Now let us examine the present situation from the point of view of Paris or Vienna. At once the whole picture changes. Besides the Pravdists and liquidators, we see no less than five Russian groups claiming membership of one and the same Social-Democratic Party: Trotsky’s group, two Vperyod groups, the “pro-Party Bolsheviks” and the “pro-Party Mensheviks”.[6] All Marxists in Paris and in Vienna (for the purpose of illustration I take two of the largest centres) are perfectly well aware of this.
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Take a period of two full years—1912 and 1913. As everybody knows, this was a period of the revival and upswing of the working-class movement, when every trend or tendency of a more or less mass character (and in politics this mass character alone counts) could not but exercise some influence on the Fourth Duma elections, the strike movement, the legal newspapers, the trade unions, the insurance election campaign, and so on. Throughout those two years, not one of these five groups abroad asserted itself in the slightest degree in any of the activities of the mass working-class movement in Russia just enumerated!
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It cannot be denied that some of the groups which, like Trotsky’s, really exist exclusively from the Vienna-Paris, but by no means from the Russian, point of view, possess a degree of definiteness
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This example should serve the Russian “advanced workers”, with whom Trotsky has good reason to be so displeased, as a striking illustration of the lengths to which the groups in Vienna and Paris—who persuaded even Kautsky that there was “no Party” in Russia—go in their ludicrous project-mongering. But if it is some times possible to fool foreigners on this score, the Russian “advanced workers” (at the risk of provoking the terrible Trotsky to another outburst of displeasure) will laugh in the faces of these project-mongers.
It seems that he's talking about Russian emigre/exile socialists in Western & Central Europe. The "abroad" here seems to be less in the sense of some kind of shady NED-type thing (which is how it sounded to me at first), but more so socialists who haven't been to Russia in a long while, are completely unaware of and uninvolved in the development of the working class movement in Russia, and yet are apparently really opinionated on it (turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same, Western leftists have been doing this shit since fucking forever).
I really don't know much about the pre-revolution history of socialism in Russia though, Lenin's dropping cool-sounding party names like "the liquidators", "the Machists" and "the Iskrists", which are completely alien to me. Apparently Russia had a whole lot of groups like this:
Such types are characteristic of the flotsam of past historical formations, of the time when the mass, working-class movement in Russia was still dormant, and when every group had “ample room” in which to pose as a trend, group or faction, in short, as a “power”, negotiating amalgamation with others.
It seems that he's talking about Russian emigre/exile socialists in Western & Central Europe. The "abroad" here seems to be less in the sense of some kind of shady NED-type thing (which is how it sounded to me at first), but more so socialists who haven't been to Russia in a long while, are completely unaware of and uninvolved in the development of the working class movement in Russia, and yet are apparently really opinionated on it (turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same, Western leftists have been doing this shit since fucking forever).
I really don't know much about the pre-revolution history of socialism in Russia though, Lenin's dropping cool-sounding party names like "the liquidators", "the Machists" and "the Iskrists", which are completely alien to me. Apparently Russia had a whole lot of groups like this: