In No. 3 of the newspaper *Volnaya Mysl*{62} there appears an article under an ornate heading: "Oneness, Twoness or Threeness."

"We declare openly," it is stated in this article, "that the claims of one faction of Bolsheviks to absorb within itself the entire workers' movement are just as senseless and absurd as the striving of two factions of social-democrats to embody within themselves all the socialist movement in Russia. Only to the unification of all socialist currents in a single party belongs the future.

And we, having put forward this slogan from the beginning of 1900, remain true to it to the end."

Here is a specimen of amusingly-angry phrases about "unity"!! Not a word about the principled content of the historical struggle between Marxists and Narodniki, a struggle that has been going on for several decades. Not a word either about the history of the movement of 1905–1907, when the open appearance of the masses of the population from all classes showed in practice the fundamental difference between the social-democratic proletariat and the "laboring" (i.e., petty-bourgeois) peasantry.

If in Russia there exists a radical and serious newspaper that poses the question in such a manner, this is one of the clear signs of how much the long and stubborn struggle for the fundamentals of principled determinateness is still necessary.

That the Bolsheviks have the backing of the majority of conscious workers, this their enemies—the gentlemen liquidators—are forced to acknowledge with malice and venom.

One cannot refute this by sentimentality. The workers will not be frightened by the shout: "senseless and absurd"—they will only smile.

From the point of view of ideas, the entire history of Marxism in Russia is a struggle against petty-bourgeois theories, beginning with "legal Marxism" and "Economism." This struggle was no accident. Its direct continuation now is no accident either. The workers' party, as a genuinely class-based proletarian party, is taking shape and coming of age in Russia in the difficult time of the Third of June, precisely in this struggle against petty-bourgeois liquidationism and left-Narodnikism.

"We, left-Narodniki, have never warmed our hands at another's misfortune," writes *Volnaya Mysl*. And alongside this—assurances that the split causes "complete inner impotence of our social-democracy"!

To write such a thing is precisely, gentlemen, to "warm one's hands"—only we shall not say: at another's "misfortune," but rather "at another's ideological struggle." For at the basis of the struggle among Marxists lies precisely the collision between the ideas of liberal and proletarian politics. The workers, not disturbed by either angry words or sentimentality, have already learned to find the principled foundations of this struggle.

"Within the unified parties of the European workers' movement there are fewer disagreements than among us," writes *Volnaya Mysl*. This is a very prevalent, but profoundly false argument. Nowhere in Europe is there even a question of replacing the proletarian, Marxist organization… with talk of a "broad" party blessed by Purishkevich, and so forth.

From such a dispute the workers will gain the ability to build, in deed and not in words, a workers' party.

*Za Pravdu* No. 34, November 13, 1913

Printed according to the text of the newspaper *Za Pravdu*