Plan of Letters on Tasks of the Revolutionary Youth

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Letters on tasks of the revolutionary youth could be arranged on the following plan:

I. What the present-day student body consists of and what the task of achieving its ideological unity involves.

II. Importance of Marxism in revolutionising the students (in the revolutionary movement).

III. Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia. Theoretical and tactical differences between them. Terrorism.

IV. Problems of student organisation from the standpoint of “revolutionising the students”.

V. Students and the working class (?).

{ Ideological unity= a certain lack of ideological principles. General argument—different groups among the students. Analyse—what groups, their accidental or inevitable character.

Uplifters in different classes of society.

Uplifters as basis of liberals.

Class character of the six groups insufficiently distinct: autocracy the chief determining factor (reactionaries— uplifters—liberals). Petty bourgeoisie, workers, bourgeoisie— c l a s s[1] groupings already beginning to take shape.

Progressive significance of class (and political) differentiation. Example. Academics and their differentiation from “liberals”. This differentiation does not hinder but helps political utilisation (development, growth).

“Ideological unity”. Quid est?[2] Between whom? Academics + liberals? Liberals + socialists?

Only Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats?

Achieving ideological unity=propagating definite ideas, clarifying class differences, effecting ideological demarcation.

Achieving ideological unity = propagating ideas that can lead forward, the ideas of the progressive class.

Revolutionary Marxism, its emergence in Europe before 1848, its role in Western Europe and Russia.

{ i n s e r t: about the “superkluge"[3] contention that bourgeois students cannot become imbued with socialism. }

  1. ↑ Not “newly emerged” (the socialist intelligentsia), but going back half a century, beginning with the Petrashevsky circle,[4] approximately. —Lenin
  2. ↑ What is it?—Ed.
  3. ↑ Over-clever.”–Ed. —Lenin