16
PETER WEISS
PRISONER 1: Is that right what they say in the
Iskra?
Workers can't
rebel on their own. Need leadership. So the intellectuals must plan
it for them.
PRISONER 2: Revolution starts in the streets.
PRISONER 1: Our planners. Local heroes. Students. Go out to the sub–
urbs. Collect a few workers. Try to tell us how to take over our own
factories . And don't know one end of a machine from the other.
MRACHKOVSKY: Yet everything grinds to a halt the moment the stu–
dents are arrested. Or even go off on holiday. Not a murmur from
below.
PRISONER 1: A handful of wise guys. What good have they ever done
us? Churning out a few socialist ideas of their own. They haven't
got through to the masses.
TROTSKY: You're suspicious of the students. It's true, they come from
the middle classes. Where else? They're the only ones with the means
and the time to read and learn. The worker sweats out his eleven or
twelve hours a day. At the end has no energy left for learning. But
think what is really happening. For the first time students are not
using their knowledge
to
get themselves a comfortable place among
their own class. They're turning it against the society that raised them.
A bourgeois revolution beginning. Students taking sides with the work–
ers. That means they're prepared to go on to the next stage, to the
revolution of the proletariat. That's why we need political leadership,
a party. To push
this
revolution on, to secure power for the workers.
PRISONER 1: You're still intellectuals. How many workers read your
poems, Dzerzhinsky? Do they read your learned tracts, Bronstein?
DZERZHINSKY: What does it matter where revolutionaries come from?
In the struggle for a classless society they soon learn to forget their
families. And one day it will be the sons and daughters of the work–
ers who go to the universities.
ALEXANDRA: What have you got against intellectuals? Aren't they shut
up here too in Verkholensk? Isn't it work to print and distribute il–
legal pamphlets? To agitate? To build an organization?
MAKHAISKY: Organization is the beginning of the end.
TROTSKY: The strikes - they show the fight has really begun. But eco–
nomic struggle isn't political struggle. The individual cells inside the
factories must be brought together.
MAKHAISKY: And that puts an end to spontaneous movement. Look
at Germany: it's the party that's strong there. A bunch of opportun–
ists, starting with their Bernstein. No power for the workers, but al–
liance with the middle class. Not revolution, but liberalism.
LUZIN: All those theorizers sitting outside. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov,
