Of course, Lenin is not arguing against revolutionaries working in trade unions or taking up individual issues. He is certainly in favour of such work. But he shows the limits and dangers of this approach if treated in a one-sided way. For Lenin, in working in such an environment, Social-Democrats must be revolutionaries first and foremost and trade unionists second. They had to become worker-cadres. The party has a duty to inoculate its members against the dangers of opportunism by raising their theoretical level, ensuring they attend party meetings, and ensuring that their work is carried out under the direction of the party. Lenin saw this as a condition of membership of the party. This control is even more important where party members take positions in the workers’ movement, where there is the danger that they can be sucked in to become simply a trade union secretary, which Lenin warned against.
He hammered home that any watering down of “Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade unionist politics means preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy.” This reflects the enormous pressures within the workers’ movement to conform. Instead of the revolutionaries changing their environment, the environment changes them.
Throughout the book, which is a polemic against spontaneity and the adaption to trade union (bourgeois) politics, Lenin consistently argues for the building of a revolutionary vanguard party, based upon professional revolutionaries, who are prepared to dedicate all their time and effort to such revolutionary work.
The organisation of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession (for which reason I speak of the organisation of revolutionaries, meaning Social-Democrats). In view of this common characteristic of the members of such an organisation, all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, in both categories, must be effaced.
Here speaks the real Lenin. Within the revolutionary party, there can be no difference between workers and students: all are comrades and communists. All prejudices were left outside and were not welcome. It was not a class question, but a political one. As far as the party is concerned, students who come from a middle-class background are educated, along with worker comrades, in the ideas of Marxism. In doing so, they politically abandon their former class prejudices and come over to the standpoint of the proletariat.
This was the case with practically the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party which was made up of former students. Incidentally, Lenin’s conception of a vanguard party, which is regarded as heinous elitism by all of his critics, from reformists to anarchists, is nothing more than a party that offers leadership to the working class. The role of the party is not to trail behind the workers, but, based on its collective experience, to offer a real way forward. This is not a bad thing, but a good thing. In fact, it is the whole raison d’être of a revolutionary workers’ party.
Interestingly, Lenin explains that prior to the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party the Marxists had worked to establish “student circles”, where “the entire student youth of the period was absorbed in Marxism.” According to Grigori Zinoviev, a former student:
There was a time (chiefly in the second half of the 1890s) when the term ‘student’ was synonymous with the term ‘revolutionary’, for in that period pupils in higher educational establishments were revolutionarily or radically minded and supported the workers’ revolutionary movement. (History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, 1973, p. 63.)
These student revolutionaries, who were persecuted by the tsarist authorities, were to become a bridge to the virgin working class in Russia. The principal leaders of the local movement had already “gained a reputation” for themselves in their student days, explained Lenin.
By winning such students to Marxism and educating them, the revolutionary movement created the youthful forces which could reach the young workers. The whole experience of Bolshevism shows that serious students who are educated in Marxism can become excellent cadres for the revolutionary movement.
Lenin, who always took a great interest in the youth, took the trouble to answer any “anti-student” prejudices of some of his critics. “A committee of students is of no use; it is not stable,” agreed Lenin. “But the conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries, and it is immaterial whether a student or a worker is capable of becoming a professional revolutionary.” Again, Lenin brushes aside whether revolutionaries are students or workers. He wanted to train up both student and worker cadres. “I mean professional revolutionaries, irrespective of whether they have developed from among students or working men.”
He adds: “our task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.” However, he added “it takes years to train oneself to be a professional revolutionary.”
Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’ as SVOBODA desires to do (and by this ascends to the second grade of Economist ‘pedagogics’). I am far from denying the necessity for popular literature for the workers, and especially popular (of course, not vulgar) literature for the especially backward workers. But what annoys me is this constant confusion of pedagogics with questions of politics and organisation. You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!