, jokingly: our critics are poor if they criticize us most of all for what we have not done. We only wanted to refuse confiscation, but we did not refuse!

And I will respond to this: if you had refused, we would no longer have a unified party. We must not allow matters to come to such refusals. If we even permit the shadow of a thought about such a policy, we will shake all the revolutionary foundations of the independent class struggle of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. (Applause from the Belarusians, Poles, and Latvians.)