On the Tasks of the Social-Democratic Movement

“On the Tasks of the Social-Democratic Movement” is a short article written by Lenin. In it, he exposed the Tsarist government’s two-faced tactics and proposed tactics for the struggle of Social Democrats. It is a fragment in an article written by Lenin in November 1902. There was no title on the manuscript; the title was added by the Marxist-Leninist Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1939 the work was published in the first issue of Proletarskaya Revolutsie. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 7 of the second edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

In this article, Lenin mainly illustrates two issues:

The first point is that the exposure of the two-faced tactics of the Tsarist government and its purposes. When the workers’ movement was on the rise, the Tsarist government, on the one hand, paid great attention to the working class and the “legal” opposition. On the other hand, it encouraged the elite revolutionary forces to attack the bandits who committed the most violent acts so as to resist the pressure of the government.

Secondly, Lenin put forward the tactics, tasks, and a series of important viewpoints that Social-democrats should adopt in the face of corruption and provocations. The main points are as follows: to learn from the experience of Europe and Russia, to strengthen the socialist faith, and to adopt firm strategies in accordance with principles. Those strategies are: Social democrats should strengthen the connection between revolutionaries and the people by developing and consolidating the Social-Democratic movement. Lenin argued that the separation from the masses was the main source of their weakness and inability to carry out resolute struggle immediately. Also, put forward that the working class is the inevitable product of the collapse of modern political and social systems and the irreconcilable enemy of these systems. Only through the workers’ movement, Social-Democrats can mobilize the truly revolutionary and advanced classes. Only by relying on the revolutionary Marxist theory and the experience of the international Social-Democratic parties, can they combine the Russian revolutionary movement with the workers’ movement, carry out the invincible Social-Democratic movement. Only this way all the progressive elements of the country can be called to carry out revolutionary work and all the suffering workers be mobilized to support socialism.

In this early short article, Lenin advocated that the working class is the main force to overthrow contemporary politics, Marxist theory should be the guiding ideology of the workers’ movement, and the experience of the struggles in the international social-democratic parties should be used for reference. Today these views still have important practical significance.