Beginnings of Bolshevism

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Lenin and the Russian workers' Revolutior Local revolutionary cirles were the first form of Marxist organisation in Russia. Above: Lenin (centre with a group in St Petersburg, 1895 f Bolsh ar WC be ha h 10 19th va be lut do orI Vo sp rej 2 žž99 years ago this week the Russian workers took power. What made their caused the First of a series of icles by Andrew Hornung John O'Mahon THE Russian revolutiony movement will be victious as a movement of orkers. There is and can ' no alternative"

What astonishment must ive registered in that st, backward prison ruse of nations and oples, that perma-frost ock on progress, that was th century Russia, at ese words of George ekhanov, spoken in 1889. For Russia in those days is a country with a tiny orking class numbering out one million, while ere were over a hundred illion peasants. It was this st peasant mass that had en looked to as the revotionary class by the then minant revolutionary ganisation, Narodnaya ılya (Narodniks).

Plekhanov's words exessed the historic perective of Marxism on the irking class, and were & jection of the views of the trodniks.

Lenin was then only 19. • had already read arx's Capital and begun ground himself seriously its scientific method.

Born in the provincial wn of Simbirsk, into the nily of a schools adminiator, Lenin was no anger to revolutionary as other than Marzism. s brother Alexander bad en banged in 1887 for uning the essentination be TsIr. He had been i aber of the liarada If saace.

was crystallising the proletariat, the modern working class.

He also criticised the tactics of the Narodniks, who sent out heroic and isolated revolutionaries with guns and bombs to act in the name of 'the People' and assassinate the hated representatives of Tsarist tyranny.

What he had to say in the course of fighting these terrorist tactics is particularly instructive for us today. "We have never rejected terrorism on principle, nor can we do so... The point is however, terror is advocated [by the Narodniks] not as one of the operations the army in the field must carry out in close connection and in complete harmony with the whole system of fighting, but as an individual attack, completely separated from any army whatsoever. In view of the absence of a central revolutionary organisation, terror cannot be anything but that' This was the period when the new Russian working class, recently driven into the factories from the countryside, revolted against their conditions and against Tsarist tyranny, with wave upon wave of mass, illegal Even the savage Tsarist repression failed to quell the movement of the workers, which was spontaneous and lacking in any stable organisation. Trade were of course illegal.

There were also groups of insetterprats who had impotec the ideas of Marz20I Dex Rassia from Viest. = Lirape These sumed ! a de test d eiding mE a je zoe ié jeme e TT =L :35€ jese saretec abraad contact the emigre 'Emancipation of Labour Group' and learn about developments in the West European movement.

The Emancipation of Labour Group comprised the oldest generation of Russian Marxists, like Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich and Deutsch, and was the powerhouse of Russian Marxist analysis and propaganda.

With them, he arrange for the pubiication of t miscellany, 'Rabotnik' (Worker). Returning Russia, he arranged its he autumn 10t in St Petersburg the League for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and arranged for the publication of a'new illegal paper, Rabochye Dyelo.

But just as the proofs for the paper were finally being checked, Lenin and most of the other members of the League were arrested.

After a period in jail Lenin was sent into exile in Eastern Siberia. Here he was joined by his comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya. They were married in 1896.

Neither jail nor exile meant silence or inactivity. This was a period of intense political study, the monument to which is the massive work, The DevelopBuesia, Of Capitalion ment But he was cut off from the working class, and unable to carry out the urgent task of building a working class revolutionary organisation. From the time of his release in 1900 he concentrated his entire energy on this.

His firs ides was to break with tbe isolated stie mat. in which SECREE Eope of Marz. = Irainda exissed is Deepend I TOR TI Me dis jar al cratic movement (Marzisin was called Social Democracy until 1914). This centralism was to prefigure the unification and ideological independence of the working class.

Again he travelled abroad, realising that the paper would have to be produced outside Russia owing to the ciose police supervision there of their every move. At the end of 1900 this work bore its first fruit with the appearance of 'Iskra' (The Spark), and then in January of the following year a journal, 'Zarya' (Dawn), was produced.

Now he set about that work that was to lead to a breakthrough in Marxist thinking, and in its practical effects was to become one of his most important and most characterist contributions to Marxism as a revolutionary force: the organisation of the Russian workers' revolutionary drive into a fighting lithough an attempt t found 8 vor cee made in 1898 while he was in exile, it had collapsed almost immediately when nearly all the delegates to the founding conference were arrested soon after it.

The period from 1894 to the first Congress of the Party in 1898 had been, in Lenin's own words, one in which Social Democracy appeared "as a social movement, as a rising of the masses of the people and as a political party"

Even the Zubatov 'unions' - so-called because they were 'unions' organised by the police chief Zubator - 'led' strikes, even general strikes, in large cities, so great was the spontaneous will to struggle of the working class.

But if Social Democracy uppeared som as a political Pes i nas a policical JE I ibe aid sense: in Use dée united for ITIE SAMOR DNICAS. 500 c ag 507 a iese sogetbes. Lenin madier. stood, borever, thes wbas was wanted was a party of a new type': something that broke out of the scattered, restricted work of the Marxist educational and leaflet-distributing circles and became a factor on the national political scene, enabling the working class in turn to unite organisationally and ideologically.

This party of a new type' had to combine the features of an organisationally secure unity capable of escaping detection by the secret police and of a politically trained and unified group capable of directing struggles surely and singlemindedly.

The period of the rise of working class struggle in the '90s was, however, also the period of the rise of the theory of 'economism' , the view that economic, trade union struggles of workers were in themselves an adequate basis for the political struggle of the working class, leaving the sphere of the political struggle to the domination of the bourgeoisie.

All Marxists then agreed that the first revolution in Russia would be a bourgeois revolution. The 'economist' approach meant surrendering the working class in politics to the leadership of that bourgeoisie, while the socialists concentrated on trade unionism and general propaganda.

The inevitable separation between 'economic struggle' and 'political struggle' that this entailed made economism the at first unwitting, and later conscious, ally of the revisionism that had just reared its head in Germany. The reviM00ists wantea wo trans- •dad damn on form Social Democracy from a movement to overthrow capitaliam into one aiming merely to achieve reforms.

I the famous book •Whee is to be Dose. Lesia curtised a fra cret. s0 is speak of the tear. of was sod role of be pas Pasted in 1902. this book developed ideas atready set out in • Where to Begin' (1901) and Letter to a St Petersburg' The book showed how a central revolutionary organisation based on a scientific programme could both link together the fragmented struggles of the working class and also link the struggles of that class on a whole series of fronts and around a great variety of objectives. It would do this by forging out of these disparate struggles an organisational and ideological unity which would be a crystal of the true character of the proletariat.

This struggle to protect the purity of the proletarian character of the revolutionary movement was concentrated within the revoLutony are But it had Leon relationship to th to movement outside.

'The stronger our Party organisations are, consisting of real Social Democrats, and the less wavering and instability there is within the Party, the broader, the more varied, the richer and more fertile will be the influence of the Party on the elements of the working class masses surrounding it and guided by it"

In backward however, Asiatic Russia, however where the peasantry, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie of both the town and the countryside, as well as the working class, were oppressed classes, there was a great danger that the working Class movement would fall under the domination of these far more numerous classes.

The struggle against false ideas developing in and around the workers' movement nao to be coupt- and Lad de La macul ed with an equally determined struggle against the external class influences.

With the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 came an even greater sharpening of differences within the RSDLP. Ranged against Lenin were all those who understood a 'party' to be, as in the old sense of the word, simply the side.

Such a conception wa entirely inadequate to th founding of a 'party' whos practice and programm was based on an underlyin scientific theory, whos members would have to b steeled, dedicated, and pol itically trained. Lenin har to fight against many o his one-time collaborator: to establish his ideas.

He won, but his victor was shortlived: though hi Bolshevik (majority) factior triumphed over the Men. sheviks (minority) at the Congress, the defection ol Plekhanov soon afterwards to Menshevism put Lenin in the minority. He resigned from the Editorial Board of Iskra.

Thus began a long anc bitter struggle in which he fought not only his close collaborators of the pre. vious period such as Mart. ov and Potresov, but also his teacher Plekhanov. He began to build up a faction that was finally to emerge in 1912 as the Bolshevik The split in 1903 is referred to in vulgar Stalinist legend as already exhibiting in fully developed form all the distinguishing traits of both Bolshevism and Menshevism, traits which led the two factions to line up on different sides of the class barricades in the revolution of 1917. In reality it was no more than their prefigurement.

A whole series of experiences, struggles, reunifi. cations, new splits and the interchange of personnel was necessary before the final crystallisation of the two tendencies.

Many of the active workers in Russia rallied to Tenin against the 'anarchic' behaviour of the emigre Menshevik intellectuals who had overturned the conference decisions. The debates of this period were anticipations of the burning probiems of the revolution. • The approach of the great storm was felt everywhere. All classes were in a state of ferment and preparation"

Continued next week

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Socialist' Órganiser no: 108 November I1 1982 Page 11

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