The severe crisis of the workers' movement and the social-democratic party in Russia is still continuing. The disintegration of party organizations, the wholesale flight of the intelligentsia from them, discord and vacillation among those who have remained faithful to social-democracy, despondency and apathy among quite broad layers of the advanced proletariat, uncertainty about where the way out of this situation lies – such are the features that distinguish the present situation. There are not a few faint-hearted and doubters among social-democrats who are ready to despair of the possibility of sorting out the prevailing confusion, to despair of the task of restoring and strengthening the party, the RSDLP with its revolutionary tasks and traditions, ready to throw up their hands and withdraw into personal life or into narrow, petty circles occupied solely with "cultural" work and the like.

The crisis continues, but its end is now clearly visible, the path to a way out has been fully mapped out and tested by the party, discord and vacillation have already crystallized into quite definite and very definitely evaluated currents, directions, and factions – and the definiteness of anti-party currents, a clear assessment of them, is already half the way to deliverance from discord and vacillation.

In order not to succumb to despair and disillusionment, one need only understand the full depth of the sources of the crisis. One cannot leap over this crisis, one cannot circumvent it, one can only work through it in persistent struggle, for this is not an accidental crisis but one engendered by a particular stage of both Russia's economic and political development. Autocracy reigns, as before. Even cruder violence. Even stronger rightlessness. Even more shameless economic oppression. But autocracy can no longer sustain itself by the old means alone. It is forced to make a new attempt, an attempt at an open alliance with the reactionary landlords and serf-owners, with October Union capitalists, an alliance in the Duma and through the Duma. To everyone who has not lost the capacity to think, the hopelessness of this attempt is evident, the growth of a new revolutionary crisis is evident. But this revolutionary crisis is being prepared in a new situation, amid immeasurably greater consciousness, cohesion, and organization of classes and parties than existed before the revolution of 1905. Russian liberalism has been transformed from a good-natured, dreamy, flabby and raw opposition of pious wishes into a firm, parliamentarily-trained party of intelligent bourgeois, who are conscious enemies of the socialist proletariat and the revolutionary reckoning of the peasant masses with the serf-owners. To beg concessions from the monarchy, to threaten it with revolution (hateful and terrible to the liberal himself), eternally to betray the liberation struggle and to desert to the enemy's side – such is the inevitable, by virtue of class nature inevitable, fate of the liberal, Constitutional-Democratic party. The Russian peasantry has proven its capacity for mass revolutionary struggle when begun by the proletariat, and its property of endless vacillation between liberalism and social-democracy. The Russian working class has proven itself the only thoroughly revolutionary class, the only leader in the struggle for (even bourgeois) freedom. And now the great task of continuing the struggle for freedom can be and will be solved only by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, drawing behind it the masses of the toiling and exploited. Acting in a new situation, amid more conscious and more cohesive enemies, the working class must rebuild its own party, the RSDLP. In place of the intellectual leader, it puts forward leaders from the workers' milieu. A new type of social-democratic worker-party member is growing – one who independently conducts all party affairs and is capable of uniting, bringing together, organizing ten times and a hundred times larger proletarian masses compared with before.

It is above all to this new worker that we address ourselves with our "Workers' Gazette". This worker has outgrown the age when it could please him to be spoken to in a coddling manner, to be fed pap. He needs to know everything about the political tasks of the party, about its construction, about the internal party struggle. He is not frightened by the unvarnished truth about the party, with the strengthening, restoration and restructuring of which he is occupied. Those general revolutionary phrases, those mawkishly-conciliatory exclamations which he finds in the collections "Forward" or in Trotsky's newspaper "Truth", help him not at all – on the contrary, they do harm – inasmuch as he finds there neither a clear, precise, direct exposition of the party line nor of the party situation.

This party situation is very difficult, but the chief difficulty consists not in the fact that the party is terribly weakened and organizations are often completely shattered, and not in the fact that the internal party struggle of factions has become acute, but in the fact that the advanced layer of social-democratic workers has not sufficiently clearly understood the essence and significance of this struggle, has not sufficiently cohered for its successful conduct, has not sufficiently independently and energetically intervened in it to create, support, and strengthen that party nucleus which is leading the RSDLP out of discord, collapse, and vacillation onto firm ground.

This path has been fully mapped out by the decisions of the December 1908 Conference, developed in the decisions of the Central Committee Plenum of 1910. This nucleus consists of that alliance of orthodox Bolsheviks (opponents of recallism and bourgeois philosophy) and party Mensheviks (opponents of liquidationism), which is now conducting, in fact, not merely by virtue of formal relations, the main work in the RSDLP.

Workers are told that this alliance only intensifies and exacerbates the factional struggle, the struggle against liquidationists and recallists "instead of" struggling against liquidationism and recallism. This is empty phrase-mongering, this is mere coddling, presupposing in the worker not an adult but a child. The unpleasant truth is that in the weakness of the party, in the shattering of organizations, in the unavoidability of a foreign base, every current easily constitutes in fact a completely independent and autonomous foreign faction apart from the party; but it is ridiculous (or criminal) to hide this truth from the social-democratic worker, who must rebuild his party on the basis of a definite, precise, clear party line. The most undesirable forms of factional struggle prevail among us at present, this is undoubtedly true, but precisely in order to transform the forms of this struggle, the advanced workers must not wrinkle their noses in scornful disdain, must not wave away with phrases the unpleasant (for the dilettante, for a guest in the party) task of transforming the unpleasant forms of an unpleasant struggle, but must understand the essence and significance of this struggle and organize the work locally such that on every question of socialist propaganda, political agitation, the trade union movement, cooperative work, etc., etc., one determines that boundary beyond which begins a deviation from social-democracy into liberal liquidationism or semi-anarchical recallism, ultramism, and the like, and conducts party work along the correct line determined by these boundaries. One of the chief tasks of the "Workers' Gazette" we set for ourselves – to help workers in determining these boundaries on each of the most important concrete questions of present-day Russian reality.

Workers are told: it is precisely the unifying attempt of the Central Committee Plenum (full assembly) in January 1910 that proved the sterility and hopelessness of internal party factional struggle, which supposedly "disrupted" the unification. People say this who are either uninformed or altogether incapable of thinking or who are concealing their true aims by means of one or another resonant, melodious phrase that says nothing. The Plenum "disappointed" only those who were afraid to look truth in the face and who consoled themselves with illusions. However great the "conciliatory mush" sometimes was at the Plenum, the result was precisely that unification which alone is possible, which alone is necessary. If liquidationists and recallists signed a resolution about struggling against liquidationism and recallism, and the next day set about the old business "even more" zealously, this only proved the impossibility of the party reckoning on non-party elements, only showed more clearly what sort of elements these are. The party is a voluntary union, and unification is possible and useful only when people unite who want and are able to conduct, at least to some extent, conscientiously a common party line, or more precisely: who are interested (by their ideas, their tendencies) in conducting a common party line. Unification is impossible and harmful when it attempts to muddy and obscure consciousness of this line, when it attempts to bind with a fictitious bond those who are pulling the party decidedly in an anti-party direction. And unification between the main groups of Bolshevism and Menshevism was achieved by the Plenum and consolidated, if not thanks to the Plenum, then through the Plenum. A worker who does not want to be spoken to in a coddling manner cannot fail to understand that liquidationism and recallism are just as little accidental, deeply-rooted directions as Bolshevism and Menshevism. Only tale-spinners of "stories for workers" explain the difference between these factions as "intellectual" disputes. In fact these two directions, which have left their imprint on the whole history of the Russian revolution, on all the first years (and in many respects the most important years) of the mass workers' movement in Russia, are engendered by the very process of Russia's economic and political transformation from a serf-holding into a bourgeois country, engendered by those influences of different bourgeois classes which acted upon the proletariat, or more precisely: by that situation created by different layers of the bourgeoisie in which the proletariat acted. From this it follows that unification of social-democracy in Russia is impossible through the elimination of one of the two directions that crystallized in the epoch of the most open, broadest, mass, free, historically-important actions of the working class in the revolution. But from this it also follows that the basis of a real rapprochement lies not in benevolent phrases about unity, about the elimination of factions, etc., but only in the internal development of the two factions. It is precisely such a rapprochement that the workers' party has been undergoing ever since we Bolsheviks finally buried "recallism" in the spring of 1909, and the party Mensheviks, with Plekhanov at their head, began an equally decisive struggle against liquidationism. That conscious workers in both factions stand in the overwhelming majority on the side of opponents of recallism and liquidationism is undoubted. Therefore, however heavy, at times difficult, and always unpleasant the internal party struggle on this basis may be, we must not lose sight of the essence of the phenomenon because of its form. Those who cannot see the forest for the trees are those who do not see at the foundation of this struggle (inevitable in the given state of the party in the form of a struggle of factions) the process of cohesion of the basic party nucleus of conscious social-democratic workers.

The "Workers' Gazette", which we Bolsheviks are founding, having secured the agreement of the party Mensheviks (with Plekhanov at their head) to support our publication, will also serve the aims of such cohesion of the genuine social-democratic nucleus. This publication is compelled to appear as a factional publication, as a factional undertaking of the Bolsheviks. There will perhaps be people who even here fail to see the forest for the trees and cry out about a return "backward" to factionalism. Having set forth in detail our view on the essence and significance of the genuinely occurring, genuinely important and necessary party unification, we have thereby already shown the worth of such objections, which in fact would mean only a muddying of the question of unification and a concealment of one or another factional aim. And we want above all for the "Workers' Gazette" to help workers with full clarity and completely to understand the entire party situation and all party tasks.

In undertaking the publication of the "Workers' Gazette", we reckon on the help of both the Central Committee of our party and local organizations and individual groups of conscious workers now separated from the party. We reckon on the help of the Central Committee, knowing that for a number of months it has not succeeded in properly organizing its work in Russia, has not succeeded precisely because besides the Bolsheviks and party Mensheviks it has encountered nowhere any assistance and often has encountered direct obstruction from other factions. This heavy period in the life of the Central Committee will pass, and so that it passes more quickly, we must not simply "wait" for the Central Committee to recover, for it to grow stronger, etc., but must immediately, on the initiative of individual groups and individual local organizations, begin to establish – at first on the most modest scale – precisely that work of strengthening the party line and genuine party unity on which the Central Committee is laboring most of all. We reckon on the help of local organizations and individual groups of workers, for only their active work on the newspaper, only their support, their reviews, their articles, materials, information and remarks can put the "Workers' Gazette" on its feet and ensure its conduct.

Written in October 1910

First published May 5, 1937 in the newspaper "Pravda" No. 122

Printed from the manuscript