V. I.

Lenin

Articles for “Rabochaya Gazeta”

In the previous article we said that our immediate task is to establish a
Party organ, one that appears and can be delivered regularly, and we
raised the question of whether and under what circumstances it is possible
to achieve this aim. Let us examine the more important aspects of this
question.

The main objection that may be raised is that the achievement of this
purpose first requires the development of local group activity. We consider this fairly widespread opinion to be fallacious. We
can and must immediately set about founding the Party organ—and, it
follows, the Party itself—and putting them on a sound footing. The
conditions essential to such a step already exist: local Party work is
being carried on and obviously has struck deep roots; for the destructive
police attacks that are growing more frequent lead to only short
interruptions; fresh forces rapidly replace those that have fallen in
battle. The Party has resources for publishing and literary forces, not
only abroad, but in Russia as well. The question, therefore, is whether
the work that is already being conducted should be continued in
“amateur” fashion or whether it should be organised into the
work of one party and in such a way that it is reflected in its entirety
in one common organ.

Here we come to the most urgent question of our movement, to its sore
point—organisation. The improvement of revolutionary organisation
and discipline, the perfection of our underground technique are an
absolute necessity. We must openly admit that in this respect we are
lagging behind the old Russian revolutionary parties and must bend all our efforts to
overtake and surpass them. Without improved organisation there can be no
progress of our working-class movement in general, and no establishment of
an active party with a properly functioning organ, in particular. That is
on the one hand. On the other, the existing Party organs (organs in the
sense of institutions and groups, as well as newspapers) must pay greater
attention to questions of organisation and exert an influence in this
respect on local groups.

Local, amateurish work always leads to a great excess of personal
connections, to study-circle methods, and we have grown out of the
study-circle stage which has become too narrow for our present-day work
and which leads to an over-expenditure of forces. Only fusion into a
single party will enable us strictly to observe the principles of division
of labour and economy of forces, which must be achieved in order to reduce
the losses and build as reliable a bulwark as possible against the
oppression of the autocratic government and against its frantic
persecutions. Against us, against the tiny groups of socialists hidden in
the expanses of the Russian “underground,” there stands the huge
machine of a most powerful modern state that is exerting all its forces to
crush socialism and democracy. We are convinced that we shall, in the end,
smash that police state, because all the sound and developing sections of
our society are in favour of democracy and socialism; but, in order to
conduct a systematic struggle against the government, we must raise
revolutionary organisation, discipline, and the technique of underground
work to the highest degree of perfection. It is essential for individual
Party members or separate groups of members to specialise in the different
aspects of Party work—some in the duplication of literature, others
in its transport across the frontier, a third category in its distribution
inside Russia, a fourth in its distribution in the cities, a fifth in the
arrangement of secret meeting places, a sixth in the collection of funds,
a seventh in the delivery of correspondence and all information about the
movement, an eighth in maintaining relations, etc., etc. We know that this
sort of specialisation requires much greater self-restraint, much greater
ability to concentrate on modest, unseen, everyday work, much greater real heroism than the usual
work in study circles.

The Russian socialists and the Russian working class, however, have shown
their heroic qualities and, in general, it would be a sin to complain of a
shortage of people. There is to be observed among the working youth an
impassioned, uncontrollable enthusiasm for the ideas of democracy and
socialism, and helpers for the workers still continue to arrive from among
the intellectuals, despite the fact that the prisons and places of exile
are overcrowded. If the idea of the necessity for a stricter organisation
is made widely known among all these recruits to the revolutionary cause,
the plan for the organisation of a regularly published and delivered Party
newspaper will cease to be a dream. Let us take one of the conditions for
the success of this plan—that the news paper be assured a regular
supply of correspondence and other material from everywhere. Has not
history shown that at all times when there has been a resurgence of our
revolutionary movement such a purpose has proved possible of achievement
even in respect of papers published abroad? If Social-Democrats working in
various localities come to regard the Party newspaper as their own and consider the maintenance of regular contact with it, the
discussion of their problems and the reflection of the whole movement in
it to be their main task, it will be quite possible to ensure the supply
to the paper of full information about the movement, provided methods of
maintaining secrecy, not very complicated ones, are observed. The other
aspect of the question, that of delivering the newspaper regularly to all
parts of Russia, is much more difficult, more difficult than the similar
task under previous forms of revolutionary movement in Russia when
newspapers were not, to such an extent, intended for the masses of the
people. The purpose of Social-Democratic newspapers, however, facilitates
their distribution. The chief places to which the newspaper must be
delivered regularly and in large numbers are the industrial centres,
factory villages and towns, the factory districts of big cities, etc. In
such centres the population is almost entirely working class; in actual
fact the worker in such places is master of the situation and has hundreds
of ways of outwitting the police; relations with neighbouring factory
centres are distinguished by their extraordinary activity. At the time of the
Exceptional Law against the Socialists (1878-90) [2] the German political police did not function worse, but probably better,
than the Russian police; nevertheless, the German workers, thanks to their
organisation and discipline, were able to ensure the regular transport
across the frontiers of a weekly illegal newspaper and to deliver it to
the houses of all subscribers, so that even the ministers could not
refrain from admiring the Social-Democratic post (“the red mail”). We
do not, of course, dream of such successes, but we can, if we bend our
efforts towards it, ensure that our Party newspaper appears no less than
twelve times a year and is regularly delivered in all the main centres of
the movement to all groups of workers that can be reached by socialism.

To return to the question of specialisation, we must also point out that
its insufficiency is due partially to the dominance of “amateur’
work and partially to the fact that our Social-Democratic newspapers
usually devote far too little attention to questions of organisation.

Only the establishment of a common Party organ can give the “worker
in a given field” of revolutionary activity the consciousness that
he is marching with the “rank and file,” the consciousness that his
work is directly essential to the Party, that he is one of the links in
the chain that will form a noose to strangle the most evil enemy of the
Russian proletariat and of the whole Russian people—the Russian
autocratic government. Only strict adherence to this type of
specialisation can economise our forces; not only will every aspect of
revolutionary work be carried out by a smaller number of people, but there
will be an opportunity to make a number of aspects of present-day
activities legal affairs. This legalisation of activity,
its conduct within the framework of the law, has long been advised for
Russian socialists by Vorwärts ( Forward ), [3] the chief organ of the German Social-Democrats. At first sight one is
astonished at such advice, but in actual fact it merits careful
attention. Almost everyone who has worked in a local study circle in some
city will easily remember that among the numerous and diverse affairs in
which the circle engaged some were, in themselves, legal (e.g. the
gathering of information on the workers’ conditions; the study of legal literature
on many questions; consultation and reviewing of certain types of foreign
literature; maintenance of certain kinds of relations; aid to workers in
obtaining a general education, in studying factory laws, etc.). Making
affairs of this sort the specific function of a special contingent of
people would reduce the strength of the revolutionary army “in the
firing line” (without any reduction of its “fighting potential”) and increase the strength of the reserve, those who replace
the “killed and wounded.” This will be possible only when both the
active members and the reserve see their activities reflected in the
common organ of the Party and sense their connection with it. Local
meetings of workers and local groups will, of course, always be necessary,
no matter to what extent we carry out our specialisation; but, on the one
hand, the number of mass revolutionary meetings (particularly dangerous
from the standpoint of police action and often having results far from
commensurate with the danger involved) will become considerably less and,
on the other hand, the selection of various aspects of revolutionary work
as special functions will provide greater opportunities to screen such
meetings behind legal forms of assembly: entertainments, meetings of
societies sanctioned by law, etc. Were not the French workers under
Napoleon III and the German workers at the time of the Exceptional Law
against the Socialists able to devise all possible ways to cover up their
political and socialist meetings? Russian workers will be able to do
likewise.

Further: only by better organisation and the establishment of a common Party
organ will it be possible to extend and deepen the very content of
Social-Democratic propaganda and agitation. We stand in great need of
this. Local work must almost inevitably lead to the exaggeration of local particularities, to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. [1]

this is impossible without a central organ which will, at the same time,
be an advanced democratic organ. Only then will our urge to
convert. Social-Democracy into a leading fighter for democracy become
reality. Only then, too, shall we be able to work out definite political tactics. Social- Democracy has
renounced the fallacious theory of the “one reactionary mass.” It
regards utilisation of the support of the progressive classes against the
reactionary classes to be one of the most important political tasks. As
long as the organisations and publications are local in character, this
task can hardly be carried out at all: matters do not go farther than
relations with individual “liberals” and the extraction of
various “services” from them. Only a common Party organ,
consistently implementing the principles of political struggle and holding
high the banner of democracy will be able to win over to its side all
militant democratic elements and use all Russia’s progressive forces in
the struggle for political freedom. Only then shall we be able to convert
the workers’ smouldering hatred of the police and the authorities into
conscious hatred of the autocratic government and into determination to
conduct a desperate struggle for the rights of the working class and of
the entire Russian people! In modern Russia, a strictly organised
revolutionary party built up on this foundation will prove the greatest
political force!

In subsequent issues we shall publish the draft programme of the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party and begin a more detailed discussion of the
various organisational questions.

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Notes:
[1]
Part of the manuscript is not extant.— Ed .

[2]
The Exceptional Law Against the Socialists was promulgated in
Germany in 1878. The law suppressed all organisations of the
Social-Democratic Party, mass working-class organisations, and the labour
press; socialist literature was confiscated and the banishing of
socialists began. The law was annulled in 1890 under pressure of the mass
working-class movement.

[3]
Vorwärts ( Forward )—the central organ of
German Social-Democracy; it was first published in 1876 and was edited by
Wilhelm Liebknecht and others. Engels made use of its columns for the
struggle against all manifestations of opportunism. From the middle
nineties, however, after the death of Engels, Vorwärts began
regularly to print articles of the opportunists, who predominated in
German Social-Democracy and in the Second International.