V. I.

Lenin

The Mining Congress has declared itself in favour of the
freedom for the unions. One of the biggest liberal bourgeois newspapers,
Kievskaya Mysl [1] has this to say about it:

“ One of the greatest services rendered by the Congress
is this declaration of the right of workers to organise, this support for
the demand for freedom of workers’ association.

“ Since the working-class movement in Russia re-emerged
after the interval of 1908–09 and greater and more frequent repressions
have been showered upon it, the demand for freedom of association is
increasingly becoming a demand put forward by the masses of the
working-class. Until now, however, the demand for the right of association
has been regarded as the slogan of the day only in working-class
circles. Liberal society showed complete indifference towards it. The
Congress, which included quite a number of industrialists, has now been
compelled to afford moral support to the demand of the working class.”

Here we can clearly see how the liberals are employing their widely
circulated, profit-making press to curtail the demands and slogans
of the working class. The liberals know full well that the workers have
quite different “ slogans of the day ”, uncurtailed slogans. The
liberals are foisting on the workers their own liberal narrowness
which they claim to be the opinion of “masses” of workers; this is the
old, worn-out method of making the supposedly undeveloped masses
responsible for the unwillingness of the liberal bourgeoisie to face up to
the real source of political privileges and lack of political rights! This
was the method employed by the “liberal” serf-owners who, half a century
ago, said that the abolition of all landowner privileges was
not “a slogan of the day” for “the masses”.

Characteristically, the liberals give themselves away. The Congress
demand is incomplete, they say. Why? Listen to this:

“ The Congress favoured the right of association but could not hide from itself the fact that the realisation of this right
inevitably presupposes a whole series of legal conditions. It is impossible
to grant freedom to trade unions where general freedom for unions and
societies does not exist. Freedom for the working-class press can only be
established where there is freedom for the liberal and democratic
press. Freedom of association cannot exist where administrative control is
the rule and where the masses of the population are kept from participation
in elections to legislative bodies. The Congress should have indicated the
need to bring about these conditions if it wished to be consistent.”

So the Congress was not consistent. In what way was it not consistent?
In its not having listed certain reforms, answers the liberal.

But did you list everything , gentlemen?

Of course not! You got as far as the “ conditions ” that are
“presupposed” before certain liberties can be “ brought about ”,
but you did not say what these conditions were. You stopped there. You are
today afraid of the slogan of the “working-class masses”—not
reforms but “ reform ”. In substance you adopt the viewpoint of Struve. Struve took up this slogan in the spring
preceding October 17, but he does not accept it today because the
entire bourgeoisie, even the most liberal, has turned to the right.

There was a similar situation at the time of the abolition of
serfdom. The consistent democrats, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, justly
ridiculed the liberals for their reformism , underlying which there
was always a striving to curtail the activities of the masses and defend a
little bit of privilege for the landowners, such as redemption payments for
the land, etc.

The liberals are wasting their time trying to blame the poverty of
their reformism on the “masses of the working class”!

---
Notes:
[1]
Kievskaya Mysl ( Kiev Thought )—a liberal-bourgeois daily published from December 1906 to December 1918. The Menshevik
liquidators were closely connected with the paper.