A week ago, we wrote about the revolution in Petersburg. Today it is the revolution in almost all of the Russian empire. In Moscow, Riga, and Vilnius, in Liepāja and Jelgava,† in Yekaterinoslav and Kiev, in Warsaw and Łódź, the proletarians have responded to the massacre in Petersburg with mass strikes—in Warsaw it was a general strike, in the literal meaning of the term—and they have energetically demonstrated their political class solidarity with the proletariat on the Nevá. And with the masses that have gone into action, something else is also growing—the “thoroughness” of commitment (“die Gründlichkeit,”‡ to speak in the language of Marx) of those same masses, whose action it is.
In Petersburg, the uprising of the proletariat was spontaneous and the signal given for it was by a purely accidental leader [Father Gapon], even if the goals, the program, and thereby the political character of the uprising, as has been described in very precise news reports, were directly dictated by the intervention of Social Democratic workers. In the rest of the tsarist empire, and particularly in Poland, the initiative and the leadership of the movement from the very start was in the hands of the Social Democrats. Obviously [we are speaking] even here not in the sense that the Social Democrats of their own free will conjured up a mass strike out of nowhere merely at their own discretion. They had to adjust themselves everywhere to the pressure from the workers, who in reaction to the very first news and even rumors about the events in Petersburg became greatly aroused and instinctively seized on the idea of solidarity action. But it was the Social Democrats who immediately gave the necessary expression to the stormy outbreaks of the masses, provided political slogans, and gave the movement a clear direction.
Thus, the Russian Revolution, when viewed as an entirety, has already taken on the clearly defined character of a political rebellion by the whole working class—and that was on the very next day after the bloodbath of January 22. Because it is precisely this echo produced by the Petersburg events immediately in the other industrial cities and regions of Russia that is the best proof that in Petersburg itself we are not talking about an isolated, blind revolt of desperation by a particular section of the working class, as has frequently and bloodily occurred in the case of the Russian peasantry from time to time for many years. No, it was an expression of the same ferment and the same aspirations for something better that are vitally alive among the industrial workers in the whole empire. Open and conscious solidarity action of this kind, and indeed it was political solidarity action by the workers in the various cities and regions of Russia—no such thing has happened before during the existence of the tsarist regime. Even May Day, the idea of which has had a powerful impact in Russia, was never able to summon forth a comparably cohesive and composite mass outpouring.
Only the immediate struggle could bring them so suddenly together into action and show for the first time that the working class in the tsarist empire is no longer merely an abstract concept or a mechanical aggregation of separate groups of proletarians with similar interests and parallel aspirations, but rather is an organic whole fully capable of action, a political class with a common will and a class consciousness held in common. Since the battles of this past week in the tsarist empire there no longer exist scattered workers here and there, in the north, in the south, in the west, Latvian, Jewish, Polish workers, with each group acting by itself, rattling separately the chains of enslavement that they all suffer in common. Today a tight-knit proletarian phalanx is standing against the tsarist system, and by its terrible sacrifices and struggle has shown that it has understood how to reject the ancient slogan divide et impera*—the reigning wisdom of every form of despotism. And by the blood that it has shed, which has a more powerful effect than any paper “instructions” issued by secret party conventicles, this proletariat has been forged together into a single revolutionary class.
Therein lies the enduring value of the last week of January, which has been epoch-making in the history of the international proletariat and its struggle for emancipation. The proletariat of Russia has stepped onto the political stage as an independent force for the first time. In the massacre of January 22, it had its baptism in blood, just as the Paris proletarians did in the slaughter of June 1848, and the proletariat of the Russian empire is now an active member of the international family of workers in struggle.
This tremendous fact does not exist for the bourgeois literati, who limit themselves to pumping out information about what they fear might be the martyrdom of Maxim Gorky, pumping it out as quickly as they can in the age-old, moss-covered common coin “for purposes of promotion.”† But this was only to be expected. If one wanted to have a look in its purest form at the grotesque leaping about of today’s bourgeois “intelligentsia” in the face of the historic drama on the Nevá, just for the fun of it, one need only take in one’s hands Mr. [Maximilian] Harden’s Zukunft [The Future], which shimmers in all the colors of “modern” decadence. This publication tries to keep in step with [Dmitri Fyodorovich] Trepov’s telegraph agencies.* Zukunft reports that black is white, that the present political situation in Russia “meets the needs of the Russian masses,” that the “poor” Petersburg workers, who are [supposedly] pious and innocent little lambs loyal to the tsar, are being “taken for a ride” by demagogues. Thus, Harden clears the name of the Petersburg proletariat before the eyes of the world, and explains that the death of 2,000 proletarians demanding freedom was actually mere child’s play compared to the Decembrist revolt of eighty years ago.† Harden explains that “even officers of the guard” had already proclaimed the republic way back then. The standard thick skulls of the bourgeoisie were never designed, even in their heyday, to comprehend the historical grandeur of proletarian class struggle. At the very least in the period of the decline of the bourgeoisie some dwarf-sized thick skulls may be destined to do that.
But even for international Social Democracy, the uprising of the Russian proletariat is a new phenomenon, which needs to be assimilated mentally from the outset. We are all incorrigible metaphysicians, no matter how dialectically we imagine ourselves to think. In our immediate, everyday states of consciousness, we cling to the notion that things are unchangeable. And although we are the party of social progress, even for us, every healthy element of progress which has taken place unobserved now suddenly appears before us as a surprise—although it is an accomplished fact—so that at first we have to inwardly adjust our thinking patterns to this new reality.
In the imagination of quite a few Social Democrats in Western Europe, the Russian proletarian still lives in the form of the “muzhik,” the Russian peasant of olden times, with long flaxen hair, feet wrapped in strips of cloth, and an expression of stupidity on his face, someone who only yesterday arrived from the countryside, a stranger and a mere visitor to the cultural world of the modern city. By no means have our people noticed the extent to which capitalism has raised the cultural and mental level of the Russian proletarian, as has also been done by the work of enlightenment and explanation carried on by the Social Democrats of the Russian empire, work performed beneath the leaden ceiling of the absolutist system of repression. We fail to notice that yesterday’s muzhik has been transformed into today’s intelligent worker with a thirst for knowledge—the big-city proletarians who are idealistic, ready for battle, and jealous of their honor. And when one recalls that the propaganda and agitation of the Social Democrats in Russia has been going on for only about fifteen years, that the first attempt at a mass union campaign in Petersburg dates from the year 1896*—then it must be admitted that in Russia the pace of this underground miner’s work of social progress has been positively “rip-roaring” [“rasendes”].
All the sluggish mists and slow-brewing vapors of stagnation have suddenly been dispersed and blown away by the proletarian thunderstorm. And where yesterday the enigmatic fortress of rigid, centuries-old immobility seemed to loom like a menacing phantom over everything, there stands before us today a land thoroughly churned up and left quivering by storms of the most modern kind, a land from which the light of a mighty bonfire shines out upon the entire bourgeois world.
The Petersburg events have given us a fundamental lesson in revolutionary optimism. Forcing its way over and through a thousand obstacles and all the bulwarks set up by medievalism, lacking all the modern conditions of life politically and socially, the iron law of capitalist development has been carried through victoriously in the form of the birth, growth, and coming to consciousness of the working class. And in the volcanic outburst of this revolution it is first revealed to us how thoroughly and quickly the young mole has been working in the ground. How merrily it has worked, right under the feet of Western European bourgeois society! If one wished to use election statistics or figures about union membership or the number of existing voters’ associations in order to measure the degree of political correctness or the latent revolutionary energy of the working class, that would mean trying to encompass Mont Blanc with a tailor’s tape marked off in centimeters. In the so-called normal times of everyday life under capitalism, by no means do we know how powerfully our ideas have already taken root, how strong the proletariat is, and how inwardly fragile the superstructure of the ruling society already is. And all the vacillations and errors of opportunism in the last analysis result from such an incorrect estimation of the strength of the socialist movement, a subjective illusion about its weakness.
Therefore, the dull and vapid, shallow and empty petty-mindedness which only understands how to grasp at the copper pennies of immediate tangible results will bemoan the “misfired revolution,” the “straw fire” of the Petersburg uprising, which supposedly produced no results, because, formally speaking, absolutism is still in the saddle; it still exists. No Constituent Assembly has yet been called, and the masses, which are still on strike today, will probably return to business as usual tomorrow. Actually, the events of the past week have ripped a gigantic tear through the “everyday” existence of Russian society. Tsarism is no longer the same, nor is the working class, and it is no longer the same society that will emerge from the revolutionary whirlpool. Inwardly, tsarism already feels the fatal stab wound it has received, and its further existence, however brief or prolonged, can only consist of its death agony. For the first time, it has come face to face with a class from among the people that is destined to destroy it. This class has shown the world, above all, that tsarism can no longer continue to exist by virtue of the passivity of this social stratum but can only exist against the positive will of this stratum, a will that is now politically decisive. For the first time, the working class as a whole has engaged in a struggle for the political leadership of society against absolutism, and has assumed that leadership unto itself. Even the ultimate weapon of brute force, with which absolutism today has barely managed to hold on, has become shaky and unreliable precisely because this ultimate weapon has already been used. The military is certainly quite severely demoralized and politically shaken by the civil conflict—something that decades of underground agitation in the barracks had not been able to accomplish. The tsarist regime hardly dares to risk one more military test of strength with its own people.
And now the true task of Social Democracy is beginning—to keep the revolutionary situation going in permanence.* This task arises automatically as a counter to the inclination toward political shortsightedness, the inclination to see failure and the end of struggle exactly where the revolution is in fact just beginning. [The task is] to take steps to counteract any pessimistic downheartedness among the worker masses, for that is what reaction is gambling on; to make clear to the proletariat the inner meaning and the tremendous successes of the first attack; to dispel the hangover that the masses have been accustomed to experiencing in bourgeois revolutions when the goals of the revolution were not immediately and obviously achieved, and the liberal heroes in Russia will undoubtedly declare as early as tomorrow that those goals are unattainable—such is the fertile field of work that opens up for Social Democracy in the coming period. Neither in Russia nor anywhere else in the world has Social Democracy been able to artificially create historic moments or situations, even though youthful “mole-heroes” might perhaps imagine that they could. However, what it can and must do is make the best use of any such situation so that its historical meaning and consequences can help bring the proletariat to class consciousness and thus lead it on toward more advanced stages of struggle.
At the present moment in Russia, the most important necessity that presents itself is to stand with the masses after the first battle, explaining, encouraging, and inspiring. And we will not leave these tasks to the Gapons—who characteristically flame like meteors across the sky of the revolution and then burn out forever. Nor will we leave them to the liberals, who after any timid attempt shrink back within themselves and clap themselves shut like pocketknives. Nor will we leave these tasks to various types of revolutionary adventurers, who are always ready to disappear just at the time when a large-scale assault is necessary. Only Social Democracy can fulfill this function in Russia, and it must be present at every particular moment of the struggle because it has a final goal that reaches over and beyond all the particular moments, and therefore it does not regard any immediate success or failure as the end of the world. In short, only Social Democracy can do this, because for it the working class is not the means to an end—political liberty—but political liberty is a means to the end of the emancipation of the working class.