About Autonomism: Decisions from the First Zionist Socialist Workers Party Congress

Recognizing,

that any national political institution created on the basis of national autonomy in all its forms, is of value only to the extent that it answers a number of definite necessities—needs which touch on all sides of national life and are common to all classes of people;

that such institutions will have a solid basis, legal force, and therefore real political content only if the different classes of the nation are organically bound up in the productive process;

Recognizing further,

that the Jewish upper bourgeoisie and certain parts of the middle bourgeoisie are not bound up with the Jewish proletariat in the productive process;

that the Jewish proletariat in the diaspora can satisfy all of its national necessities, which do not include the national culture in its entirety, by means of the education of the working classes;

that only the Jewish working classes, who are kept in isolation from the process of production, are interested in the Yiddish language as the language of education, while the social, economic, cultural, and political interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie oblige them to struggle against the Yiddish language in the interest of the local language or of Hebrew;

that the entire social, economic, cultural, and political life of the peoples among whom it is scattered, obliges the Jewish proletariat to learn the local language in addition to its own mother tongue;

that the institutions which are needed in order to satisfy these requirements of the Jewish proletariat cannot, as a result of the economic situation of the Jewish people, receive any real political power;

The Assembly finds,

that national autonomy in the form of a political Seym [Jewish Parliament] is a reactionary dream on the part of certain elements of the Jewish bourgeoisie, who, having only recently awakened to political life as a result of the great Russian Revolution [of 1905], feel that the power of the [tsarist] antisemitic regime is still strong enough so that they will be able to occupy an appropriate place in the general political life of the country and strive therefore to create via the Seym a political platform for their bourgeois-assimilationist and reactionary nationalist goals;

that national autonomy in the form of a cultural Seym, which would in the last analysis have to divide into separate school systems according to the social elements that belong to it, has no basis in the national and cultural life of the Jewish people,

And finally,

that national-cultural autonomism, by attempting to provide a cultural and idealistic answer to the social and economic problem of the Jewish masses, substitutes an ethical radicalism for revolutionary socialism and diverts the Jewish proletariat from its true movement of liberation.