LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
and how foreign to them is the conception that a
Social Democrat must concern himself first and
foremost with an organization of revolutionaries
which shall be capable of guiding the whole proletarian
 struggle for emancipation. To talk of “the
political emancipation of the working class” and
the struggle against “Czarist despotism,” and at the
same time to write statutes like these, indicates a
complete misunderstanding of what the real political
 tasks of the Social Democrats are. Not one
of the fifty or so paragraphs reveals the slightest
glimmer of understanding that the widest possible
political agitation among the masses is necessary,
dealing with every phase of Russian absolutism and
every aspect of the various social classes in Russia.
With such statutes not only political, but even trade
union aims are impossible of fulfillment, for they
require organization according to trade, and not
the slightest reference is made to this in the
statutes.
But most characteristic of all, perhaps, is the
amazing top-heaviness of the whole “system,”
which attempts to unite every factory with the
“committee” by a long string of uniform and ludicriously
 petty rules and a three-stage system of
election. Bound by the narrow outlook of economism,
 the mind loses itself in details which positively
reek of red tape and bureaucracy. In practice, of
course, three-fourths of the clauses are impossible
of application; moreover, a ‘conspiratorial’ organization
 of this kind, with its central group in each

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