Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

IMPERIALISM AND THE SPLIT IN SOCIALISM119varieties of one such party. There is not the slightest reasonfor thinking that these parties will disappear beforethe social revolution. On the contrary, the nearer therevolution approaches, the more strongly it flares up andthe more sudden and violent the transitions and leaps inits progress, the greater will be the part the struggle ofthe revolutionary mass stream against the opportunistpetty-bourgeois stream will play in the labour movement.Kautskyism is not an independent trend, because it hasno roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratumwhich has deserted to the bourgeoisie. But the danger ofKautskyism lies in the fact that, utilising the ideology ofthe past, it endeavours to reconcile the proletariat withthe “bourgeois labour party”, to preserve the unity of theproletariat with that party and thereby enhance the latter’sprestige. The masses no longer follow the avowedsocial-chauvinists: Lloyd George has been hissed down atworkers’ meetings in England; Hyndman has left theparty; the Renaudels and Scheidemanns, the Potresovs andGvozdyovs are protected by the police. The Kautskyites’masked defence of the social-chauvinists is much moredangerous.One of the most common sophistries of Kautskyism isits reference to the “masses”. We do not want, they say, tobreak away from the masses and mass organisations! Butjust think how Engels put the question. In the nineteenthcentury the “mass organisations” of the English tradeunions were on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Marxand Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground;they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that thetrade union organisations directly embraced a minority ofthe proletariat. In England then, as in Germany now, notmore than one-fifth of the proletariat was organised. Noone can seriously think it possible to organise the majorityof the proletariat under capitalism. Secondly—andthis is the main point—it is not so much a question of thesize of an organisation, as of the real, objective significanceof its policy: does its policy represent the masses, doesit serve them, i.e., does it aim at their liberation fromcapitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority,the minority’s reconciliation with capitalism? The