Emancipation of Labour

History

The Emancipation of Labour group was founded in Geneva in 1883. Its founders were former "Cherny Peredel" activists who had turned from Narodism to Marxism: Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Pavel Axelrod, Leo Deutsch, and Vasily Ignatov. It was the first Marxist organization in Russia. On 13 (25) September of that same year the group made its aims public through the announcement of the "Library of Modern Socialism." The founding aims were to translate the principal works of Marx, Engels, and their successors into Russian in order to spread scientific socialism, to criticize Narodism from the standpoint of Marxist theory, and to study the problems of Russian social life.

In publishing, the group produced the first systematic Russian translations of Marx and Engels. Plekhanov had already translated the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" into Russian in 1882, and the group went on to translate and publish "Wage Labour and Capital" (1883), "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1884), "Free Trade" (1885), "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1886), "Ludwig Feuerbach" (1892), and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1894). Two program drafts written by Plekhanov (1883 and 1885) were published, an important step that led toward the building of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The practical section of the 1885 draft consisted of general democratic reforms, measures for the interests of workers, and measures for the interests of peasants.

Distinctions

The group became the principal polemicist against the Narodniks in left-wing politics in the Russian Empire. In "Socialism and the Political Struggle" (1883) and "Our Differences" (1885), Plekhanov criticized Narodnik theory and tactics and drew the conclusion that Russia had already entered the capitalist path and that the decisive force in the coming revolution would be the proletariat, not the peasantry. Lenin located the historical significance of the group in its having laid the ideological and theoretical foundations of Russian Social Democracy and taken the first step toward the Russian labour movement. At the same time he saw the group's weaknesses as its lack of connection to the labour movement and its members' failure to recognize the need for a concrete analysis of the specific features of Russian capitalist development and for building a party of a new type.

Relations

In 1894, on the initiative of the Emancipation of Labour group, the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad was formed in Geneva. The Union published "Rabotnik" and the "Rabotnik News Sheet" from its own press, and at first the group led the Union and edited its publications. In the spring of 1898 the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party recognized the Union as the party's representative abroad, but afterwards the "young ones," that is the Economists, took the leading position within the Union. In November 1898 the group stopped editing the Union's publications, and in May 1900 it broke with it definitively and set up its own publishing house, "Sotsial-Demokrat."

On the international stage as well the group acted as the representative of Russian Social Democracy. After the first congress of the Second International in Paris in 1889, the group represented Russian Social Democrats at every congress, and when the International Socialist Bureau was set up at the Fifth Congress in Paris in September 1900, Plekhanov was elected as the Russian representative. The group's most important period, 1901-1903, unfolded within the framework of the League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democracy Abroad, when the group joined forces with Lenin's "Iskra." This began as a period of productive cooperation between Lenin and Plekhanov, but ideological disagreements emerged in 1901-1903, sharpened further after the Second Congress, and led to the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In August 1903, during the Second Congress of the RSDLP, the group declared its dissolution.

Examples

In a letter to Zasulich in 1885, Engels wrote that he took pride in the fact that among Russian youth there existed a party that had sincerely and without reservation adopted Marx's economic and historical theory and had decisively broken with the anarchist and Slavophile traditions of its predecessors. Within Russia, the Emancipation of Labour group influenced the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, founded in St Petersburg in 1895 by Lenin and others, and in May 1895 Lenin met Plekhanov in Switzerland and agreed to publish "Rabotnik" together in Geneva in 1896. Lenin wrote that the Emancipation of Labour group "laid the theoretical foundations of the Social Democratic movement and took the first step toward the Russian working-class movement."