LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
lend assistance are actually members of the Party, 
when in fact this very fact is in dispute and our 
opponents have to prove the necessity and advan- 
tage of such an interpretation. What is the mean- 
ing of the phrase “to throw overboard,” which at a 
first glance seems so terrible? If only members 
of organizations can be regarded as Party members, 
why cannot persons who are unable to belong “di- 
rectly” to a Party organization work in an organ- 
ization which is a non-Party organization, but 
attached to the Party? There is therefore no ques- 
tion of throwing anybody overboard, in the sense 
of depriving him of work or of preventing him 
participating in the movement. On the contrary, 
the stronger our Party organizations, consisting of 
real Social Democrats, will be, the less will the 
vacillation and instability within the Party be, and 
the wider, the more many-sided, the richer and the 
more fruitful will the influence of the Party be over 
the elements of the surrounding working class 
masses which it leads. We must not confuse the 
Party as the vanguard of the working class with 
the whole class. And, it is into this confusion, in 
fact, (so characteristic of our opportunistic econom- 
ism in general) that Comrade Axelrod falls when 
he says: “We shall, of course, before all create an 
organization of the more active elements in the 
Party, an organization of revolutionaries; but since 
Wwe are a class Party we must not keep outside of 
the Party people who conscientiously, although 
perhaps not very actively, associate themselves with 
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