Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

466V. I. LENINHow erroneous Comrade Plekhanov’s arguments on thissubject are is shown in a most striking manner by his articlein Sovremenny Mir, 166 No. 12, 1907. On page 55 Plekhanovquotes a statement by Lunacharsky that trade-unionneutrality is supported by the German revisionists. Plekhanovanswers this statement as follows: “The revisionistssay that the unions must be neutral, but understand by thisthat the unions must be used to fight orthodox Marxism.”And Plekhanov concludes: “The elimination of trade-unionneutrality will not help matters at all. Even if we makethe unions closely and formally dependent on the Party,and revisionist ‘ideology’ triumphs in the Party, the eliminationof trade-union neutrality will merely be a fresh victoryfor ‘the critics of Marx’.”This argument is a typical example of Plekhanov’s usualmethod of dodging the issue and suppressing the essence ofthe dispute. If revisionist ideology really does triumph inthe Party, then it will not be a socialist party of the workingclass. It is not at all a question of how the party takesshape, and what struggle and what splits occur in the process.It is a question of the fact that a socialist party and tradeunions exist in every capitalist country, and it is our jobto define the basic relations between them. The class interestsof the bourgeoisie inevitably give rise to a striving toconfine the unions to petty and narrow activity within theframework of the existing social order, to keep them awayfrom any contact with socialism; and the neutrality theory isthe ideological cover for these strivings of the bourgeoisie. Inone way or another, the revisionists within the S.D. partieswill always clear a way for themselves in capitalist society.Of course, at the outset of the workers’ political andtrade-union movements in Europe it was possible to upholdtrade-union neutrality as a means of widening the originalfield of proletarian struggle during the period when it wascomparatively undeveloped and when the bourgeoisie exertedno systematic influence on the unions. At the present timeit is quite indefensible, from the point of view of internationalSocial-Democracy, to uphold trade-union neutrality.One can only smile when reading Plekhanov’s assurancesthat “even today, Marx would be in favour of trade-unionneutrality in Germany”, especially when that kind of argu-