LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
other Social Democratic programs, has been so cast
as to permit the interpretation, and it was indeed
so interpreted by Plekhanov, that the task of the
leaders of the organization is to push back the class
it is leading, and to sever the former from the latter.”
 The formulation of our political tasks is
therefore exactly the same as that of the “Narodnaya
 Volya.” Comrade Akimov was opposed by
Comrade Plekhanov and other Iskrists who accused
him of opportunism. Does not Comrade Axelrod
think that this dispute indicates (in fact, and not
in the imagined whimsies of history) an antagonism
between the modern Jacobins and the modern Girondists
 of Social Democracy? And did not Comrade
 Axelrod begin to talk of Jacobins because he
found himself (owing to his errors) in the company
of the Girondists of Social Democracy?
Second example. Comrade Posadovsky raises
the question of the “serious differences” on “the
fundamental question” of the “absolute value of
Social Democratic principles.” In conjunction with
Plekhanov he denies their absolute value. The
leaders of the “centre,” of the Marsh (Egorov) and
of the anti-Iskrists (Goldblat) decidedly objected
to this and pretended to discern in Plekhanov “an
imitation of bourgeois tactics”’—that indeed is Comrade
 Axelrod’s idea of the connection between orthodoxy
 and bourgeois tendencies, only with the difference
 that while with Comrade Axelrod this idea,
is simply in the air, Goldblat brings it into open
debate. We once again ask: Does not Comrade

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