ABSTRACT

Lenin had no sooner formed his party round a nucleus of "professional revolutionists"— defined and selected according to the purposive ideas in their minds— than he proceeded to split it upon the question whether people of a certain type should be allowed to consider themselves members. In forming his revolutionary party, Lenin identified and excluded another type of revolutionist whose attitude he described as the "Infantile Disease of Leftism". At the time when Lenin formed his party, practically all the "Infantile Leftists" in Russia were opposed to Marxism itself. Lenin generalizes the idea of history as determined by the development of the forces of production, in order to cover the Russian revolution. Bolshevism is an unconscious, and therefore incomplete, substitution of a practical science of revolution for that revolutionary philosophy of the universe which Marx created.