V. I. Lenin

Notes of a Publicist


 

8. Conclusion. The Platform of the Bolsheviks

The Party conference fixed by the plenum cannot and must not confine itself to the agenda proposed by the plenum on condition that all the Mensheviks come over to the Party position. This did not happen, and it is not fitting for us to play hide-and-seek with ourselves.

The election slogan for this conference, the slogan under which it is to be convened and prepared must be the rallying of the Party members in the struggle against the group of independent-legalists. In accordance with this task and taking into account the anti-Party position of the Golosists, we must resolutely reorganise all the leading institutions of the Party, so that they shall be concerned not with the squabbles which every Golosist is preparing and will henceforth be preparing for them, but with the real work of building the Party. The Golosists do not want to build the Party, they want to help secretly the group of independent-legalists.

The following must be the platform of the Bolsheviks for this conference: to build the Party in accordance with the December (1908) resolutions and in their spirit; to continue the work of the plenum, making the above-mentioned corrections of its decisions, corrections which have been dictated by the entire course of events since the plenum; to concentrate all our efforts on a systematic, undeviating, comprehensive and persistent utilisation of each and every legal possibility in order to gather the forces of the proletariat, to help it to group and consolidate itself, to help it to train itself for the struggle and stretch its limbs; and also steadily to restore the illegal Party units, to learn how to adapt them to new conditions, to restore the illegal purely Party organisations, and, first and foremost, the purely proletarian organisations, which alone are capable of directing all the work in the legal organisations, to imbue this work with the revolutionary Social-Democratic spirit, to carry on an irreconcilable struggle against the renegades and the independent-legalists, and to prepare for the time when our Party, our R.S.D.L.P., having preserved all the traditions of the revolution and of the great victories of the proletariat in 1905, and having strengthened and enlarged the proletarian army of the Party, will lead it into a new battle, to new victories.


Notes

  7. Pro-Party Menshevism and its Evaluation |  

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