For Lenin, the December movement in Moscow demonstrates that the general strike, as a predominant mode of struggle, is outmoded: “the movement is breaking out of these narrow bounds with elemental and irresistible force and giving rise to the highest form of struggle—an uprising.” He argues that even as the unions and revolutionary parties “intuitively felt” that the strike they called for December 7 should grow into an uprising, they weren’t prepared for this; they spoke of it as something remote. At the same time, a general strike was already contained within the parameters of the expected. The government was ready for the strike, organizing its countermeasures accordingly. These counterrevolutionary measures on the part of the government pushed the masses of people to insurrection. As the government escalated its repression, “the unorganized street crowds, quite spontaneously and hesitatingly, set up the first barricade.” Lenin traces the move from strike, to isolated barricades, to the “mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops.” At each point, the revolutionary movement compels the reaction to further violence, further attack, further extension and exhaustion of its troops. The workers demand more resolute action: “what is to be done next?” The Social Democratic leaders are left behind, perhaps because they are arguing over what is to be done even as the revolutionary masses have already destroyed the previous setting of action and are rapidly creating a new one.
Lenin’s excoriating critique of Plekhanov puts “into consistency the haste of the cause,” that is, it retroactively assigns consistency to the revolutionary workers in anticipation of the certainty of their ultimate victory. Lenin writes:
Thus, nothing could be more short-sighted than Plekhanov’s view, seized upon by all the opportunists, that the strike was untimely and should not have been started, and that “they should not have taken to arms”. On the contrary, we should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively; we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine things to a peaceful strike and that a fearless and relentless armed fight was necessary. And now we must at last openly and publicly admit that political strikes are inadequate; we must carry on the widest agitation among the masses in favour of an armed uprising and make no attempt to obscure this question by talk about “preliminary stages”, or to befog it in any way.
Plekhanov failed to respond to the masses as subject; he failed to note how their haste brought into being another phase of political conflict. What if the party had not lagged behind the workers? As he makes the party the subject support of the revolutionary people, Lenin makes it responsive to the lessons they teach.
In a passage evocative of descriptions of the March 18, 1871 crowd event that made way for the Commune, Lenin praises the crowd:
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