V. I.

Lenin

In the legal press, the liquidators headed by Trotsky argue
that it can. They are doing all in their power to distort the true
character of the workers’ movement. But those are hopeless efforts. The
drowning liquidators are clutching at a straw to rescue their unjust cause.

In 1910 little groups of intellectuals began a campaign of
petitions for freedom of association. It was an artificial campaign. The mass of the workers remained
indifferent. One cannot fire the proletariat with so futile an
undertaking. It was fitting for liberals to believe in political reforms
under the tsarist autocracy. The workers at once saw through the
falsity of the undertaking and remained aloof.

The workers are not against the struggle for reforms—they fought for
the Insurance Bill. Through their deputies they used every opportunity in
the Third Duma to bring about at least slight improvements. But the point
is that the Third Duma and the Insurance Bill are not fiction, but
political facts, while “freedom of association” under the June
Third monarchy of Romanov is an empty promise from rotten liberals.

The liberals are enemies of the revolution. Even now they are outspoken
in their opposition to it—the Black-Hundred Third Duma has not taught
them to throw off their fear of the revolution. Being afraid of the
revolution, the liberals comfort themselves with the hope of
constitutional reforms and advocate for the workers one of those
reforms, freedom of association.

But the workers do not believe the fable about a “constitution” under
the conditions of the Third Duma, general lack of rights, and unbridled tyranny. The workers demand freedom of
association in earnest and therefore they are fighting for freedom for the whole people, for the overthrow of the monarchy , for a republic.

The strikes in April and May showed in point of fact that the
proletariat had risen in a revolutionary strike . The combination
of the economic and political strike, revolutionary meetings, and the
slogan of a republic advanced by the St. Petersburg workers on May
Day—all these facts were conclusive proof of the beginning of a
revolutionary upswing .

The factual, objective situation in Russia is this: the proletariat has
begun a revolutionary struggle of the masses to overthrow the tsarist
monarchy, and unrest in the armed forces is growing—an indication that
they have joined in the struggle. As for the peasant democrats, the best
among them are turning away from the liberals to lend ear to the
working-class vanguard.

Meanwhile the liberals, enemies of the revolution, up hold
only the “constitutional” path and put forward, against
the revolution, the promise (an empty and false promise) of “freedom of
association” under Russia’s tsarist monarchy!

Such is the actual political situation. And these are the real social
forces:
(1) the tsarist monarchy, which flouts all “constitution”;
(2) the liberal-monarchist bourgeois, who out of fear of the revolution
pretend that they believe in a combination of “freedom” and the tsarist
regime, and (3) the revolutionary democrats; from the midst of the latter a leader has
already risen—the mass of the workers, to whose appeal the sailors and
soldiers, from Helsingfors to Tashkent, are responding.

How hopelessly stupid, under the circumstances, is the liquidators’
talk about “freedom of association”! Of all “reforms”, these sages of
liberal labour policy have chosen an impossible constitutional
reform, which is nothing but a promise, and they are amusing themselves by
playing at “European” constitutionalism.

It won’t do! The workers are casting aside the liberals and liberal
labour policy. They will support, develop, and make an object of
their campaigns, every reform that really be comes an immediate issue—both in the Third and in the

Fourth Duma—from insurance to increased salaries for those who slave in
offices.

But the workers laugh contemptuously at the empty and absurd promise of
a constitutional political reform under the autocracy. May the revolutionary struggle begun by the masses in order to
overthrow the monarchy and win a republic grow in scale and intensity! The
struggle will show what half-hearted constitutional reforms will result in
if the new revolution is defeated , but to suggest to the masses a
non-revolutionary road, a peaceful constitutional reform, now, at the
beginning of a revolutionary onslaught, is something that only the “man in
a

muffler” [1] can do.

The revolutionary onslaught which has begun calls for revolutionary
slogans. Down with the monarchy! Long live the democratic republic, the
eight-hour working day, and the confiscation of all landed estates!

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Notes:
[1]
The man in a muffler —the chief character in Chekhov’s story
of that name, a man typifying the narrow-minded philistine who dreads all
initiative and all that is new.