Illustration: a pre-1914 imperial intelligence-dossier collage of colonial telegraph logs, sepia field photography and empire maps.

Opening

Illustration, not an archive object

WE shall start off again from the praises that have been sun, for Rabocheye Dyelo. Martynov gave his article in No. 10 of Rabocheye Dyelo, on his differences with Iskra, the title: “Exposure Literature and the Proletarian Struggle.” He formulated the sub. stance of these differences as follows:

We cannot confine ourselves entirely to exposing the state of affairs that stand in its [the labour party’s] path of development. We must also respond to the immediate and current interests of the proletariat [p. 63].

“...Iskra ... is in fact the organ of revolutionary opposition that exposes the state of affairs in our country, particularly the political state of affairs. . . . We, however, work and shall continue to work for the cause of labour in close organic contact with the proletarian struggle” [zbid.]. One cannot help being grateful to Martynov for this formula. It is of exceptional general interest because substantially it embraces not only our disagreements with Rabocheye Dyelo, but the general disagreement between ourselves and the Economists concerning the political struggle. We have shown already that the Economists do not altogether repudiate “politics,” but that they are constantly deviating from the Social- Democratic conception of politics to the trade-unionist conception. Martynov deviates in exactly the same way, and we agree, therefore, to take him as an example of an Economist wandering into error on this question. As we shall endeavour to prove, neither the authors of the Special Supplement of Rabochaya Mysl, nor the authors of the manifesto issued by the Emancipation group, nor the authors of the Economist Letter published in Iskra, No. 12, will have any right to complain against this choice.

What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, V. I. Lenin. The translation (J. Fineberg, ed. A. Trachtenberg) was first published in the United States in 1929, in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, vol. IV, book II (International Publishers, notice "Copyright, 1929"; registered as A 19207, entered 31 December 1929 in the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1930). A work published in the United States in 1929 entered the public domain there on 1 January 2025. This printing repeats that 1929 translation and its editor's notes; a comparison of the two scans found the same wording. Lenin died in 1924, so the Russian original is also public domain. The editor's foreword printed in this volume is signed "December, 1931", is not covered by the 1929 notice and is not included. The library is served from the United States; readers elsewhere should check their own law (the translator died in 1957). Provenance and rights.