The key question which conditioned everything else was the attitude to the bourgeois parties. This question was thoroughly debated at the Congress. Four people led off on this subject – Lenin, Martynov, Rosa Luxemburg, and Abramovich. Lenin, who spoke first, highlighted the central importance of this issue:
The question of our attitude to the bourgeois parties is the nub of the differences in matters of principle that have long divided Russian Social Democracy into two camps. Even before the first major successes of the revolution, or even before the revolution – if it is permissible to express oneself in this way about the first half of 1905 – two distinct points of view on this question already existed. The disputes were over the appraisal of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. The two trends in the Social Democracy agreed that this revolution was a bourgeois revolution. But they parted company in their understanding of this category, and in their appraisal of the practical and political conclusions to be drawn from it. One wing of the Social Democracy – the Mensheviks – interpreted this concept to mean that the bourgeoisie was the motive force in the bourgeois revolution, and that the proletariat could occupy only the position of the ‘extreme opposition’. The proletariat could not undertake the task of conducting the revolution independently or of leading it.
Lenin accepted that:
[T]he aims of the revolution that is now taking place in Russia do not exceed the bounds of bourgeois society… But from this it does not at all follow that the bourgeoisie is the motive force or leader in the revolution. Such a conclusion would be a vulgarisation of Marxism, would be a failure to understand the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
And he concludes:
[T]hat the bourgeoisie can be neither the motive force nor the leader in the revolution. Only the proletariat is capable of consummating the revolution, that is, of achieving a complete victory. But this victory can be achieved only provided the proletariat succeeds in getting a large section of the peasantry to follow its lead.
The Mensheviks complained of the “one-sided hostility” of the proletariat towards liberalism. Lenin replied that the bourgeois liberals did not represent a revolutionary, but a counter-revolutionary force:
The Mensheviks say that our bourgeoisie are “unprepared to fight”. Actually, however, the bourgeoisie were prepared to fight, prepared to fight against the proletariat, to fight against the ‘excessive’ victories of the revolution… To maintain silence at the present time about the counter-revolutionary nature of our bourgeoisie means departing entirely from the Marxist point of view, means completely forgetting the viewpoint of the class struggle. (LCW, The Fifth Congress of the RSDLP, vol. 12, p. 456, p. 457, p. 458 and pp. 462-63.)
In this debate, Rosa Luxemburg was naturally close to Lenin. She poured scorn on the Menshevik argument:
It turns out that this revolutionary liberalism striving for power, to which we are urged to adapt the tactics of the proletariat, and to please which they are ready to restrict the proletariat’s demands, this revolutionary Russian liberalism exists not in reality, but in the imagination, it is an invention, it is a phantom. (Applause.) And this policy, erected on a lifeless schema and on invented relations and not taking into account the special tasks of the proletariat in this revolution, calls itself ‘revolutionary realism’. (Congress Minutes, Pyatiy S’yezd RSDRP Protokoly, p. 386.)
Trotsky moved an amendment which Lenin commented on favourably. Here for the first time, Trotsky had the opportunity of expounding his views on the revolution before the Party. His speech in the debate on the attitude to the bourgeois parties, for which he was given only 15 minutes, was twice commented on by Lenin, who emphatically agreed with the views expressed by Trotsky, especially his call for a Left Bloc against the liberal bourgeoisie:
These facts are sufficient for me to acknowledge that Trotsky has come close to our views. Quite apart from the question of ‘uninterrupted revolution’, we have solidarity on fundamental points in the attitude towards the bourgeois parties.
On Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, Lenin was not prepared to commit himself. But on the fundamental question of the tasks of the revolutionary movement, there was complete agreement. The differences between the positions of Lenin and Trotsky will be dealt with later. That these differences were regarded by Lenin as secondary was again revealed at the Congress when Trotsky moved an amendment to the resolution on the attitude towards the bourgeois parties. Lenin spoke against the amendment on the grounds, not that it was wrong, but that it added nothing fundamental to the original: “It must be agreed,” he said, “that Trotsky’s amendment is not Menshevik, that it expresses the ‘very same,’ that is, Bolshevik, idea.” (LCW, The Fifth Congress of the RSDLP, vol. 12, p. 470 and p. 479, my emphasis.)[5] Lenin’s resolution on the attitude towards the bourgeois parties was passed by Congress.
Despite the identity of views on the analysis of the tasks of the revolution, Trotsky still attempted to steer a course in between the rival factions in a vain attempt to prevent a fresh split. “If you think,” he said at the Congress, “that a schism is unavoidable, wait at least until events, and not merely resolutions separate you. Do not run ahead of events.” Trotsky made the mistake of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, attempting to mediate between the two factions. On the basis of the experience of 1905, Trotsky believed that a fresh revolutionary upheaval would have the effect of pushing the best elements among the Mensheviks, in particular, Martov, to the left. His main concern was to hold the forces of Marxism together in a difficult period, to prevent a split which would have a demobilising effect on the movement. This was the essence of Trotsky’s ‘conciliationism’, which prevented him from joining the Bolsheviks in this period. In later years Trotsky was honest in admitting his mistake. Commenting on this, Lenin wrote:
A number of Social Democrats in that period sank into conciliationism, proceeding from the most varied motives. Most consistently of all was conciliationism expressed by Trotsky, about the only one who tried to provide a theoretical foundation for that policy.
The extreme differences that now separated the right and left wings were brought out into the open at the Fifth Congress, which did not resolve them. The factional centres continued to exist and increasingly went their own way. The Bolsheviks had their own centre including Lenin and the Central Committee members, plus, among others, Krassin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov. As so often happened, political differences found their expression in organisational questions. Even before the congress Axelrod, Larin, and others had been canvassing the idea of a so-called Labour Congress. Faced with the swift advance of reaction, the right wing Mensheviks advocated the closing down of the Party’s illegal organisations and the setting up of a broad Labour organisation including the SRs, anarchists, non-party people, “and Uncle Tom Cobley and all”. But they overlooked one little detail. The establishment of a ‘legal’ organisation in Russia in 1907 was not at all the same as the establishment of a mass Labour Party in Britain under conditions of bourgeois democracy. Under the given conditions, this proposal represented an opportunist adaptation to the norms established by the triumphant reaction. It would have meant in essence dissolving the activists into the mass of non-party, unorganised workers, an aim, incidentally, which has since been pursued by the right-wing labour leaders in Britain and other countries.
This proposal was also rejected by the Congress. This by no means signified the abandonment of the aim of creating a real mass workers’ party. But the way to do this is not to water down the party to the lowest common denominator, but to conduct a stubborn struggle to win the mass of the workers in action to the revolutionary programme. Having first won and educated the advanced layer of the class, it was necessary to find a road to the masses. The way to link up with the masses was by conducting patient work in the mass organisations, starting with the trade unions. The Party must not dissolve itself into the mass, but fight to win leadership of the unions.
A further point of difference concerned the relations between the Party and its parliamentary representatives. The Mensheviks defended the independence of the Duma fraction from the Central Committee. This was also rejected by Congress, which insisted that its public representatives must be under the control of the Party. The conduct of the Social Democratic deputies in the Duma – all Mensheviks at this time – came in for some bitter criticism, and the Congress carried a Bolshevik resolution criticising the Duma fraction. Finally the old dual leadership was abolished. Henceforth, only the Central Committee was to lead the Party. A 12-man CC was elected: five Bolsheviks (Goldenberg, Rozhkov, Dubrovinsky, Teodorovich, and Nogin), four Mensheviks (Martynov, Zhordania, Isuv, and Nikorov), two Poles (Warski and Dzerzhinsky) and one Lett (Danishevsky). The other three, consisting of the representatives of the Bund and the Latvian Social Democrats, were elected after the congress.
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The notes of the Russian edition of the minutes of this Congress, published in 1959, with astonishing cynicism, state that: “In fact, Trotsky supported the Mensheviks on every basic question.” (Congress Minutes, Pyatiy S’yezd RSDRP Protokoly, 812.)