Revolutions - 10.23- On Agitation

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Why propagandize when you can agitate? Sponsor: harrys.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 20.23 on Agitation. Last time we did the biographical introduction of Lenin and Krupskaya. And though I called them Vladimir and Nadia last week, for future clarity I will be referring to them by their better known names, Lenin and Krupskaya. Lucky for us, we ended last week with their first meeting in February 1894, where this man, Vladimir Iliic, read a lot of the last year. loud from a book that would be the first book he published under the pen name Lenin. And though he would

use a bunch of different numbed plumes in his life in revolutionary letters, Lenin would be the one that stuck and the one that would become his permanent public identity. So where we left them was in St. Petersburg in 1894 working in the Revolutionary Underground just about six months before the ascension of Zarr Nicholas II, who they would in 25 years, insure would be the last Tsar of Russia. The Revolutionary Underground at the time of Nicholas's ascension was a tug of war pitting the re-emergent neo-Nerodists who will wind up forming the SRs against the Marxists, like Lenin and Khrbskaya, who will go on to form the Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia. These two groups had plenty to disagree about, but also had a lot in common.

And one of the biggest things they had in common was that they were really only talking to each other. This was coffee house radicalism. This was salon bickering. The SRs were arguing in favor of the rural peasants. The Marxists were arguing in favor of the industrial workers, but there were no actual peasants or workers involved in this argument. These discussion circles of young radical members of the intelligentsia were insular. These people were coming out of the middle and upper classes and they wore suits. They sported university educations. And they had uncalist, hands. In the parlance of our times, they are a hundred percent white collar. Now, when the earlier people's will types had faced the problem of how to connect with the capital P people, they went to the people, and then they got sent back by the people. And so they concluded that it was hopeless, and they simply had to do the revolution for themselves. But this is not how Lenin and his comrades are going to want to do things. They don't want to do the revolution for themselves. they wanted, no, they needed to get the proletariat involved.

So that left them facing a vexing question. How to connect to the working class who are meant to be the leaders of our socialist revolution. This was a real problem for Lenin, and one that could not just be dismissed. Because to reiterate the point I made when we were talking about Plahanov and the Emancipation of Labor Group, Lenin read Marx, historical materialism, the nature of class conflict, in the role of the proletariat and the socialist revolution, and he believed it. If they were going to follow the scientific program of some future history, they believed Marx and Engels had laid down,

it was going to take the proletariat as a class doing the necessary revolutionary work, not just a handful of effete coffee house radicals. And that brings me to another point I need to make about Lenin, that when he committed himself to Marxism, he also committed himself to the doctrine of two revolutions, as elaborated by Plahannov. that because Russia was still laboring under a medieval mode of agrarian production, they were going to have to undergo a bourgeois capitalist revolution

in order to sufficiently transform the country for a subsequent socialist revolution. For Lenin, capitalism was not something he liked, but it was something he considered a vital and inevitable force of history, that without it, Russia would remain condemned to the stagnant despotism of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality forever. Without the historical power of capitalism, modernizing the Russian economy, increasing its productive capacity, and more importantly, turning rural peasants into urban laborers, the socialist revolution was simply not possible. And then, of course, along with that advance of the capitalist

mode of production, would come the first revolution, the democratic revolution, led by the bourgeoisie against the old medieval state that oppressed them under the weight of anachronistic aristocratic privilege. and that first revolution would be necessary to create the second and far preferable socialist revolution. Now, as they waited for this, that did not mean they were just going to sit around and do nothing. No, it did not. Lenin believed that they should begin now to make connections inside the actual working class to forge at least a small skeletal structure of a political party that would first add weight to the coming Democratic Revolution,

and second, make them ready to boldly stride towards the next. socialist revolution once democratic reform made open political organizing legal. Because remember, the goal here is Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, which was not understood to mean a small Jacobin-style revolutionary committee of public safety. It was simply meant to express a mass majority now ruling a fully democratic system. So one way to think about this is that the dictatorship of an aristocracy is a monarchy. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is an oligarchy. The coming dictatorship of the proletariat would be mass-majority democracy.

The first system, Marx always noted approvingly, where the majority would actually rule. That's how it was supposed to go anyway. So the Russian Marxists of the 1890s believed that what they needed to do was build the skeleton of an organization that would connect the socialist intelligentsia to worker groups inside the factories. and in the rather annoying business-speak language of our time, to have this organization be scalable, that as the proletariat inevitably expanded as a result of the advance of capitalism, that this proto-party they were building now would be able to grow with it

and soon become the party of the mass majority. Now, one of the great influences on Lenin's thinking at this time was a German Marxist named Karl Kautzky, who I briefly named check back when we were talking about the emancipation, of Labor Group because he was friends with Pavel Axelrod. They were like neighbors in Zurich. Now, I can't go overboard on Kautzky because this is technically a series on the Russian revolution, not a general history of 19th century European socialism, though you wouldn't necessarily know that from listening to our past episodes. But just so you know, Kautzky was one of

the two or three most important Marxists in the generation that came up after Marx and Angles themselves. Kautzky was a friend, comrade, disciple, correspondent, and occasionally wayward protégé, especially of angles. What Kautzky advocated was a merger of the labor movement and the socialist intelligentsia, who were not, at that point, the same thing. Kautzky was arguing that the educated intelligentsia needed the manpower, energy, and numbers provided by the workers, and the less educated workers needed the theories, ideas, and direction that would be provided by the more educated members of the intelligentsia.

But again, these two groups are not necessarily primed to be bosom buddies. On the one side, you have blue-collar factory workers, and on the other you have these white-collar student socialists. Culturally, personally, there's a lot of mutual side-eyeing going on. But Kautzky said these two groups must bridge their differences, recognize the advantages of an alliance, the principal advantage of which was if they did combine they could literally take over the state and become Marx's Dixon. dictatorship of the proletariat. The merger of the socialists and the workers was the essential feature of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which is why Lenin and his friends will soon be organizing their own Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Now in the early 1890s, the strategy

for forging connections between the workers and the socialists was a process called propagandizing, which is the opposite of what we usually understand the term propaganda to, mean these days. We are not talking about brief, manipulative messages aimed at a large population, but rather an intensive course of education aimed at a select few, highly motivated members of the working class. These potential propagandized workers could be identified in the kind of worker education programs that Krupskaya was dedicating her early life to. If a particular student was eager and motivated, you could just keep feeding them more and more books and articles and pamphlets about politics and economics and history until they emerged as a fully enlightened

Marxist. The problem with this approach is that it was time-consuming, and extremely hit and missed. It required patience and sustained interest from both teachers and students. But if they stuck to it and kept to a strict program of propagandizing individual workers, in 10,000 years they might all be ready for a revolution. But what happens if you would prefer, you? for your revolution to come less than 10,000 years from now. Well, we will spend the rest of today's episode talking about the new strategy they would adopt and the man who would come to St. Petersburg in 1895 bearing the new gospel. This guy will be very important to our story going forward as he starts out as Lenin's great friend, practically Lenin's only friend, and then, down the road,

his bitterly disappointed rival, if he was never able to quite bring himself to call Lenin an enemy. and this is Julius Martoff. When it was all over, as he neared death in 1921 and reflected on the revolution, he had in fact successfully hijacked and led, Lenin said that he had one regret, that Martoff is not with us. What an amazing comrade he is, what a pure man. So, let us talk about Julius Martoff. Julius Martoff, as we know him in the West, by his Anglicanized revolutionary name, was born on November the 24th, 1873.

He was the son of a Russian Jewish family then residing in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, though they moved to Odessa when Martoff was four years old. He had five siblings, one of whom Lydia, would become a revolutionary socialist comrade in her own right, and she is known to the history books as Lydia Don, after taking her comrade husband's name. Their father, mother, aunts, and uncles seemed to have been a generation. of disillusion liberals. Once excited by the prospect of the great reforms, they were by the 1870s disappointed how far short of the mark the Tsar Liberator had ultimately fallen. Though they were Jewish, they were not particularly observant about it, and Martov's lived experience

as a Jew in the Russian Empire had less to do with a strong cultural or religious identity built from within, and more to do with the negative experiences of anti-Semitism he had to deal with from without. Lydia later said that the myriad ways anti-Semitism expressed itself in Russian society, both big and small, made her brother sympathetic to any group who found itself maltreated for ethnic, religious, or class reasons. But it did not push him towards Jewish nationalism or separatism or Zionism, all of which were options on the table for radical Jews at the end of the 19th century. When Martoff was about 15 years old, the family was living in St. Petersburg, and he fell in with a group of rebelliously progressive friends who clash constantly with the more Russian nationalist conservative kids at the school.

And unlike Lenin, who was always a loner, Martov found it easy to make and keep friends, and he later remarked, I have the nasty privilege of being liked by people. It was at this point that he got super into the French Revolution. He read everything he could get his hands on by and about, Robespierre, Dantan, Damula, Mara, Ebert, and Babuff. And he mentally advanced his own beliefs along with the course of the revolution. He said, within half a year, I had gone through all the phases of revolutionary enthusiasm. My model at first was Mirabeau, and then the Girondists, and then Dantan, and finally, Robespierre.

Martov's ideological evolution would then keep following the course of European social history. He read all the post-revolutionary socials. like Fouquier and Saint-Simone and Proudon, and then a friend came back from a family holiday to Switzerland loaded with banned Russian revolutionary writers. Lavrov and Chernyshevsky are among the names that we would recognize, and this brought him into contact with the Russian revolutionary tradition, and gave him a pretty neurotist point of view. Though it must be said that he also came across a journalist's account of the 1881 trial of the Assassins of the Zahar Liberator and walked away from that, convinced that mere revolutionary terrorism was not only an insufficient strategy, it was

downright counterproductive. Meanwhile, he got his hands on a copy of the Communist Manifesto and was stirred by its call to the masses to rise up openly, let them tremble at our size and strength. Martoff quite like the sound of that. In 1891, Martoff graduated and went off to the University of St. Petersburg. He was originally studying science. But like so many of his contemporaries, attending class was secondary to his real passion, which was reading dangerous literature and dreaming dangerous dreams. He and his friends formed a little radical reading circle and discussed everything they could get their hands on. And they were idealistic enough that they wanted to reach out and bring in members of the working class into this circle.

And they did manage to recruit one worker and they were very proud of themselves. Unfortunately, this guy allowed himself to be recruited because that was the mission he had been assigned by his handlers. He was a police spy, and after a few meetings, he turned names over to the police. One of Martoff's best friends was arrested, and after a month of interrogation, he coughed up Martoff's name. So Martoff was arrested in February 1892 and then held until May. But as he sat in custody, it turned out he was such a minor priority that he never really was. got interrogated too deeply or too harshly. He was just another student reading banned books. In May 1892, his grandfather managed to bail him out of detention while he awaited sentencing.

There would be no trial, mind you. There would just be a sentence that would get handed down. And while others may have emerged from this chastised by the experience, Martoff was thrilled by it all. His arrest in detention meant that he had received his revolutionary baptism. He was a real revolutionary now with real credibility. He was, of course, expelled from university, though his parents did manage to arrange an interview with school officials to review the case if the boy was sufficiently penitent, but Martoff was insufficiently penitent. He in fact refused to attend the meeting. The expulsion stood, and he awaited his final sentence. It was during this summer of waiting in 1892 that we come to the conversion to Marxism portion of Martoff's biography. He got his hands on the

writings of Brechanov and Axelrod and a French translation of capital. And he was blown away by what he read. He later said that before this, his revolutionary instincts had been flimsy and superficial, and now they had weight and heft. He believed what he was reading was the final stop on the development of his revolutionary ideology, which had begun with Mirabeau and now ended with Marx. Whatever lingering neurotist ideas he held were banished. The rural peasants would be an apathetic sack of potatoes until they were turned into a working-class proletariat by the inevitable force of capitalist modernization. Having had this conversion, Martoff received his sentence in December 1892, five months solitary confinement. So he was arrested again and tossed in prison again,

and though it was technically solitary confinement, security and oversight in these prisons was shockingly lax, and he was able to get books to read and exchange letters and writing with friends that were never much analyzed or monitored. We'll talk more about this later, but though the Tsar's police state was aiming for omnipresent totalitarian suppression, it would always be hampered by limited personnel, limited resources, limited talent, and limited interest at all levels. If you were a prison guard, you could either pour over every single sentence of every single letter that came and went, or you could not. Martoff was hoping his five months in prison would be it,

but when he got out in May of 1893, he received a further sentence, two years of administrative exile. Now, he would be allowed to choose his destination. It just couldn't be a city with a university in order to keep him away from other students. But someone tipped him off that interesting things were happening in what was then called Vilna, and what is today Vilnius Lithuania. So he said, I'll go to Vilna. And in June, 1893, he got on a train and left St. Petersburg for exile.

And it was in this, quote, unquote, exile that Julius Martoff really found his own revolutionary potential. So Vilna was a part of Lithuania, which had once been a part of Poland, Lithuania, and had come under Russian hegemony during the great partitions of Poland. So one of the principal reasons that interesting things were happening in Vilna was because the authorities there were mostly focused on Polish nationalists, not Russian socialists. The other reason is that these interesting things that were happening were happening in the Jewish community, which was really off the radar of the local authorities. Jewish factory workers often worked for Jewish factory owners, and so the local Russian authorities considered labor relations in those industries, to be an internal Jewish affair. So Jewish socialists in Vilna operated uniquely unmonitored and unharassed. And so even though he was in administrative exile and had to check in with those local Russian authorities,

the not yet 20-year-old Martoff was able to jumpstart his revolutionary career. Martoff made contact with the local Jewish socialist immediately, the most important of these being Arkhadi Kremer. And Kremer gets to go down as the father of the Jewish labor bund, and if you know what that means, then great. If you don't, we'll talk all about the Bund when we get to the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Now, initially, Martov was deployed as a teacher of economics and politics and history, doing propagandizing among the workers to turn them into fully enlightened Marxists. But though they did find plenty of eager students, it was always going to be slow going and slow building. So over the winter of 1893, 1894, Kramer, Martoff, and a few others strategized.

And the conclusion they came to was that they needed a new strategy, but they needed to move from propagandizing to agitation. And this strategy would thereafter be referred to as the Vilna program. Now they started doing it before they wrote about it, but the Vilna program was summed up by a pamphlet published in 1895 called On Agitation. that was devised by Kramer and the other Vilna veterans and written up by Martoff, who, they discovered much to their delight, was a very good writer. On agitation was not pure invention.

They were not inventing this out of whole cloth and had many sources feeding into it. Karl Kautzky in the German program, of course, but also a piece that Pohannov had written in 1891 in response to the famine, saying that socialists should take advantage of the crisis to set down literary debate and go out among the people to give a name and a purpose and a direction to their immediate angry suffering. But on agitation became the touchstone for the new organizing strategy that Russian Marxists would embrace. By agitation, they meant ditching abstract philosophy for concrete issues. For starters, do less talking and more listening to the workers. Find out what they

specifically hated about their job. Along hours, low wages, pay, living conditions, safety concerns. Whatever pissed them off, find out about it, listen to them. Then bring it back, review it, collate it, condense it, draw it up in a crisp declaration that enumerated those complaints, and then publish it on a single leaflet and get it spread around the factory. Is this what you want? Because if it is, there is a way to get it, and that way is to go on strike. This is the heart of agitation, taking nebulous resentment and turning it in to direct action. Help the workers realize the benefits of group action

to achieve what are clearly their shared goals. The role of the socialist intelligentsia was to give voice and direction through leaflets and maybe pamphlets, but not much more than that. And in many ways, the debates over the merits of this strategy is whether the revolution is going to be won with 500-page books about abstract philosophy, or single-page leaflets about better pay.

The group in Vilna was saying, leaflets. Now I know what you're saying, and you're right, this strategy is anathema to traditional Russian anarchist and neurotic ideology, which said we must not engage with such petty concerns, that even if you won a shorter workday or a few more rubles a month, in exchange you are granting the premise and legitimacy of an exploitive capitalist system. More comfortable chains are still chains. Plus, small material improvements will sap the revolutionary energy of the workers, make them complacent. But on agitation argued the opposite. It said the very act of going on strike together and demanding better conditions, not asking, demanding, would enhance the revolutionary

class consciousness of the workers not diminish it, that coming together to agitate for concrete shared demands, that experience of going on strike, suffering hardship together, and hopefully winning concessions together would create solidarity and trust. Getting an hour knocked off the workday or getting a slight increase in wages would not be the end of anything. It would be the beginning. So for starters, yes, agitate for small issues related to individual factories or sectors. Once this organization is up and running to accomplish small goals, it can be turned to bigger and more political projects, and the workers will turn to those projects with experience and confidence. If the revolutionary proletariat is necessary for the achievement of a socialist revolution,

then this is one way to start building the revolutionary proletariat. And it is certainly quicker and easier than waiting for every single lathe operator to graduate from propaganda school with the equivalent of a master's degree in Marxist economics. Now, there was one further aspect to the Vilna program that was specific to Vilna, but which did have broader applicability as a general theory. The problem they were having among the Jewish workers is that most of them spoke Yiddish, while the socialist intelligentsia spoke Russian. So the Vilna Socialists came to a conclusion that's kind of obvious.

Let's write our leaflets in Yiddish. Don't make them come to us, let us go to them. Now in Vilna, there was literally a language barrier to overcome. But in broader strategic terms, speaking the language, language of the worker, whether it be literally another language, or merely dialect or expressions or relatable references or simple sentences, the important thing was to speak their language. And one of the most persistent complaints that would be lobbed back at the exiled leaders like Plahanov is that they produce nothing the average worker could read or understand.

That was going to have to change if we actually want to organize the masses, not just talk amongst ourselves. Now, of course, what Kramer and Martoff and the others in Vilna were doing wasn't just speaking the language of the worker. They were Jews working among Jews. And what we're watching right now is something close to the foundation of the Jewish labor bund, the organization of Jewish socialists who believed in maintaining a separate organization of Jewish socialists because Jews faced unique Jewish problems that required unique Jewish solutions. And this is going to be an issue down the road once the real revolutions get going. And I do promise eventually there will be real revolutions that get going.

I mean, was there a place for a Jewish identity inside a movement so committed to defining the world in terms of economic class? These are questions we will get to later. So this agitation strategy was outlined and implemented, and by May of 1895, Martoff was able to give a speech to a group of about 400 comrades announcing that it had been a resounding success. Their organization was bigger than ever. They were more democratic than ever. they were more worker-focused than ever. They actually had workers in their organization. But this success, and their desire to spread the idea to other cities, face pushback.

There were intelligentsia socialists who enjoyed their pamphlets and books and intellectual debates. They wanted to talk theoretical forces of history, not a 10-hour workday. Then there were the propagandized workers who had achieved enlightenment. For them, their emergence from a previous state of ignorance was the whole point of the revolution. it's certainly what they personally valued above all. And they saw in the Vilna program and they read in on agitation and abandonment of that effort. A strategy that would leave their fellow workers in their ignorance in exchange for a few more rubles in their pockets. And they were offended by the idea that it was not worth the time or effort to educate those workers fully.

That all they were good for was bodies in the street. And that down the road, they would be turned into revolutionary cannon fodder, dying on behalf, of their intelligentsia leaders. The other big objection, an objection that Lenin and Martov would themselves soon be making, is what happens if the Vilna program becomes an end unto itself. Agitation for strikes on behalf of factory workers to address their particular grievances was great, as long as it was a step on the way to the political revolution.

But as the years went on, others in the movement would say this focus on improving the economic status of the workers is practically all that matters. The people who would take up this argument would later be disparagingly referred to as the economists and be added to Lenin's very long list of revolutionary Philistines that he carried around with him in his pocket. But as we will see next week, right here at this moment in 1895, Lenin is going to be totally on board with this program.

He will read on agitation and embrace it. He will meet Martoff and embrace him. And next week, we will see. how well they are rewarded for this change in strategy, which will be, you guessed it, exile in Siberia.