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

312V. I. LENINprobably find themselves degraded from the leaders to theled or even cast aside.In Magdeburg these leaders were remonstrated with,they were censured, they were given an official ultimatumas the representatives of all that was unreliable that hadaccumulated in the great revolutionary army, of all thatwas weak, infected with bourgeois legality and stupefiedby pious prostrations before this legality, before all thelimitations of what is one of the eras of slavery, i.e., oneof the eras of bourgeois supremacy. In condemning theopportunists, threatening them with expulsion, the Germanproletariat thereby expressed its condemnation of all theelements in its mighty organisation personifying stagnation,diffidence, flabbiness and inability to break with the psychologyof moribund bourgeois society. In condemning thebad revolutionaries in its own ranks the vanguard classheld one of the last reviews of its forces before entering uponthe path of social revolution.* **While the attention of all revolutionary Social-Democratsthroughout the world was concentrated on seeing howthe German workers were preparing for action, selecting themoment for action, keeping a watchful eye on the enemy andpurging themselves of the weaknesses of opportunism—theopportunists throughout the world were gloating over thedifferences which had arisen between Luxemburg andKautsky in their estimate of the present situation, on thequestion whether one of those turning-points like the Ninthof January in the Russian revolution was due now or notjust yet, this very minute or the next. The opportunistsgloated. They did their utmost to make a burning issue ofthese differences, which were not of prime importance,in the columns of Socialist Monthly, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata(Martynov), Zhizn, Vozrozhdeniye and suchlikeliquidationist papers and Neue Zeit (Martov)*. The shabbinessof these methods of the opportunists in all coun-* In Neue Zeit Martov was met with an emphatic rebuke from ComradeKarsky.