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 advantage
 of such an interpretation. What is the meaning
 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 “directly”
 to a Party organization work in an organization
 which is a non-Party organization, but
attached to the Party? There is therefore no question
 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 economism
 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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