4. The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 4: The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries¶
This chapter mounts a sustained polemic against the Economists' organisational primitiveness, which Lenin diagnoses as a disease of growth rather than decline, but one that must be vigorously fought. The core argument is that the economic struggle against employers and the government neither requires an all-Russia centralised organisation nor can produce one composed of professional revolutionaries. Rabocheye Dyelo thus legitimises narrowness in both political activity and organisational work, subordinating consciousness to spontaneity.
The typical Social-Democratic study circle of 1894-1901 operated with astonishingly primitive equipment: no connection with older revolutionaries or other circles, no systematic plan. Its open warfare usually ended in immediate fiasco because the police, knowing the leaders from their student days, waited for a palpable corpus delicti before raiding. From the strikes of summer 1896 onwards, these defects became critical. Raids cleared out local circles so thoroughly that workers lost all leaders; the work became sporadic and discontinuous.
Lenin insists on a fundamental distinction: the organisation of revolutionaries must be sharply differentiated from the organisation of workers. The political struggle of Social-Democracy is far more extensive than the economic struggle, so the revolutionary party must consist of professional revolutionarians, effacing distinctions between workers and intellectuals, be not very extensive, and be as secret as possible. Workers' organisations for economic struggle should be broad trade unions, as public as conditions allow. The Economists confuse these two forms, setting up broad workers' organisations in rigid, top-heavy structures that make it easy for the gendarmes to carry out raids.
A small, compact core of reliable, hardened workers, connected by strict secrecy to a revolutionary organisation, can perform all trade union functions without formal mass organisation. Using the German example, Lenin asserts that no class can wage a determined struggle without a dozen professionally trained, experienced leaders working in harmony. The conclusion drawn from the instability of student committees is not to abandon outside leadership but to create committees of professional revolutionaries. Centralising secret functions in a small, professional body does not reduce mass participation; it increases it by allowing broad, non-secret organisations to flourish.
The chapter rejects the charge of following a Narodnaya Volya line, arguing this rests on a twofold misunderstanding: Zemlya i Volya, not Narodnaya Volya, created the model militant centralised organisation, and the Narodnaya Volya's mistake was its non-revolutionary theory, not its organisation. Under tsarist autocracy, the 'broad democratic principle' is a hollow phrase when the fundamental condition of publicity cannot be fulfilled. The only serious organisational principle is strictest secrecy, strictest selection of members, and training of professional revolutionaries, which guarantees complete comradely mutual confidence, not toy democratism. Drawing on the Webbs' concept of 'primitive democracy' in early English trade unions, Lenin argues that the movement's main failing is that amateurism has lowered the prestige of revolutionaries; the task is to raise amateurs to the level of revolutionaries, not degrade revolutionaries to amateurs.