Zarya's "inclination to predict a rupture between the Mountain and the Gironde in international Social-Democracy."[1]
Generally speaking [writes Krichevsky, editor of Rabocheye Dyelo] this talk about the Mountain and the Gironde that is heard in the ranks of Social-Democracy, represents a shallow historical analogy, which looks strange when it comes from the pen of a Marxist. The Mountain and the Gironde did no represent two different temperaments, or intellectual tendencies, as idealist historians may think, but two different classes, or strata—the middle bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat on the other. In the modern Socialist movement, however, there is no conflict of class interests; the Socialist movement in its entirety, all of its diverse forms [B. K.'s italics] including the most pronounced Bernsteinists stand on the basis of the class interests of the proletariat, and of the proletarian class struggle for political and economic emancipation [pp. 32–33].
A bold assertion! B. Krichevsky, have you heard the fact long ago noted, that it is precisely the extensive participation of the "academic" stratum in the Socialist movement in recent years that has secured the rapid spread of Bernsteinism? And what is most important—on what does our author base his opinion that even "the most pronounced Bernsteinists" stand on the basis of the class struggle for the political and economic emancipation of the proletariat? No one knows. This determined defence of the most pronounced Bernsteinists is not supported by any kind of argument whatever. Apparently, the author believes that if he repeats what the pronounced Bernsteinists say about themselves, his assertion requires no proof. But can anything more "shallow" be imagined than an opinion of a whole tendency that is based on nothing more than what the representatives of that tendency say about themselves? Can anything more shallow be imagined than the subsequent "homily" about the two different, and even diametrically opposite, types, or paths, of party development? [Rabocheye Dyelo, pp. 33–35.] The German Social-Democrats, you see, recognise complete freedom of criticism, but the French do not, and it is precisely the latter that present an example of the "harmfulness of intolerance."
- ↑ A comparison between the two tendencies in the revolutionary proletariat (the revolutionary and the opportunist), and the two tendencies among the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century (the Jacobin Mountain and the Gironde) was made in a leading article in Iskra, No. 2, February, 1901, written by Plekhanov. The Cadets, the Bezzaglavtsi and the Mensheviks to this day love to refer to the Jacobinism in Russian Social-Democracy but they prefer to remain silent about or … to forget the circumstances in which Plekhanov used this term for the first time against the Right Wing of Social-Democracy. [Lenin's note to 1908 edition.—Ed.]
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