The winter of 1902-3 saw “a desperate struggle of tendencies” (NK Krupskaya, O Vladimirye, 1924 edition, vol. 1, p. 81.) but gradually the political and organisational superiority of Iskra won the day. Committee after committee declared for the congress. Only a few expressed reservations. Yuzhny Rabochii criticised Iskra for its harsh treatment of the liberals. In desperation, the followers of Rabocheye Dyelo attempted to split a series of local committees, inciting the workers against ‘intellectuals’. Unfortunately, errors and clumsiness by Iskra supporters played into the hands of the opposition in some areas. In St. Petersburg, they allowed the rabochedeltsy to reverse the decision to support the congress. This, however, proved to be only a hiccup. By the time the congress was convened, only one committee, Voronezh, decided to stay away.
The congress finally convened on the 17 July, 1903 in Brussels, where its first 13 sessions were held. The attentions of the police forced the Congress to move to London where it reconvened as an anglers’ club, periodically changing the venue to different workers’ meeting places to avoid detection. At the First Congress, the movement in the interior had been represented by only five local committees. The present gathering could now claim to represent several thousand members, with influence over hundreds of thousands of workers. The majority of delegates were young, mostly under 30 years old. Lenin, at 33, was already a veteran. The rapid pace of revolutionary events in Russia was a forcing house for the development of the young cadres of Marxism. Only the former members of Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group stood out as the representatives of an older revolutionary generation, belonging to a different epoch, almost a different world.
The conditions for acceptance as a delegation was a minimum of 12 months’ existence as an active organisation. Several local committees (Voronezh, Samara, Poltava, Kishinev) were not invited because they did not fulfil this condition. There were 43 delegates with 51 full votes. Partly because in many areas there was more than one local committee, every delegation was given two full votes, whether or not there were more than one delegate present. The Central Committee of the Bund was given three votes (one for the Bund’s foreign organisation), and the two Petersburg organisations, one vote each. In addition, there were 14 people present with a consultative vote, including two representatives of the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democracy who arrived during the tenth session.
A great deal of time was taken up with the question of the place of the Bund in the party. This debate was of crucial importance in clarifying the Marxist attitude towards the national question. The historic significance of this can be gauged by the fact that without a clear position on the national question, the Russian Revolution could never have been successful. In The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky gives a succinct definition of the Bolshevik position on the national question:
Lenin early learned the inevitability of this development of centrifugal national movements in Russia, and for many years stubbornly fought – most particularly against Rosa Luxemburg – for that most famous paragraph of the old party programme, which formulated the right of self-determination – that is, to complete separation as states. In this the Bolshevik Party did not by any means undertake an evangel of separation. It merely assumed an obligation to struggle implacably against every form of national oppression, including the forcible retention of this or that nationality within the boundaries of the general state. Only in this way could the Russian proletariat gradually win the confidence of the oppressed nationalities.
But that was only one side of the matter. The policy of Bolshevism in the national sphere had also another side, apparently contradictory to the first, but in reality supplementing it. Within the framework of the party, and the workers’ organisations in general, Bolshevism insisted upon a rigid centralism, implacably warring against every taint of nationalism which might set the workers one against the other or disunite them. While flatly refusing to the bourgeois state the right to impose compulsory citizenship, or even a state language, upon a national minority, Bolshevism at the same time made it a verily sacred task to unite, as closely as possible, by means of voluntary class discipline, the workers of different nationalities. Thus it flatly rejected the national federation principle in building the party. A revolutionary organisation is not the prototype of the future state, but merely the instrument for its creation. An instrument ought to be adapted to fashioning the product; it ought not to include the product. Thus a centralised organisation can guarantee the success of a revolutionary struggle – even where the task is to destroy the centralised oppression of nationalities. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 890-91.)
The Bund had played an important role in the early days of the movement, which earned it considerable prestige and enabled it to exercise a decisive influence on the First Congress, where it entered the RSDLP on the basis of autonomy. The weakness of the Russian Social Democracy meant that the Bund, in practice, led an independent existence up to the Second Congress, developing strong nationalist tendencies. At the Second Congress, the Bundists in effect spoke as an independent party, which was only prepared to enter the RSDLP on a loose, federal basis, which would have meant the legalisation of separate organisations of the Jewish workers. Lieber, the Bundist spokesman, justified this on the grounds of the special position of the Jewish workers, suffering not only from class oppression but also racial oppression, which Russian workers would not have the same degree of interest in combating. Answering Lieber, Martov said:
Underlying this draft is the presumption that the Jewish proletariat needs an independent political organisation to represent its national interests among the Social Democrats of Russia. Independently of the question of organising the party on the principle of federation or that of autonomy, we cannot allow that any section of the party can represent the group, trade or national interests of any sections of the proletariat. National differences play a subordinate role in relation to common class interests. What sort of organisation would we have if, for instance, in one and the same workshop, workers of different nationalities thought first and foremost of the representation of their national interest? (1903: Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP, p. 81.)
Of course, on purely practical grounds, it would be possible to give a certain degree of autonomy to national groups within the party. This would, however, be of a purely technical character, arising from the need, for example, to publish material in the different languages of the groups concerned. There would have been no objections to the Bund enjoying the necessary autonomy to produce Party literature in Yiddish and conducting agitation among the Jewish workers and artisans with special material, etc. But what the Bund demanded was the exclusive right to speak in the name of the Jewish proletariat and, in effect, to have a monopoly of Jewish affairs within the Party. When the Bund’s pretensions were decisively rejected, its delegates abandoned the Congress. They were soon followed by the other representatives of the right wing, the Economists Martynov and Akimov, who were present as representatives of the émigré Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, who walked out when the Congress recognised the rival League of Revolutionary Social Democrats as sole representatives of the party abroad. These walkouts decisively changed the balance of forces at the Congress.
Over the years, the events of this Congress have been heavily overlaid with a crust of myths, inventions and downright falsehoods. Here, it is alleged, Bolshevism emerged, fully clad and armed, like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. Yet closer examination reveals that the split between ‘Bolsheviks’ (‘majority-ites’) and ‘Mensheviks’ (‘minority-ites’), or more accurately between ‘hards’ and ‘softs’ in 1903 was by no means final but only an anticipation of future differences.
The Iskra group, in theory, had a clear majority with 33 votes. The open opponents of Iskra held eight votes – three Economists and five Bundists. The remaining votes were held by indecisive, wavering elements, whom Lenin later characterised as the ‘centre’ or ‘the marsh’. At first, everything seemed to be going smoothly for the Iskraites. There was complete unanimity in the Iskra camp on all political questions. Then suddenly everything started to change. During the 22nd session, when the Congress had been going on for two weeks, differences between Lenin and Martov began to surface. The crystallisation of two trends within the Iskra camp was quite unforeseen. There had been tensions, of course, but nothing that would seem to justify a split. On a number of secondary issues (role of the Organising Committee, the Bor’ba group, Yuzhny Rabochii). (For a detailed explanation, see One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, LCW, vol. 7, pp. 203-425.) it became clear that some of Iskra’s supporters had voted with the right wing and the ‘marsh’. But these things seemed to be mere anecdotes. On all the important questions, the Iskra camp remained united. But suddenly, the unity was broken by an open clash between Lenin and Martov on an organisational issue.
The first clause of the party rules dealt with the question: “Who is a member?” Lenin’s draft reads as follows: “A member of the RSDLP is one who accepts its programme and supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the party organisations.” Martov opposed this clause and moved as an alternative that a member was somebody who accepted the programme, and supported the Party financially and “ gives the party his regular personal cooperation under the direction of one of the party organisations.” On the face of it, there is only a slight difference between the two formulas. In fact, the real significance of the difference only became clear later. “The differences were still intangible,” Trotsky recalled, “everybody was merely groping about and working with impalpable things.” (L. Trotsky, My Life, p. 160.) But behind Martov’s proposal was a certain ‘softness’, a conciliatory attitude which amounted to the blurring of differences between members and sympathisers, between revolutionary activists and fellow travellers. At the moment when all the energies of Iskra should have been concentrated on combating the old anarchistic formlessness and circle mentality, Martov’s position represented a big step back. Small wonder that it led to a sharp struggle in the Iskra camp on and off the floor of the Congress. In the months and years after the Congress, a whole mythology has been constructed about this incident. It is alleged that Lenin stood for dictatorial centralism and a small conspiratorial party, whereas Martov’s aim was a broad-based, democratic party which would allow the workers to participate. Both ideas are completely false.
To begin with, all the Iskra supporters were agreed upon the need for a strong, centralised party. That was one of the main arguments against the Bund’s national-federalism, in which Martov and Trotsky played the main role. Immediately prior to the discussion on Clause One, Martov is quoted in the Minutes as saying: “I would recall to Comrade Lieber that our organisational principle is not broad autonomy but strict centralisation.” Incidentally, the Bund itself was a highly centralised organisation. Its alleged opposition to centralism only applied to the party as a whole, and reflected nothing more than an unscrupulous defence of its own sectional interests. As to the demagogic argument that Martov’s formula was intended to ‘open the party to the workers’, that, too, is a misrepresentation. At the outset of the debate Axelrod let the cat out of the bag with the following example, which really revealed what was behind the proposal:
And, indeed, let us take for example a professor who regards himself as a Social Democrat and declares himself as such. If we adopt Lenin’s formula we shall be throwing overboard a section of those who, even if they cannot be directly admitted to an organisation are nevertheless members… We must take care not to leave outside the party ranks people who consciously, though perhaps not very actively, associate themselves with that Party. (1903: Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP, p. 308 and p. 311, my emphasis.)
The working class and its organisations do not exist in a vacuum, but are surrounded by other social classes and groups. The pressure of alien classes, of bourgeois public opinion, and especially the pressure of the intermediate layers, the middle class, the intellectuals who surround the workers’ organisations, is ever present. The demands of these layers that the workers should adapt their programme, methods and organisational structure to suit the prejudices and interests of the petty bourgeoisie are a constant pressure. A long period of very close coexistence with the radicalised middle class in the person of the Legal Marxists had left its stamp on the consciousness of the older members of the Emancipation of Labour Group. They moved among social strata divorced from the working class, formed personal friendships with the radicalised quasi-Marxist university professors, lawyers, and doctors who helped them with financial donations and words of encouragement, but were not prepared to dirty their hands with practical revolutionary work. “I support your aims, but to come out openly as a socialist would be inconvenient and risky. Think of my job, my position, my career prospects,” and so on. Unconsciously, or perhaps semi-consciously, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Martov were acting as the spokesmen for this social stratum, the transmission belt for the pressures of alien classes upon the workers’ party.
Plekhanov was placed in a difficult position by this split, in which his friends and lifelong colleagues were ranged against him. For the first time in her life, Vera Zasulich openly stood up to her mentor. It must have been a shock, but to Plekhanov’s credit, he stood up against the pressure at the Congress. All his revolutionary instinct told him that Lenin was in the right. In the course of debate he pitilessly demolished the arguments of Axelrod and Martov:
According to Lenin’s draft, only someone who joins a particular organisation can be regarded as a Party member. Those who oppose his draft say that this will cause unnecessary difficulties. But what do these difficulties consist of? They talk of persons who do not want to join, or who can’t join, one of our organisations. But why can’t they? As someone who has himself taken part in Russian Revolutionary organisations, I say that I do not admit the existence of objective conditions constituting an insuperable obstacle to anyone’s joining. As to those gentlemen who do not want to join, we have no need of them.
It has been said here that some professors who sympathise with our views may find it humiliating to join a local organisation. In this connection, I remember Engels saying that where it becomes your lot to deal with professors, you have to be prepared for the worst (laughter).
The example, is, in fact, an extremely bad one. If some Professor of Egyptology considers, because he has by heart the names of all the Pharaohs, and knows all the prayers that the Egyptians submitted to the bull Apis, that it is beneath his dignity to join our organisation, we have no need of that professor.
To talk of control by the Party over persons who are outside the organisation means playing with words. In practice such control is impossible.
After a heated discussion, Martov’s variant was approved by 28 votes to 23, but only because the wavering elements in Iskra combined with the Economists of the Union, the Bund and the ‘Centre’, represented by the trend around the journal Yuzhny Rabochii. Nevertheless, the split had not yet acquired a definite character. Lenin, in the course of the debate, showed that he was still anxious to reach agreement:
First, as regards Axelrod’s kind proposal (I am not speaking ironically) to ‘strike a bargain’, I would willingly respond to this appeal for I do not at all consider our difference so vital as to be a matter of life and death for the party. We shall certainly not perish because of a bad point in the rules! (1903: Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP, p. 321 and p. 326, my emphasis.)
From a Marxist point of view, organisational questions can never be decisive. There are no eternal, fixed laws governing the mode of organisation of a revolutionary party. The rules and organisational structures must change with changing circumstances and in line with the development of the party. The same Lenin who argued fervently for restricting the party membership in 1903, under different historical circumstances, in 1912, when the party was becoming transformed into a mass force representing the decisive majority of the active working class in Russia, in effect argued that the party should be open to any worker who considered himself a Bolshevik – a formula which apparently echoes Martov’s celebrated phrase that ‘every striker should be able to proclaim himself a Party member’. Does this mean that Lenin was wrong and Martov right in 1903? Such a conclusion would be to completely misunderstand the dialectical relationship between the mode of operation of the revolutionary party and the concrete stage through which both the party and the working class movement is passing. A house must be built upon solid foundations. In 1903, the Party was only taking its first hesitating steps towards the conquest of influence among the masses. It was necessary to lay heavy stress on basic political and organisational principles, above all the need for working-class cadres with a clear understanding of the ideas and methods of Marxism. This was all the more necessary in view of the chaotic period which had gone before. To have thrown the doors open at this concrete stage would have been absolutely disastrous, although at a different moment it would be necessary to do just that.