Outline of an Article Against the Socialist-Revolutionaries

V. I. Lenin

α) Lack of principle	About the Socialist-Revolutionaries (a party without a programme). Unprincipledness in matters of theory: Narodnik prejudices + West-European opportunist bourgeois “criticism.” Absence of a credo, blurred political consciousness. Playing at hide-and-seek....
β) Petty-bourgeois ideology	Petty-bourgeois ideology: corrupts the class-consciousness of the proletariat, makes it unfit for an independent stand towards bourgeois democracy (because the Socialist-Revolutionaries are striving to fuse and confuse social and bourgeois democracy, while being in essence a branch of the latter).
γ) Phrases and bluff	Phrase-mongering in theory and in tactics: an unserious attitude towards revolu tionary work, exaggeration, bluff, “fiction” ... (dishing out trivialities in “popular” literature) (war against “polemics,” absence of principles).
δ) Terrorism	A tactical mistake, a very flagrant one: terrorism, advocacy of it, weakening of contact with the mass movement. ΣΣ [Summa summarum—sum-total.—Ed.]: from all the bourgeois revolutions in Europe the working class emerged disappointed, because it entered them with bourgeois-democratic illusions.
ε) Dissemination of illusions + reactionary spirit of the Narodnik part of the programme + ideological, political and practical harm	The Socialist-Revolutionaries are doing their utmost to “repeat” this history; it is our duty to wage a determined struggle against it, so that the Russian proletariat should derive from the forthcoming revolution not disappointment, but fresh faith in its strength, greater courage for the still more tremendous struggle before it, and the beginnings of a strong, purely proletarian organisation.

Written: Written in July 1903
Published: First published in 1939 in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia, No. 1.
Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 6, pages 464-466.

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