Written: Written on November 19 (December 2), 1904
Published:
First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVI.
Published according to the manuscript.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
publisher??,
pubdate??,
Moscow,
Volume 7,
pages 519-522.
Translated: Fineberg Abraham
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2002).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
{ 1. Already at the Second Congress the minority Iskraists displayed instability of principle (or went astray) and in the elections found themselves in coalition with their ideological opponents.
2. After the Congress too—even at the League—the minority championed the continuity of the old Iskra but actually shifted further and further away from it.
3. Plekhanov at the time of his swing-over (No. 52) saw clearly that the minority constituted the opportunist wing of the Party and were fighting like anarchistic individualists.
(Contra Vasilyev and Lenin in the matter of circle spirit.)[1]
{ 4. Defending, justifying, elevating to a principle our organisational backwardness and the organisational nullification of the Congress already constitutes opportunism. No one will today venture to support, as such, theses on programme versus Rules, etc.
5. To accuse the majority of ignoring the economic struggle, of Jacobinism, of ignoring the workers’ independent initiative, is nothing but totally groundless repetition of the attacks of Rabocheye Dyelo on Iskra.
6. Fear of the Third Congress and opposition to it completes the false position of both the minority and the conciliators.
7. In the Zemstvo campaign plan the Iskra editors have embarked on a particularly false and harmful, an undoubtedly opportunist tactical course by bringing up the question of panic and extolling agreements with the Zemstvo-ists about peaceful demonstrations as being a new type.
The campaign plan is connected with Starover’s mistaken resolution.
[1] See pp. 147-49 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] This talk on the situation within the Party was given by Lenin shortly after he wrote The Zemstvo Campaign and “Iskra’s” Plan— at meetings of Russian political bmigrbs in Paris on November 19 (December 2), in Zurich on November 23 and 24 (December 6 and 7), and in Berne on November 25 (December 8), 1904.
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