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V. I. Lenin
STATEMENT OF THE EDITORS
OF PROLETARY
Proletary, No. 21
February 26 (13), 1908
Published according
to the text in Proletary
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1972First printing 1962
Second printing 1972Vol. 13, p. 447.
Translated from the Russian by Bernard Isaacs
Edited by Clemens Dutt
Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@marx2mao.org (October 2001)
page 447
STATEMENT OF THE EDITORS
OF PROLETARY
In Neue Zeit, No. 20, in the foreword by an unknown translator of A. Bogdanov's article on Ernst Mach, we read the following: "Russian Social-Democracy, unfortunately, reveals a strong tendency to making this or that attitude towards Mach a question of factional division within the party. Grave tactical differences of opinion between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are aggravated by a controversy on a question, which, in our opinion, has no bearing whatever on these differences, namely, whether Marxism, from the point of view of theory, is compatible with the teaching of Spinoza and Holbach, or of Mach and Avenarius."
In this connection the Editorial Board of Proletary, as the ideological spokesman of the Bolshevik trend, deems it necessary to state the following. Actually, this philosophical controversy is not a factional one and, in the opinion of the Editorial Board, should not be so; any attempt to represent these differences of opinion as factional is radically erroneous. Both factions contain adherents of the two philosophical trends.