LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
simply betray opportunism. A Jacobin who is 
closely bound up with the organization of the pro- 
letariat and who is conscious of his class interests 
is in fact a revolutionary Social Democrat. A Gir- 
ondist who yearns for the professors and students, 
who fears the dictatorship of the proletariat and 
who grows sentimental over the absolute value of 
democratic demands is in fact an opportunist. Only 
an opportunist can today still see danger in con- 
spiratorial organizations when the idea of narrow- 
ing the political struggle down to a conspiracy has 
been a thousand times exploded in our literature, 
and long ago rejected and cast out by life itself, and 
when the cardinal importance of mass political 
agitation has been affirmed and re-affirmed ad nau- 
seum. The real cause of the fear of conspiracy 
and of Blanquism is to be attributed not to the 
characteristics revealed in the practice of the move- 
ment (as Bernstein & Co. have been long and 
earnestly trying to prove), but to the Girondist 
timidity of the bourgeois intellectuals, whose psy- 
chology has so often betrayed itself among present- 
day Social Democrats. Nothing can be more comic 
than the desperate attempts made by the new 
“Iskra” to utter a new word (which has in fact 
been already uttered a hundred times) by way of 
warning against the tactics of the French revolu- 
tionary conspirators of the ’forties and ’sixties. .. 
...Forward slowly, zig-zag fashion! (23). We 
have already heard this motif in connection with the 
discussion on tactics; we now hear it again in 
165