In Defense of Marxism:4

The Second Congress
A lot of nonsense has been written
about the famous Second Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP) without any of it explaining the
reasons for the split. Every revolutionary
party has to go through a fairly long stage
of propaganda work and cadre building.
This period, inevitably brings about a series
of habits and ways of thinking which, over
a period of time, can become an obstacle
to transforming the party into a mass party.
If the party proves incapable of changing
these methods, when the objective situation
changes, then it becomes an ossified sect.
At the Second Congress the struggle
between the two wings of the Iskra group,
which caught everyone by surprise,
including those who were directly
involved, was due to the incompatibility
between Lenin’s position, which was that
of consolidating a revolutionary mass
party with some degree of discipline and
efficiency, and that of the members of the
old “Emancipation of Labor Group”, who
felt comfortable in their routine, saw no
need for any changes and who put down
Lenin’s position to questions of personality,
a desire to be in the limelight, “Bonapartist
tendencies”, “ultra-centralism” and all the
rest of it.
Generally speaking it is a law of
history that petit-bourgeois tendencies are
organically incapable of separating political
questions from personal questions. Thus,
when Lenin, for entirely justified reasons,
proposed removing Axelrod, Zasulich
and Potresov from the Editorial Board of
Iskra, they took it as a personal insult and
caused a scandal. Unfortunately, the “old”
activists managed to impress Trotsky, who,
being young and impressionable, did not
understand the situation and accepted at
face value the accusations that were being
made by Zasulich, Axelrod and the others.
The so-called “soft” tendency represented
by Martov emerged as a minority and
after the Conference refused to abide by
its decisions or to take part in the Central
Committee or the Editorial Board. All
Lenin’s efforts to find a compromise
solution after the Congress failed because of
the opposition of the minority. Plekhanov,
who at the Congress had supported Lenin,
proved incapable of standing up to the
pressures of his old comrades and friends.
In the end, in early 1904, Lenin found that
he had to organize “majority Committees”
(Bolsheviks) to salvage something from
the wreckage of the Congress. The split
in the party had become an accomplished
fact.
Initially Trotsky had supported
the minority against Lenin. This has led
to the false account that Trotsky was a
“Menshevik”. However, at the Second
Congress, Bolshevism and Menshevism
had not yet emerged as clearly defined
political tendencies. Only a year later, in
1904, did political differences begin to
emerge between the two tendencies, and
these differences had nothing whatsoever
to do with the question of “centralism”
or “no centralism”. They were about
the key question facing the Revolution:
collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie
or class independence. As soon as the
political differences emerged, Trotsky
broke with the Mensheviks and remained
formally independent from both factions
until 1917.
Trotsky in 1905
On the eve of the Russo-Japanese
war, the whole country was in a prerevolutionary
ferment. A strike wave was
followed by student demonstrations. The
ferment affected the bourgeois liberals who
launched a campaign of banquets, based on
the “Zemstvos”, local committees in the
countryside which served as a platform
for the liberals. The question arose as to
what should be the position of the Marxists
towards the liberals’ campaign. The
Mensheviks were in favor of total support
for the liberals. The Bolsheviks were
radically opposed to any kind of support

for the liberals and came out with strong
criticism of their press exposing them in
the eyes of the working class. Trotsky had
the same position as the Bolsheviks, which
led him to break with the Mensheviks.
As of that moment, up to 1917, Trotsky
remained organizationally separate from
both tendencies, although on all political
questions he was always much closer to
the Bolsheviks than to the Mensheviks.
The revolutionary situation was
maturing rapidly. The military defeats of
the Tsarist army added to the growing
discontent which erupted during the
9th January 1905 demonstration in St.
Petersburg, which was brutally put
down. Thus began the 1905 revolution
in which Trotsky played an outstanding
role. What role did Trotsky play in the
1905 Revolution, and in what relation did
he stand to Lenin, and the Bolsheviks?
Lunacharsky, who at that time was one
of Lenin’s right hand men, writes in his
memoirs: “I must say that of all the Social-
Democratic leaders of 1905-06 Trotsky
undoubtedly showed himself, despite
his youth, to be the best prepared. Less
than any of them did he bear the stamp
of a certain kind of émigré narrowness of
outlook. Trotsky understood better than
all the others what it meant to conduct the
political struggle on a broad national scale.
He emerged from the revolution having
acquired an enormous degree of popularity,
whereas neither Lenin nor Martov had
effectively gained any at all. Plekhanov
had lost a great deal, thanks to his display
of quasi-Cadet [i.e. liberal] tendencies.
Trotsky stood then in the very front rank.”
(Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes,
p. 61.)
This is not the place to analyze the
1905 revolution in detail. One of the best
books on this question is Trotsky’s 1905,
a classical work of Marxism, the value of
which is enhanced by the fact that it was
written by one of the most outstanding
leaders of that revolution. (Also see Alan
Woods’ recent publication, Bolshevism—
the Road to Revolution )
Still only 26 years of age, Trotsky
was the chairman of the Petersburg Soviet
of Workers’ Deputies, the foremost of
those bodies which Lenin described as
“embryonic organs of revolutionary
power”. Most of the manifestos and
resolutions of the Soviet were the work
of Trotsky, who also edited its journal
Izvestia. On major occasions he spoke both
for the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and for
the Soviet as a whole. The Bolsheviks, in
Petersburg, had failed to appreciate the
importance of the Soviet, and were weakly
represented in it. Lenin, from exile in
Sweden, wrote to the Bolshevik journal
Novaya Zhizn, urging the Bolsheviks to
take a more positive attitude to the Soviet,
but the letter was not printed, and only saw
the light of day, thirty-four years later. This
situation was to be reproduced at every
major juncture in the history of the Russian
revolution; the confusion and vacillation of
the Party leaders inside Russia, when faced
with the need for a bold initiative, without
the guiding hand of Lenin.
In 1905, Trotsky took over the
journal Russkaya Gazeta and transformed
it into the popular revolutionary paper
Nachalo, which had a mass circulation, to
put over his views on the revolution, which
were close to those of the Bolsheviks and
in direct opposition to Menshevism. It was
natural that, in spite of the acrimonious
dispute at the Second Congress, the work
of the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in the
revolution should coincide. Thus, Trotsky’s
Nachalo and the Bolshevik Novaya Zhizn,
edited by Lenin, worked in solidarity,
supporting each other against the attacks
of the reaction, without waging polemics
against each other. The Bolshevik journal
greeted the first number of Nachalo thus:
“The first number of the Nachalo
has come out. We welcome a comrade in
the struggle. The first issue is notable for
the brilliant description of the October
strike written by Comrade Trotsky.”
Lunacharsky recalls that when
someone told Lenin about Trotsky’s success
in the Soviet, Lenin’s face darkened for a
moment. Then he said: “Well, Comrade
Trotsky has earned it by his tireless and
impressive work.” In later years, Lenin
more than once wrote positively about
Trotsky’s Nachalo in 1905.
As Chairman of the famous St.
Petersburg soviet, Trotsky was arrested
together with the other members of the
soviet and exiled once more to Siberia
after the defeat of the revolution. From
the accused bench, Trotsky delivered a
rousing speech from the dock which turned
into an indictment of the Tsarist regime.
He was finally sentenced to “perpetual
deportation” but in fact remained in
Siberia for only eight days before escaping.
In 1906 he again went into exile, this
time to Austria, where he continued his
revolutionary activity, launching a paper
from Vienna called Pravda. With its simple
and attractive style, Trotsky’s Pravda soon
achieved a popularity which no other
Social Democratic publication could match
at the time.
The years of reaction following
the defeat, were probably the most difficult
period in the history of the Russian Labor
movement. The masses were exhausted
after the struggle. The intellectuals were
demoralized. There was a generalized
mood of discouragement, pessimism and
even of desperation. There were many
cases of suicide. On the other hand, in this
generalized reactionary situation, mystical
and religious ideas spread like a black cloud
over the intellectual circles, finding an echo
inside the Labor movement in a series of
attempts to revise the philosophical ideas
of Marxism. In these difficult years, Lenin
dedicated himself to an implacable struggle
against revisionism, for the defense of
Marxist theory and principles. But it
was Trotsky who provided the necessary
theoretical basis upon which the Russian
revolution could resurrect itself from the
defeat of 1905 and go on to victory.