open to all the working class to participate?"
Accordingly, they wanted a convention to which all the factory-workers
would be invited to send representatives. There should be no doctrinal
tests, the sole qualification being membership in the working class. It did
not matter to the advocates of this policy whether a man belonged to the
Social Democratic party or to any party; whether he called himself a
revolutionist or anything else. It was, they said, a movement of the
working class, not the movement of a sect within the working class.

They knew, of course, that in such a great mass movement there would
probably be some theoretical confusion, more or less muddled thinking. They
recognized, too, that in the great mass convention they proposed some
Social Democratic formulations might be rejected and some others adopted
which did not accord with the Marxian doctrines. But, quoting Marx to the
effect that "One step of real movement is worth a thousand programs," they
contended that if there was anything at all in the Marxian theory of
progress through class struggles, and the historic rule of the working
class, it must follow that, while they might make mistakes and go
temporarily astray, the workers could not go far wrong, their class
interests being a surer guide than any amount of intellectualism could
produce.

Lenine and his friends, the Bolsheviki, bitterly opposed all this reasoning
and took a diametrically opposite position upon every one of the questions
involved. They absolutely opposed any sort of co-operation with bourgeois
parties of any kind, for any purpose whatever. No matter how progressive a
particular bourgeois party might be, nor how important the reform aimed at,
they believed that Social Democrats should remain in "splendid isolation,"
refusing to make any distinction between more liberal and less liberal,
progressive and reactionary, groups in the bourgeoisie. Trotzky, who did
not at first formally join the Bolsheviki, but was a true Bolshevik in his
intellectual convictions and sympathies, fully shared this view.

Now, Lenine and Trotzky were dogmatic Marxists, and as such they could not
deny the contention that capitalism must attain a certain development
before Socialism could be attained in Russia. Nor could they deny that
Absolutism was an obstacle to the development both of capitalist industry
and of Socialism. They contended, however, that the peculiar conditions in
Russia, resulting from