Identity With a Class.
LENIN joined the labor movement at its very dawn. The first spontaneous outbreaks of the class struggle in the '80s reverberated thru Russia with a resounding echo. The advancing Marxian movement thrust itself upon the beginnings of the industrial development of Russia, drawing into its ranks many elements of the radical intelligentsia. The first generation of revolutionary intellectuals (Plechanov, Vera Sassulitsch, and Deutsch) founded the group of "Liberation of Labor" which is the predecessor of the Russian Social-Democratic Party and of the Russian Communist Party. Lenin belonged to the second generation of Marxians. Together with many others he joined the labor movement, but while the others were merely passersby, utilizing it for their own purpose, Lenin remained and led the movement until his very end.
Lenin understood from the very outset the power of the new class. In his very first writings he discusses this matter and says: "The working class is the bearer of the revolution." The working class stands in the foreground and everything which hampers its development, which demoralizes its ranks, which stands in the way of its historical development, must be destroyed and removed. To say at that period that the working class was the bearer of the revolution meant to determine its historic role as against the conceptions of the old socialist school of the "Narodniki."
Lenin completely identified himself with the working class and became its spokesman. He knew as nobody else did how to keep away from the working class and from the then-developing working class party all alien elements. At present it is easier, of course, to see which of those elements were really alien to the labor movement. But to have known this 25 or 30 years ago was much more difficult. At that time there were no material advantages to be derived by people accepting the Marxian theory. On the contrary, they had to bring sacrifices, suffer persecutions, etc. Nevertheless some of these Marxians were nothing more than hangers-on to the labor movement. Chief among those was Peter Struve, formerly a Social-Democrat and later on a leader of the left-wing of the liberal movement, still later a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and at present a monarchist. One required a sharp theoretical mind, and an extraordinary instinct, to detect in the Marxian phraseology of the first work of Peter Struve the real weak spots.
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