Lenin on organization

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1738032973

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-116975

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹič http://d-nb.info/gnd/118640402

Title:: Lenin on organization

Place of publication:: Chicago

Publisher:: Daily Worker Pub. Co

Year of publication:: 1926

Scope:: 235 pages

Digitisation:: 2020

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: XII. The party cleansing (From "Pravda", no. 210, September 21, 1921)

Collection:: Economics Books

LENIN ON ORGANIZATION capable of leading it to victory amid great difficulties and dangers. One partial function of the Party cleansing, I should say, is to purge it of former Mensheviks*. In my opinion, of the Mensheviks who joined the Party since the beginning of 1918 only about one- hundredth part should be allowed to remain and even these should be tested three or four times over. Why? Because during the period 1918-1921 the Mensheviks as a class revealed two peculiarities: one, a capacity for adapting themselves, for “adher- ing” themselves to the prevailing movement among the workers; secondly, a still greater capacity for faithfully serving the White Guards, serving them in deed while renouncing them in word. Both these capacities follow naturally from the whole history of Menshevism. We have only to recall Axelrod’s “Labor Congress,” the relations of the Mensheviks to the Cadets (and to the monarchy) in word and in deed, etc., etc. The Mensheviks “adhere” them- selves to the Russian Communist Party not merely and not even primarily from Macchiavilism (al- though as far as the methods of bourgeois diploma- cy are concerned, the Mensheviks since 1903 have shown that they are past masters in that art), but because of their “pliability.” An opportunist is dis- tinguished by his pliability (although pliability is not always opportunism), and the Mensheviks, being opportunists, adapt themselves, so to speak, * Comrade Lenin, is here, of course, referring mainly to former Menshevik intellectuals.—Editor, 299

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