LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
tions of organization, to which, already at that time, 
Comrade Lenin attached enormous and even deci- 
sive 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-bour- 
geois intellectuals, who shrank from Party disci- 
pline and active revolutionary struggle. They were 
of the opinion that every man that went on strike 
could declare himself a Party member. They sub- 
ordinated the element of consciousness in the pro- 
letarian 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 enor- 
mous masses of the working class, the whole of 
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