John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The redefinitions of Marxism suggested by Bookchin, Albert, Bahro and Gorz, and latterly by Lowy, Kovel and other eco-socialists, emerged from the failure of Leninism to produce a democratic socialism or to transcend capitalism’s productivist economic model. In the late 19th century Bernstein, without fully understanding what he was doing, laid the groundwork for such a revisionist critique. To the fury of dogmatic Marxists he attacked the theory at its point of pride–that it was a science akin to Darwinism, a unique paradigm shift amounting to a separate academic discipline. Bernstein denied this was so and claimed that a rigorous reformist socialism–i.e. a programme based on realistic plans for economic regulation–was in fact more scientific than the abstractions of Marxist political economy.

The utility and necessity of reformist socialism arose from the industrialised and urbanised capitalism of Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century. But Imperial Russia was several decades behind this process and openings for political reform did not exist. Resistance to the gross inhumanity of early capitalism in Russia was a mixture of ferocious trade union organising and the occasional riot in the face of brutal state repression. The Russian labour and trade union movement may have been in its infancy, but it was already following Marx’s prescriptions for resistance to working inhumanely long hours in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.

In Capital, Volume I , Marx pointed out that although there may seem to be a voluntary exchange of contracts between worker and owners in a free market, the imbalance of power was such that workers were inevitably exploited. The first step to resistance therefore had to be securing strong employment regulation and restrictions on working time. As Marx wrote in the “Working Day” chapter:

The labourers must put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ comes the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day, which shall make clear when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. 17

One of the most significant examples of this kind of trade union organising arose from the General Union of Jewish Workers, known as the Bund.

In the mid-19th century most of the four million Jews within the Russian Empire’s borders were confined to the Pale of Settlement, which stretched from Poland and Lithuania to Ukraine and the Black Sea. In the 1860s and 1870s, Alexander II began to reform the Empire’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws by allowing certain categories of Jews (merchants, doctors, craftsmen and ex-soldiers) to move beyond the Pale. Jews were allowed to enter the civil service and attend universities, and Jewish communities began to appear in St Petersburg and Moscow. But the accession of Alexander III saw a reappearance of mass pogroms, a ban on Jews working for the government and a restriction of the number of Jewish students.

The most significant change was a ban on Jews working the land. This inevitably pushed them into the cities of the Pale and created a large Jewish working class. By 1897 there were an estimated 105,000 Jewish urban workers in the Russian Empire, mainly in the big cities of Warsaw, Vilno, Lodz, Minsk, Grodno and Białystok. Between 1897 and 1910, the total Jewish urban population leapt to over three million. The result was the creation of the Bund, a trade union and political party which was an “organic emergence out of existing working class networks” 18in those cities.

The Bund had its own democratic structures, a popular newspaper and paid full-time organisers. It was one of the founding bodies of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903. It also rejected Zionism, which it called “emigrationism”, and the idea that there was a World Jewry with common problems. At the same time, it insisted that the issues faced by the Jewish proletariat within the Empire must be addressed primarily by Jewish organisations. There was an obvious contradiction here. On the one hand the Bund dismissed the idea that it had a common interest with, say, rich French Jews, but it considered all Russian Jews a nationality and it wanted a Russian Revolution to deliver autonomy for all the Empire’s oppressed nationalities, including its own. Yet for a time it led the way in providing a model of grassroots industrial organising for all the Russian working class. 19

In late-19th-century Russia this kind of activism arose from the work of Jewish trade unionists in Vilno that became known as the Vilno Programme. At the end of the 19th century Jews comprised nearly 60% of the urban population of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus. In 1891 Alexander III expelled all Jews from St Petersburg and Moscow, leading to an upsurge of radical political organisation in cities such as Vilno, Warsaw and Riga. In 1892 the disparate socialist groups in Poland came together to form the Polish Socialist Party. This would attract far more support from Polish workers (both Jewish and Catholic) than would the Marxist Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania group, formed in 1893 on Rosa Luxemburg’s initiative, which denied the necessity of a separate struggle for Polish independence.

The Bund adopted a socialist political programme which sought to improve the lot of Jewish workers inside the Empire. It campaigned for the recognition of Yiddish, full legal and cultural rights for Jewish citizens, and political liberalisation. The Vilno Programme, which pre-dated the creation of the Bund, derived from the efforts of Jewish social democrats such as Alexander Kremer to break out of propagandising for Marxism with small groups of “advanced workers” and to bring their ideas to the mass of common workers. To do this they decided to drop abstruse discussion of Marxist philosophy and concentrate on agitating for legal reforms and employment rights.

One of the key figures behind the Vilno Programme was the 22 year-old Marxist revolutionary Julius Martov. Although the basic ideas were those of the older Praktiki (practical men) Kremer and Gozhansky, Martov wrote them up in a pamphlet called On Agitation . The pamphlet quickly “acquired the status of a handbook of social-democratic action”. 20For the first time it placed the politically conscious worker at the centre of events, rather than as the recipient of academic wisdom handed down to him by bourgeois intellectuals. Its goal was to link political analysis to the everyday needs of the urban worker, and by doing so “destroy his faith in a paternalist employer and his subservience to a paternalist state, and to turn him into a conscious and organised enemy of both”. 21To achieve this, revolutionaries should immerse themselves in the life of the worker in factory, dock or train yard, and be acutely aware of specific industrial struggles around pay and conditions.

In taking concrete steps to implement such a programme, Martov was far ahead of the other Marxists in St Petersburg and Moscow still sunk in the academic grind of the “study circles”. In the aftermath of the 1891 famine even Plehkanov had argued for a shift of political work to agitation. In On the Tasks of Socialists During the Famine in Russia he wrote that Marxists must take up demands of more immediate relevance to the working classes, and “all–even the most backward workers–will be clearly convinced that the carrying out of socialist measures is of value to the working class”. 22At the time the Marxists of St Petersburg ignored his call. It was in the heavily Jewish parts of the Russian Empire such as Poland and Lithuania that it found a receptive audience, where working-class trade union organisation was far in advance of St Petersburg. Even in 1907, two years after the revolution of 1905, only 7% of St Petersburg’s workers were organised in trade unions, whereas in Vilno it was 24%, in Minsk between 25-40%, and in Gomel over 40%. 23