Our Political Tasks

Neglect of the Tasks of Autonomous Activity of the Proletariat: The Heritage of the Iskra¹ Period

Many, far too many comrades remain deaf and blind to the questions we have just raised. This deafness and blindness are not individual, chance faults, but characteristics arising as tendencies during the period of ideological liquidation, of “Economism” and “craft dilettantism.” Many Iskra-ists must become clearly conscious of these faults and “eliminate” them, and the sooner the better.

We, the Iskra-ists, have always been inclined to view the Party as the technical agency of the paper, and to identify the content of all the political works of our Party, with the content of our press alone.

Without taking stock of the “minority’s” energetic attempts to put an end to this narrow outlook, Comrade Lenin, in his latest pamphlet, attempts once more to reduce the problem of the content of our Party’s work to that of the content of its programme, or even of a few issues of Iskra (see One Step Forward). In this Comrade Lenin remains formally loyal to the traditions of [his iconic 1902 article—Eds.] What Is to Be Done? And in part to the traditions of the old Iskra. But Vernunft wird Unsinn (Reason becomes Unreason). This identification of the Party with its paper—which made some sense organizationally in relation to the given tasks of the preceding period—today turns into an extremely reactionary residue.

The problematic of the new period is defined by the contradiction between, on the one hand, the theoretical foundations of the Party, worked out in its writings in the course of the past period and formulated in its programme, and on the other hand the political content of the impact of the Party on the proletariat, and the influence of the proletariat on all the political groupings of society. To overcome this contradiction is the task placed on the agenda in Axelrod’s “notes,” and this is what gives meaning to the struggle of the “minority” against the narrow-mindedness, limitations and political formalism of the “majority.” To say as Lenin does that we are in the Social Democratic Party because we have a social democratic programme is to take a purely bureaucratic way out of a problem which may become fatal for our Party. Our programme, in theory, has not progressed one step in relation to that of the “Emancipation of Labour” Group worked out twenty years ago; but the forms of action in which our Party operates within society have become both richer and more complex.

Vernunft wird Unsinn [Reason becomes irrationality—Eds.]! The extremely primitive organisational “plans” put forward by the author of What Is to Be Done? which occupied an insignificant place in the whole realm of ideas, but which, as propagated by Iskra and Zarya² were nonetheless an undeniable factor for progress, reappear three years later in the work of their “epigone,” the author [Lenin] of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, as a furious attempt to prevent Social Democracy from being fully itself.

The old Iskra, as we said above, fought directly for influence over the revolutionary intelligentsia, so as to subjugate it to the political programme of the proletariat, which it had drawn up in a very vigorous way. Such a struggle has its own methods. Its only arm is literary polemics; for literary life is the specific milieu in which the Russian intelligentsia not only learns but also lives. It is in and through literature that the professionally “intelligent” intelligentsia adheres to the political principles of a given class. The plan of Iskra was to create a theoretical and political organ and group around it the revolutionary elements to be won to the cause of the proletariat. Iskra was a political platform and at the same time a weapon—essentially for struggle against the political “prejudices” of the intelligentsia. The content of the Party’s work was effectively identified with the content of Iskra—if you abstract from (and indeed everything was made in abstract) the immediate work in the proletariat, work which anyway was moving further and further away from the basic tasks and duties of the Party. Lenin’s “organisational plan” was not of course a revelation but—if one tries not to see his Letter to a Petersburg Comrade, his article Where to Begin? or even his book What Is to Be Done? as exercises of a bureaucratic pen—a good answer to the following question: where to begin, what is to be done is to assemble the scattered members of the future organisation of the Party and thus make it possible to establish broader political tasks? The way in which this organisation, once built, would acquit itself of its basic tasks, was of course evaded. I repeat, the so-called “organisational plan” concerned not so much the edifice of the Party itself, as the “scaffolding” necessary to build it (cf. What Is to Be Done, p. 221).

The Second Congress, during which the “minority” could only put forward certain tactical questions very hastily (and in any case they attracted little serious attention, because the “main” thing had been done: Iskra was consolidated and the Central Committee subordinated to it), the Second Congress, with its plan of “orthodox theocracy” was a reactionary attempt to extend to the whole of the Party—in saecula saeculorum—the methods of work and forms of relationship which has shown their utility in the limited field of struggle against “Economism” and “craft dilettantism,” in order to create a centralised organization of professional Social Democratic revolutionaries. But congresses, however sovereign they may be, are no better able to halt the unfolding of history than absolute monarchs.

Against its will the Second Congress has become the instrument of new pretensions. It wished only to consolidate the gains of the period of “liquidation,” in fact, it has opened a new period, and has made us discover a whole universe of new tasks. And demonstrating the internal logic of the succession of these periods, the new tasks only flow specifically from our old basic problematic, which only now, thanks above all to the work of the old Iskra, is presented to us in a genuine, immediate form: the development of the consciousness and autonomous activity of the class of the proletariat.

This is however something more than we have done up to now. To resolve this problematic immediately, it is not enough to oppose in theory the principles of the proletarian class to the principles of the bourgeoisie. It is indispensable politically to oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.