Workers' Liberty

Introduction, by Sean Matgamna: How “many ideas to few people” serves mass agitation. Earlier articles have recounted the pre-history of the Russian Marxist movement in revolutionary populism. Before we go on to describe the work of the first Russian Marxist groups, the Group for the Emancipation of Labour and later its offshoot, the Iskra/Zarya group, we will first ask, with George Plekhanov: what is the socialist movement, and what do socialists do? Plekhanov, the pioneer of the Russian Marxist movement, answered this fundamental question in his 1891 text The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats in the Famine. This is one of the basic documents of Russian socialism and we print part of it here.

"The task of our revolutionary intelligentsia therefore comes, in the opinion of the Russian Social Democrats, to the following: they must adopt the views of modern scientific socialism, spread them among the workers and, with the help of the workers, storm the stronghold of autocracy. The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as the revolutionary movement of the workers. There is not and cannot be any other way out for us."
George Valentinovich Plekhanov, speaking at the Founding Congress of the Second International in Paris, July 1889

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism

"The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers' group."

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism

Populism "denied a future to Russian capitalism. The proletariat was assigned no independent role at all in the revolution. It happened accidentally, however, that propaganda designed in its content for the villages found a sympathetic response only in the cities... assembling only the intelligentsia and some individual industrial workers".

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles

"The question of the city workers is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decision of the revolutionary leaders".
G V Plekhanov, in the journal of Zemlya i Volya

The history of the beginnings of a labour movement in Russia is a subordinate part of the history of populism. The first Russian labour movement was a populist movement. It was initiated by populists who "went to the people" in the cities. It was made up of workers whose political outlook was populist.

By John O'Mahony

In the first instalment of this series I traced in broad outline the populist revolutionary environment in which Russian Marxism emerged.

In the mid 19th century a great wave of radical, leftist, people-oriented - "populist" - rebellion developed among the educated youth of Russia. In 1874-6 the populists "went to the people" in the countryside with revolutionary socialist propaganda and failed.

By John O'Mahony

The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head.

Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914).