LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
grow and become as strong as it is. Our wiseacres,
however, at a moment when the crisis within Russian
 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 cutside!
 In your political naivite you do not observe
that you are playing into the hands of our economists
 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 student
 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 contrary,
 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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