At this stage, it would not be correct to say that the ‘Economist’ deviation already existed as a full-fledged current. But this discussion revealed alarming tendencies and an incipient opportunist trend which gave the ‘veterans’ cause for concern. Their worst fears were confirmed with the appearance of Rabochaya Mysl’, the first issue of which came out in St. Petersburg in October 1887. This expressed the ideas of the new tendency in the most open and crudest fashion. The first issue had clearly laid down the attitude of the journal:
As long as the movement was no more than a means to soothe the conscience-stricken intellectual (!) it was alien to the worker himself… the economic base of the movement was obscured by the constant attempt to remember the political ideal… The average worker stood outside the movement…
The struggle for economic interests was the most stubborn struggle, the most powerful in terms of the numbers of people it was understandable to, and in terms of the heroism with which the ordinary person would defend his rights to existence. Such is the law of nature. Politics always docilely follows economics, and as a general result political shackles are snapped ‘en route’. The struggle for economic status, (?) the struggle against capital in the field of everyday vital interests and of strikes as a method of this struggle – such is the motto of the workers’ movement. (Quoted in F. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, p. 217.)
The basic idea expressed in these lines is that workers cannot understand and do not need ‘politics’. The logic of this is that the revolutionary party is an irrelevance. Behind the demagogic advocacy of the independence of the workers from the intellectual leadership is really the independence of the workers from Marxism. The danger implicit in this idea was clear. If the Economists’ arguments were accepted, the party would be dissolved into the politically untutored mass of workers. Already at the meeting between the new leaders of the Petersburg League and Lenin and Martov, when they were released on parole in February 1897, Takhtarev had proposed that delegates of the trade union (Central Workers’ Group) be automatically allowed to participate in the League. Lenin defended the recruiting of workers into the party, but opposed blurring the distinction between the party, representing the most advanced section of the workers, and the broad organisations of the class, particularly at a moment when the party was fighting for its existence under the difficult and dangerous conditions of illegality.
Naturally enough, the Economist trend in general, and Rabochaya Mysl’ in particular, has got an excellent press from the present-day bourgeois critics of Bolshevism, who are willing to indulge in the most barefaced distortions in order to back any and every tendency against Lenin. The gist of the distortion is approximately as follows: the Economists were democratic, in favour of ‘opening up the party’ to the workers, whereas Lenin was a conspiratorial elitist, determined to keep the leadership in the hands of a small clique of intellectuals, dominated by himself. A classic case of this is AK Wildman’s book, The Making of a Worker’s Revolution, which is an ill-disguised attempt to use the Economist controversy as a stick to beat Lenin. Unfortunately, ‘facts are stubborn things’. After searching frantically, Wildman finally discovered that there was actually a worker (just one) on the editorial board of Rabochaya Mysl’. But the leading lights of Rabochaya Mysl’ were all intellectuals from Takhtarev’s group. Most of them ended up as liberals and bitter enemies of socialism, which explains their sympathetic treatment in bourgeois history books. And lo and behold! On page 130 of his book, Wildman is compelled to admit that “despite their control of the leadership, the adherents of Rabochaya Mysl’ failed to bring worker representatives into the Soyuz Bor’by (League of Struggle), in flagrant contradiction of their theoretical commitments”. (My emphasis.)
Nor did the attempt to curry favour with the ‘masses’ by talking down to them meet with much success. A genuinely revolutionary workers’ paper should not merely reflect the current position and consciousness of the workers, but, setting out from the present level of consciousness, should strive to raise it to the level of the tasks posed by history. Alongside agitational articles dealing with the daily lives and problems of workers, it should include more general articles (propaganda) and also some theory. Even such an ardent admirer of Rabochaya Mysl’ as Wildman had to admit that:
[A]fter a few columns, the endless recitation of ‘swindles’ and ‘gyps’ by the bosses and bully ragging by the shop stewards [i.e., foremen], interspersed with blustering expressions of indignation, become wearisome. (A.K. Wildman, The Making of a Worker’s Revolution – Russian Social Democracy 1891-1903, p. 132.)
A worker might buy such a paper once or twice, but then, realising that it is a mere repetition of what he already knows, that no attempt is made to raise his level of understanding or teach him anything new, would invariably get bored with it and stop reading it. After all, why should one buy a paper that tells you what you already know?
The intellectual theoreticians of Rabochaya Mysl’ who in words put the worker on a pedestal, in practice showed their contempt for the workers by talking down to them in the pages of their journal, which was merely a glorified strike bulletin. In their desire to be ‘popular’ and produce a ‘mass paper’, the Economists were tail-ending the working class. The fact was shown up during a strike at the big Maxwell and Paul factory in December 1898. The striking workers, faced with brutal police tactics, chose to defend themselves. The workers’ letters that fell into the hands of the Social Democrats showed how much more advanced and revolutionary they were than the Economists were prepared to admit. One woman worker from the Vyborg district wrote:
You don’t know what a shame it was for me and all of us. We didn’t half want to go down the Nevsky Prospect [the main upper-class street in the centre of Petersburg] or into the city. It’s really sickening to die in a hole like dogs where no one can even see you… And another thing I want to tell you: though they captured lots and lots of us – perhaps there are no more left at all – all the same we will stand fast.
Another worker remarked: “It’s a pity we didn’t have a banner. Another time we’ll get hold of both a banner and pistols.” (Quoted in G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, p. 71.) The local Social Democrats welcomed this development, and sent an enthusiastic article to the editors of Rabochaya Mysl’ abroad. The émigré editors appended a statement criticising the workers for exposing themselves to repression. When the St. Petersburg group received this issue, they were so incensed that they refused to distribute the journal for several months.
In Kremer’s famous pamphlet, On Agitation, the relation between economic agitation and the political struggle is spelled out clearly, when it states that “No matter how broad the workers’ movement is, its success will not be assured until the working class stands solidly on the basis of political struggle”, and that:
[T]he attainment of political power is the principal test of the fighting proletariat… Thus the task of the Social Democrat consists of constant agitation among the factory workers on the basis of existing petty needs and demands. The struggle provoked by this agitation will train the workers to defend their own interests, heighten their courage, give them assurance of their own powers and an awareness of the necessity for union, and, in the final analysis ultimately confront them with more serious questions demanding a solution. Prepared in this way for a more serious struggle, the working class will move on to the solution of its most pressing questions.
However, the Economists interpreted this in an entirely one-sided manner. Economic agitation and crude ‘activism’ were elevated into a panacea. Revolutionary theory was effectively relegated to an unimportant secondary role. In this way, a correct idea was turned into its opposite, giving rise to the anti-Marxist ‘theory of stages’, which was later to have such a disastrous effect in the hands of the Mensheviks and Stalinists. “Political demands”, wrote the Economist Krichevsky, “which in their nature are common to all Russia, must correspond initially to the experience extracted from the economic struggle by a given stratum of workers. It is only on the grounds of this experience that it is possible and necessary to move on to political agitation.” (Quoted in F. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, p. 216 and p. 218.)
These lines express very clearly the opportunist nature of Economism, which flows from the desire to find a short cut to the masses by watering down the programme of Marxism and abandoning ‘difficult’ demands alleging that the masses are not ready for them. At bottom, this phenomenon was analogous to the politics of ‘small deeds’ advocated by the liberal Narodniks. It fitted in perfectly with the cowardly opportunism of the Legal Marxists, who themselves really represented the left wing of bourgeois liberalism. Implicit in the ideas of the Economists was the fear of confronting the tsarist authorities, by avoiding political demands and attempting to present the activity of the Social Democrats as a ‘private affair’ between workers and employers on the labour front, leaving the question of the state to others. In reality, the meaning of all the arguments of the Economists was that the Social Democrats should passively adapt themselves to the narrow limits of legality or semi-legality offered to them by the tsarist state.
By confining themselves to economic demands they hoped to avoid the wrath of the authorities. In this sense, Economism was the mirror image of the position adopted by Legal Marxism. It was tantamount to abandoning the revolutionary struggle and handing over the leadership of the movement to the liberals. Such a scheme, however, flew in the face of the facts. If the Economists were willing to adopt a hands-off policy in the revolutionary democratic struggle against tsarism, the tsarist state was by no means prepared to stand aloof from the struggle between workers and capitalists. Strike after strike was broken up by the police and Cossacks. Wave after wave of arrests carried off the most active and conscious sections of the workers’ movement.
According to the report of the Bolshevik delegation to the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Second International, the average life of a Social Democratic group in Russia at this time was no more than three to four months. The constant wave of arrests carried off the older, more theoretically trained and experienced members, who were replaced by raw, half-prepared youth. This fact was an important element in the rapid rise of the Economist current during the latter half of the 1890s. A party which has such a high turnover, and is obliged to replenish its leadership with a constant influx of inexperienced and theoretically untutored young people, inevitably suffers from a certain ideological dilution and a general lowering of its political level. When the majority of these young people are students and intellectuals, the risk of political degeneration and the influx of alien ideas becomes magnified a thousandfold. A revolutionary party which loses its cadres loses its backbone. Losing its theoretical magnetic North, it is inevitably blown off course. Instead of intervening in the movement of the class in order to provide it with a conscious political direction, such a party is capable only of tail-ending the movement. The Russian Marxists had a graphic word for this tendency: Khvostism (tail-ism). Whereas revolutionary Marxism represents the most conscious thinking part of the working class, Economism and all the other schools of reformism personify a different and opposite part of its anatomy. Economism was never a homogeneous ideological trend.
Despite all the problems and setbacks, the new movement was growing rapidly. Social Democratic groups sprang up in Tver, Arkhangelsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Saratov, Kharkov, Kiev, Yekaterinoslav, Odessa, Tiflis, Batum, Baku, Warsaw, Minsk, Riga, and many other important centres. For the first time one could speak of a genuinely all-Russian Marxist organisation. The situation in which these groups were forced to function was, however, not conducive to ideological clarity and organisational cohesion. Contacts between them were difficult, irregular and constantly being disrupted. Arrests frequently led to the disruption of some groups and the emergence of new ones. Under the circumstances the task of establishing a firm and authoritative leadership inside Russia proved well-nigh impossible. Inevitably the local Social Democratic groups tended to have a somewhat limited outlook. The absence of stable links with a national centre, the problems created by illegal conditions, and the immaturity and inexperience of the majority of the membership meant that much of the work had a rather local and amateurish character. The Economists’ lack of concern with theory and their narrow insistence on the practical tasks of mass work and agitation was only the other side of the same coin. Possibly, the Economist deviations of a part of the Russian youth could have been put down to a case of ideological measles, were it not for the fact that they coincided with a far more serious international phenomenon.