LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
grow and become as strong as it is. Our wiseacres, 
however, at a moment when the crisis within Rus- 
sian Social Democracy is wholly due to the fact 
that we have not a sufficient number of trained, 
developed and experienced leaders to guide the 
elemental ferment of the masses, cry out with the 
profundity of fools, “It is a bad business when the 
movement does not proceed from the depths.” 
“A Committee of students is no good, it is not 
stable.” Quite true. But the conclusion that 
should be drawn is that we need a committee of 
professional revolutionaries, no matter whether it 
be a student or a worker who is capable of training 
himself to be a professional revolutionary. The 
conclusion you draw, however, is that the working 
class movement should not be pushed on from cut- 
side! In your political naivite you do not observe 
that you are playing into the hands of our eco- 
nomists and amateurs. Permit me to enquire in 
what does the “pushing on” of the workers by the 
students consist? Solely in the fact that the stu- 
dent brings to the worker the fragments of political 
knowledge he possesses, the crumbs of Socialist 
ideas he has managed to acquire (for the main 
intellectual diet of the present-day student, legal 
Marxism, can furnish only the A. B. C., only the 
crumbs of knowledge). Such “pushing on from 
outside” can never be too excessive; on the con- 
trary, there has so far been too little, all too little 
of it in our movement; we have stewed far too 
much in our own juice; we have bowed ourselves 
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