The events of the last few weeks constitute an epoch in the history of the Polish working class, in the history of our society, and in the history of absolutism. The uprising of the Petersburg proletariat on the memorable day of January 22, suppressed with the blood of thousands by the bashi-bazouks of tsarism,† set off further uprisings [in the twinkling of an eye] by tens of thousands of workers throughout the empire. In virtually all provinces and territories of the tsarist state, in dozens of industrial centers, the working class walked out en masse at the first news of the Petersburg uprising and rose up with the slogans, Down with absolutism! Long live political freedom and a Constituent Assembly!
The Polish proletariat took its place with honor in this workers’ revolution. All of Warsaw, all of Łódź, all of the Dąbrowa mining region, almost all the provinces, stood up as one, ready for an all-out battle for full political freedom. Wherever smoke rose from factory chimneys, wherever the wheels of industrial machinery were turning, wherever the hard-working hands of labor wielded hammers, everywhere there rose up at a moment’s notice to join in the battle of solidarity—the gigantic army of exploited proletarians. They showed their oppressors and exploiters that neither oppression nor poverty could suppress the spirit within them, but on the contrary those things aroused in them both revolt and hatred against the yoke of capitalism and against the vile yoke imposed by the tsarist government’s gang of hoodlums.
With pride and joy, Social Democracy can look upon the memorable history of this wonderful workers’ revolution. Because, in this revolution, the things that our party has been saying to the Polish working people for the last twelve years, our words and teachings, have become a reality.
On January 22, the proletariat of Petersburg, having covered the paving of the streets with its blood, showed that in the fight against absolutism it stood at the front lines. And the coming-out of the whole gigantic army of workers, both Russian and Polish, in response to the call from Petersburg, showed that the Polish worker understands and feels that the Russian proletarian is his brother and comrade, the blood of his blood and the bone of his bone. In spite of all differences and distinctions of nationality that, for many years, tsardom (on the one hand and Polish nationalists on the other) has tried to emphasize and instill among the working people, the workers of the entire empire formed one single fighting army, a single working class, aspiring to a single common goal, fighting for one and the same demand, with all their strength in common, jointly by all their means, for their common interests!
Here, at this point, it became palpably evident that in political events, economic development had welded Poland together with Russia by means of capitalist economics. During the time when Poland was led by the nobility, in the first half of the previous century, our country was a completely separate entity, an independent society that was forcibly held to Russia by the violence of the tsarist state and the absence of forces of resistance inside Poland. The entire policy of the nobility was expressed in the aim of breaking away from Russia.*
In order to create for itself a strong base of support in Poland, the tsarist government in the 1880s busily developed capitalism in our country; it raised up a new breed, the bourgeois class, nursed it along and made it rich at the expense of the blood and sweat of the Polish worker. These calculations were not disappointing. Bourgeois Poland ceased to be rebellious and insurrectionary; it became a domestic in the service of the tsarist knout. The Polish bourgeoisie married into and fused together with the Russian tsarist system, and in the process, they were jointly robbing the Polish proletariat and sucking the living juices out of it. By carrying out jointly the shameless capitalist exploitation of workers, it fused together with the Russian bourgeoisie in the joint robbing of the consumers, under the joint protection of the tsarist autocracy and its foreign and domestic policies.
These calculations were not disappointing for tsarism—the capitalism bred by tsarism in Poland eliminated the rule of the nobility, as well as the national uprisings [led by them] and all active tendencies toward separation from Russia.
But this sowing yielded quite a different crop from the one the tsarist government expected. From capitalism there grew up in Poland, as in Russia, not only a servile bourgeoisie but also a revolutionary working class. And while uniting the Polish bourgeoisie with the Russian by the same lust for enrichment through exploitation, tsarist absolutism united the Polish proletariat with the Russian by a common need for class struggle against exploitation and by a common aspiration for political freedom.
Sowing and cultivating a single capitalist bourgeoisie in the entire empire, promoting the interests of the exploiters regardless of national differences, also raised up a single class of the exploited without regard to differences of nationality, one single working class both in Russia and in Poland, for which freeing itself from the clutches of absolutism is a matter of life and death.
The policies of the tsarist government, with the help of the bourgeoisie, buried the aspiration toward national independence, but it bred up and cultivated a working class that in its drive for political freedom is now going to bury absolutism itself.
It is precisely this fact that has passed a death sentence upon the tsarist government in the last few weeks. This time, the soldiers, once again acting as the blind and obedient agent of the criminal tsarist regime, seem to have defeated the workers’ revolution. Once again, temporarily, the gang of highway robbers prevails. But its death agony and the birth of political freedom for the 130 million suffocating under tsarism are only a matter of time, and not a long time. The uprising of the working class through the length and breadth of the tsarist empire revealed to absolutism the force that will strangle it and hurl it to the ground. This time, it is no longer a prediction for the more-or-less distant future, as stated by Social Democracy for many years, knowing the direction in which the development of social conditions was moving. This time it is no longer hundreds of proletarians inspired by socialist ideas that have entered into unequal battle, no longer thousands of the most enlightened leaders of the proletariat who have come out to demonstrate. It is now hundreds of thousands, the masses themselves, and the wide and deep sea of the proletariat, which has poured forth from its ocean bed. The working class itself, in its essential core, has risen up to fight for political freedom.
But that means it was the working class as a whole, that social and political force, that showed the world [the strength of] an unprecedented general strike in the last weeks of January and in February. When the factories, workshops, mines, streetcars, and railroads stood still, when the banks, stores, telephones ceased their activities, when the electric lights and gas lights went out, when industry, commerce, and communications were brought to a standstill—at that point both the government and the whole society immediately realized that the working class by its voluntary service under the yoke of capital was holding up the entire present-day state. No government can maintain itself or even exist if the entire working class in the entire state has decided to wage a war by any and every means and is shaking the very foundations of society to their depths.
Such a deadly weapon has not been available to any modern revolution until now. The barricade was the primary, if not the only, means of struggle in the revolutions of the nineteenth century, revolutions that served the interests of the bourgeoisie, in which the proletariat had not yet separated itself as a distinct class from the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie, but followed their leadership into battle as a blind instrument of bourgeois rule. At present, in the Russian state, the general strike has become for the first time the initial phase of combat for this revolution, in which, also for the first time in history, the proletariat is going into battle as an independent class, conscious of its own separate interests.
With this first attempt by the Russian and the Polish proletariat to go into action with this weapon in their hands, and with the readiness to carry the fight through to the end in a life-or-death struggle, the fate of tsarist rule has already been sealed.
Absolutism understands this and feels it. Whereas in regard to the demands and resolutions of the “zemstvo” liberals the cretin-tsar contemptuously allowed himself to scribble that they were “tactless and insolent,” and from on high the ministerial flunkeys ordered the liberal gentlemen to make no further mention of freedom—the news of the workers’ uprising instilled mortal fear into the camp of the governmental gang of thieves. That is precisely why they are raging so furiously, why they resort to the most horrendous and hideous acts of mass murder, because they have understood that their end is drawing near, that the day of judgment is coming for them—victorious popular revolution.
Thus, just as in Russia, the coming-out of the workers also saved the honor of Polish society. Whereas in our country the bourgeois classes were moldering in the quagmire of capitalist self-enrichment while humbly kissing the knout, and our intelligentsia on the whole failed to rise to the level of even such a liberal movement as we saw in Russia, the tsarist gang of robbers could look down contemptuously on Polish society, lulling itself with the thought that it had very strong pillars of support for its rule. In the Polish press, for example in Dziennik Poznański [Poznań Daily], advice could be given to Tsar Nicholas, at the first news of revolution in Petersburg, that in order to save his crown and his head he should quickly come from the banks of the Nevá to a loyal place—Warsaw!*
Today, thanks to the heroic coming-out of our revolutionary working class, Poland has all at once found itself in the front ranks of the fight against absolutism and for political freedom. Already, in today’s bourgeois Poland, the fates have given political leadership to the class of the most oppressed and exploited—to the Polish proletariat—just as in Russia [this has happened] for the Russian proletariat. In the last few weeks, the workers, both Polish and Russian, have given proof that they have matured enough to assume the role assigned to them by history. By their struggle, full of dedication, perseverance, and dignity, they have won themselves a place at the head of society, which until now regarded them merely as brute labor, like caryatids† holding up, on their slavishly bent-over necks, the grand edifice of the rule of capital.
The revolution has been started, but has not yet ended. In front of the united working class of the tsarist empire there stands a whole series of battles against absolutism, still to be fought. The momentary lull is merely an interval between the proletariat’s first assault on the fortress of despotism and the further assaults to come. This interval should be used to intensify our agitation to the highest degree. The present situation places obligations on Social Democracy that are extraordinarily difficult and important. The first wave of general strike and workers uprising, which flowed from Petersburg through the entire empire, including through our country, was to a large extent spontaneous. Not in the sense that the workers rose up blindly, without any understanding of what was going on. On the contrary, the slogans and ideas of the struggle, which were circulated widely by Social Democracy, were so much “in the air,” were such a natural expression of the workers’ needs and had so much entered into the flesh and blood of the proletariat, that the only thing needed was an initial nudge for the entire mass of workers instinctively to rise up to do battle in response to the news from Petersburg. Social Democracy in our country, just as in Russia—as is usual for all true revolutionary mass movements—could barely keep up with, and give expression to, the feelings and desires of the masses, which had erupted volcanically.
Certainly, this mass uprising of the Petersburg working class was an undoubted surprise for Russian Social Democracy itself, aside from the fact that the outward leadership of this colossal political revolt was obviously not in the hands of Social Democracy. People will therefore be inclined to say the following: “Events have grown up over their heads.” If by this is meant the basic idea that the elemental outpouring of this movement in its scope and rapidity has gone beyond the expectations of the agitators and also beyond the available forces and means of guiding and leading the movement, then this phrase would certainly apply to the present moment in Russia—the idea being that the Russian Social Democrats are “in over their heads” because of the overwhelming rush of events. Indeed, woe to that Social Democratic party that has not prepared and is not capable in a similar historical situation of summoning up its strength and stepping out onto the social stage—only in that sense have events “grown up over their heads.” If the situation were truly beyond their capabilities, Russian Social Democracy would have failed to understand how to bring into motion a truly revolutionary mass movement. In general, revolutions are not summoned forth in a planned manner, thoroughly organized and well led. Such revolutions exist only in the blossoming imaginations of policemen with souls of the Puttkammer* type, the standard type of Russian or Prussian public prosecutor.
But, if the phrase “it has outgrown them; it is up over their heads” is to be understood in the sense that the direction, the strength, and the phenomenon of the proletarian revolution itself was a surprise for the political leaders of Russia’s Social Democracy, that in the stormy course of events they had placed their goals far beyond what could be expected, then the fact is that the Social Democrats are precisely the only factor that counts in public life in the tsarist empire today, and for them the Petersburg events have not at all “grown up over their heads;” mentally they are fully masters of the situation.
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, 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.
Now there has begun an important second phase of the revolution, one in which Social Democracy must aim at meeting events head-on in a planned way, to try as much as possible to take in its hands the helm to steer the movements of the masses and give direction to the next revolutionary action. And we can cope with these tasks only by the most persistent and strenuous work of organization and agitation.
On this ground, fertilized and enriched by recent events, every day ought to bring us so much work and such a good harvest in terms of the enlightenment and rallying of the workers as would require a month or even a year in different times. The more effectively and vigorously the revolutionary core succeeds now in building a road for the party organization to reach the masses, the quicker the victory and the fewer the casualties we will suffer in the next confrontation with absolutism. In the ordeal by fire of historical events, the program and tactics of Social Democracy have withstood the test splendidly, and our comrades can and should intensify their energy and enthusiasm ten times over, to summon the mass of the proletariat to come stand beneath our banner. And, on this banner, is written in the blood of the workers, shed in the unforgettable recent battles, for the entire Polish people and society to see—under this sign thou shalt conquer!*