LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
when Marxism began to beat a path for itself in 
Russia, bourgeois intellectuals, totally alien to the 
spirit of revolutionary Marxism, began to adopt 
Marxism in order to disperse the petty-bourgeois 
Narodniki’s conception of the progress of the revo- 
lutionary movement in Russia and to prove that 
Russia must inevitably pass through the stage of 
capitalist production. This gave rise to the so- 
called “legal Marxism”. Meanwhile, the best So- 
cial Democrats were being systematically plucked 
out of the ranks of the Social Democratic organiza~ 
tions by the Czarist gendarmerie. The intellectuals 
had managed to permeate the labor movement, to 
reduce it to a mere trade union movement (econ- 
omism) and to convert it into an auxiliary weapon 
in the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie. The revo- 
lutionary Social Democrats were therefore obliged 
to take up the fight against the intellectuals. 
The Social Democrats aimed so to train cadres of 
experienced professional revolutionaries who were 
to devote their lives entirely to party work, to give 
them a definite Marxian program and definite 
tactics, and finally to gather these cadres into a 
united militant party sufficiently secret to be able 
to evade the raids of the gendarmerie, but at the 
same time having sufficient contact with the masses 
to be able to lead them into the battle at the required 
moment. 
V. L Lenin clearly saw these tasks as early as the 
end of the ’90’s and the beginning of the 20th cen- 
tury, and consistently advocated them in “Iskra”, 
the organ of the Russian revolutionary Social De-