LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
the thousands of proletarians (to whom Comrade 
Axelrod and Comrade Martynov refer) are con- 
cerned; they will only too often be entrusted to the 
professors, of whom Comrade Axelrod spoke, to the 
students about whom Comrade Liber and Comrade 
Popov were concerned, and the revolutionary youth, 
to whom Comrade Axelrod referred in his second 
speech. In a word, Comrade Martov’s formula 
will either remain a dead letter, an empty 
phrase, or be useful chiefly, and indeed almost 
exclusively, to “intellectuals who are thoroughly 
impregnated with the spirit of bourgeois individual- 
ism’ and who are not anxious to join an organiza- 
tion. In words, Martov’s formula protects the 
interests of the wide sections of the proletariat; in 
fact, however, it serves the interests of the bour- 
geois intellectuals, who fight shy of proletarian dis- 
cipline and organization. No one can deny that 
the intellectuals, as a special section in modern 
capitalist society, are, as a rule, characterized by 
individualism and by the fact that they are not 
amenable to discipline and organization (see the 
well-known articles of Kautsky on the subject of 
the intellectuals). Therein, in fact, this section of 
society distinguishes itself unfavorably from the 
proletariat; therein lies the explamation of the in- 
tellectuals’ weakness and vacillation from which 
the proletariat has so often suffered. This pecul- 
iarity of the intellectuals is indissolubly bound up 
with their conditions of life and their manner of 
earning a living, which in many respects approxi- 
149