Self-Criticism and Frankness.
LENIN knew exactly the strong and weak sides of the labor movement. And for this reason he reacted so exceptionally critically to every theory built upon the backwardness and weaknesses of the working class. He possessed a sixth sense, the sense of anti-reformism. He smelled reformism from a distance. It was very difficult indeed in 1903 to have determined on the basis of differences of opinion regarding the first paragraph of the party constitution, who were the proletarian Girondists and who were the Jacobins. Nevertheless, Lenin determined this very definitely after the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Party. Thru the formulation of the famous paragraph one, he came to the creation of the Girondist wing of the Party. Since then he continuously criticized the right wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Party whose reformism became apparent to everyone only in 1905.
Thruout the first revolution, in the period preceding the late war, and particularly after the war, this anti-reformist sense of Lenin manifests itself in all his activities. He was deceived neither by revolutionary phrases nor by well-sounding resolutions. He exposed to the daylight the reformist theoreticians and men of action, despite all their attempts to conceal their real nature. He was primarily a man of experience and practical deeds, and it was in this sphere of life that he caused the defeat of the strategians of reformism. More than one half of his writings were devoted to the demoralizing activities of reformism, specifically to the Russian Mensheviks. Just as an archeologist determines the species of a pre-historic animal by the examination of a single bone, so Lenin was able to determine the reformist nature of his opponents by a single phrase in one or another of their articles.
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