In Łódź, a sea of blood, piles of corpses, thousands injured. A terrible harvest gathered by the Angel of Death—dying tsarist absolutism.
On June 20–5, the proletariat of Łódź stood at the head of the revolution, going into the fight more powerfully, massively, persistently than has happened yet anywhere else since the outbreak of tumultuous revolution in the tsarist empire. Who caused it? Who gave the start to that June uprising in Łódź? Only people who are deaf and blind to the sufferings and desires of our working masses [can ask that], people who do not understand that a people’s revolution has its own vital inner strength and spontaneous impulse, and that it moves inexorably forward. The victims of May Day and the heroism of the Warsaw proletariat awakened and stimulated the spirit of the workers in Łódź, and spurred them to fight. The Łódź workers went on strike en masse and tugged desperately at the yoke of capitalist exploitation—because they had to, because that yoke—for those awakened in spirit—had become unbearable. The fighting workers of Łódź arranged huge gatherings and demonstrations—because they had to, because awakened consciousness and class solidarity will move with irresistible force toward common mass action, toward that refreshing, uplifting feeling of power and encouragement offered to a slave of capital and a subject of the knout—when marching in a compact mass with fellow workers. The proletarians of Łódź responded to the crimes of the tsarist thugs with even bigger demonstrations because they had to, because, when spiritually awakened and reborn, the workers can no longer accept submission to violence at the hands of the oppressors, because such submission would break them spiritually, would make their faith and their strength fold up. The fighting in Łódź kept building rapidly as fights erupted on the barricades—a single chain of cause and effect. That could be interrupted only if the workers abandoned their aspirations leading them to liberation.
Despite heroic defensive battles, the proletariat of Łódź was crushed. Again, in Łódź, the same force of brutal bayonets and rifle bullets that drowned in blood the huge demonstration in Warsaw on May 1 is seemingly triumphant —the same force that stifled the January uprising of the proletariat in Petersburg.
But revolution is the only kind of war, which despite the number of failures, the revolutionaries do finally win. Absolutism triumphs in Petersburg and Warsaw and Łódź and Kishinev and the Caucasus—yet each of those victories brings absolutism fatally, inexorably, one step closer to the grave, and the working people to victory. Each of these massacres committed by absolutism disperses and spreads the sparks of hatred, rebellion, and struggle, pushes further the waves of revolution that are surging with unstoppable force, which swell ever higher and more powerfully.
In May in Warsaw, a march of 20,000 people threw the government and the bourgeoisie into a state of astonishment. A month later in Łódź, 70,000 were marching under the banner of the revolution. The Warsaw massacre of defenseless people was the culmination of an unbelievably huge mass demonstration. The bullet and bayonet triumphed over people who were fleeing, trying to save themselves from the murderous attack. In Łódź, after a month, in response to the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators, a fierce battle on the barricades began and lasted forty-eight hours. It was hard and laborious work this time for absolutism to win its “victory.” For five days, from [June] 20 to 25, Łódź was the focus of continuous demonstrations, general strikes, and clashes with the soldiers—for five days in Łódź, the intensive, uninterrupted fights continued. The “laws” and the lawlessness of absolutism, and the yoke of capital, were trampled and swept away by the mass of workers, and spreading out over the city, stormy and undulating like the sea, a threatening power arose—for five days in Łódź, the Revolution was the all mighty goddess!
In that hot battle, absolutism was bound to win, inch by inch. With the help of a handful of revolvers, the heroic proletariat resisted the bandit violence of the tsar’s phalanxes for two whole days, until murderous iron and deadly weariness knocked it to the ground.
Absolutism is triumphant in Łódź, deadly silence has swept away for a while the uproar of stormy revolution. The silence is interrupted by the intruding clatter of steel bayonets marching to the square of lawlessness and killings. New legions of bandits from the vicinity are pulled in. But the rivers of blood flowing on the streets of the “conquered” city call out in their silence to the people of our whole country, and of the entire empire, loud and shrill, like a bronze bell in mournful alarm. More of such “victories”—and absolutism will collapse in a simultaneous general uprising of the people in all parts of the country.
The fate of the Łódź revolutionary uprising graphically indicates the nature and conditions for victory for the revolution in the tsarist empire. Embittered, trembling, and demanding revenge against the murderers, a worker of Łódź cries out, “Weapons!” The weapons are needed; they are essential. But no weapon can give one isolated city a victory over the tsardom that rules over 130 million. As long as absolutism can bring to Łódź new battalions of soldiers from towns and villages nearby, the victory of the armed workers of Łódź is a forlorn hope. And the same is true for the workers of Warsaw, of Petersburg, of Moscow. Only when the rising becomes general, overtakes and encompasses all the major cities and leaps outward to the countryside, only then will tsarism no longer be able to bring its killer bandits from the “peaceful” villages and concentrate their oppressive force against one or several revolutionary towns, only then will victory be on the side of the people, because then even the most powerful weapons will not restore peace. Then, building up here and there, still partly suppressed, the murmur among the troops themselves will gain enough strength and courage to merge into a loud outcry of protest, shaking and breaking up the ranks of the defenders of tsarism.
The workers’ revolution can overcome absolutism only when there is a widespread, simultaneous, sustained rising involving the giant mass of working people in both the towns and the villages throughout the empire. Today absolutism continues to live only because of the isolation and dispersal of the revolutionary explosions. The [problem is] that the proletariat rises up individually and sequentially in some places while in other places it has temporarily stopped its fight, or yet in others has not yet exploded.
But, in fact, with these individual outbreaks the revolution continues to live. The proletariat will abolish the rule of the knout only by a widespread general revolutionary uprising. But this general uprising of the people can only arise from individual explosions, and each such new outbreak extends the revolutionary flame, prepares and accelerates the explosion in other places, as the fighting energy of the proletariat grows in the entire country. This wearies and discourages the army, confuses the state machinery, sharpens and tightens the relations of classes and parties in the society, and fuels the overall revolutionary atmosphere. The isolated insurrection of the June rebellion of the Łódź proletariat was strangled, but in falling, it shook the foundations of the tsarist regime, just as Samson shook the pillars of the temple.
Woe to the pioneers! The revolution of the working class, which has appeared for the first time in modern history with the current revolution born in the tsarist empire, develops and becomes more powerful only through the increased consciousness and organization of the huge class of the proletariat. And the only school for this awareness and this organization is not the leadership of the bourgeoisie, as in the past in Europe, but only the result of the tireless struggle of the proletariat, its sacrifices, its blood, with which it has occupied every new position won in that fight.
The most terrible sacrifices, the greatest part of the increasing costs [of the struggle] fall upon those ranks of the proletariat that, displaying the greatest energy, consciousness, and organization, are the first to rush into battle and the first to be mowed down, because their courage rips them farther ahead of the ranks of their comrades-in-arms and brings down on them the murderous iron of the counterrevolution.
Alongside of the proletarians of Petersburg, who in January lay down wrapped in snowy winding-sheets on the pavements of the tsar’s capital, alongside the proletarians of Warsaw, who with their eyes dimmed by death took a last look at the May sunshine of this year, the proletarians of Łódź have also laid down their lives on their barricades, under their scarlet banner—as pioneers of the revolution and for the emancipation of the proletariat throughout the Russian empire.
This is not the first bloody harvest to be reaped during “June Days” in the history of the working class. In the very same days of June—the 23rd, 24th, and 25th, exactly fifty-seven years ago—the proletariat of Paris fought a very strong battle against the government of the French bourgeoisie. In February 1848 the proletariat, together with the middle and lower strata of the bourgeoisie, had overthrown the monarchy of Louis Philippe and established a government under a republic. At that time, the Parisian proletariat believed that the republic would release them immediately from under the yoke of capital, that the republic would give the workers bread and jobs and social justice.
However, the bourgeoisie dominated the republic, which is to say that this same capitalism ruled in the republic, and the heroic proletariat of Paris, betrayed and cheated by the property-owning class, left to be the prey of poverty and unemployment, rose up in June with desperate courage to fight against the same old accursed bondage of wage slavery. For nearly four days, the battle raged in the suburbs of Paris. With unprecedented heroism, the Paris workers placed themselves behind more than 400 barricades, choosing rather to die together with their wives and children than be forced back under the yoke of capital.
The “June Days” [in 1848] ended with the defeat of the proletariat. The rampaging “victorious” bourgeoisie, after the suppression of the uprising, butchered 3,000 workers and condemned 15,000 others to penal servitude and exile. It was a real failure that removed that proletariat from the political stage for a long time. But that defeat was inevitable, because fighting heroically, the Parisian workers went into battle with the illusory hope that, in the republic of the bourgeoisie, a single armed conflict would be enough to abolish the rule of capital.
But the June defeat of the Paris proletariat was a victory for the cause of the international proletariat. Only in that terrible carnage, in that sea of its own blood, the French proletariat learned for the first time that it is a separate class, and that it can count only on itself. It learned that liberation from the hell of capital will not be given by the republic of the bourgeoisie, not even with the most heroic street battle, but by a long class fight with some help from the political rights gained in the republic. The June victims among the workers of Paris—that was the price the international proletariat had to pay to gain consciousness of its class separateness and its goals. The sea of blood, shed in June 1848 on the streets of Paris, stands between the working class and the class of exploiters all over the world.
And even today, after half a century, the June victims of the Parisian proletariat are yielding an abundant crop—the workers’ revolution against tsarism. With a clear awareness of its paths and class objectives, without illusions, without fallacies, the proletarians of Russia and Poland are marching forward to storm the last stronghold of despotism, to overthrow it, and by that to speed their own liberation and that of the entire international proletariat.