The Russian Revolution полностью

In the summer of 1895 he traveled abroad and met with Plekhanov and the other veterans of the Social-Democratic movement. He was told it was a profound mistake to reject the “bourgeoisie”: “We turn our faces to the liberals,” Plekhanov said, “whereas you turn your back.”⁴³ Akselrod argued that in any joint action with the “liberal bourgeoisie” the Social-Democrats would not lose control because they would retain “hegemony” in the joint struggle, guiding and manipulating their temporary allies in a direction that best served their own interests.

Lenin, who worshipped Plekhanov, was impressed. How deeply he was convinced cannot be determined: but it is a demonstrable fact that upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1895 he made the debut as an orthodox Social-Democrat, committed to organizing workers for the struggle against the autocracy in a common front with the “liberal bourgeoisie.” The change was striking: in the summer of 1894, he had written that socialism and democracy were incompatible; now he argued that they were inseparable.⁴⁴ Russia in his eyes was no longer a capitalist but a semi-feudal country, and the main enemy of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie allied with the autocracy but the autocracy itself. The bourgeoisie—at any rate, its progressive element—was an ally of the working class:

The Social-Democratic Party declares that it will support all the strata of the bourgeoisie engaged in the struggle against the autocratic government.… The democratic struggle is inseparable from the socialist one; [it is] impossible to wage a successful fight for the cause of labor without the attainment of full liberty and the democratization of Russia’s political and social regime.⁴⁵

Conspiracy and coup d’état he now dismissed as impracticable. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lenin’s change of heart on the role of the “liberal bourgeoisie” was firmly anchored in the premise, stated by Akselrod, that in the campaign against the autocracy the revolutionary socialists would lead and the bourgeoisie follow.

After his return from abroad, Lenin established desultory contact with labor circles that were leading a precarious existence in the capital. He did some tutoring in Marxist theory, but he did not much care for educational work and he gave it up after a worker whom he was initiating into Das Kapital walked off with his overcoat.⁴⁶ He preferred to organize workers for action. At the time, there operated in St. Petersburg a circle of Social-Democratic intellectuals which maintained contact with individual workers as well as the Central Workers’ Circle, formed by the workers themselves for purposes of mutual aid and self-improvement. Lenin joined the Social-Democratic circle, but involved himself in its work only late in 1895 when it adopted the technique of “agitation” formulated by Jewish socialists in Lithuania. To overcome the workers’ aversion to politics, the “agitational” technique called for inciting industrial strikes based on the workers’ economic (i.e., non-political) grievances. It was believed that once the workers saw how the government and the forces of order invariably sided with the proprietors of the affected enterprises, they would realize it was impossible to satisfy their economic grievances without a change in the political regime. This realization would politicize labor. Lenin, who learned of the “agitational” technique from Martov, joined in the distribution among St. Petersburg workers of agitational material which explained to the workers their rights under the law and showed how these rights were being violated by the employers. The output was meager, and the effect on the workers doubtful: but when in May 1896, 30,000 textile workers in the capital went on a spontaneous strike, the Social-Democrats had cause for jubilation.

By then Lenin and his comrades were in jail, having been arrested in the winter of 1895–96 for incitement to strikes. Nevertheless, Lenin felt that the “agitational” method of struggle had vindicated itself: “The struggle of workers with factory owners for their daily needs,” he wrote in the wake of the textile strike, “of itself and inevitably suggests to the workers problems of state and politics.”⁴⁷ The task of the party Lenin defined as follows:

The Russian Social-Democratic Party declares its task to be helping the struggle of the Russian working class by developing labor’s class consciousness, assisting its organization, and showing it the real goals of the struggle.… The task of the party is not to invent in its head some fashionable methods of helping the workers, but to join the labor movement, to illuminate it, to help the workers in the struggle which they have already begun to wage themselves.⁴⁸