INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Cranborne could hardly have foreseen in July 1866 the extraordinary course of events which he was to review when he next wrote for the Quarterly in the autumn of 1867. Having come into office by resisting Gladstone's moderate Reform Bill, Derby and Disraeli, in the space of a year, led the House of Commons step by step into a measure of more than twice the size, which, by establishing household suffrage in the boroughs, seemed drastically to alter the balance of electoral power in favour of the urban working man. As a feat of dexterity and impudence, their successful conduct of the Reform Bill of 1867 was a triumph; as an act of moral tergiversation, it seemed to Cranborne to mark a new nadir in their leadership of the Conservative party.

The volte-face of 1866–7 was the product of political expediency. Neither Derby nor Disraeli wanted Reform as such: they were driven to accept it by the dictates of party and personal advantage. Their overriding concern was to make their ministry something more than a mere interlude between the last Liberal administration and the next; to show that the Conservative party, almost permanently out of office for twenty years, was capable of giving the country sound government, and, far from being reactionary and obscurantist, was sufficiently flexible in outlook to provide such instalments of moderate, constitutional progress as the nation might require – including, if necessary, parliamentary reform.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Lord robert cecil's first Quarterly article establishes at once his major preoccupations: with the threat posed by the development of the class struggle and the advance of ‘democracy’, with the corrosive effects of the financial tenets and idealistic pacifism of the Manchester school upon the nation's capacity to maintain its international position, and with the failure of the Conservative party under Derby and Disraeli adequately to uphold Conservative principles. It centres upon the chief domestic political topics of the spring of 1860, Gladstone's budget and Lord John Russell's Reform Bill, with a side glance at the menace supposedly offered to Britain by the designs of the emperor Napoleon III.

Lord Palmerston had become prime minister in June 1859, after the ejection of Derby's second ministry by that Whig-Liberal-Peelite-Radical amalgam that was ultimately to produce the Gladstonian Liberal party. The action of the Peelites, six of whom, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, Newcastle, Argyll, and Elgin, entered Palmerston's cabinet, finally destroyed the longcherished hope of bringing them back to the Conservative fold, and dealt a severe blow to the prospects for Conservative revival, though the Conservative party in the Commons, about 300 strong after the 1859 general election, remained a substantial force

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The early sixties were years of remarkable placidity in British politics. In the comfortable atmosphere of mid-Victorian prosperity, the personal position of Lord Palmerston, who reached the age of eighty in 1864, was not seriously challenged, and the genial conservatism which he purveyed seemed for the moment to suit the country's mood. Indeed, it went down so well as to render the competing product, offered by the official Conservative party, something of a drug in the market. With Palmerston in possession of the conservative cause, and of much of conservative sentiment, Derby was virtually compelled to acquiesce in his reign, and to prop him up against the more radical elements in his heterogeneous following. Disraeli's co-operation in this policy was so impeccable that Lord Robert felt no need to refurbish the philippics of 1860. The result was that domestic politics, without major issues or keen party strife, became very flat. Reviewing a year of peace, prosperity, and calm, the Annual Register for 1864 wrote: ‘The spirit of party, indeed, appeared to have lost nearly all its acrimony, and even a large share of its vitality, both in Parliament and in the country at large; it seemed as if few questions remained to divide in any material degree the opinions of the different sections of politicians.’ Perhaps the main focus of attention in this period was less any domestic topic than the tremendous struggle of the American Civil War, which, breaking out in 1861, divided British opinion (Conservatives, including Lord Robert, tending to sympathise with the South), and caused considerable distress in Lancashire and elsewhere by interfering with the supply of raw cotton to the textile industry.

PREPARATORY MANOEUVRES AND THE SPLIT

In June 1902 the Iskra group published in its newspaper a draft programme for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Iskra, no. 21). During the following year, no ‘critical comments’ or ‘proposed amendments’ were published by anyone (with the exception of a short article by the Latvian comrades in Zhizri'). However, ‘resolutions’ expressing full agreement with the views of Iskra were passed by some fifteen committees. This in itself showed that the comrades did not approach the complex, difficult, and important matter of drafting a Party programme with sufficient care and attention.

In publishing the draft programme, its authors wrote, quite properly, that ‘the Party programme should embody the collective thought of the Party’. ‘This means’, they went on, ‘that all the active Party groups should help to draft it.’ Yet the fact is that for the whole year no other group took any part in the preparation of the programme, and the work which should have been collective remained individual.

The decision to publish a translation of Akimov's two major political tracts was taken some years ago, but, as is the way with such enterprises, the period between promise and fulfilment proved unexpectedly prolonged. Despite the work and time expended, I am not sorry that I made the effort if only because Akimov would seem to deserve a more substantial place in the history of Russian Marxism than has usually been assigned him hitherto. True, in the last few years there have been signs of a growing appreciation of Akimov's qualities as polemicist and historian—Dr J. H. L. Keep, for instance, in his study of early Party history certainly pays him and the ‘Economists’, in general, considerable attention. I hope that this trend will be sustained now that Akimov's two most important works are more accessible.

I received help from many quarters in preparing this edition. The enterprise would never have been possible if I had not received unflagging support from the faculty of the Russian Institute at Columbia University. Nearly all the work on the book was completed while I was a visiting Fellow of the Institute. The Directors—first Professor Henry L. Roberts and then Professor Alexander Dallin—encouraged and advised me throughout with great good will, in a spirit of real friendship. However, I feel that special thanks are due to Miss Louise E. Luke of the Institute (now Managing Editor of the Slavic Review) who devoted unlimited effort and innumerable hours to editing the manuscript in its early stages. What patience I now have for the laborious exactitudes of editing, I have learnt from her.

The development of exchange has established such close links between all the peoples of the civilized world that the great liberation movement of the proletariat could not but become, and has in fact long since become, international.

As it considers its Party to be a unit of the world army of the proletariat, the Russian Social Democratic movement has pursued the same ultimate goal as the Social Democrats of all other countries.

This ultimate goal is determined by the character of bourgeois society and by the course of its development. The chief characteristic of this society is commodity production on the basis of capitalist productive relations. The most important and significant part of the means of production and of commodity distribution belongs to a class that is numerically small. Yet the vast majority of the population consists of proletarians and semi-proletarians, compelled by their economic position continually or periodically to sell their labour power, i.e., to hire themselves out to the capitalists, and by their labour to create the income of the upper classes of society.

The area dominated by capitalist productive relations constantly increases as steady technological advance gives greater economic weight to large enterprises and makes for the elimination of small independent producers, transforming some into proletarians, and narrowing the socio-economic functions of the others, who, in certain areas, are forced into more or less complete, more or less open, more or less oppressive dependence on capital.

This technological progress also enables the employers to use the labour of women and children on an ever-mounting scale in the production and distribution of commodities.

This booklet appeared in two editions: Materialy dlia kharakteristiki razvitiia Rossiiskoi Sotsialdemokraticheskoi Rabochei Partii (Geneva, 1904) and Ocherk razvitiia sotsialdemokratii u Rossii (St Petersburg, 1905). It is the later edition which has been translated here; those few changes that were made for the second edition were of a stylistic nature alone. (The preface to the later edition added little to the original preface and has therefore been omitted here.)

Most of the footnotes are editorial and are keyed into the text by numerical indicators. Akimov's notes are keyed into the text by symbols.—Ed.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The spring of 1901 witnessed an event of enormous importance in the life of Russian society. Tens of thousands of people, men ‘of every calling and condition’, assembled in a number of cities, at a given place and a given time, to express their hostility to the autocratic government.

The so-called ‘March events’ did not occur suddenly and without warning. They were preceded during the winter by a number of outbursts which were touched off by utterly trivial incidents: an anniversary celebration by the editor of a certain newspaper which had been spreading reactionary ideas for a quarter of a century, the production of a play fomenting national hatreds by a journalist who had betrayed his liberal past, the expulsion from the university of two students guilty of a dishonourable action during a nocturnal drinking spree.

Such incidents had occurred repeatedly in the past. But it was only now that they produced a reaction. A hostile demonstration was held in Kharkov near the home of the editor, Iuzefovich, compelling him and his eminent guests to break off their celebration.

INTRODUCTION

Leninism: Marxist or Populist?

In the years 1902–5 Vladimir Akimov and Vladimir Lenin stood at the opposite poles of Russian revolutionary Marxism. Lenin, as the leader of the Bolshevik faction, had opted for a ‘maximalist’ interpretation of Marxist thought—a full-blooded socialist régime in Russia as an immediate goal. For Akimov (the major spokesman of the so-called ‘Economist’ faction), Marxism demanded before all else the belief that the workers must master their own fate. The ‘kingdom of freedom’ could only be built on the broad foundations of popular initiative. A socialist revolution, as distinct from a revolutionary coup or an anarchic jacquerie, could be carried through only by a working-class confident in its own self-made and democratically-run organizations, in its own knowledge and ambitions. And to lay such foundations required time, patience. Both men were revolutionaries because both saw in the Tsarist autocracy an insuperable barrier thrown across the road of historical advance. But profound disagreement about the post-revolutionary future led to their diametrically opposed interpretations of party history, of Marxist doctrine and of the principles of party organization.

The full implications of this dispute only became apparent after the February Revolution of 1917 when Lenin's call for the immediate establishment of a proletarian dictatorship clashed with the caution of the Mensheviks who, together with the right-wing Bolsheviks led by Kamenev, urged that a longer period of parliamentary government was required to enable the proletariat to prepare itself for power. But Lenin successfully asserted the primacy of political initiative over the dictates of socio-economic ‘realities’. It was against his voluntaristic interpretation of Marxism that Bukharin, too, was twice to argue a ‘deterministic’ alternative.

From 1895 on, the Social Democratic movement in Russia began to shift from kruzhkovshchina to methods of mass agitation. This produced, among other things, a demand for agitational pamphlets for distribution among the worker masses. But there were few pamphlets available, and those only in extremely limited quantities. At that time the Union of Russian Social Democrats [Abroad] published only a few pamphlets a year and was unable to arrange adequate delivery of its publications to Russia.

Nobody was satisfied with the Listok Rabotnika [Worker Supplement] which was published abroad (there were eight issues from May 1896 to October 1898). Furthermore, its publication led to a clash between the GEL [Group for the Emancipation of Labour] and the majority of the ‘young’ comrades. As a result of these clashes, the ‘youngsters’ convened in November 1898, and decided to demand that the GEL allow them to publish independently the Listok Rabotnika and agitational pamphlets. If this right were not granted, they proposed to begin publication activities outside the Union. The ‘youngsters’ wanted the GEL to continue to edit the Rabotnik and also those pamphlets which it decided itself ought to be published. However, although it acceded to the changes demanded by the ‘youngsters’, the GEL refused to take any active part in the subsequent publications of the Union.

The ‘youngsters’ set themselves very modest tasks. According to their [new] statute, the Union's duties were: (1) to publish agitational literature and deliver it to Russia; (2) as their representative abroad, to carry out the instructions of the Party organizations in Russia; (3) to undertake other tasks that might arise, provided they were not in conflict with the Party's Manifesto.