LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
point in the development of the Russian labor move-
ment since the triumph of the counter-revolu-
tion...
The fundamental cause of the crisis in the Party
is set forth in the introduction to the resolution on
organization. The cause was that the Party was
being cleansed of wavering intellectual and petty-
bourgeois elements, who, as a rule, had joined
the labor movement in the hope of the early
triumph of the bourgeois democratic revolu-
tion, and who were too weak to withstand the
period of reaction. Their weakness betrayed itself
in the realm of theory (‘departure from revolution-
ary Marxism”: the resolution on Current Affairs),
the realm of tactics (‘‘the cutting down of slogans’)
and in the realm of Party organizational policy. The
class-conscious workers resisted this vacillation;
they energetically attacked the liquidators, and
began to take the conduct and control of affairs
of the Party into their own hands. If this firm
kernel in our Party was unable immediately to gain
the mastery over the elements of disintegration
who caused the crisis, it was not only because the
task was too great and difficult to be accomplished
amidst the triumph of counter-revolution, but also
because of a certain indifference towards the Party
on the part of workers who were revolutionary in
spirit, but who did not possess a sufficient degree
of Socialist consciousness. It is in fact to the
class-conscious workers of Russia that the decisions
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