LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
tions of organization, to which, already at that time,
Comrade Lenin attached enormous and even decisive
 importance.
The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at
that time was only in the process of formation and
it was particularly important to determine on what
basis it was being formed. Martov, P. Axelrod and
several other old “Iskra-ists” were carried away by
the tide of petty-bourgeois influence and desired to
form the Party on a wide basis: They proposed that
even those who did not directly belong to any
branch of the party, but merely helped the party, be
regarded as party members. By this they opened
wide the doors to the near-the-Party petty-bourgeois
 intellectuals, who shrank from Party discipline
 and active revolutionary struggle. They were
of the opinion that every man that went on strike
could declare himself a Party member. They subordinated
 the element of consciousness in the proletarian
 struggle to the element of spontaneity.
This explains the fact that the Mensheviks always
dragged at the tail of the movement and did not
lead it. Holding this point of view the Mensheviks
were quite consistent when, in 1908-1909, the period
of black reaction which followed the revolution of
1905, they advocated the liquidation of the illegal
party and the formation as a substitute for it of an
amorphous body “at all costs working within the
bounds of legality.”
At the Second Congress Lenin said: “The Party
must be really the vanguard, the leader of the enormous
 masses of the working class, the whole of

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