Date: 1911
Source: ru:PSS/v49

Source: PSS, Volume 49

Dear Comrade!

You dispute my remark regarding the possibility of transforming this very imperialist war into a national one.

Your argument? “We will have to defend an imperialist fatherland”...

But is that logical? If what remains is a “i m p e r i a l i s t” fatherland, then how, pray tell, can the war possibly be national??

In my view, discussions about “possibilities” are, from a theoretical standpoint, improperly introduced by Radek and by §-fom in the five theses of the Third International, 392.

Marxism is grounded in facts, not in possibilities.

A Marxist must base the premises of his or her political strategy solely on facts that have been established with absolute certainty and incontrovertible proof.

This is precisely what our (party) resolution does*.

When, instead, one presents “impossibility,” I reply: that is incorrect, un-Marxist, and purely schematic. All manner of transformations are possible.

And I cite a historical example—the wars of 1792–1815. I offer this instance as an illustration of possibility—and now, likewise, of the potential for similar developments, should history were to reverse its course.

In my opinion, you confuse the possible—about which I was not the one who first initiated the discussion—with the actual.

When you assume that recognizing a possibility somehow permits one to alter one’s tactics, you are indulging in the height of illogic.

* See Collected Works, 5th ed., Volume 26, pp. 161–167. Ed.

I acknowledge that it is possible for a social democrat to become a bourgeois—and vice versa.

That is an indisputable truth. Does this mean that I should now regard Plekhanov, this very bourgeois, as a social democrat? No, it does not. But what of the possibility itself? Let us wait and see whether that possibility ever becomes reality.

That is all there is to it. It is precisely within “methodology”—about which you write—that we must distinguish between what is possible and what is actual.

All manner of transformations are possible—even turning a fool into a wise man—but such transformations rarely become actuality. And merely because a particular transformation of this sort might be possible, I am not thereby compelled to cease regarding that fool as a fool.

Your puzzlement over “dual” education remains unclear to me. I have, in fact, given a concrete example—of Norway—in both “Enlightenment”* and in the article against Kiev**.

You do not address this!! Instead, you invoke a highly obscure example concerning Poland.

This is not “dual” education; rather, it is the process of reducing diverse elements to a common denominator—leading disparate paths from Nizhny Novgorod and Smolensk toward a single Moscow.

The Swedish social democrat who does not stand for Norway’s right to secede is a scoundrel. You do not dispute this. The Norwegian social democrat, on the other hand, may support secession—or oppose it. Is unity on this issue absolutely essential for all social democrats across all nations? No.

To insist upon such unity would be to fall into a rigid, laughable pattern—a laughable pretension.

We have never accused Polish social democrats (as I wrote in “Enlightenment”) of opposing Poland’s independence.

Instead of offering a simple, clear, theoretically irrefutable line of reasoning—namely, that one cannot now advocate for a democratic demand like “an independent Poland,” when in practice such a demand would inevitably subject us entirely to one of the imperialist powers or to a coalition of imperialist powers—

* See “On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (Collected Works, 5th ed., Volume 25, pp. 289–294). Ed.

** See “On the Caricature of Marxism and on ‘Imperialist Economism’” (Collected Works, 5th ed., Volume 30, pp. 99–106). Ed.