Iskra and Zarya with "setting up its programme against the movement, like a spirit hovering over the formless chaos" (p. 29). But what else is the function of Social-Democracy if not to be a "spirit," not only hovering over the spontaneous movement but also raising the movement to the level of "its programme"? Surely, it is not its function to drag at the tail of the movement: At best, this would be of no service to the movement; at the worst, it would be very, very harmful. Rabocheye Dyelo, however, not only follows this "tactics-process," but elevates it to a principle, so that it would be more correct to describe its tendency not as opportunism, but khvostism (from the word khvost).[1] And it must be admitted, that those who have determined always to follow behind the movement like a tail, are absolutely and forever ensured against "belittling the spontaneous element of development."
And so, we have become convinced that the fundamental error committed by the "new tendency" in Russian Social-Democracy lies in its subservience to spontaneity, and its failure to understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a mass of consciousness from us Social-Democrats. The more spontaneously the masses rise, the more widespread the movement becomes, so much the more rapidly grows the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical political and organisational work of Social-Democracy.
The spontaneous rise of the masses in Russia proceeded (and continues) with such rapidity that the young untrained Social-Democrats proved unfitted for the gigantic tasks that confronted them. This lack of training is our common misfortune, the misfortune of all Russian Social-Democrats. The rise of the masses proceeded and spread uninterruptedly and continuously; it not only continued in the places it commenced in, hut it spread to new localities and to new strata of the population (influenced by the labour movement, the ferment among the students and the intellectuals generally, and even among the peasantry revived). Revolutionaries, however, lagged behind this rise of the masses in both their "theories" and in their practical activity; they failed to establish an uninterrupted organisation having continuity with the past, and capable of leading the whole movement.
In Chapter I, we proved that Rabocheye Dyelo degraded theoretical tasks and that it "spontaneously" repeated the fashion-
- ↑ Khvost is the Russian word for tail.—Ed.
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