11. A Cursory Comparison of Some Resolutions of the Third Congress of the RSDLP and of the “Conference”

The question of the provisional revolutionary government is the central point of the tactical questions of Social-Democracy at the present moment. There is neither the possibility nor the need to dwell in the same detail on the other resolutions of the Conference. We shall confine ourselves to a brief indication of a few points that confirm the difference in principle, analysed above, in the tactical direction of the resolutions of the Third Congress of the RSDLP and those of the Conference.

Take the question of the attitude to the government’s tactics on the eve of the revolution. Once again you will find a complete answer to it in the resolution of the Third Congress of the RSDLP. This resolution takes into account all the various conditions and tasks of the particular moment: the exposure of the hypocrisy of the government’s concessions, and the use of “caricature forms of popular representation”, and the revolutionary carrying out of the urgent demands of the working class (the eight-hour working day first among them), and, finally, resistance to the Black Hundreds. In the Conference resolutions the question is scattered over several sections: “resistance to the dark forces of reaction” is mentioned only in the preamble to the resolution on the attitude to other parties.

Participation in elections to representative institutions is considered separately from the “compromises” of tsarism with the bourgeoisie. Instead of a call to carry out the eight-hour working day by revolutionary means, a special resolution with the grand title “On the Economic Struggle” merely repeats (after ringing and very unintelligent words about “the central place occupied by the labour question in Russian public life”) the old slogan of agitation for “the establishment by law of the eight-hour working day”. The inadequacy and backwardness of this slogan at the present moment are too obvious to need proof.

The question of coming out openly in political activity. The Third Congress takes into account the radical change in our activity that lies ahead. Conspiratorial activity and the development of the conspiratorial apparatus must on no account be abandoned: that would play into the hands of the police and be extremely advantageous to the government. But we cannot now fail to think of open activity as well. We must at once prepare suitable forms of such activity and, consequently, special apparatus, less conspiratorial, for this purpose. We must make use of legal and semi-legal societies in order to turn them, as far as possible, into bases for the future open Social-Democratic workers’ party in Russia.

Here, too, the Conference splits up the question and gives no complete slogans. There pops up separately a ridiculous instruction to the Organising Commission to see to the “placing” of legal writers. Quite absurd is the decision about “subordinating to their influence those democratic newspapers which set themselves the aim of assisting the labour movement”. All our legal liberal newspapers, almost wholly of the Osvobozhdenie trend, set themselves that aim. Why should not the editors of Iskra themselves begin by carrying out their own advice and show us an example of how to subordinate Osvobozhdenie to Social-Democratic influence? Instead of the slogan of using legal unions to create bases for the party, we are given, firstly, a particular piece of advice about “trade” unions only (the obligatory participation of party members in them) and, secondly, advice to lead the “revolutionary organisations of the workers” = “unofficial organisations” = “revolutionary workers’ clubs”. How the “clubs” got among the unofficial organisations, and what these “clubs” are, Allah alone knows. Instead of precise and clear directives from the highest body of the party, we have before us some sketches of ideas and rough notes of literary men. No complete picture of the beginning of the party’s transition to an entirely new basis for all its work emerges.

The “peasant question” is posed quite differently by the party congress and by the Conference. The Congress drew up a resolution on “the attitude to the peasant movement”, the Conference one on “work among the peasants”. In the one case the tasks of leading the whole broad revolutionary-democratic movement in the general national interests of the struggle against tsarism are put in the forefront. In the other case the matter comes down merely to “work” among a particular stratum. In the one case a central practical slogan of agitation is put forward: the immediate organisation of revolutionary peasant committees to carry out all democratic reforms. In the other the “demand for the formation of committees” is to be presented to the constituent assembly. Why must we wait for this constituent assembly? Will it in fact be constituent? Will it be durable without the prior and simultaneous establishment of revolutionary peasant committees? The Conference has lost sight of all these questions. All its decisions reflect the general idea we have traced, that in the bourgeois revolution we must do only our own special work, without aiming to lead the whole democratic movement and to carry it through independently. Just as the “Economists” constantly slipped into the view that the economic struggle is for the Social-Democrats and the political struggle for the liberals, so the new-Iskrists, throughout their reasoning, slip into the view that for us there is a modest little corner away from the bourgeois revolution, while for the bourgeoisie there is the active carrying through of it.

Finally, we cannot fail to note the resolution on the attitude to other parties. The resolution of the Third Congress of the RSDLP speaks of exposing every kind of limitation and inadequacy in the liberation movement of the bourgeoisie, without entertaining the naive idea of enumerating from congress to congress all the possible cases of this limitation and of drawing a line separating bad bourgeois from good bourgeois. The Conference, repeating Starover’s mistake, persistently looks for such a line and develops the famous theory of the “litmus paper”. Starover started from a very good idea: to set stricter conditions for the bourgeoisie. He only forgot that any attempt to separate in advance the bourgeois democrats who deserve approval, agreement, etc., from those who do not leads to a “formula” that the development of events at once throws overboard and that brings confusion into the class consciousness of the proletariat. The centre of gravity is shifted from real unity in struggle to declarations, promises and slogans. Starover considered “universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage” to be such a fundamental slogan. Not two years had passed before the “litmus paper” proved its uselessness: the slogan of universal suffrage was taken over by the Osvobozhdenie people, who not only did not come any closer to Social-Democracy by doing so but, on the contrary, used this very slogan to try to mislead the workers and divert them from socialism.

Now the new-Iskrists put forward “conditions” that are still “stricter”: they “demand” from the enemies of tsarism “energetic and unequivocal (!?) support of every decisive action of the organised proletariat”, and so on, up to and including “active participation in the self-arming of the people”. The line has been drawn considerably further, and yet this line has already become out of date again, and proved useless at once. Why, for instance, is the slogan of a republic missing? How is it that, in the interests of a “ruthless revolutionary war against all the foundations of the monarchical order of estates”, the Social-Democrats “demand” from the bourgeois democrats everything you like except the struggle for a republic?

That this question is not a cavil, that the mistake of the new-Iskrists is of the most vital political importance, is proved by the “Russian Liberation Union” (see Proletary, No. 4). These “enemies of tsarism” will fully satisfy all the new-Iskrists’ “demands”. And yet we have shown that the Osvobozhdenie spirit reigns in the programme (or the absence of a programme) of this “Russian Liberation Union”, and that the Osvobozhdenie people can easily take it in tow. The Conference, however, declares at the end of its resolution that “Social-Democracy will continue as before to oppose the hypocritical friends of the people, all those political parties which, while raising a liberal and democratic banner, refuse to give real support to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat”. The “Russian Liberation Union” not only does not refuse this support, it zealously offers it. Is that a guarantee that its leaders are not “hypocritical friends of the people”, even if they are Osvobozhdenie people?

You see: by composing “conditions” in advance and presenting “demands” that are comic in their formidable impotence, the new-Iskrists at once put themselves in a ridiculous position. Their conditions and demands at once prove inadequate to take account of living reality. Their chase after formulas is hopeless, for no formula can catch all the manifestations of the hypocrisy, inconsistency and narrowness of bourgeois democracy. The point lies not in the “litmus paper”, not in formulas, not in written and printed demands, not in drawing a line in advance between hypocritical and non-hypocritical “friends of the people”, but in real unity in struggle, in unremitting criticism by the Social-Democrats of every “unsteady” step of bourgeois democracy. For “the real rallying of all the social forces interested in democratic reconstruction”, what is needed is not “points” such as the Conference laboured over so zealously and so vainly, but the ability to put forward genuinely revolutionary slogans. For this we need slogans that raise the revolutionary and republican bourgeoisie to the level of the proletariat, not slogans that lower the tasks of the proletariat to the level of the monarchist bourgeoisie. For this we need the most energetic participation in the uprising, not sophistical excuses for evading the urgent task of armed uprising.