The theory that the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is a struggle for influence over an immature proletariat is not a new one. We have been encountering it since 1905 (if not since 1903) in innumerable books, pamphlets, and articles in the liberal press. Martov and Trotsky are putting before the German comrades liberal views with a Marxist coating.

    Of course, the Russian proletariat is politically far less mature than the proletariat of Western Europe. But of all

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classes of Russian society, it was the proletariat that displayed the greatest political maturity in 1905-07. The Russian liberal bourgeoisie, which behaved in just as vile, cowardly, stupid and treacherous a manner as the German bourgeoisie in 1848, hates the Russian proletariat for the very reason that in 1905 it proved sufficiently mature politically to wrest the leadership of the movement from this bourgeoisie and ruthlessly to expose the treachery of the liberals.

    Trotsky declares: "It is an illusion" to imagine that Menshevism and Bolshevism "have struck deep roots in the depths of the proletariat". This is a specimen of the resonant but empty phrases of which our Trotsky is a master. The roots of the divergence hetween the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks lie, not in the "depths of the proletariat", but in the economic content of the Russian revolution. By ignoring this content, Martov and Trotsky have deprived themselves of the possibility of understanding the historical meaning of the inner-Party struggle in Russia. The crux of the matter is not whether the theoretical formulations of the differences have penetrated "deeply" into this or that stratum of the proletariat, but the fact that the economic conditions of the Revolution of 1905 brought the proletariat into hostile relations with the liberal bourgeoisie -- not only over the question of improving the conditions of daily life of the workers, but also over the agrarian question, over all the political questions of the revolution, etc. To speak of the struggle of trends in the Russian revolution, distributing labels such as "sectarianism", "lack of culture", etc., and not to say a word about the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat, of the liberal bourgeoisie and of the democratic peasantry, means stooping to the level of cheap journalists.

    Here is an example: "In the whole of Western Europe," Martov writes, "the peasant masses are considered suitable for an alliance [with the proletariat] only to the extent that they begin to feel the grave consequences of the capitalist revolution in agriculture; in Russia, however, a picture has been drawn of a numerically weak proletariat combining with a hundred million peasants who have not yet felt, or have hardly felt, the 'educational' effect of capitalism, and therefore have not yet been through the school of the capitalist bourgeoisie."

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    This is not a slip of the pen on Martov's part. It is the central point of all the ideas of Menshevism. The opportunist history of the Russian revolution which is being published in Russia under the editorship of Potresov, Martov and Maslov (The Social Movement in Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century ) is thoroughly permeated with these ideas. The Menshevik Maslov expressed these ideas still more graphically when he stated in the article which sums up this "work": "a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry would run counter to the whole course of economic development." It is precisely here that the roots of the divergencies between Bolshevism and Menshevism must be sought.

    Martov's arguments on the Russian revolution and Trotsky's arguments on the present state of Russian Social-Democracy definitely confirm the incorrectness of their fundamental views.

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of the struggle of liberalism against the proletariat. The entire liberal press of that time showed that the liberals feared the development of the revolution and directed all their efforts towards reaching an "agreement" with tsarism.

    What were the objective conditions for an immediate mass struggle? The best answer to this is supplied by the statistics of strikes (subdivided into economic and political strikes) and of the peasant movement. We cite here the principal data, which will serve to illustrate the whole of our subsequent exposition.

    Concerning the October strike, Martov writes: "Just at this time, when general excitement reigns among the working masses . . . an attempt is made to merge the struggle for political liberty and the economic struggle into a single whole. Comrade Rosa Luxemburg's opinion notwithstanding, this revealed, not the strong, but the weak side of the movement." The attempt to introduce the eight-hour working day by revolutionary means ended in failure and "disorganised" the workers. "The general strike of the post and telegraph employees in November 1905 acted in the same direction." This is the way Martov writes history.

    It is sufficient to glance at the statistics given above to see the falsity of this history. Throughout all the three years of the revolution we observe that every time the political crisis becomes acute there is an upsurge, not only of the political, but also of the economic strike struggle. Not the weakness, but the strength of the movement lay in the combination of the two forms of struggle. The opposite view is the view of the liberal bourgeois, for the very thing he wanted was that the workers should take part in politics, without, however, the broad masses being drawn into the revolution and into the struggle against the bourgeoisie. It was precisely after October 11 that the liberal Zemstvo movement finally split; the landlords and industrialists formed the openly counter-revolutionary party of the "Octo-

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brists", who unleashed all the force of reprisals against the strikers (while in the press the "Left" liberals, the Cadets, accused the workers of "madness"). Martov, echoing the Octobrists and the Cadets, is of the opinion that the "weakness" of the workers lay in the fact that at that very time they were trying to make the economic struggle still more aggressive. In our opinion the weakness of the workers (and still more of the peasants) lay in the fact that they did not resolutely, widely and quickly enough pass to the aggressive economic and armed political struggle which inevitably resulted from the whole course of events, and not at all from the subjective desires of particular groups or parties. A wide gulf separates our view from Martov's and, in spite of Trotsky's assertions, this gulf between the views of "intellectuals" reflects only the gulf which in fact existed at the end of 1905 between the classes, namely, between the revolutionary proletariat, which fought, and the bourgeoisie, which behaved in a treacherous manner.

    It must be added that defeats of the workers in the strike struggle are characteristic not only of the end of 1905, which Martov seized upon, but to a still greater extent of 1906 and 1907. The statistics show that during the ten years 1895-1904 the employers won 51.6 per cent of the strikes (according to the number of strikers involved); in 1905, 29.4 per cent; in 1906, 33.5 per cent; in 1907, 57.6 per cent; in 1908, 68.8 per cent. Does this mean that the economic strikes of 1906-07 were "mad" and "inopportune", and that they revealed the "weak side of the movement"? No. It means that inasmuch as the offensive of the revolutionary struggle of the masses was not strong enough in 1905, defeat (both in politics and in "economics") was inevitable, but that if the proletariat had not been able to rise at least twice for a new attack against the enemy (a quarter of a million persons involved in political strikes alone during the second quarter of 1906 and also 1907), the defeat would have been still greater ; the coup d'etat would have taken place not in June 1907, but a year, or even more than a year, earlier, and the workers would have been deprived of the economic gains of 1905 even sooner than they were.

    It is this significance of the revolutionary struggle of the masses that Martov absolutely fails to understand. Echoing

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the liberals, he says, in reference to the boycott at the beginning of 1906, that "for a time the Social-Democrats remained outside the political line of battle ". From a purely theoretical standpoint such a presentation of the question of the boycott in 1906 is an incredible simplification and vulgarisation of a very complex problem. What was the real "line of battle" during the second quarter of 1906 -- was it parliamentary or extra-parliamentary? Look at the statistics: the number of persons involved in "economic" strikes rose from 73,000 to 222,000, the number of those involved in political strikes rose from 196,000 to 257,000. The number of uyezds affected by the peasant movement rose from 36.9 per cent to 49.2 per cent of the total. It is known that mutinies in the armed forces also increased greatly and became more frequent during the second quarter of 1906 compared with the first. It is known further that the First Duma was the most revolutionary parliament in the world (at the beginning of the twentieth century), yet at the same time it was the most impotent; not a single one of its decisions was put into effect.

    Such are the objective facts. In the estimation of the liberals and Martov, these facts show that the Duma was the real "line of battle ", whereas uprisings, political strikes and the unrest among the peasants and soldiers were the inconsequential affair of "revolutionary romanticists". And the deep thinking Trotsky is of the opinion that the factional differences that arose on this ground represented an "intellectualist" "struggle for influence over an immature proletariat". In our opinion the objective data prove that in the spring of 1906 there was such a serious upsurge of a real revolutionary mass struggle that the Social-Democratic Party was obliged to regard precisely that struggle as the principal struggle and exert every effort to support and develop it. In our opinion the specific political situation at that period -- when the tsarist government obtained from Europe a two thousand million loan on the security, as it were, of the convocation of the Duma, and when the tsarist government was hastily promulgating laws against the boycott of the Duma -- fully justified the attempt made by the proletariat to wrest the convocation of the first parliament in Russia out of the hands of the tsar. In our opinion it was not the

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Social-Democrats, but the liberals, who "remained outside the political line of battle " at that time. Those constitutional illusions, on the spread of which among the masses the whole career of the liberals in the revolution was based, were most glaringly refuted by the history of the First Duma.

    In both the First and the Second Dumas the liberals (Cadets) had a majority and occupied the political foreground with much noise and fuss. But it was just these liberal "victories" that clearly showed that the liberals remained all the time "outside the political line of battle", that they were political comedians who deeply corrupted the democratic consciousness of the masses. And if Martov and his friends, echoing the liberals, point to the heavy defeats of the revolution as an object-lesson of "what should not be done ", our answer to them is, firstly, that the only real victory gained by the revolution was the victory of the proletariat, which rejected the liberal advice to enter the Bulygin Duma and led the peasant masses to an uprising; secondly, by the heroic struggle it waged during the course of three yeas (1905-07) the Russian proletariat won for itself and for the Russian people gains that took other nations decades to win. It won the emancipation of the working masses from the influence of treacherous and contemptibly impotent liberalism. It won for itself the hegemony in the struggle for freedom and democracy as a pre-condition of the struggle for socialism. It won for all the oppressed and exploited classes of Russia the ability to wage a revolutionary mass struggle, without which nothing of importance in the progress of mankind has been achieved anywhere in the world.

    These gains cannot be taken away from the Russian proletariat by any reaction, or by any hatred, abuse and malice on the part of the liberals, or by any vacillation, short sightedness and lack of faith on the part of the socialist opportunists.

    The development of the factions in Russian Social-Democracy since the revolution is also to be explained, not by the "adaptation of the intelligentsia to the proletariat", but by the changes in the relations between the classes. The

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Revolution of 1905-07 accentuated, brought out into the open and placed on the order of the day the antagonism between the peasants and the liberal bourgeoisie over the question of the form of a bourgeois regime in Russia. The politically mature proletariat could not but take a most energetic part in this struggle, and its attitude to the various classes of the new society was reflected in the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism.

    The three years 1908-10 are marked by the victory of the counter-revolution, by the restoration of the autocracy and by the Third Duma, the Duma of the Black Hundreds and Octobrists. The struggle between the bourgeois classes over the form of the new regime has ceased to be in the forefront. The proletariat is now confronted with the elementary task of preserving its proletarian party, which is hostile both to the reaction and to counter-revolutionary liberalism. This task is not an easy one, because it is the proletariat that suffers all the brunt of economic and political persecution, and all the hatred of the liberals because the leadership of the masses in the revolution has been wrested from them by the Social-Democrats.

    The crisis in the Social-Democratic Party is very grave. The organisations are shattered. A large number of veteran leaders (especially among the intellectuals) have been arrested. A new type of Social-Democratic worker, who is taking the affairs of the Party in hand, has already appeared, but he has to overcome extraordinary difficulties. Under such conditions the Social-Democratic Party is losing many of its "fellow-travellers". It is natural that petty-bourgeois "fellow-travellers" should have joined the socialists during the bourgeois revolution. Now they are falling away from Marxism and from Social-Democracy. This process is observed in both factions: among the Bolsheviks in the shape of the "otzovist" tendency, which arose in the spring of 1908, suffered defeat immediately at the Moscow Conference, and after a long struggle was rejected by the official centre of the faction and formed a separate faction abroad -- the Vperyod faction. The specific character of the period of disintegration was expressed in the fact that this faction united those Machists who introduced into their platform the struggle against Marxism (under the guise of defence of "proletarian

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philosophy") and the ,"ultimatumists", those shamefaced otzovists, as well as various types of "days-of-freedom Social-Democrats", who were carried away by "spectacular" slogans, which they learned by rote, but who failed to understand the fundamentals of Marxism.

    Among the Mensheviks the same process of the falling away of petty-bourgeois "fellow-travellers" was expressed in the liquidationist tendency, now fully formulated in Mr. Potresov's magazine Nasha Zarya, in Vozrozhdenie and Zhizn, in the stand taken by "the Sixteen" and "the trio" (Mikhail, Roman, Yuri), while Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, published abroad, acted as a servant of the Russian liquidators in fact and a diplomatic disguise for them before the Party membership.

    Failing to understand the historical and economic significance of this disintegration in the era of counter-revolution, of this falling away of non-Social-Democratic elements from the Social-Democratic Labour Party, Trotsky tells the German readers that both factions are "falling to pieces ", that the Party is "falling to pieces ", that the Party is "demoralised."

    It is not true. And this untruth expresses, firstly, Trotsky's utter lack of theoretical understanding. Trotsky has absolutely failed to understand why the plenum described both liquidationism and otzovism as a "manifestation of bourgeois influence on the proletariat". Just think: is the severance from the Party of trends which have been condemned by the Party, and which express bourgeois influence on the proletariat, an indication of the Party's disintegration, of its demoralisation, or is it an indication of its becoming stronger and purer?

    Secondly, in practice, this untruth expresses the "policy" of advertisement pursued by Trotsky's faction. That Trotsky's venture is an attempt to create a faction is now obvious to all, since Trotsky has removed the Central Committee's representative from Pravda. In advertising his faction Trotsky does not hesitate to tell the Germans that the Party is falling to pieces, that both factions are falling to pieces and that he, Trotsky, alone, is saving the situation. Actually, we all see now -- and the latest resolution adopted by the Trotskyists (in the name of the Vienna Club, on November 26, 1910) proves this quite conclusively -- that Trotsky enjoys

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the confidence exclusively of the liquidators and the Vperyodists.

    The extent of Trotsky's shamelessness in belittling the Party and exalting himself before the Germans is shown, for instance, by the following. Trotsky writes that the "working masses" in Russia consider that the "Social-Democratic Party stands outside [Trotsky's italics] their circle" and he talks of "Social-Democrats without Social-Democracy".

    How could one expect Mr. Potresov and his friends to refrain from bestowing kisses on Trotsky for such statements?

    But these statements are refuted not only by the entire history of the revolution, but even by the results of the elections to the Third Duma from the workers' curia.

    Trotsky writes that "owing to their former ideological and organisational structure, the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions proved altogether incapable" of working in legal organisations; work was carried on by "individual groups of Social-Democrats, but all this took place outside the factions, outside their organisational influence". "Even the most important legal organisation, in which the Mensheviks predominate, works completely outside the control of the Menshevik faction." That is what Trotsky writes. But the facts are as follows. From the very beginning of the existence of the Social-Democratic group in the Third Duma, the Bolshevik faction, through its representatives authorised by the Central Committee of the Party, has all the time assisted, aided, advised, and supervised the work of the Social-Democrats in the Duma. The same is done by the editorial board of the Central Organ of the Party, which consists of representatives of the factions (which were dissolved as factions in January 1910).

    When Trotsky gives the German comrades a detailed account of the stupidity of "otzovism" and describes this trend as a "cristallisation" of the boycottism characteristic of Bolshevism as a whole, and then mentions in a few words that Bolshevism "did not allow itself to be overpowered" by otzovism, but "attacked it resolutely or rather in an unbridled fashion" -- the German reader certainly gets no idea how much subtle perfidy there is in such an exposition. Trotsky's Jesuitical "reservation" consists in omitting a small, very

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small "detail". He "forgot" to mention that at an official meeting of its representatives held as far back as the spring of 1909, the Bolshevik faction repudiated and expelled the otzovists. But it is just this "detail" that is inconvenient for Trotsky, who wants to talk of the "falling to pieces " of the Bolshevik faction (and then of the Party as well) and not of the falling away of the non-Social-Democratic elements!

    We now regard Martov as one of the leaders of liquidationism, one who is the more dangerous the more "cleverly" he defends the liquidators by quasi-Marxist phrases. But Martov openly expounds views which have put their stamp on whole tendencies in the mass labour movement of 1903-10. Trotsky, on the other hand, represents only his own personal vacillations and nothing more. In 1903 he was a Menshevik; he abandoned Menshevism in 1904, returned to the Mensheviks in 1905 and merely flaunted ultra-revolutionary phrases; in 1906 he left them again; at the end of 1906 he advocated electoral agreements with the Cadets (i.e., he was in fact once more with the Mensheviks); and in the spring of 1907, at the London Congress, he said that he differed from Rosa Luxemburg on "individual shades of ideas rather than on political tendencies". One day Trotsky plagiarises from the ideological stock-in-trade of one faction; the next day he plagiarises from that of another, and therefore declares himself to be standing above both factions. In theory Trotsky is on no point in agreement with either the liquidators or the otzovists, but in actual practice he is in entire agreement with both the Golosists and the Vperyodists.

    Therefore, when Trotsky tells the German comrades that he represents the "general Party tendency", I am obliged to declare that Trotsky represents only his own faction and enjoys a certain amount of confidence exclusively among the otzovists and the liquidators. The following facts prove the correctness of my statement. In January 1910, the Central Committee of our Party established close ties with Trotsky's newspaper Pravda and appointed a representative of the Central Committee to sit on the editorial board. In September 1910, the Central Organ of the Party announced a rupture between the representative of the Central Committee and Trotsky owing to Trotsky's anti-Party policy. In Copenhagen, Plekhanov, as the representative of the pro-Party

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Mensheviks and delegate of the editorial board of the Central Organ, together with the present writer, as the representative of the Bolsheviks, and a Polish comrade, entered an emphatic protest against the way Trotsky represents our Party affairs in the German press.

    Let the readers now judge for themselves whether Trotsky represents a "general Party", or a "general anti-Party" trend in Russian Social-Democracy.

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