Social Democratic Labour Party Research Articles

Witnesses to permanent revolution: the documentary record

Preface Introduction 1. The Slavs and Revolution (1902), Karl Kautsky 2. The Draft Programme of Iskra and the Tasks of Russian Social Democrats (1903), N. Ryazanov 3. 'Orthodox' Pedantry (1903), G.V. Plekhanov 4. To What Extent is the Communist Manifesto Obsolete? (First edition: 1903 - Revised edition: June 1906), Karl Kautsky 5. Revolutionary Questions (February 1904), Karl Kautsky 6. What Was Accomplished on 9th January (January 1905), Parvus 7. Up to the Ninth of January (1905), Leon Trotsky 8. After the Petersburg Uprising: What Next? (20 January [2 February] 1905), Leon Trotsky 9. The Revolution in Russia (28 January, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg 10. After the First Act (4 February, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg 11. The Consequences of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy (July 1905), Karl Kautsky 12. Introduction to Ferdinand Lassalle's Speech to the Jury (July 1905), Leon Trotsky 13. Social Democracy and Revolution (25 November [12 November], 1905), Leon Trotsky 14. The Revolution in Permanence (1 November 1905 - 25 November [12 November], 1905), Franz Mehring 15. The Next Questions of our Movement (September 1905), N. Ryazanov 16. Our Tasks (13 November, 1905), Parvus 17. Foreword to Karl Marx, Parizhskaya Kommuna (December 1905), Leon Trotsky 18. The Russian Revolution (20 December, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg 19. Old and New Revolution (December 1905), Karl Kautsky 20. The Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution (1889, reprinted December 1905), Karl Kautsky 21. The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution: Speech to the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (25 May 1907), Rosa Luxemburg 22. The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and Its Prospects (November 1906), Karl Kautsky 23. The American Worker (February 1906), Karl Kautsky References Index

Storytelling to Enrich the Democratic Debate: The Dutch Discussion on Embryo Selection for Hereditary Breast Cancer

In the Netherlands, the opposition between advocates of embryo selection (preimplantation genetic diagnosis, PGD) and opponents seeking to ban PGD altogether escalated in May and June 2008, shortly after the State Secretary of Health proposed to rescind the ban on PGD for hereditary breast cancer. The clash between the Social Democratic Labour Party and the Reformed Christian Party, both represented in the Dutch Parliament, was ultimately settled in a quite friendly atmosphere. The active engagement in the debate of women and some men with a family history of hereditary breast cancer, who wrote or told their personal stories to the media, may have helped solve the conflict. In this article, I identify the stories of suffering and the arguments for or against PGD that BRCA mutation carriers made public in response to the controversy. Subsequently, the empirical findings are interpreted in light of political theories on the role of storytelling in political discourse. Deborah Stone's recognition that storytelling is part and parcel of all political discourse and Iris Marion Young's analysis of what stories do are used to evaluate the transformative effect that the real-life stories had in the Dutch public debate on PGD for hereditary breast cancer.

A “Museum of Bad Taste”?: The Jewish Labour Bund and the Bolshevik Position Regarding the National Question, 1903-14

This article discusses the debates on the national question between the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP), led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Jewish Labour Bund, then an integral part of the RSDRP, from 1903 to the First World War. The escalating conflict and competition between the Bolsheviks and the Bund shaped both groups’ position regarding national minorities, at a time when the former were striving to gain control of the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement. I examine Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s fierce criticism of the program of national-cultural autonomy advanced by the Bund and the Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer and show how Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted the formula of “right of nations to self-determination” partly as a result of tactical considerations during their decade-long debate with the Bund. The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Stalin, formulated their ideas on nationalities in opposition to the Bund; the Bund thus played a role, even if a negative one, in the long-term development of Bolshevik ideas and policy.

The First Histories of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 1904-06

The First Histories of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 1904-06

N.A. Rozhkov: His Bolshevik years and the origin of his polemics with Lenin

It is ironic, to say the least, that for a long time now the little known name of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927) has been used to substantiate a range of claims about the world's most famous revolutionary – Lenin. Despite numerous one‐line references, so little has been written about Rozhkov that readers are unable to evaluate the validity of any statement written about him or his relationship to others, including Lenin. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by providing a very brief biography of Rozhkov, with particular reference to his revolutionary work in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and his relationship with Lenin up to 1908.

De democratische paradox van de RKSP. De 'leer van de uiterste noodzaak' als uiting van de groeiende eensgezindheid tussen katholieken en sociaal-democraten in het interbellum

The democratic paradox of the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP). The ‘doctrine of the last resort’ as an expression of the growing solidarity between the Catholics and Social Democrats during the interbellumBetween the First and Second World War, coalition-building was fairly problematic in Dutch politics. This was partly caused by the refusal of the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP) to form a government coalition with the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP). On several occasions, the leadership of the party argued that the RKSP would only agree to collaborate in a so-called ‘Roman-red coalition’ out of ‘sheer necessity’. In the literature, roughly two interpretations of the Catholic refusal can be discerned. According to the first interpretation, the RKSP rejected a government coalition with the SDAP because the leadership of the party thought that the ideological differences between both parties were insurmountable. According to the second interpretation, the Catholic leadership refused to collaborate because it was afraid that the Catholic party would disintegrate as a result of the internal schism. In this article, it is claimed that the first interpretation is not tenable, and the second only partly. The refusal of the RKSP leadership to collaborate with the SDAP did not signify Catholic division or a clash between Catholic and social democratic principles but, paradoxically, a growing Catholic unity and a growing consensus between both parties. However, for the Catholic leaders a Roman-red coalition was a taboo subject since it would force the party to explicitly recognise that the Catholic and social democratic ideologies were reconcilable.

‘The Armalite and the ballot box’: Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy in Northern Ireland

Since the start of the Northern Ireland conflict in 1969, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been committed to a military campaign to achieve a British withdrawal from the province. The adoption of a parallel electoral strategy in the 1980s and 1990s represents a fundamental change of tactics. This article outlines the background to this change, and analyses the electoral success of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. Using survey data collected over four decades, the results show that Sinn Fein’s electoral support has come mainly from previous non-voters and new voters, at a time when the Catholic proportion of younger voters has been increasing. The net effect has been to increase the overall nationalist and republican vote, with no decrease in the Social Democratic Labour Party vote. The personal influence of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, together with public support for the IRA’s military campaign, helps to account for Sinn Fein’s mobilization of these voters. The strategy of pursuing parallel military and electoral campaigns has paid major political dividends for Irish republicans.

Young Zhdanov (1896–1918)

Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov's entry into the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1915 was the act of an insecure teenager at war with the world. After the death of his father, a government school inspector, in 1909, the tsarist authorities had provided for Andrei's mother and her four children, and had paid for his secondary schooling in Tver. Even though he was thus one of the select beneficiaries of the tsarist social-support system, Zhdanov chose to join the Marxists who called for the Old Regime's abolition. Zhdanov's political convictions may have continued to waver for some time after 1915, contrary to the subsequent official version of his conversion. In 1916, he completed training as an army ensign without demur. He was awaiting dispatch to the front when the tsar abdicated. Then, presented with an opportunity, Andrei Zhdanov decided definitively to throw in his lot with Lenin's followers, the self-assured Bolsheviks. Once the Revolution unfolded, Zhdanov clearly could thank his lucky stars. Within the year, the determined RSDLP faction he supported gained in Russia. He probably did not always identify himself as a Social-Democrat in March 1917, but he undoubtedly considered himself to be one by early 1918. Leading a small Bolshevik group, he introduced Soviet power to a little town just east of the Ural mountains in January 1918, three months after Lenin and Trotsky had organized the coup in Petrograd.1 In June of the same year, under threat of the approach of anti-Bolshevik forces, Zhdanov revamped to Ekaterinburg. The Civil War would force him to leave the Urals, and in the spring of 1919 he arrived in his old stamping ground of Tver'. From there would commence in earnest his rise to the highest echelons of in the USSR. From 1919 to 1922, he was one of the up-and-coming leaders of Tver' province. A dozen years in Nizhnii Novgorod (Gor'kii) followed, ten years of which he served as provincial first secretary of the Communist Party.2 In 1934 he became a junior secretary of the Party's Central Committee, a position that he would combine for ten years with that of head of the Leningrad city and province Party organizations (as S.M. Kirov's successor). From 1944 until his death in 1948, Zhdanov joined Stalin and Molotov as one of the three most visible leaders, pronouncing publicly on foreign affairs and culture. His prominence inspired speculations that he was to be Stalin's successor.3 Although Zhdanov was a pivotal figure in history, instrumental in constructing the Stalinist edifice during the 1930s and 1940s, neither in Russian nor in Western languages has his life been the subject of systematic study.4 His youth and first steps as a (minor) leader present us with some key insights into his later behaviour as a leader. He would be Stalin's deputy in the 1940s despite his brief stint as an officer in the tsarist army or his rearing in a bourgeois milieu, according to Marxist criteria. These non-proletarian antecedents helped to make Andrei Zhdanov an exceedingly cautious Bolshevik, even though, ironically, his middle-class, intelligentnyi, background recommended him to Stalin in the 1930s, for Zhdanov seemed well-equipped to deal with matters of science, philosophy, and culture. Attentive parents and rigorous schooling helped to develop in the young man an indefatigable attitude toward work, another quality that Stalin would come to appreciate. As a teenager, Zhdanov joined a social-democratic network of young acquaintances who would rise with him through the Communist Party's ranks to reach the highest bodies of Party and state in the 1920s and 1930s. The devastating blow of his father's death when Zhdanov was thirteen contributed to the boy's sense of social and psychological insecurity, and induced resentment toward those more affluent whom he suspected to be looking down on him. One could suggest that the uncertainty that resulted from the disappearance of the adored authority figure of his father drew Zhdanov to the monistic Marxist workers' party in 1915 and then to the Bolsheviks with their peculiar leadership cult in 1917. …

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Government of Ireland - Alliance Party - Progressive Unionist Party - Sinn Fein - Social Democratic Labour Party - Ulster Unionist Party - Women's Coalition: Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Government of Ireland - Alliance Party - Progressive Unionist Party - Sinn Fein - Social Democratic Labour Party - Ulster Unionist Party - Women's Coalition: Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations

Shopkeepers and the Swedish Model: The Petty Bourgeoisie and the State during the Interwar Period

When the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party came to power in 1932, Sweden experienced a turning point in its history. For the first time the role of the Social Democratic Party in the construction of the welfare state became significant. Until the end of the 1910s the Social Democrats had concentrated their primary efforts on the problems of trade union recognition and the struggle for parliamentary democracy. After 1920 the Social Democrats became the largest party, but did not gain political power except for a brief interlude. The concept of the ‘Swedish Model’ has often been used in Sweden and abroad to describe the unique development of Swedish society in the twentieth century. However, historians and social scientists have tended to analyse Swedish society without a clear definition of the very concept, the ‘Swedish Model’.

Mensheviks Wage the Cold War

The tattered remnants of the exiled Menshevik party organization arrived in New York in 1940 from their previous French refuge. They brought with them their twenty-year-old journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, their internal quarrels and many dashed hopes.1 Readily dismissed by US authorities as 'long forgotten in Russia and with no real roots in American society', they were not prepared to abandon their long struggle against bolshevism, although they were to wage it on different foundations.2 As one Menshevik put it, in spite of the fact that the social democratic party networks which had served the exiled Mensheviks so well during the interwar period in Western Europe were unavailable, 'our chances in contemporary America have risen considerably'.3 Astonishingly, this optimistic assessment was borne out. To be sure, the last Menshevik party institution, the Foreign Delegation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, soon disintegrated over the issue of the post-second world war Soviet emigration. However, several prominent individual Mensheviks notably, Raphael Abramovitch (1880-1963), David Dallin (1889-1962) and Boris Nicolaevsky (1887-1966) succeeded in carving out a strategic niche in American discourse on the Soviet Union. Their outlooks and their

Creating social democracy: a century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden

Creating social democracy: a century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden

Politics and Philosophy in Russian Social Democracy: Alexander Bogdanov and the Sociotheoretical Foundations ofVpered

Bolsheviks struggled to determine the political direction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1909 a third tendency emerged, Vpered, whose chief theoretician and representative was Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov and the Vperedists opposed both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks on fundamental questions of the revolutionary movement. Bogdanov was also a prominent exponent of neo-Kantianism or Machism in Russian Social Democracy and, along with other Social Democrats, had developed the epistemological implications of recent discoveries in the natural sciences for the social sciences and, thus, for Marxism.1 But despite philosophical disagreement with Lenin, Bogdanov had collaborated closely with the philosophically orthodox Bolshevik leader between 1904 and 1908 because both men had agreed on the necessity of building the Party to bring from the outside revolutionary consciousness to workers. The experience of the 1905 Revolution convinced Lenin to revise sharply the theses of What is to be Done? on this point. That same experience, on the other hand, led Bogdanov energetically to reaffirm in 1909 his tutelary conception of the Party in the workers' movement.2 In this essay I attempt to establish the nature and reasons for the tutelary role of the Party vis-a-vis the working class. My methodological point of departure seeks to grasp Bogdanov' s views in philosophy and political economy in relationship to his political practice in Vpered because he wanted to help workers contest the coming domination of capitalist society, specifically, the impersonal rule of the market and the attendant ideological mystification engendered by its operation bourgeois ideology. The ideological restructuring of workers' consciousness, if successfully accomplished by Vpered, would shorten the era of bourgeois ideological

Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (review)

140 SHOFAR Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia, by Yoav Peled. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 171 pp. $45.00. The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russian , more commonly known as the Bund, was founded in Vilna in 1897, a year after Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to Jewish workers as the "vanguard" of the Russian proletariat. For the better part of a decade, the Jewish working class lived up to Plekhanov's praise. The Bund soon became a leading constituent of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. It helped educate, organize, and politicize Jewish workers, whose eagerness to strike won them significant wage concessions and a shorter working day. By 1905, however, many of those achievements were in the process of being reversed. In 1903 the Bolsheviks hijacked the RSDLP. After the 1905 revolution many of the material gains won by the Jewish working class were turned back. The strike movement waned. Although part of that decline is attributable to the general reaction that set in after 1905, it also had deeper structural roots. Close to 85 percent of the 300,000 Jewish workers in the Pale labored in small shops with one or two other employees. The remaining 15 percent-the Jewish industrial working class proper-were concentrated in the least productive, technologically most backward plants of the Russian empire, located mainly in the northwest region . Simply put, the Jewish workers' movement weakened because the industrial positions its members occupied were being squeezed out of existence by more advanced plants. In this short, tightly written treatise, Yoav Peled brilliantly analyzes the reasons why the Bund, confronting the situation just described, developed a program that simultaneously spoke to the class and ethnic interests of Jewish workers. The Bund originally propagandized in Russian and spoke hardly at all of special Jewish needs in the labor movement. By the early years of this century, however, it had switched to Yiddish as its main language of agitation and education. Moreover, it had developed the idea that the Jewish community in general, and the Jewish proletariat in particular, had special needs and interests that required a: fight for "national-cultural autonomy," that is, the control of educational and cultural institutions, and for a new Russia based on a federation of nationalities. That shift of emphasis is usually explained as a result of the increasing involvement of Jewish workers in the Bund. As the Yiddish-speaking masses swelled the ranks of the organization, it is held, the intellectual leadership had little choice but to become more ethnically conscious and nationalistic. Nearly a decade ago, the Hebrew University historian, Jonathan Frankel, VoLume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 141 offered a revisionist interpretation. In his opinion, it was less pressure from below than inter-party struggles that required a new strategy. The nationalistic appeal of socialist Zionism and Polish socialism threatened to attract many Jewish workers, and the Bund leadership simply decided to chart a new course in order to consolidate and expand its power base. In part, Frankel made his case by analyzing Jewish labor movements cqmparatively. He showed that "sociologically similar" movements in various countries had divergent ideological trajectories because of variations in the form of interparty competition. Peled agrees with neither interpretation. He scores the traditionalists for failing to explain in structural (or material) terms what it was about the situation of the Jewish masses that made them so ethnically conscious. And he demonstrates that the movements analyzed comparatively by Frankel were in fact not sociologically similar. In brief, Peled holds that the Bund could not develop a purely ethnic program, as the Zionists did, because its actual and potential membership consisted ofworkers in conflict with their bosses-and their bosses were Jews too. Nor could the Bund develop a purely class program , like the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, because the fortunes ofJewish workers were closely tied to the fate of Jewish employers. Fighting for higher wages and better working conditions, the workers drove many Jewish employers out of business; but unemployed Jewish workers found it virtually impossible to get jobs in more...

Alexander Bogdanov, Vpered, and the Role of the Intellectual in the Workers' Movement

The defeat of the Revolution of 1905 and the ensuing reflux of the revolutionary workers' movement set the stage for a crisis in the Bolshevik leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party about what to do politically to move forward again. In 1909, Alexander Bogdanov emerged as the chief spokesman of a dissident group of Bolsheviks. He and his partisans launched a campaign to shift the axis of the RSDLP's political activity. For Bogdanov, the old tasks of building the Party, of agitation and propaganda in the mass movement, seemed more and more irrelevant with the decline and eventual disappearance of that movement. The new conditions persuaded Bogdanov to attempt to deploy a strategy to prepare workers to seize power by creating an all-embracing culture, hic et nunc, within the framework of the existing society by means of educating the working class in proletarian universities run by socialist intellectuals.' Bogdanov recognized no national limitations to his strategy. In his view, the politics of creating proletarian culture were valid not only for Russia but for all countries where the modem working class movement had come into existence.

Swedish Working-Class History

Interest in the history of the Swedish labor movement is almost as old as the movement itself. The Social Democratic Labor party was founded in 1889, and the Central Trade Union Organization (LO) in 1898. And by 1902 the Archives ofthe Labor Movement had been established in Stockholm to preserve the memory of the pioneers of the movement for future generations. The Swedish labor movement has continued to show considerable interest in its own history, and innumerable histories of party organizations and union locals have been published to celebrate anniversaries. Influential individuals have con tributed to their interest, including Sigfrid Hansson, brother of the party leader and Prime Minister, Per-Albin Hansson. Interest among rank-and-file members also has been substantial. At the universities, interest in labor history can be traced to the 1920s. John Lindgren's pioneering book on the formative years ofthe Social Democratic Labor party in the 1880s (1927) was followed in the 1930s by G. Hilding Nordstr?m 's study of the party's history (1938) and Tage Lindbom's work on the early trade union movement (1938). Historical interest within the labor movement and the academic world was

Trotskii and the ViennaPravda, 1908-1912

(1985). Trotskii and the Vienna Pravda, 1908-1912. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 248-268.

8 Protection of Female Labor

basic norms and regulations regarding women's working and living conditions were adopted during the first years of Soviet power: equal right to work, prohibition of employment underground and in some other jobs, at night, and on overtime, a ban on carrying loads, paid pregnancy and maternity leave, and so on. They embodied the demands of the first Program of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (August 1903). second Program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (March 1919) set a new task: The Party does not restrict itself to formal equality for women; it seeks to rid them of the material burdens of the outdated household by replacing it with housing communes, public dining rooms, centralized laundries, day nurseries, etc.1

Making the turn: The political roots of Lenin's theory of the party press

It is weU known that the March, 1902 publication of Lenin's What is to Be Done! laid many of the ideological foundations of Bolshevism, foundations which began to assume a definite organizational form at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in the Summer of the foUowing year. The distinction between consciousness and spontaneity, the conception of a centralized vanguard party, the emphasis on consistent political activity based on agitation and propaganda, the 'plan for an aU-Russian political newspaper' aU these insistently repeated themes of Lenin's most influential work would provide much of the material around which Russian revolutiona ries would organize, argue, and divide in the coming years.1 Although What is to Be Donel expressed these motifs in a particularly sharp and polemical fashion, the foundation on which Lenin's pamphlet was based was largely in place before 1902.2 It was centered around his insistence that the 'party of a new type', whose construction he considered to be the 'chief task' facing Russian Social-Democracy, be organized around the regular printing, distribution, and use of a poUtical paper. I propose to examine the ideological and poUtical foundations of Lenin's theory of the party press, taking as my starting-point his often-repeated assertion that the press was the center around which his thinking revolved prior to the pubUcation of What is to Be Donel Several analysts have devoted considerable attention to Lenin's thoughts concerning the press and have tried to connect them to his concern with party-bu?ding.3 Others consider the role of the press in a relatively brief, superficial and unrevealing manner.4 But almost aU existing accounts tend to treat the press either as a strict organizational question related to specific tactics in the struggle against tsarism5 or as a function of Lenin's personal, poUtical drive for leadership, domination and power.6 The result is that the ideological and poUtical roots of his concerns tend to be obscured or ignored, and this examination represents an attempt to clarify both the reasoning behind his projections and the role he assigned to the paper. Wh?e his thinking was partly taUored to the specific problems facing Russian Social-Democracy,

Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. General Editor Robert H. McNeal. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1974. inclusive. $75.00, set of four.) 4 Volumes. Volume I: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party: 1898–1917. Edited by Ralph Carter Elwood. Pp. 306. Volume II: The Early Soviet Period: 1917–1929. Edited by Richard Gregor. Pp. 382. Volume

Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. General Editor Robert H. McNeal. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1974. inclusive. 75.00, set of four.) - Volume 71 Issue 4