Lenin wrote this book in the middle of a revolution, and it reads like it. It was drafted in June and July 1905, in the Geneva exile of the defeated, while Russia burned: Bloody Sunday in January had shattered the myth of the good Tsar, strikes and peasant risings were spreading, and the battleship Potemkin mutinied in the very weeks Lenin was correcting proofs. The pamphlet appeared in Geneva that July. Its immediate occasion was a quarrel inside a broken party. The Russian Social-Democrats had split in 1903, and in the spring of 1905 the two halves met separately — the Bolsheviks at their Third Congress in London, the Mensheviks at a rival "Conference" in Geneva — and passed opposing resolutions on the same question: what should Marxists do in a revolution that was, on any orthodox reckoning, a bourgeois one? Much of the book is a line-by-line comparison of those two sets of resolutions. Beneath the exegesis lies the argument that would define Bolshevism.
The Mensheviks reasoned mechanically from the textbook. If the coming revolution was bourgeois-democratic, then the bourgeoisie must lead it; the workers' party should stay in opposition, push from below, and wait for a later, separate, socialist revolution once capitalism had matured. Lenin's answer was that this schema handed the revolution to a class that did not want it. The Russian liberal bourgeoisie, tied by a thousand threads to the landlords and the throne, was "inconsistent, self-seeking and cowardly in its support of the revolution," and would betray it the moment its own narrow interests were satisfied. The revolution could be carried through to a decisive victory only by another combination: the working class leading, and the peasant millions marching with it. "Only the proletariat can be a consistent fighter for democracy," Lenin wrote; "it may become a victorious fighter for democracy only if the peasant masses join its revolutionary struggle." Their victory he named the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." This is the living core of the book, and it has not aged: the insistence on the hegemony of the working class, its refusal to dissolve itself into a liberal coalition, its wager on the alliance of the workers and the rural poor. Against every version of tailing after a "progressive" bourgeoisie, Two Tactics is a manifesto of political independence.
It is honest to say where the book is dated, and the tradition from which this introduction is written has always said it. The particular formula — a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" that would carry through the democratic revolution and then, as a separate task, pass to socialism — Lenin himself abandoned. In April 1917, returning to a Russia where the workers' soviets and the bourgeois Provisional Government already stood face to face, he declared the old algebra obsolete and told the "old Bolsheviks" who still clung to it that the slogan belonged in the archive of pre-revolutionary antiques. The class content of 1917 — a proletariat taking power and being driven at once toward socialist measures — was closer to the "permanent revolution" that Trotsky had sketched in 1906 than to the staged sequence of 1905. On this one point Trotsky had seen further, and it does the memory of both men no service to pretend otherwise. What survived 1917 was not the formula but the method: proletarian leadership, distrust of the liberal, the worker-peasant bloc. And the deepest chapter of the book, the appendix on Marx's view of dictatorship, survived entirely. There Lenin recovered, against the "vulgar bourgeois" mind for which "the terms dictatorship and democracy are mutually exclusive," Marx's own understanding — that every state is the dictatorship of a class, and that the rule of the labouring majority is the most democratic dictatorship history has known.
Was the state that canonised this book faithful to it? Here the record turns bitter. Stalinism kept Two Tactics on every reading list and inverted its meaning. It seized on the "stages" — first the democratic revolution, then, much later, the socialist — and on the alliance with non-proletarian classes, and it quietly dropped the one thing that had given the book its soul: the political independence of the working class. The result was not Leninism but the Menshevism Lenin had fought in these very pages, resurrected and exported. In China in 1925–27 the Communist Party was ordered into the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang and subordinated to it — Bukharin's "bloc of four classes" — in the name of the democratic stage. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek turned on his communist allies and drowned the Shanghai workers in blood. The party that had been told to trust the national bourgeoisie was destroyed by it, exactly as Two Tactics had warned that the bourgeoisie would betray. Trotsky's response, in The Permanent Revolution and the writings on China, was to point out the obscene irony: the schema Lenin demolished in 1905 had been dressed in Lenin's own authority and used to lead a revolution to slaughter. The same stagist logic would later disarm the workers in Spain and, after 1945, tie communist parties across the colonial world to their own bourgeoisies. A book written to keep the proletariat from surrendering its leadership was made the charter of one surrender after another.
The lineage did not stop at the colonial world. In Western Europe the same stagism reached its settled form in Eurocommunism, where by the 1970s the Italian, French and Spanish parties made the partnership with the "progressive" bourgeoisie not a passing tactic but a strategy — a standing compromise in the joint management of the capitalist state, the "democratic stage" stretched out until it swallowed the socialist one entirely. Ernest Mandel, in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, followed that surrender back through the popular-front turn of 1935 to the abandonment of the proletarian independence this pamphlet was written to defend. What Lenin argued in 1905 against the Mensheviks had become, seventy years on, the standing argument against the parties that governed in his name.
That is what it means to introduce this text today. The Soviet edition in your hands — Volume 9 of Lenin's Collected Works, issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1962, in the translation of Abraham Fineberg and Julius Katzer — presents Two Tactics as a seamless anticipation of everything that followed, a founding document of an unbroken "Marxism-Leninism." The apparatus of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, thorough on chronology and citation, is silent on the two facts that matter most: that Lenin retired the book's central formula in 1917, and that the formula was afterwards revived to break the revolution in China. The canon needed the 1905 formula intact and timeless precisely because the living Lenin had moved past it and the dead Lenin could be made to authorise the stagism his epigones practised. The frozen text became a measure of the distance between the revolutionary and the state that embalmed him.
So read Two Tactics for what it is and refuse both of the readings pressed on it. It is not the Menshevik pamphlet its Stalinist admirers half-turned it into, and it is not a relic. It is a young revolutionary's insistence that the working class must lead in its own name, keep its own banner, trust no bourgeoisie to make its revolution for it, and build its power on the alliance of the exploited town and country. Read against the ossified "Marxism-Leninism" that flew its title while betraying its method, this small book from the Geneva of 1905 remains one of the sharpest arguments in the whole literature against the popular-front stagism that has cost the movement so dearly — and one of the clearest statements of why the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.