V. I. Lenin

Source: en:CW/CW43; ru:PSS/v46;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

For instance, in your letter to a friend I clearly see two trends: one—the perfectly legitimate emphasis on the need for economic struggle, on the necessity of being able to make use of the workers’ legal societies, on the need for “all kinds of responses to the daily and urgent needs of the workers,” etc. All this is legitimate and correct. It is a misunderstanding if you think that the revolutionaries “take a negative attitude towards legal societies,” that they “hate” them, that they “turn their backs on society,” etc. The revolutionaries, too, recognise that economic struggle is necessary, that it is necessary to respond to daily and urgent needs, that it is necessary to learn to make use of legal societies. Not only have the revolutionaries never anywhere or at any time advised turning one’s back on society, but, on the contrary, they have emphasised that it is necessary for Social-Democracy to place itself at the head of the social movement and to unite all democratic elements under the leadership of a revolutionary Social-Democratic party. But care must be taken that legal societies and purely economic organisations do not separate the working-class movement from Social-Democracy and from revolutionary political struggle, but, on the contrary, bind them together as closely and inseparably as possible. In your letter, however, there is also this other (pernicious and, in my conviction, deeply reactionary) trend—the trend of separating the working-class movement from Social-Democracy

* Variant of part of the letter. —Ed.

and from revolutionary political struggle, of pushing political tasks into the background, of substituting the concept of “political struggle” by the concept of “legal struggle,” etc.*

How is the line to be drawn between the healthy and useful trend and the harmful one? That it is impossible to confine oneself to wordy disputes, I think I need not prove to you—to you who have already tasted the cup of “foreign meetings.” And is it not ridiculous to fear a discussion of the question in the press, when in any case it has long been discussed in letters and debates?

Why is it permissible to argue at meetings and write letters, but to clarify controversial questions in print is “the most pernicious thing, fit only (???) to amuse our enemies”? This I do not understand. Only literary polemics can precisely establish the line of which I speak, because individuals very often and inevitably go to extremes in this matter. Of course, struggle in the press will give rise to a few new grievances, will deal not a few kicks, but we are not such touch-me-nots as to be afraid of kicks! To desire struggle without kicks, disagreements without struggle, would be a schoolgirl’s naivety, and if the struggle is conducted openly, it will be a hundred times better than the “Gubaryovism” abroad and in Russia, and, I repeat, it will a hundred times sooner lead to durable unity.