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Lassalle’s 1852 letter to Marx, quoted by Lenin in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, supplies the epigraph for a chapter that grounds the Bolshevik conception of party organisation in a specific historical judgement: that internal struggle is not a pathology but the very mechanism of a party’s vitality. The chapter’s core argument is that a revolutionary party achieves strength not through the avoidance of factional conflict but through the sharp demarcation of political lines and the periodic expulsion of opportunist elements. Lassalle’s formulation is deployed as a weapon against the Mensheviks, who championed organisational “diffuseness” and the blurring of ideological boundaries under the banner of unity and democracy. The chapter contends that such diffuseness is the hallmark of a weak, pre-political formation, incapable of disciplined revolutionary action.
The key claim is that a party “purges itself” into strength. This is not a metaphor for arbitrary exclusion but a dialectical process: the resolution of principled struggle clarifies the party’s programme, hones its cadre, and expels those whose presence would otherwise rot its fighting capacity. The evidence cited is the historical experience of the German Social Democracy, where Lassalle’s own conflicts with rival tendencies were understood by Marx as necessary for the movement’s maturation. The chapter draws on the theoretical context of Marx’s and Engels’s lifelong insistence on the primacy of political clarity over organisational sentimentality—a tradition Lenin presents as the authentic Marxist inheritance, contra the eclecticism of the Second International.
The polemic is directed squarely at the Mensheviks and, by extension, at all tendencies that equate party unity with the suppression of debate. The chapter argues that the Menshevik call for “broad” party membership and loose organisational ties is a cover for the admission of petty-bourgeois intellectuals and trade-unionist elements who will dilute revolutionary consciousness. Lassalle’s maxim is thus inverted: the party that fears to purge itself will be purged by history. The chapter’s narrative thrust is to establish that the Bolshevik insistence on a centralised, combat-ready vanguard is not a deviation from Marxism but its logical organisational corollary, proven by the very struggles that built the German workers’ movement.