The 1905 Russian Revolution
D. L. Jacobs
Platypus Review 190 | October 2026
On May 24, 2017, the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of Houston hosted an introductory workshop by D. L. Jacobs on the 1905 Russian Revolution. D. L. Jacobs was a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society and took a leading role in many of its activities. He sadly passed away in September 2026. This workshop was chosen for publication not just to honor his memory but to continue his invaluable work of educating others. What follows is an edited transcript of the workshop recording.[1]
1905 and 1917
Why do a teach-in on the 1905 revolution and the centennial of 1917? It appears that I am 12 years late. It was necessary because I found it impossible to talk about 1917 without reference to 1905. All of the conditions in 1917 found their genesis in 1905 and before. The mass strike, the soviets, the growing inter-imperialist rivalries, the national liberation movements, the slogans, the secret agreement between the unions and the party in Germany, the clarity of the task, the knowledge that we were living in the era of revolution. In fact Lenin wrote in a note to himself on Bloody Sunday[2], âScope [in 1895]: only circles then. ⊠Propaganda very heavy and academic. ⊠Today. ⊠Revolutionary epoch.â[3]
In fact, reflecting 20 years later on this, Leon Trotsky would say that 1905 was the first genuine revolution in Russia.[4] So heâs saying, yes, weâve had mutinies before, weâve had the Decembrist revolt, weâve had lots of peasant uprisings before, weâve had terrorist acts, but this is the first revolution in the modern sense â masses of people rising up. I'm not trying to claim I am an expert on 1905, but I want to flag how obscure the relationship has become, which says something about historical experience and how it used to be accumulated.
There's a famous line that the Bolsheviks used to say even before October 1917, that 1905 was the dress rehearsal.[5] This is a phrase liable to abuse. A rehearsal is a trial performance for a later performance. One remembers the cues, the rote memorization, etc. They try to perfect the act in order to prevent any contingency. But history is not a laboratory, where if you do something wrong, you just correct for the problem in the future. Insurrection is an art, Marx used to say,[6] and this was one of Leninâs favorite lines. It is not something that has a formula, but rather, like art, is a judgment of the speculative type, of how the present forms point beyond themselves. In this sense, 1905 was how a child learns how to walk, hopefully to one day run. They learn how to use their limbs. They learn how different environments respond to their actions. The Russian proletariat in 1905 learned how to treat the class as an object and a subject. Lenin used to say that strikes were a school of war, but not the war itself.[7] What happened in 1905 was finally practiced at war. No one â anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, even liberals â denied this. All of these groups wanted freedom: freedom for society and freedom for individuals. They all saw themselves as revolutionaries. Where they differed was on what they considered the depth of the task, and the possibilities that were being engendered by the revolution.
Let's start at the RSDLP, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, at the Second Congress in 1903. This is necessary because the justification for the Bolshevik-Menshevik split is still being pursued in the 1905 revolution. Lenin wrote What is to be Done? before the Congress to expound the view of the Iskraists, that's the Spark, which included Lenin, Plekhanov, Martov, and Zasulich.[8] Lenin tried to get Trotsky on the Iskra board, but it was denied by Plekhanov. They were supposed to win hegemony within the Social Democratic Party. But we have a split in the Russian Social Democratic Party that gives us the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
At the time, the split seemed excessive to some, especially those in West Europe. Kautsky, in a letter to Axelrod, said he couldnât tell the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Trotsky was at the time part of the Mensheviks. Luxemburg and Trotsky both wrote polemics against Lenin in 1904: Trotsky wrote Our Political Tasks, and Luxemburg wrote the Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy on the basis that Lenin was setting up the party to be captured by a petty-bourgeois demagogue in the coming bourgeois revolution, or even worse â this was Trotskyâs phrase â it was substitutionism, that the party was going to substitute for the masses, and of course this would be used against Trotsky later when Stalinism happened.
In the intervening period between then and the 1905 revolution, Plekhanov had changed his support from the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks, and the Mensheviks started self-critiquing their support for What is to be Done?, even though they had all supported it when it was originally written. And we get what was called the New Iskra, because Lenin leaves Iskra and the editorial board changes. Therefore, going into 1905, Lenin really felt at odds with most of the Russian social democrats, justifying the split mainly on intuition and actually really blaming Martov, who, in Fall of Eagles,[9] literally stands up and says, âI will not be on a board with that person,â and then walks out with Zasulich. So Lenin would say, itâs really you who's causing the split. But by the end of 1905, all three of these radicals of the Second International would find themselves on the same side, and even Kautsky for some time; Kautsky defended the Bolsheviks in 1906â1907.
1904 was a year of growing unrest as well, with growing political prospects for all tendencies, liberalism and socialism, in the democratic movement. The Russo-Japanese War[10] ended in a sordid defeat for the Russians, and the effect was extremely demoralizing for the entire population, especially the sailors who would end up being very active in mutinies in 1905: battleship Potemkin, as well as the Sevastopol rising. A statement leaked around this time admitted that the government was willing to continue sacrificing lives so as not to lose to Imperial Japan, which angered a lot of the liberals who began demanding an end to the war. A hundred years later, reflecting on 1905, during the anti-war movement of the mid-2000s, Peter Glatter of the ISO (International Socialist Organization) would refer to this as the first stop-the-war movement. So this is how 1905 has looked at different times in the last century or more.
Around this time, there was growing political use of the Zemstvos, or the municipal bodies, by the liberals. These were banquets where the liberals would campaign for representative institutions, and they would bring workers up and interview them, and then kind of throw the workers away, because the workers would start demanding eight-hour days. And so there was literally a liberal spring in the final months of 1904. Eventually, what was called the Radical Sons (it was the students) of these liberals began joining the movement. They made it more militant and this brought in socialist ideas. This led to several demonstrations in November and December, but the Sons didn't get any support from the fathers, let alone the workers, so they were just all arrested. Nevertheless, this would have an effect on the Mensheviks, specifically Martov, who thought they had discovered a third element, which he called the democratic intelligentsia. So rather than just the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, he thought there was this third group.
Around this time, the government also had what was called Zubatov unions. Of course, they had been set up much before this, but they became sort of radical at this time; they were the police-run unions. The government put them up in order to get workers to focus on economic issues and not political issues. So they would say, you should work on bettering your position, on building workersâ power. So this is something the tsarist government could support.
At the end of December 1904, the Putlov factory in Petersburg went on strike, and in response, eleven workersâ sections went on strike as well. What became clear was the limit of these strikes. The workers realized that they would have to win political powers in order to broaden the terrain of their struggle. They turned to an influential Russian Orthodox priest, who was a political agent at this time, Father Georgy Gapon, and they gave him a petition which included not only standard liberal rights, but also the demand for the eight hour day and labor legislation.
It is important to point out the relationship between the political and economic. Rosa Luxemburg speaks about this in The Mass Strike, and Lenin in What is to be Done? The economic limits of the police unions were set by political considerations. Eventually the idea was that the winning of a democratic republic would enact back upon the economic struggle, and that would be the terrain for socialism.
And so we get Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905. Infamously, Peter Struth, who was a legal-Marxist-turned-liberal by the end of 1905, said there was no revolutionary people in Russia yet, about two days before Bloody Sunday. This was wrong already when it was written and not merely two days later. Georgy Gapon led a march to the Winter Palace with a petition. In a way, this evoked the images of an ancient peasant tradition of going to ask the little father, the Tsar, for security and protection, like these peasants asking the kings in the Middle Ages. But there was a difference: social democracy had radicalized the workers. They pushed Father Gapon to play a role that he himself would eventually try to throw off. Despite the warnings of some intelligentsia of an expected ambush, the workers marched on the Winter Palace and were met with a volley of bullets. Father Gapon pretended to be dead, lying in the snow, and then ran off with his supporters. And so the image of the benevolent Tsar was destroyed.
Soon after, there was the Shidlovsky Commission: he was just a senator and they were going to set up workerâs delegates and some kind of delegation system; it was a two-tiered system to send representatives to talk to the Tsar. The liberals and the Mensheviks were really happy about this, they thought it was a good concession, but this just fell through because it was never popular.
The bourgeois revolution
Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, had said in 1883 that the next Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois revolution. Before they could have socialism, the country would have to go through this stage, and from that they would develop capitalism. This stage was something that one could not leap over. It meant that the bourgeoisie were going to take leadership in the next revolution; and the role of the proletariat was not to scare the bourgeoisie away, but instead to display tact, as he put it.
There's a theory that can be garnered from Marx that justified this. Marx has this line in The Class Struggles in France, where he says that England is the demiurge of bourgeois society and so that all the backward countries on the continent at the time, like France and Germany, would follow England.[11] And so we can see how heâs saying, Russia is even more backward, so itâll follow those countries. Furthermore, the experience of 1848 showed that the bourgeoisie was frightened when the workers demanded their bourgeois rights.
The Mensheviks went a little bit farther than this. In fact, they saw themselves as being the more orthodox Marxists than the Bolsheviks at this time. They were hesitant to participate in any provisional revolutionary government in the same way that Plekhanov was, because they thought if they got in, they would be unable to deliver socialism and they would delegitimize the brand, if you may, for all the workers. Like what happened in 1848: we have Louis Blanc; he tries to get the national workshops of socialism, but he canât â they havenât smashed up the state. And so the idea is donât participate in a bourgeois provisional revolutionary government.
They had this idea of, why would we use the peasants? They've always been reactionary. And in fact, they were part of the counterrevolution in 1848, and even in the original French Revolution; itâs the VendĂ©e area of France.[12] Thus the Mensheviks wanted to be a party of extreme opposition. They didn't think now was the time for power, so they werenât against it altogether. They just thought the time was not right. Furthermore, they wanted to take up a socialist organization. So they had a demand for revolutionary communes, and they established this in their April-May Congress in Geneva. In fact, perhaps before Lenin and Trotsky, they recognized the soviets as being the forms of revolutionary workersâ organization, but this would change by the end of the revolution because they would start to have a different view of the soviets with respect to the bourgeois state. This is really where the differences started to come through.
This is interesting because itâs precisely here that we can see a varied response. Lenin condemned the Mensheviks for confusing the democratic with the socialist revolution. The Mensheviks responded by accusing Lenin of elitism, of being a Blanquist. He was so obsessed with taking power that he was forgetting the daily work of organizing the proletariat and just focusing on taking power. They criticized what they saw as an authoritarian party. So Israel Getzler, who is the biographer of Martov, sums up his view very succinctly: "Martovâs tactical thinking was appropriate to a party which wanted to foment revolution, but to abstain from taking power." He wanted to just agitate all the time.
While Lenin might seem right-wing because individuals like Plekhanov, who had swung even more rightward, were saying we needed the bourgeois revolution, it in fact said something about politics going back to the genesis of Marxism. The Spring of Nations in 1848 was a farce for Marx of the French Revolution, the tragedy. The republicans, the liberals, as he says; literally went extinct. So the bourgeoisie is actually dead for Marx after 1848. The class struggle, we must remember, is sub-bourgeois. So to speak of classes really in the French Revolution would have been seen to be separating up the democratic revolution. But that happens as a function of history, and this is what we get in 1848. So this is why class struggle is sub-bourgeois in a certain way.
So Axelrod and Plekhanovâs desire that the workers not scare off the bourgeoisie is a demand for the class struggle to cease. For Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, following Marx, the class struggle wasnât something demanded, say go and have a class struggle, but something that existed, and it was going to be resolved one way or another: socialism or barbarism. Trotskyâs view was actually the closest to Lenin here. Trotsky would later say that in fact Lenin did agree with him and admitted it at the Fourth Reunification Congress the following year. Thus, if there was disagreement, it would be around the slogan: permanent revolution, or the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and proletariat. The real difference just seemed to be that Trotsky had followed further to the conclusion. So in other words, he did agree, yes, it will be the peasants and proletariat that take power. But his point is, what is going to happen once that provisional government happens? It's that the proletariat, in order to consolidate power, is going to have to take the leadership right there. And that this would eventually â and this is Trotsky following Kautsky â necessitate a revolution in Western Europe. So the famous line of Russia being the weakest link in imperialism, not being a backward country as in very backward, but being sort of the most backward of the industrialized countries. Because as we know, in fact, Russia was using the latest technology and machinery at the time, and it was importing all of the finest machinery and capital, but also it was the weakest. Sometimes people turn that into like, oh, so you just find like the most oppressed country in the world or something like that. The abuse of that is why we can get all this sort of Third Worldism in the 20th century. Whereas the point, and this is really Kautskyâs insight, is that a revolution in Russia will necessitate a revolution in the West because of how it's linked up.
Once the proletariat starts growing in Russia at this time, Germany and England start sending in money and start training the counter-revolutionary forces. In fact, they were already meddling in the Russo-Japanese War. Britain and France were backing Japan, and Germany was egging on Russia. So they already were playing around in the area as a function of their capital interests.
The anarchists have come to see 1905 in Russia as a refutation of Marxism, in fact. They claimed that prior to 1905, the mass strike was dismissed by Marxists, usually referring to Engelsâs article, "The Bakuninists at Work," his polemic against the anarchist strike in Spain, which he wrote right after the collapse of the First International against Bakunin, to say, letâs see what Bakunin's followers do; they go and get everybody killed.[13] Thereâs some truth to this. The anarchists had been isolated or thrown out of the Second International by 1905, yet all of a sudden they were getting a hearing on the mass strike in 1905. So VorwĂ€rts in Germany was publishing anarchists out of nowhere, even though they were thrown out of the Congresses a few decades prior.
In the works on Russia after 1917, the anarchists had even come to subordinate 1917 to 1905. That is because 1905 is seen as more spontaneous. The soviets are spontaneous, the mass strike is spontaneous, itâs not called by a party, etc. And of course, the old Noam Chomsky line, that the revolution was later hijacked by the Bolsheviks, right? So we have these spontaneous forms and then these intellectuals come in and hijack them. The anarchists then see the Marxists as contradicting themselves in 1905, that they only come over to the mass strike because itâs popular, and thus they find Luxemburgâs pamphlets disingenuous and dishonest, an attempt by the Marxists to cover Engelsâs previous condemnation of the work of the Bakuninists through dialectical Rococo, right? Like, oh, itâs a new form and content, and theyâre going to give an explanation for why they support it all of a sudden.
Rosa Luxemburg only got into Russia in December of 1905 under the name of Anna Matschke. Her reflection on the revolution had an affinity with Lenin and Trotsky, but for different reasons. While the Russian Marxists were concerned with how the revolutionary provisional government would act, Luxemburg was interested in showing how the German workers should take responsibility for the Russian Revolution. Indeed, it was the labor struggles and union gains in Germany that caused German capital to invest in Russia to maintain the union wages: imperialism. Luxemburg tasked herself with trying to break through the inertia of the party by using the product of their history, the 1905 revolution, to reanimate the SPD. The revisionist dispute had just formally ended in the SPD, although we know it actually resolved for the revisionists against the orthodoxy, and the conservative trade unions leaned on Marxist dismissals of the mass strike to counter the influence of the Russian Revolutionaries. So already by January 1905, there were strikes in Germany that the trade unions were actually trying to put down. So there was like a minor strike and they were like, no, no, no, this is a bunch of anarchists, right? Thatâs not us, weâre not a backwards country, weâre an industrialized country.
But if the mass strike was the form of the bourgeois revolution in Russia, then it was the task of the proletariat returning from 1848. We might even say that the Marxists had to change in order to stay true to Marx. What Marx had articulated in 1848 was not a closed form or a system; but rather a fallout, a failure, a disintegration of society, an impasse that required political leadership. The revisionists, the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and the liberals treated Marxâs experience of 1848 as something which had a definite period. They said that was 1848, this is now. They would sort of look through history in the same way that a historian rummages for examples, right? They would say, oh, those were the conditions in 1848, and these are conditions now, and so it has nothing to do with it. Itâs just changed conditions. Whereas Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky realize that under those changed conditions actually it was the same old problem, right? There are two sides to the dialectic: thereâs the static and the dynamic side, and itâs not simply changed conditions that get rid of old problems; itâs rather the old in distress. Itâs continuing to emerge.
The bourgeois revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries had the form of general strikes, of agrarian revolutions, of workers' government. But that doesn't make them mere window dressing. A change in form means a change in the content as well, and indeed much had happened since 1848. The form expressed how the bourgeois revolution had been taken up by the proletariat and shirked by the bourgeoisie. The economic strikes in the agrarian revolution were the French, American, and English revolutions in the 20th Century. This is a change to preserve the task of the bourgeois revolution and the point of preserving the task is so that society can truly be changed. In other words, the reason the workers had to do a mass strike, or an economic strike, or a mass political strike, is because thatâs how they could get a hold of the government. It comes up through the Zubatov unions, through the police unions as well, and thatâs where theyâre getting the limits of the economics. So theyâre like, in order to be political, itâs going to take the form of something economic, but really itâs politically directed. And we got a little bit of this in the Rosa Luxemburg pamphlet when she mentions textile workers going on strike, and they know theyâre going to lose wages. And yet they do it anyways, for the political solidarity. Not even solidarity; for the political attack, right? Theyâre the worker bees. Theyâre going to sting, and they might have to sacrifice themselves, but theyâll sting for the revolution.
And then finally, the liberals treat 1905 as a distorted expression of the bourgeois revolution, and indeed thereâs a truth to that. So Count Witte, who was the minister of the interior for the most militant part of the revolution, and whom the liberals considered that was their man on the inside, considered all the socialists and revolutionaries to be a âdisturbed balance between the ideological aspirations of Russia's thinking public and the outward forms of life.â[14] This was a minister of the Russian government who was sympathetic to the revolution; the non-government liberals were in fact supportive and called themselves revolutionaries all the way up until the end of 1905 where they then felt the revolution was infringed upon by plebeian Jacobinism.
It would actually echo later liberal views of 1917, that Marxism was a theory of backward countries and really was just a form of anarchism. So in 1917, the Bolsheviks were called Bakuninists, not just by Kautsky but also by liberals in the West as well. And of course, this includes Woodrow Wilson, who sort of was like, oh, Marxism is some kind of radical, feudal expression. It's a radical theory in a feudal country thatâs backwards, and this is why weâre getting a distorted expression. Anti-Marxism to him was also putting an end to feudalism, not just the Tsar as well.
The Soviets
The Soviets were recognized as revolutionary by all: Marxists, socialists, anarchists, and liberals. When exactly the Soviets emerged is still a controversy today. The standard story is that they emerged out of the strike committees and the mass strikes later in October of 1905. That is, once entire cities were shut down, complete disorganization of the existing government was created and the Soviets emerged out of the strike committees. Some would credit the Mensheviks with being the first party to make the demand for revolutionary communism and workers self-organization, and thus to be the ideological parents. And so when the Odessa uprising happened, Martov was like, yes, thatâs what we want. Those are workers taking over the city and having revolutionary communes, and this is before even Lenin is saying that much about the Soviets. Heâs still asking, what are these forms exactly?
Volin, who was an anarchist who later participated in the 1917 revolution, says that he was part of the genesis of the Soviet before Bloody Sunday, even. He says he was approached by workers who wanted him to be their leader, and he declined saying heâs an anarchist; they have no leaders. And so this is the kind of myth that he makes for himself. It might have been true that that was the genesis of the Soviets.
In fact, the Bolsheviks were somewhat hostile, before Lenin arrived in Russia, to the soviets, because they saw them as competing with the party for working-class support. The benefit of the soviet was also its drawback. It allowed anybody to join and participate in the democratic structure. As a result, it had an expansive mass base. But this meant it also took the full character of mass society, with all of its contradictions under capitalism. Democracy had become contradictory in capital, and this was best reflected in the vacillations and inconsistency of the petty bourgeoisie. They are an expression of democracy. The reason they go back and forth is because they are contradictory in their claims. This is why Marxâs Address to the Communist League[15] was very popular amongst the Mensheviks at this time, because they considered themselves following Marx on this, that they were pushing democracy. This is why they were the extreme opposition.
In this sense, the Soviets would come to be the phenomenal expression of the masses, with the party being the expression of the class. The non-identity between the masses and the class was important to uphold. To just have it be the self-organization of the workers or even just the party, or even to have the Soviet be the revolutionary form itself was to collapse the masses and the class. So in fact, their difference is whatâs important right there. Thatâs actually how the class could exercise leadership, to be like, this is where the mass expression is and this is our relationship to it. When the Soviets had to defend themselves against the tsarist prosecutors, there was a rule in the Soviets at the time that they wouldnât have party members beyond the delegation, and so they used this as an advantage to say, no, we didnât call an insurrection, it was spontaneously decided. But of course, they were the ones that were agitating for it, but they could say they had no responsibility for it. Kind of used a little dialectical Rococo to get out of that one. And Rosa Luxemburg says the same thing in her defense: she says, no, the mass strike, we canât call it. Itâs called by the masses. But of course, she wants it.
In June, thereâs the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin, then in July, thereâs the uprising in Sevastopol. This is the sailors and the soldiers. Itâs a more concerted uprising and they actually have the ships taking part. Then itâs put down by soldiers, so the military is divided. The sailors tended to be more proletarian, especially the engineers, whereas the conscript soldiers were peasants. So this is how they divided the democratic forces. What was learned was, we actually have to win the soldiers over.
In August, thereâs the Bulygin Duma. This Duma is boycotted by the Bolsheviks and Trotsky, but the Mensheviks support it and actually are ferociously against people who are boycotting it because theyâre like, youâre leading the masses into the Black Hundreds,[16] this is the time to agitate and to gain political experience. Lenin and Trotskyâs view is that this is the bait thatâs being thrown out by the Tsar to try to capture the revolution right there. This is their running argument the entire time; they said, if you want an assembly, weâre gonna have to have the proletariat take power. Because whatever is dangled right there, it's not gonna be real. To them this comes true when we get the reactionary Duma, the Stolypin Duma later in 1907: see, we told you liberals that unless we took power, youâre not gonna get this constituent assembly.
In October, the famous strikes start to happen that lead to the Constitution, or the Constitutional Manifesto. At this time, the liberals and capitalists are supporting the mass strike. They just deduct the wages, but theyâre down with it. So itâs not like strikes are somehow against the capitalists all of a sudden. And it actually goes to the political character, which is that they understood it as the bourgeois revolution, and itâs working for them. On the 10th, the bakers start to strike, and then the typesetters follow. There are strikes in Petersburg and Moscow. They shut down the trains. On October 17, they get the manifesto. This is where we get the Octobrists. They form out of this Constitutional Manifesto that is going to promise legal rights as well as just general bourgeois rights like selfhood, etc. The Octobrists are sort of the liberals and landowners. Itâs kind of the upper bourgeoisie, and they later make a kind of coalition with the lower bourgeoisie of the Kadets.[17]
The workers don't trust this and they try to go further. The communists try to say, well, look, weâre promised this manifesto; and yet Trepov and Durnovo, who are these police chiefs, are just running through Petersburg and Moscow shooting people. So how can we be having this constitutional illusion when they actually attack people for exercising their rights? So this is what theyâre pushing on, and this is how they get the masses to not accept the Constitutional Manifesto.
Around this time the Soviets start representing themselves as the executive, and saying, look you can disobey tsarist laws if you want, but you have to obey our laws. So you have to obey our censorship, you have to obey our forms of the strike, our legal upholding of property, and so theyâre actually making a bid for sovereignty. It actually goes into an interesting question which is that the soviets literally cause disorganization for the state, it looks like anarchy, and this is a standard liberal framework: if you have two executives, whoâs implementing the laws, whoâs upholding them? But from the soviet standpoint, itâs like okay this could be the state of tomorrow, this could be the smashing up of the state. So where the soviets see themselves as exercising the right of labor, the government is like, this is straight-up anarchism. Both can actually be correct, because from the governmentâs perspective, it is anarchism, in a standard liberal understanding.
The strike in November takes on a more focused and proletarian character. Thereâs a growing financial crisis, and the Tsarist state has to start relying on loans from the French. The capitalists who were involved in the Russian Revolution start locking out the factories so the workers canât go to work when they want. Thatâs their response to mass strikes. And this begins to raise the question of insurrection: for the workers to survive they need to expropriate the factory, but the property rights of the owner are upheld by the state. Hence you need a workersâ state. So itâs raising the question of who is actually upholding the law. Furthermore, an insurrection in Kronstadt leads to the capture of many soldiers, and they also announce martial law in Poland. And so all of these things together are leading to workers demanding amnesty for the political prisoners and to remove martial law from Poland.
The capitalists meet around this time and theyâre starting to get a little bit worried because they know they canât rely on the Constitution being put in place by the Tsar, but they also know that they canât have these revolutionaries in the street as well. And this, of course, is what Lenin in June was predicting, which is that the bourgeoisie are going to become inconsistent in practice and that all of these hopes that the Mensheviks have had on them are actually criminal to the revolution. And itâs not because the bourgeoisie are evil people, itâs just from their perspective, in trying to uphold their interests, they literally become inconsistent. Thatâs why they become opportunistic.
One of the demands at the time was the eight-hour day. The eight-hour day had no direct relevance for a lot of the peasant masses because they are self-employed, and they are farmers. But thereâs a campaign to get the masses over for the eight-hour day. And so itâs sort of considered a victory at this time that the proletariat can get the democratic masses to see their interests in their own proletarian interests; even if they have no direct economic interest, they see it as their political interest. And so thatâs what leadership means, right there. This is why the proletarian class could lead, because people who actually might not be wage laborers can find their interest in the proletariat. Thatâs what makes it possible. And so whenever thereâs all these talks later in the 60s about, who are the new vanguards or anything, it all became a discussion about, oh, whoâs the most oppressed group? And that must be the new vanguard. They just skipped the whole question of political leadership, which is what it always was. And so this is the example here, that they could win them over to supporting this, even if it didnât directly benefit them.
December begins the insurrection. So Trotsky at this time is the head of the Petersburg Soviet. He famously says when the Soviet is surrounded, he yells down to the delegates, donât fire. If anybody fires, itâs an agent provocateur, because they donât want to fight the police. Thatâs fine. But instead, what they do is they take their guns and they smash them so they donât go into the hands of the police. So at this point, the necessity of insurrection becomes clear for the masses in practice, but it is too late. The Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries enter into literally a guerrilla war in Moscow. The total count is like 800 people versus an entire military, and so they just kind of drive them insane in Moscow for a while.
At this time, Milyukov, who was the head figure of the Kadets, says, you know, the problem thatâs happening right now are all these revolutionary illusions of Trotskyism. Itâs here where Trotsky claims that this term originated, and so when Stalin uses it later in the debates of the 1920s, he says, oh, youâre repeating Milyukov from 1905.
So the liberal understanding is that, we've got this constitution, and you guys are pushing for these radical aims; and they see it as fomenting reactionary responses from the upper bourgeoisie and also from reactionary forces like the Black Hundreds. So the government starts organizing bans, literally just getting the lumpenproletariat to go around and shoot people, but they also start doing patriotic demonstrations where they get pogromists and Black Hundreds. And so what Milyukov is blaming Trotsky for is for creating that. He says all of this, all the agitation for the insurrection thatâs happening right now, youâre the one that's causing the revolution to go south.
Martov also has a similar view at this time where he says that he hopes this doesnât end in a Jacobin dictatorship, which is his understanding that the French Revolution was good until the Jacobins got in power and then it went south, right? Theyâre putting too much fire on and this is fomenting right-wing reaction, etc. So itâs adventurism, right? But this sentiment was common outside of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. So Plekhanov famously said around this time, that the insurrectionaries should not have taken up arms.
After the 1905 revolution, Lenin republishes all of Marxâs letters to Dr. Kugelman about the Paris Commune. Marx said, the Paris Commune, you shouldnât take up arms, because youâre going to be killed by the German military and by the French military. But once they did, Marx was like, okay, Iâm going all in then, and weâre gonna try to learn something from this. And in fact, this is Trotsky, Lenin, and Luxemburgâs view at this time as well.
It goes to this question, are the Soviets a repeat of the Paris Commune? They are and they arenât, right? Because the soviets are different. The Paris Commune comes out of the condition of France getting defeated, and they have to arm the workers to defend Paris, and the workers just go, weâre just going to take over all the factories. Whereas the soviets came out of the strike committees. But Lenin would later say, look, this is a state of the Paris Commune type. And what he means by that is they donât have police in Petersburg or in Moscow. Itâs being run by the soviets. So in other words, the workers are the police. Thereâs not a special body of armed men. In terms of it repeating, they would say it is, but they would say it went farther because you donât just have one commune, you actually have lots of communes that are trying to bring the actual question of insurrection to the international scale. But this goes back to Marxism: why does it appear like itâs a theory, when really Marx articulated something that was apparent at the time? It's because we still live with that problem thatâs being repeated, like hell: repetition is hell, thatâs Walter Benjamin.
This brings up an interesting question, actually: should they have taken up arms? Were Lenin, Luxemburg, and especially Trotsky, who was actually active in the Petrograd Soviet; were they delusional for supporting the Moscow insurrection? The liberals in Plekhanov and tacitly Martov (although really he was just ambivalent) seemed to say that this was a mistake on the part of the proletariat, and not merely because it ended in military defeat. Rather, the liberals would say, and Plekhanov would give it a Marxist coloring, that they were frightening away the bourgeoisie before they had even had a bourgeois revolution. France at least had a French revolution, and so from there he could give an explanation, yes, they could actually strive for a dictatorship of the proletariat, but we donât even have that yet.
But from the perspective of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, this was a necessary lesson that the workers had to go through. And of course, they might have seemed crazy up until then, but in 1917, it seems like that actually was a lesson worth learning. Itâs one of these things in terms of victory and defeat, what is what? Is it a victory, or is it a defeat? Because for Plekhanov and the Kadets, itâs like, no, thatâs just a straight up defeat. You just get people murdered in the street. It was what I tried to take up at the beginning, which is weâre not just doing experiments in history, right? Weâre not in a vacuum. So when you do an experiment in the lab, itâs in a vacuum and youâre very specifically trying to recreate the same conditions. If you donât, itâs fraudulent science, right? Youâll be ripped apart in a journal. And so what happens in history, itâs sort of the repetition of moments, which really means tasks, in different forms and different conditions. So 1905 is not only a repetition of the Paris Commune, which is a repetition of 1848, but itâs under a changed condition. It has social democracy. It has Marxists.
Horkheimer in The Authoritarian State mentions briefly how every moment is a revolutionary moment, but it seems like heâs also saying that what matters is how people grasp it.
Exactly. We can say 1848 moments are returning all the time, but thereâs nothing there to make it appear. This was also in Walter Benjamin when he says history is the product, we literally produce it; and so when Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky say itâs the return of 1848, they can see it very clearly and theyâre making it apparent to masses of people. Itâs very difficult to say that now. 1848, I feel like Iâm reading a fictional novel at times, itâs like: hereâs a story from an alternate universe.
We talk about 1905 because 1917 is the highest example. And if you're going to talk about 1917, you have to talk about 1905. When we are going to meet Lenin again in 1917, he's carrying that whole experience with him. And it's the party that's carrying it with them. It's not just that Lenin is a brilliant genius, but he could be a brilliant genius because there was a party. He couldn't do it by himself. So it's not just the vehicle, it's that the party was the object for him. In other words, when he returns in 1917 and he says, oh, you guys are repeating what I said in 1905, but it's a changed content: now, it's conservative. It's actually upholding the anti-insurrectionary part.
I think it was Molotov who was the only person on the Central Committee who supported his April Theses.
Right, it certainly was nobody else. Although thatâs when Trotsky became a Bolshevik with the April Theses. He was in a Canadian work camp. It was one of these liberals, I think it was Milyukov, who was saying, no no no keep that guy in Canada! We canât have him come back! In May of the following year, the first Duma is founded, the Kadets gain a majority, Lenin begins advocating working in the Duma to make an alliance with petty-bourgeois democracy; and at this time already his own party says, youâre contradicting yourself because just last October or August he was saying to boycott the Duma, and he said, yes, that was a revolutionary moment. Now it isnât. Now weâre waning, and so now we have to dispel this last illusion. So weâre gonna fight this in a different way now. Just about a year later, you get the Stolypin Duma. So they get rid of the Duma twice, and then we get the Stolypin Coup, and then we just get a totally conservative Duma, and the Bolsheviks have to go underground, and theyâll reappear in 1914, in a London library reading Hegel.
1905, just like 1917, still tasks us today. Thereâs an idea that we are beyond 1905 because we donât have feudalism or we have the experience of 1917, which is somehow better in every way. So thereâs this idea that 1917 solves the problems of 1905. Whereas a better way of looking at it is that it develops them. It might even intensify them. But the failure of 1917 means an appraisal of the revolution has to take into account the full self-understanding of the players in the moment, and because they understood 1917 as the continuation and further development of 1905, it makes reading about 1905 necessary. Any attempt to change the world makes the preceding moments appear as historical necessity. When a historical moment flashes up, it ties itself together with past moments disobeying the temporal index. So, the title of Trotskyâs third chapter in Results and Prospects, itâs â1793, 1848, 1905.â That's how it looks in 1906 then. Itâs very specific moments. What the Bolsheviks were striving for in October 1917 was to make that link with 1848, 1871, and 1905, with the very moment, so they could put an end to history. |P
Transcribed by Mike Atkinson
[1] Video of the workshop can be found at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHwW0HSE24>.
[2] The massacre of marching workers seeking to petition Tsar Nicholas II by the Russian Imperial Guard. The workers were being led by Georgy Gapon, an Orthodox priest in the employ of the Russian secret police. The massacre marked the start of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
[3] Vladimir Lenin, âPlan for An Article â1895 and 1905 (Short Parallel)ââ (1926), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/jan/09.htm>.
[4] Leon Trotsky, âTwenty Years After 1905â (1925), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/12/1905.htm>.
[5] While he did not use the phrase âdress rehearsalâ, Lenin did consider the 1905 revolution to be the âprologue of the coming European revolution.â See Vladimir Lenin, âLecture on the 1905 Revolutionâ (1925), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jan/09.htm>.
[6]See Karl Marx, âXVII. Insurrectionâ, in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1852), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/germany/ch17.htm>.
[7] See Vladimir Lenin, âOn Strikesâ (1899), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/strikes.htm>.
[8] Iskra, âSparkâ in English, was the newspaper of the RSDLP.
[9] Fall of Eagles is a 1974 television series which aired on the BBC and portrayed the fall of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian monarchies towards the end of WW1. Lenin is notably played by Patrick Stewart.
[10] A war between Russia and Japan over influence in Korea and northeast China, running from 1904 to 1905.
[11] Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France (1850), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/>.
[12] The War in the Vendeé was a conflict where the insurgent Catholic and Royal Army, composed largely of peasants, fought against the forces of the French Republic.
[13] Friedrich Engels, âThe Bakuninists at Workâ in Der Volksstaat (1873), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/bakunin/>.
[14] This is referenced by Trotsky, see Leon Trotsky, âWitteâs Ministry,â in 1905 (1909), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/index.htm>.
[15] Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm>.
[16] Reactionary monarchist groups which formed in support of the Tsar.
[17] Members of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a political party which sought a constitutional monarchy in Russia. Also known as âKadetsâ.
