THE LIQUIDATORS AGAINST THE PARTY

Lenin

April (May) 1912

Trotsky was entrusted with singing all the virtues of the Organising Committee and of the forthcoming liquidationist conference; nor could they have assigned the job to anyone fitter than the “professional uniter”. And he did sing . . . in every variety of type his Vienna printer could find: “The supporters of Vperyod and Golos, pro-Party Bolsheviks, pro-Party Mensheviks, so-called liquidators and non-factionalists—in Russia and abroad—are firmly supporting the work. . .” of the Organising Committee (Pravda No. 24).

The poor fellow—again he told a lie, and again he miscalculated. The bloc under the hegemony of the  liquidators, which was being prepared in opposition to the Conference of 1912  with so much fuss, is now bursting at the seams and the reason is that the liquidators have shown their hand too openly. The Poles refused to take part in the Organising Committee. Plekhanov, through correspondence with a representative of the Committee, established several interesting details, to  wit:

(1) that what is planned is a “constituent” conference, i.e., not a conference of the RSDLP, but of  some new party; (2) that it is being convened on “anarchical” lines; (3) that the “conference is being convened by the liquidators”. After these circumstances had been revealed by Comrade Plekhanov, there was nothing surprising to us in the fact that the so-called Bolshevik (?!) conciliators plucked up courage and resolved to convict Trotsky of—having told a lie by listing them among the supporters of the Organising Committee. “This Organising Committee, as it is now constituted, with its obvious tendency to impose upon the whole Party its own attitude to the liquidators, and with the principles of organisational anarchy which it has made the basis for increasing its membership, does not provide  the least guarantee that a really general Party conference will be convened.” That is how our emboldened “pro-Party” people comment on the Organising Committee today. We do not know  where the most Leftist of our Left—the Vperyod group, who at one time hastened to signify its sympathy with the Organising Committee—stand today. Nor is this of any importance. The important thing is that the liquidationist character of the conference to be held by the Organising Committee has been established by Plekhanov with irrefutable clarity, and that the statesmanlike minds of the “conciliators” had to bow to this fact. Who remains, then? The open liquidators and Trotsky.

The basis of this bloc is obvious: the liquidators enjoy full freedom to pursue their line in Zhivoye Dyelo and Nasha Zarya “as before”, while Trotsky, operating abroad, screens them with revolutionary phrases, which cost him nothing and do not bind them in any way.

There is one little lesson to be drawn from this affair by those abroad who are sighing for unity, and who recently hatched the sheet Za Partiyu in Paris. To build up a party, it is not enough to be able to shout “unity”; it is also necessary to have a political programme, a programme of political action. The bloc comprising the liquidators, Trotsky, the Vperyod group, the Poles, the pro-Party Bolsheviks (?), the Paris Mensheviks, and so on and so forth, was foredoomed to ignominious failure, because it was based on an unprincipled approach, on hypocrisy and hollow phrases. As for those who sigh, it would not be amiss if they finally made up their minds on that extremely complicated and difficult question: With whom do they want to have unity? If it is with the liquidators, why not say so without mincing? But if they are against unity with the liquidators, then what sort of unity are they sighing for?

The January Conference and the bodies it elected are the only thing that actually unites all the RSDLP functionaries in Russia today. Apart from the Conference there is only the promise of the Bundists and Trotsky to convene the liquidationist conference of the Organising Committee, and the “conciliators” who are experiencing their liquidationist hangover.

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,

Vol. 18, pp. 22-24