A Turning Point in the History of the Jewish Labor Movement

Speech delivered at the May meeting of agitators in Vilna in 1895.

Dear comrades!

Today, every group of the fighting proletariat has marked successes in its activities. It will be most appropriate to speak among you—the army’s advanced detachment, the detachment where this army’s leadership is concentrated, developing and implementing the movement’s program—about those victories which our movement has sustained in the sphere of consciousness and in the matter of explaining our own character and tactical objectives to ourselves. Thus, I want to speak here about what type of success our movement has achieved with regard to the self-awareness of its leading figures, primarily in this past year.

First and foremost, we should explain what type of successes we can talk about in this sense.

What can and cannot be considered a success in the development of the self-awareness of the proletariat’s representatives? It will be easy to answer this question if we recall exactly what we generally recognize as success: progress in the class movement. The success of the proletariat’s movement lies in its steady liberation from the economic and political yoke under which it finds itself in contemporary society. We are talking about the successes of the workers’ movement in the economic sphere, when, through the shortening of the workday, the organization of unions, and other means, the working class has increased its independence with respect to the ruling class; we are talking about the proletariat’s political successes, as it wins for itself one political right after another; when, through the election of its own representatives to legislative assemblies, it has increased its power to counter the bourgeoisie. Thus, by progress in the workers’ movement we mean the growing independence of the working class. Similarly, by success of the workers’ movement in the intellectual respect and growth in the working class’s self-awareness, we mean its liberation from the intellectual yoke to which the bourgeoisie has subjected it. You will agree that this explanation is correct if we just admit that in contemporary society the working class is in a state of intellectual as well as political and economic enslavement.

This intellectual enslavement consists in the fact that the proletariat experiences the influence of ideas and concepts that have grown up on the basis of bourgeois relations and that only serve to vindicate and consecrate these relations.

The concept of justice, morality, and religion—this is all created by representatives of the upper classes; all this is unconsciously adapted to the interests of the upper classes; and meanwhile all of this exerts a powerful influence on the enslaved classes.

Patriotism—the militant patriotism that strives to destroy and rampage the entire world in the interests of the homeland—that patriotism, as we well understand, arises on the basis of bourgeois relations. It is something different, being the expression of international competition among capitalists, so it is not surprising that the upper classes have been gripped by this patriotism. But the people, the very people who give their sweat and blood in this struggle—what benefit do they receive when they are carried away by patriotic feelings to the point of fanaticism? In this case, aren’t we seeing an example of people’s intellectual enslavement?

I will point to yet another very characteristic example of bourgeois ideas’ influence on the proletariat’s consciousness. In a developed capitalist society, where industry and trade, the means of communication, and credit stand at a high degree of development, economic prosperity inevitably requires full freedom of economic and civil life. Any type of oversight, any type of excessive monitoring, any type of constraint on individual energy restrains and constrains industry and trade.

In such a society, full freedom of competition among individual entrepreneurs comprises the economic ideal, and it is understandable that the views of the bourgeoisie’s educated segment are wholly determined by this ideal and that therefore the bourgeoisie’s intellectual representatives consider the highest, most just idea to be the idea of freedom, which they expand and generalize in such a way that in their understanding it is no longer freedom of trade and industry, or of competition, but freedom of the individual, and it is this idea they go on to apply to the political and religious sphere. According to these bourgeois idealists’ conviction, they stand for freedom of trade and industry because it is the consequence of the ideas of individual freedom. In fact, they stand for individual freedom because the social conditions of their era have put the vital necessity of freedom of competition in question. [ . . . ]

[T]he growth of the workers’ movement comprises the struggle not only for economic and political liberation but also for the overthrow of bourgeois ideas, for the creation of its own class theory and class program, for the development of what [Ferdinand] Lassalle called the idea of the workers’ estate. Therefore, moving on to our movement, I will set it as my goal to show in what respect we have moved ahead on the path to liberation from the influence of the ideas of the bourgeois order, on the path to class self-awareness, and I will set it as my goal to show that those changes which our young movement has experienced of late are progressive changes that respond to the growth in our intellectual independence.

Moving on now to a clarification of our movement’s theoretical successes, we should dwell on two interdependent successes: our movement has become, first of all, more democratic, and secondly, more materialist. The democratic character of the present period of our movement compared with the past consists in the fact that we have adapted our program, our tactics, and our struggle to the masses, in the fact that our main objective now is not agitation in our own circles but agitation among the masses, and finally, in the fact that the object of the influence we have in mind both in our daily work and in our holiday (May 1st) agitation is not the worker intellectual who stands out from his milieu for his intellectual abilities and his need for education but the average mass worker with average needs, average morals, and an average level of development.

The materialist character of our present-day movement as compared with the past movement lies in the fact that all our hopes and expectations do not rest on a belief in the almightiness of our ideas and theories—as is characteristic of an idealistic worldview—but are based on the needs of the masses, on the development of those needs, and on the change in the masses themselves under the influence of this development.

We await a political movement not as of when we are able to convince the masses that our political ideals are just but as of when, as a result of economic development, political needs are worked out among the masses. [ . . . ]

I have tried to show what actually constitutes our movement’s qualitative progress. All I can do is express my profound hope that all our successes in the realm of self-awareness do not fail to have a favorable effect on our future movement. Our movement has achieved these victories through a difficult, tortuous process that has cost individual people dearly. With those victories behind it, may the movement proceed more rapidly and easily, encompassing all strata of the Jewish proletariat and beneficially influencing by its example the movement of other peoples in Russia and the self-awareness of Russian and Lithuanian workers. May we be supported in our struggle by the awareness of the fact that, in the unbearable conditions of Russian political activity, the Jewish working class has been able to create and set on a broad footing a stable movement, and that we, the movement’s advance detachment, have been able to free ourselves from the influence of the bourgeois intelligentsia’s ideas. With these kinds of successes behind us, we may boldly look ahead!

Imagine a huge, solid, old building. Its walls have grown damp and are covered in moss. Imagine that a few people have set themselves the objective of setting fire to this building in order to raze it to its foundation. But the dank, damp old walls don’t catch fire easily, and meanwhile each of the arsonists has very little time; he has to hurry and work stealthily, since sentries are making rounds, vigilantly guarding the building, and one arsonist after another falls into the sentries’ hands without having succeeded at setting fire to even one corner. This is the picture that sometimes appeared to me when I heard of various failed attempts by individuals to incite a workers’ movement in one corner of Russia or another. But now it seems to me that one corner of this building has caught fire, and this flame will not go out, even if one arsonist or another is seized on the spot. I think that this flame will spread steadily, farther and farther; and although I know you cannot burn a huge building to ash from a single corner, nonetheless I fully hope that, as it continues to blaze, the flame will send sparks flying to the other side of that building, landing on those corners where other people are fighting for the same cause and cannot yet boast of success, where one spark will land opportunely and help set fire to yet another corner.

Thus, may this beneficial, cleansing flame spread more and more at our corner until it meets up with a flame coming from other corners, merges with it, and turns into one solid, obliterating fire! . . .