LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
this pretext to give every member of a trade union 
the right of “declaring himself” a member of the 
Social Democratic Party would be sheer folly and 
would involve a double menace; it would narrow 
the scope of the trade union movement and weaken 
the solidarity of the workers in this sphere, and, 
secondly, it would open the Party to the danger of 
vagueness and vacillation. The German Social 
Democrats had an opportunity of solving a similar 
problem under concrete circumstances in the 
famous incident of the Hamburg bricklayers em- 
ployed on piecework. The Social Democrats did 
not for a moment hesitate to declare that from the 
point of view of a Social Democrat, strikebreaking 
was dishonest, i. e. to recognize that the guidance 
and support of the strike was their own business : 
but at the same time they just as firmly refused to 
identify the interests of the Party with the interests 
of the trade unions and to lay responsibility upon 
the Party for the individual acts of the individual 
unions. The Party should endeavor to infuse the 
trade unions with its spirit and bring them under 
its influence, but in order to maintain that influence, 
it should firmly distinguish between Social Demo- 
crats (members of the Social Democratic Party) 
belonging to the unions and those who are not fully 
class conscious and not very politically active, and 
not mix up the former with the latter, as Comrade 
Axelrod would like to do. 
“...The centralization of the more conspiratorial 
functions in an organization of revolutionaries will 
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