V. I.

Lenin

On the Tasks of the Social-Democratic Movement [1]

Whenhypocritical flirting with both the working class and the
“legal” opposition goes hand in hand with action on the part
of a horde of infuriated scoundrels of the type of Val or

Obolensky, [2] it means that the government wants to corrupt and split up those masses
and sections of the people which it is powerless to break, and in order to
facilitate its task it wants to divert the revolutionary forces, small as
their number is, to hunt down each of these scoundrels. It does not matter
whether one representative or another of the government is aware of this
in general, or how well he is aware of it. What matters is that the
tactics to which the government is impelled by all its immense political
experience and police instinct, really has this significance. When the revolutionary movement permeates the truly
revolutionary classes of the people, moreover, when it grows in depth and
extent, holding out the promise of developing soon into an invincible
force, then the government finds it advantageous to provoke the best
revolutionary forces to hunt after mediocre leaders of most outrageous
violence. But we must not allow our selves to be provoked. We must not
lose our heads at the very first peals of really revolutionary thunder
coming from the people, cast all caution to the winds, and, to ease mind
and conscience, eschew all the experience of Europe and the experience of
Russia, all more or less definite socialist convictions, all claims to
fundamentally consistent, and not adventurist, tactics. In short, we must
not allow realisation of an attempt to restore the Narodnaya Volya
movement and to repeat all its theoretical and practical mistakes that the Socialist-Revolutionaries have under taken and persist
in furthering more and more. Our answer to efforts made to corrupt the
masses and provoke the revolutionaries must not be given in a
“programme” which would open the door wide to the most harmful
old mistakes and to new ideological waverings, or in tactics that would
tend to deepen the isolation of the revolutionaries from the masses, which
is the main source of our weakness and of our incapacity to start a
determined struggle at once. We must answer by strengthening the contact
between the revolutionaries and the people, and this contact can be
established in our time only by developing and strengthening the
Social-Democratic labour movement. Only the working-class movement rouses
that truly revolutionary and advanced class which has nothing to lose from
the collapse of the existing political and social order, the class which
is the final and inevitable product of that order, the class which alone
is the unquestionable and uncompromising enemy of that order. Only by
relying upon the theory of revolutionary Marxism, upon the experience of
international Social-Democracy, clan we bring about the fusion of our
revolutionary movement with the labour movement and create an invincible
Social-Democratic movement. Only in the name of a real workers’ party can
we, without losing faith in our convictions, call on all the progressive
elements in the country to join in revolutionary work, call on all
working, all suffering and oppressed people to support socialism.

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Notes:
[1]
“On the Tasks of the Social-Democratic Movement” is an excerpt from an article which Lenin wrote in November 1902.

Themanuscript has no heading. The present heading has been provided by
the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

[2]
Val—a

tsarist general, who ordered that workers arrested for demon strating on
May 1, 1902, should be flogged.

Obolensky—a tsarist high official, who savagely crushed
peasant uprisings in the south of Russia in 1902.