V. I.

Lenin

August 30, New Style, 1909

Dear Comrades, After receiving the curriculum of the school and two letters, in the last of
which you ask my reasons for declaring the school to be a new faction, I
consider it my duty to ex plain my view to you once more. “That there is
anything factional behind this school is the purest fiction,” you write. “A
hegemony over the school is inconceivable, for we are the majority on the
Council."

I maintain that this is a clear case of self-deception on your part. Whether or
not you are being accused of “downright factionalism” is quite beside the
point; so is the question of who has the majority on the Council. The point is
that the school has been organised (1) on the initiative of the new faction, (2) exclusively with the funds of the new faction, (3) in a place where only lecturers from the new faction are present, (4) in a place where lecturers from other sections of.. the Party, with very
rare exceptions, cannot be present .

These conditions are not of your making. You are powerless to change them. But
these conditions predetermine the character of the school, so much so
that no good intentions on your part, no decisions of your Council, can make a
jot of difference.

In any school,. the most important thing is the ideological and political trend
of the lectures. What determines the trend? The lecturing personnel ,
entirely and exclusively.

You understand perfectly well, comrades, that “control”, “leadership”,
“curricula”, “rules”, etc., as applied to the lecturing personnel are just
so many meaningless words. No control, no curricula, nor anything of that sort,
can make the studies take. any other trend than that determined by the lecturing
personnel. And no self-respecting organisation in the world, no section
or group will undertake to share responsibility for a school whose
trend is already predetermined by the lecturing personnel, if that trend is
hostile.

Now look at the lecturing personnel, the factor that has determined the
character of the school and its trend. You comrades signed your names in the
letter which you sent to me, but the one that you sent to the Central Committee
(I received a copy, together with the curriculum of the school) on behalf of the
pupils and lecturers is not signed by any of the lecturers. Hence I
cannot claim to know exactly who the lecturers are. But I know enough to form an
opinion about them as a body.

The local organisations in the Central Industrial Region have written us from
Russia that the most energetic, if not the only agitator for the Capri school,
was Comrade Stanislav, who had already been chosen as one of the lecturers by
certain Social-Democratic groups who had heard him read a paper. This Comrade
Stanislav is a most ardent otzovist and “critic” of Marxism in philosophy. I
need only remind you (1) how he lambasted Kautsky in his well-known booklet on philosophy, (2) how at the Party Conference in December 1908 he formed an otzovist faction
with the St. Petersburg otzovist vs., (3) how the article by “Worker"—an otzovist—edited by him and published in
Rabocheye Znamya , No. 5, was, on the admission of
Rabocheye Znamya itself, imbued with anarchistic ideas.

Next, look at the lecturers you now have over there in Capri. There are no
Bolsheviks among them, while all the adherents of the new faction (the faction
of the advocates of otzovism and god-building) are represented almost in
full,. I will not be very far wrong if I say that you see Comrades Maximov,
Lunacharsky, Lyadov and Alexinsky among the lecturers at Capri. That is the
identical group of comrades who have formed an opposition to Proletary
ever since the spring of 1908, agitated against it in Russia and abroad, displayed (or supported) tendencies to form a separate faction at the Party
Conference in December 1908, and ultimately broke away completely as a
separate faction.

To deny that this entire group of comrades are agitating against
Proletary , supporting and defending the otzovists, would be
flouting facts which are known to every member of the Party. To deny that
the Island of’ Capri has won fame even in general Russian literary circles
as the literary centre of god-building, would be deriding facts. The whole
Russian press reported long ago that Lunacharsky was preaching the word of
god-building from the Island of Capri; Bazarov helped him in
Russia. Bogdanov has advocated similar philosophical views in a dozen books
and articles published by the legal press in Russia, and a dozen papers
read abroad. I was on Capri in April 1908 and told all these three comrades
that my views on philosophy were unconditionally opposed to theirs (I
proposed at the time that our common re sources and energies should be used
on counterblasting the Menshevik-liquidationist version of the history of
the revolution with a Bolshevik history of the revolution , but
these Capriotes turned down my proposition, preferring to disseminate their
own special philosophical views rather than to work for the common cause of
the Bolsheviks). The majority of your lecturers on Capri are writers,
yet. not one of them has made a single attack in the press on the god-building propaganda of Lunacharsky and Bazarov.

If, in spite of all this, you comrades write that it is a
“misapprehension” and a “gross” one on my part to think that the school
has any association with god-building and otzovism, because “such aims
were never contemplated here in this school, and were even out of the
question”, I can only wonder at your extraordinary naivete. I repeat: the
real character and trend of the school is determined not by the
good intentions & the local organisations, not by decisions of the
“Council” of students, not by “curricula” and so forth, but by the
lecturing personnel . And since the lecturing personnel is and has
been determined entirely by membership of the new faction, it is simply
ridiculous to deny the factional character of the school.

To finish with the question of the lecturing personnel, I shall draw
your attention to one more fact communicated to me by Comrade Innokenty, which shows how obvious to everyone in
the Party is the thing you are trying to deny, namely: the separatist
factional character of the Capri school. Shortly before the last meeting of
the extended editorial board of Proletary , Comrade Maximov in
Paris approached Trotsky and invited him to become a lecturer at
the school on Capri. Trotsky told this to Comrade Innokenty, saying: “If
this is a Party affair I shall be glad to take part in it; if it is a
private concern run by the Capri literati—Maximov, Lunacharsky and
Co.—I shall have nothing to do with it.” Innokenty replied: “Wait for
the decisions of the editorial board of Proletary,’ I’ll
see that you get them.” Thus, even a man like Trotsky, who does not belong
to our group, understood immediately (as any Party functionary would, with
any experience) that to organise a school on Capri is tantamount to
hiding it away from the Party , to connecting the school beforehand
with a special faction— the new one.

Now I shall go on to the question of Paris. I told you in my letter
that if you are really interested in having lectures from myself and my
comrades-in-idea you should come to Paris. You reply: “Considering the
expense, travelling to Paris is quite unreasonable.”

Let us see which of us is really being unreasonable.

You went to Capri via Vienna. If you go back the same way you will have
to make a detour to Paris from Northern Italy, then straight on to
Vienna. This will involve in all probability an additional expense of 60
francs per person (I am judging by the fact that a ticket to Paris from
Geneva., where I lived for a long time, costs 30 francs). Your letter is
signed by eight persons, one of whom declares that he “will have no
further correspondence”, which obviously means that he is not even
interested in hearing my talks. That leaves seven comrades. Expenses=7×60=420 francs.

You invited four lecturers from Paris (Leva, myself, Grigori and
Innokenty). Travelling expenses from Paris to Capri and back—about 140
francs. Total 4×140=560 francs.

It will be cheaper for the eight students to come to Paris
than to send the four lecturers to Capri.

But the financial aspect, as I have already told you in my last letter, [1] is not by any means the most important. Think: for whom is it easier to
choose a place—the visiting students, or the local lecturers? You went
abroad specially to attend the school. That means there can be nothing to
prevent you from going where there is a large number of lecturers, where it
is possible to organise things on real Party lines.

But the lecturers cannot leave the Party centre to go to the
Island of Capri. I shall speak for myself. I cannot leave my editorial work
on Proletary . I cannot leave my editorial work on the Central
Organ. I cannot leave my work on the Promotion Commission for the Duma
Social-Democratic group, which has its headquarters in Paris. I have to
speak at the Proletary club in the working-class districts of
Paris, where hundreds and thousands of Russian workers are living, and so
on. It is absolutely impossible for Party writers to leave Paris to go to
Capri.

But for the school, as a Party concern, Bolshevik lecturers are not the
only important factor. Paris is the largest emigrant centre, where papers
are regularly read in public under the auspices of all Party
trends, where debates are held and all kinds of study circles are
conducted, where there are two or three quite decent Russian libraries,
where there are scores of Social-Democratic organisers with long experience
of activity in the Party, and so on and so forth. Three Russian
Social-Democratic newspapers are published in Paris. In a word, it is
clear, as clear as daylight, to anyone who knows anything at all about life
abroad, that anyone who goes to Paris to study Social-Democracy is going
where he can learn it properly. Anyone who goes to Capri is going there to
study a separatist factional “ science ”.

Whoever holds a school in Paris is holding a real Party school. Whoever
holds a school on the Island of .Capri is hiding the school away from the Party .

The school on Capri is a school deliberately hidden away from the Party .

Absolutely no control, no “ideological leadership” of the
Capri school is possible either by the Central Committee to which you appeal today, or by the editorial board of Proletary
to which you appealed yesterday. To speak of control and ideological
leadership here is idle talk. No one would think of doing such an absurd
thing as to send Party “inspectors” to Capri to superintend the school;
to send real Party lecturers to Capri (with the rarest exceptions) is out of the question at any time. The local organisations in Russia may
not have known this, but the organisers of the school knew it perfectly well . That was just why they organised the school on Capri—to
mask its factional character and to hide it away from the Party.

Take the Russian Social-Democrats, eminent for their knowledge of the
labour movement abroad, who do not belong to any factions: Parvus and Rosa
Luxemburg (Germany), Ch. Rappoport (France), Rothstein (England). Take
unattached Social-Democratic writers like Ryazanov, and you will see at
once (unless you deliberately close your eyes in order not to see) that
they could in the majority of cases, with a bit of effort from the Party,
read lectures in Paris; while to go to Capri is absolutely out of the
question for them. The money which the organisers of the school have thrown
away in sending people to study and lecture in such a remote foreign spot
as Capri would have been quite sufficient to organise readings by
at least some of these lecturers in Paris.

Further, take the new groupings among the Social-Democrats, groupings
which it is so important that the Russian comrades should know about (the
struggle between the pro-Party element and the liquidationists in the Bund;
the struggle between the Bolshevik section of the Letts and the Menshevik;
between the Polish Social-Democratic Party and the Left wing of the P.S.P.;
the split in Menshevism, Plekhanov’s publication of his Dnevnik ,
exposing the liquidationism of Potresov and the official Mensheviks; the
attempts to create a “revolutionary Menshevism”, and so on). It is
impossible to study these important Party events properly in
Capri. In Paris there Is every possibility of learning the state of affairs
at first hand, and not by mere hearsay.

Take finally the syllabus of the Capri school. Of the four sections,
one (the third) is headed: “The Philosophy of the Proletarian
Struggle”. In the international Social-Democratic movement there are tens and hundreds (if not thousands) of syllabuses for
propaganda classes of the same type. But nowhere will you find:
“The Philosophy of the Proletarian Struggle”. There is the philosophical
materialism of Marx and Engels, but nowhere is there the “Philosophy of
the Proletarian Struggle”. And no Social-Democrat in Europe will
understand what it is all about. The only people who will understand are
those who are conversant with the works of the philosophers Stanislav
(A. Volsky), Bogdanov, Lunacharsky and Bazarov. Before teaching the
“Philosophy, of the Proletarian Struggle”, such a philosophy must be
invent- NOTES ed. ˜To invent this special philosophy, which
swears more and more often by the word “proletarian” the further away it
is from the proletarian world-outlook, has been and is the occupation only
of the above-mentioned group of members of the new faction.

To conclude. If you comrades insist on you unwillingness to come to
Paris (assuring me at the same time that you want to hear my lectures),
this will be conclusive proof that not only the lecturers but some of the
students at the Capri school have been infected with the sectarianism of
the new god-building-otzovist faction.

With Social-Democratic greetings,

N. Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
See pp. 468–69 of this volume.— Ed .