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    The question of the attitude of Social-Democracy towards bourgeois parties is one of those known as "general" or "theoretical" questions, i.e., such that are not directly connected with any definite practical task confronting the Party at a given moment. At the London Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., the Mensheviks and the Bundists conducted a fierce struggle against the inclusion of such questions in the agenda, and they were, unfortunately, supported in this by Trotsky, who does not belong to either side. The opportunist wing of our Party, like that of other Social-Democratic parties, defended a "business-like" or "practical" agenda for the Congress. They shied away from "broad and general" questions. They forgot that in the final analysis broad, principled politics are the only real, practical politics. They forgot that anybody who tackles partial problems without having previously settled general problems, will inevitably and at every step "come up against" those general problems without himself realising it. To come up against them blindly in every individual case means to doom one's politics to the worst vacillation and lack of principle.

    The Bolsheviks had insisted on including quite a number of "general questions" in the Congress agenda, but succeeded in getting only one passed with the aid of the Poles and the Latvians -- the question of the attitude to bourgeois parties. This question not only took first place among the Congress questions of principle but also among all work in general. It turned out that way, and it had to turn out that way, because the real source of almost all differences, certainly all differences of substance, of all disagreements on questions of the practical politics of the proletariat in the Russian

 
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revolution, was a different assessment of our attitude to non-proletarian parties. Since the very beginning of the Russian revolution there have appeared two basic views among Social-Democrats on the nature of the revolution and the role of the proletariat in it. Anyone who attempts to analyse the tactical differences in the R.S.D.L.P. without going into the difference of these basic views will get hopelessly entangled in trivialities and partial problems.