can never learn from our factory and "economic" experience, that is, you must give us political knowledge. You intellectuals can acquire this knowledge, and it is your duty to bring us that knowledge in a hundred and a thousand times greater measure than have done up till now; and you must bring us this knowledge, not only in the form of arguments, pamphlets and articles which sometimes—excuse my frankness!—are very dull, but in the form of live exposures of what our government and our governing classes are doing at this very moment in all spheres of life. Fulfil this duty with greater zeal, and talk less about "increasing the activity of the masses of the workers"! We are far more active than you think, and we are quite able to support by open street fighting demands that do not even promise any "palpable results" whatever! You cannot "increase" our activity, because you yourselves are not sufficiently active. Be less subservient to spontaneity, and think more about increasing your own activity, gentlemen!
D. What is There in Common Between Economism and Terrorism?
In the last footnote we quoted the opinion of an Economist and of a non-Social-Democratic terrorist who, by chance, proved to be in agreement with him. Speaking generally, however, between the two there is not an accidental, but a necessary mutual connection,
gards even Rabocheye Dyelo as a political organ!) , and the other is a terrorist. The first witness is the author of a remarkably truthful and lively article entitled "The St. Petersburg Labour Movement and the Practical Tasks of Social-Democracy," published in Rabocheye Dyelo, No. 6. He divided the workers into the following categories: 1. Conscious revolutionaries; 2. Intermediate stratum; and 3. The Masses. Now the intermediate stratum he says "is often more interested in questions of political life than in its own immediate economic interests, the connection between which and the general social conditions it has long understood. …" Rabochaya Mysl "is sharply criticised. It keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again, thing we have long known, read long ago." "Nothing in the political review again!" [pp. 30–31]. But even the third stratum—the younger and more sensitive section of the workers, less corrupted by the vodka shop and the church, that has hardly ever had the opportunity of reading political literature, in a rambling way discuss political events and ponder deeply over the fragmentary news they get about the student riots, etc. The second witness, the terrorist, writes as follows: "… They read over once or twice the petty details of factory life in other towns, not their own, and then they read no more. … 'Awfully dull,' they say. … To say nothing in a workers' paper about the government … signifies that the workers are regarded as being little children. … The workers are not babies." [Svoboda, published by the Revolutionary Socialist group, pp. 67–70.]
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