The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

[4] Lenin first confronts the so-called economist trend in Russian social democracy that followed the line of Eduard Bernstein.

[3]: 30  He explains that Bernstein's positions were opportunist, a point expressed by the French socialist Alexandre Millerand as in taking a post in a bourgeois government.

[6]Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin writes that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness"; that is, combining into trade unions and so on.

Lenin states that Karl Marx and Engels themselves, the very founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.