Notification and Resolutions of the Cracow Meeting of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. and Party Functionaries
V. I. Lenin
Collected Works, Volume 18, pages 447-466.
NOTIFICATION
A meeting of the C.C. R.S.D.L.P. and Party functionaries was held in February this year. The Central Committee succeeded in securing the attendance of members of the illegal Party organisations of St. Petersburg (five persons), the Moscow Region (two), the South (two), the Urals and the Caucasus. Elections from the local organisations could not be held, and the meeting was therefore not constituted a conference. Some of the members of the Central Committee were unable to attend because of police measures.
Nearly all the participants in the meeting had been playing a prominent role in various legal workers’ societies and in the use of so-called “legal opportunities”. Thus the composition of the meeting ensured an accurate picture of the whole of Party work in all the principal areas of Russia.
The resolutions were adopted unanimously, the only exception being the abstention of one comrade on two clauses of the “insurance” resolution, and of another on particulars of the resolution on the non-Russians.
Endorsed by the Central Committee, the resolutions of the meeting provide a summary of Party experience and a guiding line on all the major questions of Social-Democratic work in present-day Russia.
*
Taking systematic stock of the experience of 1912 is a most important task of the Social-Democrats, for that year saw a great, a historic change in Russia’s working-class movement. The point is not merely that decline and disintegration are giving way to a revival. The working class has gone over to a massive offensive against the capitalists and the tsarist monarchy. The wave of economic and political strikes has surged so high that in this respect Russia is once more ahead of all the countries of the world, including the most developed of them.
This fact will not, of course, make any class-conscious worker forget how very far ahead of us are the proletarians of the free countries in regard to organisation and class education of the masses. But this fact has proved that Russia has entered a period of the growth of a new revolution.
The working class is faced with the great task of bringing about the revolutionary awakening of all the democratic masses and of educating them in the struggle, of leading them to the powerful onslaught which must bring Russia freedom and a republic by destroying the Romanov monarchy. The fundamental task of the moment is to give the utmost support to the open revolutionary struggle of the masses, to organise, extend, deepen and intensify it. Anyone who has failed to realise this task, who does not work in an illegal organisation, group or nucleus promoting the cause of the revolution, is not a Social-Democrat.
*
The revolutionary upswing of the proletariat in 1912 was the main cause of the universally recognised change in the mood of the democrats. Both in the elections to the Fourth Duma and in the matter of founding a legal working-class press that advocates at least the basic elements of Marxist theory, the Social-Democrats achieved important victories. The tsarist government was unable to prevent these achievements solely because the open revolutionary struggle of the masses had altered the entire social and political situation. While continuing its steadfast, persevering and systematic work of using absolutely all “legal opportunities”—ranging from the platform of the Black-Hundred Duma to a simple temperance society—the R.S.D.L.P. does not for one moment forget that only he is worthy of the lofty name of Party member who really carries on his entire work among the masses in the spirit of the Party decisions that were thought out and adopted from the standpoint of the growing revolution and not of June Third “legality”. Our task is not to succumb to the disorder and disintegration left over from the period of 1908–11, but to fight against them. Our job is not to swim with the stream of chaotic and unprincipled legalism, but to use every legal possibility for gradually grouping all live elements around the illegal Party. Our slogan is: no peace with those who misuse legalism to sow scepticism and indifference to the revolutionary struggle of the masses or even to hamper it outright.
We cannot guarantee the realisation of our demands by reducing them, by curtailing our programme, or by adopting the tactics of attracting unenlightened people with the deceptive promise of easy constitutional reforms under Russian tsarism. We can guarantee it only by educating the masses in the spirit of consistent democracy and awareness of the falsity of constitutional illusions. The guarantee lies in the revolutionary organisation of the foremost class, the proletariat, and in the great revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses.
The period of rampant counter-revolution has left us a heritage of ideological disorder and disruption, organisational disintegration in many centres of the working-class movement, primitive methods and forced isolation from the Party on the part of some, and a scornful, or even malicious, attitude to the “underground” that preserves the behests of the revolution and elaborates revolutionary tactics, on the part of others. The liquidators’ break-away from time Social-Democratic Party, their virtual isolation, and in some cases departure from Social-Democratic principles and disintegration of the non-Russian Social-Democratic organisations have all accentuated the demand for unity to the utmost degree.
Unity of the Social-Democratic proletariat is a necessary condition for its victories.
Unity of the Social-Democratic proletariat is impossible without the unity of its Party, the R.S.D.L.P.
And here we see at once that we cannot decide the question of unity without deciding—not merely in words but by deeds as well—the question of the need for an illegal Party. Anyone who speaks of unity and yet advocates an “open workers’ party” deceives himself and the workers. Anyone who speaks of unity, pretending that this question can be decided, cleared up, or at least raised, within the bounds of legality, deceives himself and the workers.
What will solve the problem of unity is certainly not meaningless phrases about “unity” in the legal press, nor agreements with various “straggling” little groups of intellectuals, nor yet the diplomacy of negotiations abroad, but solely unity in the localities, the actual fusion of all worker members of the R.S.D.L.P. into an integral illegal organisation.
The workers have already started of their own accord, from below, on the solution of the problem of unity, the only solution that is serious and realistic. This meeting calls on all Social-Democrats to take the same path.
Worker Social-Democrats everywhere are re-establishing integral illegal organisations of the R.S.D.L.P. in the form of factory nuclei and committees, district groups, town centres, Social-Democratic groups in all kinds of legal institutions, etc. Let all who do not wish to doom themselves to the role of powerless individuals join these organisations, where the recognition of the illegal Party and support for the revolutionary struggle of the masses take place under the control of the workers themselves.
*
The period of disintegration is passing. The time has come to gather our forces. Let us, then, rally in the illegal organisations of the R.S.D.L.P. They do not close the door to any Social-Democrat who wishes to work in them, who wishes to help the organisation of the proletariat, its struggle against capital, and the revolutionary onslaught against the tsarist monarchy that it has begun.
A nation-wide political crisis is slowly but steadily maturing in Russia. The June Third system was the last attempt to rescue the tsar’s Black-Hundred monarchy, to renovate it by an alliance with the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie, and that attempt fell through. The new democratic forces are growing and gathering strength daily and hourly among Russia’s peasantry and town bourgeoisie. The number of proletarians in town and country is growing faster than ever, they are becoming more organised, more united, and more confident of their invincibility, and their confidence is strengthened by the experience of mass strikes.
The R.S.D.L.P., in organising the foremost contingents of this proletariat into an integral whole, must lead it into revolutionary battle in the name of our old revolutionary demands.
Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.
February 1913
RESOLUTIONS
The Revolutionary Upswing, the Strikes, and the Tasks of the Party
1. The outstanding fact in the history of the working-class movement and the Russian revolution in 1912 was the remarkable development of both the economic and the political strike movement of the proletariat. The number of political strikers reached one million.
2. The character of the strike movement of 1912 deserves special attention. The workers in a number of cases put forward economic and political demands simultaneously; the period of economic strikes was succeeded by a period of, political strikes and vice versa. The struggle against the capitalists for the gains of 1905 taken away by the counter revolution, and the growing cost of living, aroused more and more sections of the workers, confronting them with political issues in the sharpest form. All these forms of combination, and intertwining of the economic and political struggle are a condition for and an earnest of the might of the movement, giving rise to revolutionary mass strikes.
3. The beginning of outbursts of discontent and of revolts in the Navy and the Army, which marked the year 1912, was undoubtedly linked with the revolutionary mass strikes of the workers, and indicated the growing ferment and indignation among large sections of the democrats, in particular among the peasantry, who supply the bulk of the troops.
4. All these facts, combined with the general swing to the left in the country, which had its effect on the elections to the Fourth Duma despite the most shameless rigging of them by the Black-Hundred tsarist government, showed beyond all doubt that Russia had once more entered a period of open revolutionary struggle by the masses. The new revolution, the beginning of which we are experiencing, is an inevitable result of the bankruptcy of the June Third policy of tsarism. This policy was unable to satisfy even the most compliant big bourgeoisie. The mass of the people has become still more enslaved, particularly in the case of the oppressed nationalities, and the peasantry has again been reduced to a state where millions upon millions are starving.
5. Under these circumstances, revolutionary mass strikes are of exceptional importance also because they constitute one of the most effective means of overcoming the apathy, despair and disunity of the agricultural proletariat and the peasantry, rousing them to independent political activity and drawing them into the most concerted, simultaneous and extensive revolutionary actions.
6. The Party organisations, in extending and intensifying their agitation for the immediate demands of the R.S.D.L.P.—a democratic republic, an eight-hour working day, and confiscation of all the landed estates for the benefit of the peasantry—must make it one of the prime objects of their activity to give all-round support to revolutionary mass strikes, and to develop and organise all forms of revolutionary action by the masses. In particular, an essential current task is to organise revolutionary street demonstrations both in combination with political strikes and as independent actions.
7. The fact that some capitalists resort to lock-outs (mass dismissals) against the strikers confronts the working class with new tasks. It is necessary to take careful account of the economic conditions of strikes in every area, every industry and every particular case, find new forms of struggle (such as stay-in strikes) to counteract the lock-outs, and replace political strikes by revolutionary meetings and revolutionary street demonstrations.
8. Some legal press organs are carrying on general agitation against revolutionary mass strikes, irrespective of their appraisal of this or that strike. Besides the liberal press, such agitation is being carried on, for example, by the group of liquidators in the newspaper Luch, against the will of a substantial section of those workers who sup port the newspaper in one form or another. In view of this, the task of all pro-Party worker Social-Democrats is: (1) to wage a determined struggle against that group; (2) systematically and perseveringly to explain the harm of the above-mentioned agitation to all workers, irrespective of their leanings, and (3) to rally all proletarian forces for the furtherance of revolutionary agitation and revolutionary action by the masses.
Building the Illegal Organisation
1. In summing up the working-class movement and the Party’s work in 1912, this meeting finds that—the new wave of revolutionary actions by the masses that has begun has fully borne out the previous decisions of the R.S.D.L.P. (particularly those of the January 1912 Conference) as regards building the Party. The course of the strike movement in 1912, the Social-Democrats’ campaign in the elections to the Fourth Duma, the course of the insurance campaign, etc., have shown beyond doubt that the only correct type of organisational structure in the present period is an illegal party as,the sum total of Party nuclei surrounded by a network of legal and semi-legal workers’ associations.
2. It is absolutely obligatory to adapt the organisational forms of illegal building to local conditions. A variety of forms of cover for illegal nuclei and the greatest possible flexibility in adapting forms of work to local and general living conditions guarantee the vitality of the illegal organisation.
3. The chief immediate task in the field of organisational work at the present time is to establish in all factories purely Party illegal committees consisting of the most active elements among the workers. The tremendous up swing of the working-class movement creates conditions in which factory Party committees can be restored and the existing ones strengthened in the vast majority of localities.
4. The meeting points out that it has now become essential in every centre to form a single leading organisation out of the disconnected local groups.
In St. Petersburg, for example, a leading City Committee, formed by combining the principle of election by district nuclei and the principle of co-option, has emerged as a type of city-wide organisation.
This type of organisation makes it possible to establish a very close and direct connection between the leading body and the primary nuclei, and at the same time to create a small, mobile, particularly well disguised executive body, authorised to act at any moment on behalf of the entire organisation. The meeting recommends this type for other centres of the working-class movement as well, with such modifications as may be prompted by local and general living conditions.
5. With a view to establishing close links between local organisations and the Central Committee, as well as to guiding and unifying Party work, this meeting deems it imperative to organise regional centres in the principal areas of the working-class movement.
6. A system of authorised nominees is proposed as a most important practical factor in establishing a permanent living link between the Central Committee and local Social-Democratic groups, as well as in devising flexible forms of directing local work in the major centres of the working-class movement. Nominees should be recruited among workers in charge of local work. Only advanced workers can by themselves strengthen and consolidate the central apparatus of the Party locally, and throughout Russia.
7. This meeting expresses the wish that the Central Committee should confer as frequently as possible with local Party functionaries active in various fields of Social-Democratic work.
8. This meeting stresses the repeated Party decisions to the effect that the workers’ party cannot exist unless there are regular membership dues and contributions by workers. In the absence of such contributions, particularly in present conditions, the existence of a central (local or all-Russia) Party body, however modest, will be absolutely impossible.
9. (Not to be published.)
The Social-Democratic Group in the Duma
1. This meeting notes that despite unheard-of persecution and the rigging of the elections by the government, and despite the Black-Hundred and liberal bloc against the Social-Democrats that in many places assumed a very definite character, the R.S.D.L.P. won tremendous victories in the elections to the Fourth Duma. The Social-Democrats polled an increased number of votes almost every where in the second urban curia, which they are wresting more and more from the liberals. In the worker curia, which is the most important for our Party, the R.S.D.L.P. retained its undivided supremacy, the working class emphasising with particular unanimity, by electing none but Bolshevik deputies in the curia, its unshakable loyalty to the old R.S.D.L.P. and its revolutionary behests.
2. This meeting hails the vigorous activity of the Social-Democratic deputies to the Fourth Duma, which found expression in a number of speeches in the Duma, the sub mission of interpellations and the reading of a declaration which in general correctly expressed the fundamental principles of Social-Democracy.
3. This meeting recognises that our Party’s established tradition, by which the Duma Social-Democratic group is a body subordinate to the Party as a whole, in the shape of its central bodies, is the only correct one, and finds that in the interests of the political education of the working class and the proper organisation of the Party’s work in the Duma, careful attention should be paid to every step of the Social-Democratic group, and in this way Party control exercised over the group.
4. This meeting cannot but regard the resolution concerning Jagiello as a direct violation of Party duty by the Social-Democratic group. That resolution backs the disruptive move of the Bund, which entered into an agreement with a non-Social-Democratic party (the P.S.P.) against the Polish Social-Democrats and elected Jagiello, a non Social-Democrat, in opposition to all the Social-Democratic electors, who were in the majority among the working-class electors. The group thereby aggravated the split among the workers in Poland and hampered the cause of unity in the Party as a whole.
5. Comrade Chkhenkeli’s defence, on behalf of the group, of cultural national autonomy under the guise of “establishing the necessary institutions for the free development of each nationality” is a direct violation of the Party Programme.[4] The Second Congress of the Party, which adopted the Programme,[5] rejected by a special vote what was in effect an identical formulation. Concessions to nationalist sentiment, even in this disguised form, are impermissible for a proletarian party.
6. The Social-Democratic group’s vote in favour of the Progressist (in reality Octobrist) formula of procedure with regard to the declaration of the Minister, and the failure to introduce an independent Social-Democratic formula are a blunder which should be noted by the Party in view of the malicious comments of the liberal press.[6]
7, 8 and 9. (Not to be published.)[7]
Illegal Literature
Having discussed the necessity for all-round development of illegal publishing and worked out a number of concrete instructions on the matter, this meeting insistently calls upon all local organisations of the Party, all workers’ nuclei and individual workers to show greater independence and initiative in the matter of transport and contacts with the Bureau of the Central Committee[8] for the distribution of illegal literature.
The Insurance Campaign
Noting that the working class and its Party, despite all persecution, have displayed great energy in upholding proletarian interests in connection with the introduction of the insurance law, this meeting considers:
1. It is necessary to wage the most determined and concerted struggle against attempts by the government and the capitalists to make the workers elect their delegates to the sick benefit funds blindly, without allowing workers’ meetings.
2. Despite the prohibition, workers should everywhere try to hold spontaneous meetings for the preliminary nomination of the candidate delegates they want.
3. Workers should organise revolutionary meetings to protest against the violence and outrages accompanying the introduction of the insurance laws.
4. It is at all events necessary to draw up beforehand a workers’ list of candidate delegates from among the more influential worker Social-Democrats and by concerted effort to champion the list also where no meetings can be held.
5. This meeting considers it inadvisable and harmful to boycott the election of delegates. At present the capitalists are devoting their main efforts to preventing the workers from gaining ascendancy in certain proletarian factory nuclei, such as the workers’ sick benefit funds should become. A boycott, which at the present time would disunite the workers, would only assist the above-mentioned efforts of the capitalists.
6. The struggle for the proper election of delegates to sick benefit funds must not cease for one moment. While using every opportunity in every way and with the utmost energy, not for a moment allowing the employers to consider the normal course of production assured, and extending and developing the workers’ struggle, we must not refrain from securing that the Social-Democratic list is adopted despite all obstacles. Elections do not preclude further development of the struggle. On the contrary, by securing the election of staunch worker Social-Democrats as delegates, we shall facilitate the further struggle for proper elections, in which the delegates will give the utmost assistance to the workers.
7. Wherever elections take place without meetings, it is necessary to carry on agitation for the re-election of delegates through genuinely free elections, with the workers holding meetings by every means available.
8. The Social-Democratic Duma group must immediately make a new interpellation on the banning of workers’ election meetings.
9. All agitation on the introduction of insurance must be closely combined with a description of the entire state of affairs in tsarist Russia, explaining our socialist principles and revolutionary demands.
The Attitude to Liquidationism, and Unity
1. The Party’s four years of struggle against liquidationism have proved the absolute correctness of the definition given by the December 1908 Party Conference of the R.S.D.L.P., which said:
“Attempts by a certain section of intellectuals in the Party to abolish the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and replace it by an amorphous association within the framework of legality at all costs, even at the price of a down right repudiation of the programme, tactics and traditions of the Party.”
Consequently, the liquidators are condemned not for stressing the necessity of legal work, but for renouncing and destroying the illegal Party.
The founding of the first Marxist workers’ daily newspaper in Russia and the election of none but Bolshevik deputies in the worker curia proved beyond all doubt that the Party was able to cope with legal activity, having pushed aside the liquidators.
2. By withdrawing from the illegal Party and grouping themselves separately from the local organisations, the liquidators brought about a split, which they confirmed by setting up so-called initiating groups in a number of localities, above all in St. Petersburg. The January 1912 Conference of the R.S.D.L.P., which decided that the liquidationist group of contributors to Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni—a group forming the core of the initiating groups—had “definitely placed itself outside the Party”,[1] thereby merely registered the split effected by the liquidators.
3. The August 1912 conference, which named itself a “conference of organisations of the R.S.D.L.P.”, proved in fact to be a liquidationist conference, since its principal and leading section was the literary group of liquidators which had broken away from the Party and was cut off from the mass of the Russian workers.
4. The devotion of the overwhelming majority of the foremost workers to the illegal Party compelled the August conference to make seeming concessions to Party principle and profess recognition of the illegal Party. In reality, however, all the resolutions of that conference are permeated through and through with liquidationism, and immediately after the conference Nasha Zarya and Luch, which announced its adherence to the August decisions, intensified their liquidationist propaganda—
(a) for an open party;
(b) against the underground;
(c) against the Party Programme (defence of cultural national autonomy, revision of the agrarian laws enacted by the Third Duma, shelving the slogan of a republic, and so on);
(d) against revolutionary mass strikes;
(e) for reformist, exclusively legalist tactics.
Hence one of the Party’s tasks is still to wage a determined struggle against the liquidationist group of Nasha Zarya and Luch, and to make clear to the mass of the workers the great harm of the liquidators’ propaganda.
5. The “unity” campaign launched by the liquidators in the legal press evades and obscures the main issue, that of joining the illegal Party and working in it; thus it misleads the workers, for this issue cannot even be raised in the legal press. In reality the liquidators still behave as splitters, which became only too obvious during the elections in St. Petersburg, for when the electors were divided into two equal groups, it was the liquidators who rejected the proposal for drawing lots, the only means of doing away with the disunity of the workers in the face of the bourgeois parties.
6. Provided the illegal organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. is recognised and joined, the unity of worker Social-Democrats of all trends and shades is an absolute necessity dictated by all the interests of the working-class movement.
Unification on these very principles has already been effected in the Narva district organisation of St. Petersburg and in a number of provincial organisations.
7. This meeting most emphatically supports such unification and recommends that the same thing should immediately be begun everywhere from below, in factory committees, district groups, etc., the worker comrades verifying whether the recognition of the illegal organisation and readiness to hack the revolutionary struggle of the masses and revolutionary tactics are really put into effect. Only to the extent that this unity from below is actually established will the final unification of the Party and complete consolidation of unity on an all-Russia scale be accomplished.
Non-Russian Social-Democratic Organisations
1. The experience of 1912 fully confirmed the correctness of the decision which the January (1912) Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. adopted on this question.[2] The Bund’s support of the nomination of Jagiello, a non-Social-Democrat, against the Polish Social-Democrats, and the violation of the Party Programme in favour of nationalism by the August (1912) conference of the liquidators, the Bund and the Lettish Social-Democrats revealed with particular clarity the complete bankruptcy of the federalist principles of organising the Social-Democratic Party and the great harm which the isolation of the non-Russian Social-Democratic organisations does to the proletarian cause.
2. This meeting therefore calls earnestly on the workers of all the nationalities of Russia to rebuff the militant nationalism of the reactionaries with the utmost determination, to combat all manifestations of a nationalist spirit among the working masses. It calls on the worker Social-Democrats locally to display the closest solidarity, and to merge into integral organisations of the R.S.D.L.P. working in all the languages spoken by the local proletariat and achieving real unity from below, as has long been done in the Caucasus.
3. This meeting expresses deep regret at the split in the ranks of the Polish Social-Democrats, which greatly weakens the struggle of the worker Social-Democrats of Poland. The meeting is compelled to state that the Executive of the Polish Social-Democrats, which today does not represent the majority of the Social-Democratic organisations of the Polish proletariat, resorts to impermissible methods in combating that majority (for example, groundlessly suspecting the entire Warsaw organisation of provocation). The meeting calls on all the Party organisations which come in contact with the Polish worker Social-Democrats to help them in establishing genuine unity among the Polish Social-Democrats.
4. This meeting points out in particular the extreme opportunism and liquidationism of the decisions adopted by the latest (ninth) conference of the Bund, which with drew the slogan of a republic, pushed illegal work into the background and was oblivious of the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat. Equally reprehensible is the Bund’s resistance to the unification of all worker Social-Democrats in the localities (Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna and elsewhere), a unification which the R.S.D.L.P. has repeatedly urged at its congresses and conferences since 1906.
5. This meeting greets the revolutionary worker Social-Democrats of the Lettish organisation, who perseveringly carry on anti-liquidationist propaganda, and expresses regret that the Central Committee of the Lettish Social-Democrats is inclined to support the anti-Party moves of the liquidators.
6. This meeting expresses firm confidence that the revolutionary upswing which has begun, and the mass economic and political strikes, street demonstrations and other forms of open revolutionary struggle by the masses will help in completely unifying and merging the worker Social-Democrats in the localities without any distinction between the nationalities, thereby strengthening the onslaught against tsarism, which oppresses all the peoples of Russia, and against the bourgeoisie of all the nations of Russia, which is in the process of uniting.
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