19
Draft Resolution on the Relations
Between Workers and Intellectuals within the Social-Democratic Organisations

1. Whereas the Right Wing of our Party still continues the systematic attempts, begun in the days of Economism, to spread hostility and distrust among the Party members— the workers and the intellectuals—attempts to represent our Party organisations as consisting solely of intellectuals (an allegation of which the enemies of Social-Democracy make clever use); attempts to accuse the Social-Democratic organisations of striving to fetter the initiative of the working class through the instrumentality of Party discipline; attempts to flaunt the elective-principle slogan for the most part without any design to apply it in practice; and

2. Whereas the full assertion of the elective principle, possible and necessary under conditions of political freedom, is unfeasible under the autocracy, though even under the autocracy this principle could be applied to a much larger extent than it is today, were it not for the obstacle presented by the Party organisation's diffuse form and actual disorganisation, for which the Party is indebted to the selfsame Right Wing of Social-Democracy;

— Therefore, the Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., recognising its duty to prepare for the coming congresses, by a series of organisational reforms, the pre-conditions for a real application of the elective principle in Party life, to the extent possible, calls attention once more to the task confronting the class-conscious adherents of the Social-Democratic workers' party: that they make every effort to strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses of the working class by raising still wider sections of proletarians and semi-proletarians to full Social-Democratic consciousness, by developing their revolutionary Social-Democratic activity, by seeing to it that the greatest possible number of workers capable of leading the movement and the Party organisations be advanced from among the mass of the working class to membership on the local centres and on the all-Party centre through the creation of a maximum number of working-class organisations adhering to our Party, by seeing to it that working-class organisations unwilling or unable to enter the Party should at least be associated with it.

Written on April 22 (May 5), 1905