LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
labor and improvements in the sense of combatting
the influence of the petty bourgeois and petty bourgeois
 anarchist instincts which are so destructive
both to the proletariat and to the Party. In order
to effect this improvement, we must cleanse the
Party of elements who have alienated themselves
from the masses (not to speak, of course, of elements
 who are disgracing the Party in the eyes of
the masses). We shall not, of course, always submit
 to the advice of the masses, for the state of
mind of the masses—especially at times of exceptional
 fatigue and exhaustion due to excessive hardships
 and sufferings—is not always of the most
advanced order. But as far as concerns a negative
estimate of those who have “adhered” themselves
to the Party, who have become “commissarized”
and “bureaucratized,” the advice of the non-Party
proletarian masses, and often the non-Party peasant
 masses, is extremely valuable. The toiling
masses have an extremely acute flair for the difference
 between honest and sincere Communists and
such as arouse disgust in people who earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow, who have no
privileges and “no pull with the authorities.”
It is a great thing in cleansing the Party to pay
heed to the advice of the non-Party toilers. It will
be productive of valuable results. It will make the
Party a still stronger vanguard of the class than
formerly, it will make it a vanguard which will be
more closely connected with the class and more

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