LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
and how foreign to them is the conception that a 
Social Democrat must concern himself first and 
foremost with an organization of revolutionaries 
which shall be capable of guiding the whole prole- 
tarian struggle for emancipation. To talk of “the 
political emancipation of the working class” and 
the struggle against “Czarist despotism,” and at the 
same time to write statutes like these, indicates a 
complete misunderstanding of what the real polit- 
ical tasks of the Social Democrats are. Not one 
of the fifty or so paragraphs reveals the slightest 
glimmer of understanding that the widest possible 
political agitation among the masses is necessary, 
dealing with every phase of Russian absolutism and 
every aspect of the various social classes in Russia. 
With such statutes not only political, but even trade 
union aims are impossible of fulfillment, for they 
require organization according to trade, and not 
the slightest reference is made to this in the 
statutes. 
But most characteristic of all, perhaps, is the 
amazing top-heaviness of the whole “system,” 
which attempts to unite every factory with the 
“committee” by a long string of uniform and lud- 
icriously petty rules and a three-stage system of 
election. Bound by the narrow outlook of econom- 
ism, the mind loses itself in details which positively 
reek of red tape and bureaucracy. In practice, of 
course, three-fourths of the clauses are impossible 
of application; moreover, a ‘conspiratorial’ organ- 
ization of this kind, with its central group in each 
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