they not only stand aside from the Plekhanovites, but also delegate a certain anonymous A. M.,[179] who, sheltering behind his anonymity, declares: "We, who have adhered to the August bloc[180] [perhaps A. M. is not one, but two "adherents"?], consider it necessary to state that the Prizyv organisation has greatly exceeded the limits which can be tolerated in our Party, as we understand them, and that there can be no room within the August bloc organisations for members of groups that are bolstering Prizyv ". What bold people these "adhering" A. M.s are, who so unflinchingly speak the naked truth!
Of the five persons comprising the "Secretariat Abroad" of the Organising Committee, which has published the collection of articles quoted, none wished to come out with so courageous a statement! It follows that the five secretaries are against a break with Plekhanov (not so very long ago Axelrod said that the Menshevik Plekhanov was closer to him than the internationalist Bolsheviks) but, afraid of the workers and unwilling to injure their "reputations", they prefer to keep it dark; however, they have put forward a couple of anonymous "adherents" so as to make a splash with a cheap and safe internationalism. . . .
On the one hand, some of the secretaries -- Martynov, Martov and Astrov -- have engaged Nashe Dyelo in a polemic, Martov even coming out with a private opinion opposed to participation in the war industries committees. On the other hand, the Bundist Yonov, who considers himself "Left" of Kosovsky -- a man who reflects the Bund's actual policy -- is willingly advanced by the Bundists to cover up their nationalism; he advocates the "further development of the
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old tactics [of the Second International, which led to its collapse] but by no means its liquidation". The editors have supplied Yonov's article with ambiguous, vapid and diplomatically evasive reservations, but they do not object to its substance, to a defence of the rotten and opportunist in the "old tactics". The anonymous A. M.s, who have "adhered" to the August bloc, openly defend Nasha Zarya ; even if it did "deviate" from the internationalist stand, yet it "rejected [?] the Burgfrieden policy for Russia; it recognised the necessity of immediately re-establishing international links and, to the best of our knowledge [i.e., of the adhering anonymous A. M.s], it approved of Mankov's expulsion from the Duma group". An excellent defence! The petty-bourgeois Narodniks favour the re-establishment of links, Kerensky is opposed to Mankov, but to say that those who have come out in favour of "non-resistance to the war" are opposed to a policy of a class truce (Burgfrieden ) means deceiving the workers with empty words.
The editors of the Organising Committee's journal have come out in a body with an article entitled "Dangerous Tendencies". This is a model of political evasiveness! On the one hand, here are clamorous Left phrases against the authors of calls for defence of the country (i.e., the Moscow and Petrograd social-chauvinists); on the other hand, they write: "It is difficult to judge which party circles both declarations emanated from"! In reality, there is not the slightest doubt that they emanated "from the circles " of Nashe Dyelo, although the contributors to this legally published journal are, of course, not guilty of having drawn up an underground declaration. Instead of dealing with the ideological roots of these declarations, and with the full identity between these roots and the liquidationist, social-chauvinist and Nashe Dyelo trends, the Organising Committee crowd have busied themselves with a ridiculous pettifogging that is, of no value for anybody but the police, namely, the personal authorship of members of one circle or another. On the one hand, the editors bluster out threats: we internationalists of the August bloc, they say, will close our ranks for "the most energetic resistance to defence tendencies'' (p. 129), for "an uncompromising struggle" (p. 126); on the other hand, we find right next to such declarations the following piece
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of skulduggery: "The line of the Duma group, which has the support of the Organising Committee, has met [hitherto!] with no open opposition" (p. 129)!
As the authors themselves are well aware, this line consists in an absence of any line, and is a covert defence of Nashe Dyelo and Rabocheye Utro.
Take the most "Left" and the most "principled" article in the collection, the one written by Martov. It will suffice to quote a single sentence expressing the author's main idea, to see what his adherence to principles is like. "It is self-evident," he writes, "that if the present crisis should lead to the victory of a democratic revolution, to a republic, then the character of the war would radically change" (p. 116). All this is a shameless lie. Martov could not but have known that a democratic revolution and a republic mean a bourgeois-democratic revolution and a bourgeois-democratic republic. The character of this war between the bourgeois and imperialist Great Powers would not change a jot were the military-autocratic and feudal imperialism to be swept away in one of these countries. That is because, in such conditions, a purely bourgeois imperialism would not vanish, but would only gain strength. It is for that reason that our paper, issue No. 47, declared, in Thesis 9,[*] that the party of Russia's proletariat will not defend, in the present war, even a fatherland of republicans and revolutionaries, whilst they are chauvinists like Plekhanov, the Narodniks, Kautsky, the Nashe Dyelo people, Chkheidze, the Organising Committee, etc.
Martov's evasive phrase in a footnote to p. 118 will do him no good. Here, in contradiction to what he says, on p. 116, he "doubts" whether bourgeois democracy can fight "against international imperialism" (of course it cannot); he expresses "doubt" whether the bourgeoisie will not turn a 1793 republic into a Gambetta and Clemenceau republic. Here the basic theoretical error remains: in 1793 the foremost class in a French bourgeois revolution fought against European pre-revolutionary monarchies, whereas the Russia of 1915 is fighting, not more backward countries, but more advanced countries, which are on the eve of a socialist
* See p. 403 of this volume. --Ed. [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Several Theses". -- DJR]
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revolution. It follows that, in the war of 1914-15, only a proletariat that is carrying out a victorious socialist revolution, can play the part of the Jacobins of 1793. Consequently, in the present war, the Russian proletariat could "defend the fatherland" and consider "the character of the war radically changed", only and exclusively if the revolution were to put the party of the proletariat in power, and were to permit only that party to guide the entire force of a revolutionary upheaval and the entire machinery of state towards an instant and direct conclusion of an alliance with the socialist proletariat of Germany and Europe (Sotsial-Demokrat No. 47, Thesis 11).[*]
Martov concludes his article, in which he juggles with sonorous phrases, by dramatically appealing to "Russian Social-Democracy" to "take a clear-cut revolutionary-internationalist stand at the outset of the political crisis". The reader who wants to find out whether these dramatic words do not conceal something rotten at the core should ask himself what a political stand is usually taken to mean. It means (1) bringing forward a formulated appraisal of the moment and the tactics to be used, and a series of resolutions, all this on behalf of an organisation (at least on behalf of a "quintet of secretaries"); (2) advancing a militant slogan for the current moment; (3) linking up these two points with action by the proletarian masses and their class-conscious vanguard Martov and Axelrod, the ideological leaders of the "quintet", have not only failed to dn any of these three things, but on all of these points have given practical support to the social-chauvinists, have shielded them! During the sixteen months of war, the five secretaries abroad have not taken a "clear-cut stand", or any stand at all on the question of programme and tactics. Martov vacillates now to the left, now to the right. Axelrod's urge is only to the right (see his German pamphlet particularly). Here there is nothing clear, formulated or organised, no stand whatever! "The central militant slogan for the Russian proletariat at the current moment," Martov writes in his own name, "must be a national constituent assembly for the liquidation of both tsarism and the war." This is neither a central nor a militant slogan.
* See pp. 403-04 of this volume. --Ed.
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It is quite useless because it does not reveal the basic social and class content, or the clear-cut political content of the concept of this dual "liquidation". It is a cheap bourgeois-democratic phrase, not a central, or militant, or proletarian slogan.
Finally, on the main issue, i.e., connections with the masses in Russia, what Martov and Co. have to offer, is not merely a zero, but a negative quantity. They have nothing and nobody behind them. The elections have shown that only the bourgeoisie's bloc with Rabocheye Utro has some of the masses behind it, whereas reference to the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group means only shielding that bourgeois bloc with falsehoods.