V. I.   Lenin

The Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.

JANUARY 5–17 (18–30), 1912


 

LIQUIDATIONISM AND THE GROUP OF LIQUIDATORS

Whereas:

(1) The R.S.D.L.P. for nearly four years has been waging a determined fight against the liquidationist trend, which was characterised at the conference of the Party in December 1908 as

an attempt on the part of a group of Party intellectuals to liquidate the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and to replace it at all costs, even at the price of downright renunciation of the programme, tactics, and traditions of the Party, by a loose association functioning legally”;

(2) The Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee held in January 1910, continuing the fight against this trend, unanimously declared it to be a manifestation of bourgeois influence upon the proletariat and demanded, as a condition for real Party unity and for the fusion of the former Bolshevik and Menshevik groups, a complete rupture with liquidationism and the utter rout of this bourgeois deviation from socialism;

(3) In spite of all Party decisions, and in spite of the obligation assumed by the representatives of all the factions   at the Plenary Meeting held in January 1910, a section of Social-Democrats, grouped around the magazines Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni, began to defend openly the trend which the entire Party has recognised as being the product of bourgeois influence on the proletariat;

(4) The former members of the Central Committee, Mikhail, Yuri, and Roman, refused not only to join the Central Committee in the spring of 1910, but even to attend a single meeting to co-opt new members, and bluntly declared that they considered the very existence of the Party Central Committee to he “harmful”;

(5) It was precisely after the Plenary Meeting of 1910 that the above-mentioned chief publications of the liquidators, Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni, definitely turned to liquidationism all along the line, not only “belittling [contrary to the decisions of the Plenary Meeting] the importance of the illegal Party”, but openly renouncing it, declaring that the Party was “extinct”, that the Party was already liquidated, that the idea of reviving the illegal Party was “a reactionary utopia”, using the columns of legally published magazines to heap slander and abuse on the illegal Party, calling upon the workers to regard the nuclei of the Party and its hierarchy as “dead”, etc.;

(6) At a time when throughout Russia the members of the Party, irrespective of factions, united to promote the immediate task of convening a Party conference, the liquidators, banded together in entirely independent small groups, split away from the local organisations even where the pro-Party Mensheviks predominated (Ekaterinoslav, Kiev) and definitely refused to maintain any Party relations with the local organisations of the R.S.D.L.P.;

The Conference declares that by its conduct the Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni group has definitely placed itself outside the Party.

The Conference calls upon all Party members, irrespective of tendencies and shades of opinion, to combat liquidationism, explain its great harmfulness to the cause of the emancipation of the working class, and bend all their efforts to revive and strengthen the illegal R.S.D.L.P.

 

Notes

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