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

PRINCIPLES INVOLVED IN WAR ISSUE159should, abandon the fight for reforms. Not at all. We cannotknow beforehand how soon we shall achieve success, howsoon the objective conditions will make the rise of thisrevolution possible. We should support every improvement,every real economic and political improvement in the positionof the masses. The difference between us and thereformists (i.e., the Grütlians in Switzerland) is not that weoppose reforms while they favour them. Nothing of the kind.They confine themselves to reforms and as a result stoop—inthe apt expression of one (rare!) revolutionary writer in theSchweizerische Metallarbeiter-Zeitung (No. 40)—to the roleof “hospital orderly for capitalism”. We tell the workers:vote for proportional representation, etc., but don’tstop at that. Make it your prime duty systematically tospread the idea of immediate socialist revolution, preparefor this revolution and radically reconstruct every aspectof party activity. The conditions of bourgeois democracyvery often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitudeof small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn,to take such a position on these reforms (in such a manner)that—to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity—five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reformsand twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.Socialist revolution is impossible without a hard revolutionarymass struggle in which many sacrifices have to bemade. But we would be inconsistent if we accepted therevolutionary mass struggle and the desire for an immediateend to the war while, at the same time, rejecting immediatesocialist revolution! The former without the latter is nil,a hollow sound.Nor can we avoid hard struggle within the party. It wouldbe sheer make-believe, hypocrisy, philistine “head-in-thesand”policy to imagine that “internal peace” can rule withinthe Swiss Social-Democratic Party. The choice is not between“internal peace” and “inner-party struggle”. Suffice itto read Hermann Greulich’s letter mentioned above andexamine developments in the party over the past severalyears to appreciate the utter fallacy of any such supposition.The real choice is this: either the present concealed formsof inner-party struggle, with their demoralising effecton the masses, or open principled struggle between the