V. I.

Lenin

Thenewspaper Tovarishch publishes a note saying that Comrade
Axelrod is campaigning for a “labour congress”. [1]

We, too, have information that the Mensheviks are in fact conducting such a campaign. We think
that open discussion of such questions is a Party duty. Or is a campaign for an
open labour congress conducted by the most prominent Mensheviks to be
concealed from the Party? If Axelrod has no opportunity of setting out
his views in print, we can offer him the columns of our newspaper.

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Notes:
[1]
The idea of convening a “labour congress”, which was advanced by P. B. Axelrod and supported by other Mensheviks,
consisted in gathering together at a congress representatives of
various workers’ organisations to provide the basis of a legal “broad labour
party” which would include Social-Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries
and anarchists. In practice this would have meant the liquidation of the
R.S.D.L.P. and its replacement by a non-party organisation. The Fifth (London)
Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. emphatically condemned the Menshevik idea of a
“labour congress” and recognised that the campaign for it was
harmful to the development of proletarian class-consciousness. Together with
the Bolsheviks, the Polish and Lettish Social-Democrats combated the idea of a
“labour congress”.

Forcriticism of the Menshevik idea of a “labour congress” in
Lenin’s works see “Philistinism in Revolutionary Circles”,
“The Crisis of Menshevism”, “Intellectualist Warriors Against
Domination by the Intelligentsia”, “Angry Embarrassment (the
question of the labour congress)” (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 246-56,
341-64 and Vol. 12, pp. 316-19, 320-32).