Lenin: A Revolutionary Life by Christopher Read Page B

allow it to fall prey to bourgeois ideology, a fate to which, he believed, the Economists were contributing. By not building up a protective shield of socialist theory they were allowing bourgeois influences to dominate. ‘Why … does the spontaneous movement … lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.’ [SW 1 131] What Lenin meant was that reformism would take hold rather than revolutionary consciousness and he pointed to various German and British examples to prove his point. Spontaneous working-class activity was good, but not, in itself, sufficient, even where it attained advanced forms. At the end of the day, ‘the greater the spontaneity of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably more so, the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political, and organizational work of Social Democracy.’ [SW 1 141] The Economists, instead of going beyond spontaneity, were ‘bowing’ to it. They were dragging at the tail of the movement and this was even worse than opportunism. [SW 1 140]
    Although Lenin’s distinctions were clear-cut, the difference in the actual formulations and propositions of the two sides seem rather similar. Even those propositions quoted by and condemned by Lenin seem somewhat similar to his own. For example, two Economist propositions were: ‘The political struggle of the working class is merely the most developed, wide and effective form of economic struggle’ and ‘The economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle.’ [SW 1 145] Both sides saw the need for both aspects of struggle and, with goodwill, one can see that they might have reached compromise. But the argument was not fully reflected in the written propositions. What Lenin feared was Bernsteinian revisionism and the Economists appeared to be the most likely point of entry of reformist and revisionist ideas despite their protestations. The subtext of their position was more important than their actual formulations. It was also the case that the two factions had identified each other as opponents from the moment of the founding of Iskra and much of the energy of Iskra and the Economist paper Rabochee delo had been expended in sniping at one another. It was the implications which Lenin thought he perceived and attacked which were so important. He pointed specifically to the Webbs, whose writings on trades unions he and Krupskaya had, of course, translated while in Shushenskoe, and the experience of British trade unions to show that, although they claimed to ‘lend the economic struggle a political character’, they remained at the reformist, trade-unionist level. In Lenin’s words, ‘the pompous phrase about “lending the economic struggle itself a political character”, which sounds so “terrifically” profound and revolutionary, serves as a screen to conceal what is, in fact the traditional striving to degrade Social Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics.’ [SW 1 148]
    In the fourth section of the pamphlet Lenin developed a similar argument based on the current level of disorganization of Party and movement which was the starting point of the whole debate. Lenin’s fear was that the Economists were idealizing the current state of affairs which, for Lenin, was nothing more than ‘amateurism’ or ‘primitiveness’. The point was to escape from current conditions of poorly prepared cadres and ill-thoughtout and uncoordinated methods of struggle. Instead it was necessary to build a strong, theoretically well-armed, well-organized, disciplined movement. According to Lenin, Economist principles provided too narrow a base for such developments. While Lenin admitted both Economists and Social Democrats