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 revolutionary
 movement in Russia and to prove that
Russia must inevitably pass through the stage of
capitalist production. This gave rise to the socalled
 “legal Marxism”. Meanwhile, the best Social
 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 (economism)
 and to convert it into an auxiliary weapon
in the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie. The revolutionary
 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 century,
 and consistently advocated them in “Iskra”,
the organ of the Russian revolutionary Social De-