A general strike has taken over almost our entire country, from factory workers and artisans down to grade school children. This is a fact without precedent, unheard of in our history, because this is not an ordinary strike, but a revolutionary strike in the full sense of the term “revolutionary”—about this there is no doubt, and this is being emphasized sufficiently, even by our reactionary newspapers. But more should be said—This is an uprising of the people—not an armed uprising, but one taking the form of a strike.†
The significance of this historical fact can perhaps not be fully comprehended in all its ramifications. But one of its characteristic features is already remarkably evident. What has more significance than anything else, already striking everyone in the eye, is one very important feature. And that is that this movement arose completely spontaneously. Of course, no socialist organization could behave indifferently in the face of this movement. Every such organization tried, and necessarily had to try, to stand at the head of the movement and to provide it with definite political and organizational forms. And it was the obligation of every socialist organization to try and impart to this movement the greatest possible, most clearly expressed political awareness. That a general strike would break out in Warsaw—our organization already knew that the week before, because immediately after January 22, when the news came of the outbreak of a revolutionary strike in Petersburg, the idea of a general strike spread like an epidemic among the workers of Warsaw. And the same thing happened in Łódź. Thus, it became obvious that the movement would erupt on its own, with spontaneous natural force. And our organization, like any other, necessarily had to take up the idea of a general strike, to promote it, and to prepare for the outbreak of such a strike. Our organization did everything it could, everything appropriate and fitting for it to do, in order to provide planning for the coming eruption and to give it a natural political expression. But one point should be stated emphatically—this movement grew beyond the strength and powers of all organizations; its stormy and turbulent current overflowed all organizational banks and poured out across almost the entire country.
But in itself the fact that a spontaneous impulse was at work became a matter of great historical significance. To take away this hallmark would mean to assert that this was not an uprising of the whole people but merely some sort of conspiracy. Just as the uprising of the Petersburg workers on January 22 caused such a colossal sensation in all of Europe and in all of Russia, and attained such great political importance despite the fact that it was an outbreak that caught everyone by surprise, the fact that it was a movement not organized from above by any conspiracy or any “revolutionary” committee—in the same way the strike-rebellion in our country provided the first evidence that an uprising of the people was underway. And that is an exceptional, outstanding phenomenon in the history of our country and turns over a completely new page.
Every great popular revolution has begun in the same way, spontaneously and suddenly. And only political charlatans can assert that the outbreak of this movement was indebted to any committee or any party. Only political speculators, for their own purposes, could seek to reduce this movement to the level of a mere conspiracy, to turn it into a party-inspired movement, and thus to deny its great historical importance.
But the most important aspect of this movement, aside from its spontaneous character, is the fact of its solidarity with the workers of Petersburg. It is a response to January 22, the same natural response that we see in all of working-class Russia.
This fact was not just theoretical but tangible proof that in Russia, with our country as no exception, a single working class had risen up, without regard to national or historical differences. A working-class uprising in another part of the empire was enough to cause an outbreak immediately among the Polish proletariat. This is not only the result of the objective development of a bourgeois society, but also of the fact that the Polish people themselves had now set a boundary between the old Poland of national uprisings fighting for separation from Russia and the new bourgeois Poland, which created common interests between the Polish and Russian proletariat. This has now become an outstanding feature, such an obvious one that every party, beginning with the supporters of Stanczyk* and ending with the National Democrats,† acknowledged this immediately and repeated the now universal chorus that this was not a “Polish” movement but an all-Russian movement.
Without a doubt, neither our organization nor any other was, nor could be, in a position to fully take control and direct such a movement of the people. Anywhere that we might have been able to do this, we would have found ourselves unexpectedly confronted not with a bourgeois revolution but a socialist one. For above these crowds of people, who had avoided falling into the organizational hands of any party, there had arisen the spirit of Social Democracy, the spirit of solidarity and of common interests between the Polish and Russian proletariat.
Before the outbreak of this general strike, our party distributed the following leaflets in Warsaw. On January 22 and 23, 9,000 copies of a proclamation by the party’s Executive Committee on the subject of the anniversary of the execution of fighters belonging to the organization “Proletariat”;* also, 8,000 copies of a proclamation by the Warsaw committee on the same subject; on January 25 and 26, a proclamation by the Executive Committee entitled, “General Strike and Revolution in Petersburg” (8,500 copies); on Saturday, January 28, 1,000 copies of an appeal by the Social Democratic Youth Circle entitled “To Our Colleagues,” and 1,000 copies of Z Pola Walki (with details about January 22 in Petersburg); on Sunday, January 29, 14,000 copies of an appeal entitled “Forward to the General Strike,” and on the next day the same number of proclamations by the Warsaw committee talking about the goals of the strike (printed inside our country).
All together about 43,000 leaflets were distributed, along with the supplement to our newspaper. Due to lack of space we will quote only a few paragraphs from some of these proclamations—“General Strike and Revolution in Petersburg,” in which our organization as early as January 25 called for a general strike in Warsaw, while recounting the events and the significance of January 22:
Whatever happens in the coming days, the revolution cannot be stopped. The working people throughout Russia are undeniably following in the footsteps of our brothers and sisters in Petersburg. It is only to be expected that general strikes like the one in Petersburg will break out in other cities and that the working people will hasten to do battle for freedom. Workers! Do not be the last to take up the struggle, because the working people in all of Russia must confront and fight against the government of the tsar!
It depends on a solidarity struggle of the working people in Russia and Poland to make a reality of political freedom for all the people. Just as Social Democracy is demanding this all over Russia, so, too, working people must demand that Russia be transformed into a democratic republic, in which the working class will have the greatest freedom possible and every country within Russia, and that of course includes our country, will have its own self-government, that is to say, autonomy.†
The appeal entitled “Forward to the General Strike” explained the significance of the strikes that had broken out in various parts of the Russian empire as follows:
Go on strike, and together with the working class of the entire empire demand the following: The eight-hour day, introduced equally for all workers; a substantial wage increase, in accordance with your demands and needs and with local conditions; political freedom, which would ensure the working-class freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and association, and the right to organize strikes, as well as participation in legislative elections. Demand that neither the tsar nor his bureaucrats should make the laws, but a Constituent Assembly, that is, a parliament elected by all the people of the empire on the basis of universal, equal, and direct suffrage and the secret ballot, so that every worker would have the right to elect representatives to a parliament and that parliament would be an expression of the will of the people in the entire empire. In order that the demands of the working class become a reality, demand the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, elected by all the people of the state, which would lay the basis for a new and better political system in the state, and which would declare a people’s republic and autonomy for all the countries within the state.*
Workers!† The general strike quickly spread to all of Warsaw. It is a grand manifestation against the present governmental order—against the autocracy and against the present social system—really, against capitalism. Without thinking for a moment that we can overthrow that, we nevertheless fight for what is possible under existing conditions; thus we demand political freedom, that makes possible the free unfolding of our fight for our final goal, socialism; we demand the improvement of our economic conditions, even if this is only to a minor extent. We demand therefore a democratic republic.
Thus, we need free and independent teaching. We need a type of knowledge that is pure and noble, not contaminated by any tendencies alien to it; we need an educational system truly capable of speaking to our minds and hearts, above all in our own language, and therefore only a free and democratic social system can assure us of all this …‡
In this great work, turbulent but at the same time creative, we Polish people must eventually secure full freedom of national-cultural development for ourselves. A democratic republic in all of Russia would guarantee this for us—and one of its manifestations would be autonomy for the Polish lands. On the broad basis of democratic liberties, the need that is nearest and dearest to us will immediately be realized free and independent learning.*
The Bund and the PPS also issued proclamations calling for the strike. The latter organization came out with demands that were only economic. Evidently this party, which is “also socialist,” has more confidence in the economy’s power of attraction than in its own politics, and it was afraid to bring up its own demand for an independent Polish state. It saw right away that the strike movement was not a “purely Polish” one, as the pure nationalists would say, but that it was a movement in common among the proletarians of the whole tsarist empire, and it did not know how to attach itself to that movement.
As it turns out, moreover, it was not until later, when the general strike was already coming to an end—that is, not until Monday, January 30, that the “political declaration” of this peculiar party [the PPS] was distributed—which had been signed with the date, January 28. That did not prevent these gentlemen from shouting in Naprzód† that the Warsaw workers with their general strike, which broke out on Friday, January 27, were supporting the “political declaration” of the PPS. In the same way the PPS could now issue a “political declaration” to the people of the United States and then claim that in electing [Theodore] Roosevelt as president [in 1904], they were supporting the PPS “declaration.” It is true that the PPS on Saturday [January 28] at young people’s rallies spoke about a “Polish Sejm”‡ but the “political declaration” addressed to the workers—and we repeat this undeniable fact with emphasis—did not show up until Monday.
And, in addition, in this wonderful “declaration” there disappeared any reference to the usual “independent, democratic Polish republic.” Instead there remained only a demand for the use of the Polish language in all institutions and the removal of foreigners from government bodies in our country. In short, our demands for autonomy—but without any mention of autonomy.
And, in order to show that this whole hodgepodge§ was ready to eat, the “declaration” also included a demand for our own Constituent Assembly, but what that applies to remains unknown—whether for an independent Poland or a republic within the Russian state. Truly, a political “party” would have to be like this one in order not to say clearly, at this decisive moment in history, what it is aiming for. In other words, it would have to be a nationalist party trying to attach itself, at all costs, to the workers’ movement.