Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

NOTES OF A PUBLICIST213Otkliki Bunda, which I have just received. The Mensheviksdid not venture to propose a Central Organ with a majorityof their own trend, although, as is seen from Martov’s argumentabove quoted, they recognised the existence of twoopposite trends in the Party. The Mensheviks did not eventhink of proposing a Central Organ with a majority of theirtrend. They did not even attempt to insist on a CentralOrgan with any definite trend at all (so obvious at the plenarysession was the absence of any trend among the Mensheviks,who were only required, only-expected, to make asincere and consistent renunciation of liquidationism).The Mensheviks tried to secure “neutralisation” of the CentralOrgan and they proposed as neutralisers either a Bundistor Trotsky. The Bundist or Trotsky was to play the part of amatchmaker who would undertake to “unite in wedlock”“given persons, groups and institutions”, irrespective ofwhether one of the sides had renounced liquidationism ornot.This standpoint of a matchmaker constitutes the entire“ideological basis” of Trotsky’s and Yonov’s conciliation.When they complain and weep over the failure to achieveunity, it must be taken cum grano salis. It must be takento mean that the matchmaking failed. The “failure” of thehopes of unity cherished by Trotsky and Yonov, hopes ofunity with “given persons, groups and institutions” irrespectiveof their attitude to liquidationism, signifies onlythe failure of the matchmakers, the falsity, the hopelessness,the wretchedness of the matchmaking point ofview, but it does not at all signify the failure of Partyunity.There is another view on this unity, namely, that long agoa number of profound objective causes, independently ofthe particular composition of the “given persons, groupsand institutions” (submitted to the plenum and at the plenum),began to bring about and are steadily continuingto bring about in the two old and principal Russian factionsof Social-Democracy changes that create—sometimes undesiredand even unperceived by some of the “givenpersons, groups and institutions”—ideological and organisationalbases for unity. These objective conditions are rootedin the specific features of the present period of bourgeois