As we stated in the chapter on practical tasks in a period of party-building, the line of “propaganda as the chief form of our work” is almost always based on the belief that the Russian Marxists put forward this “principle” for mass work in the period before a proletarian vanguard has been won to communism. The belief is false.
One reference commonly cited in support of it is pp. 16-17 of the History of the CPSU(B). This states that sometime after Lenin came to St. Petersburg, he “proposed to pass from the propaganda of Marxism among the few politically advanced workers who gathered in the propaganda circles to political agitation among the broad masses of the working class on issues of the day.” However, neither the History nor anything we have seen in Lenin’s writings says that it was correct for St. Petersburg Marxists to wait as long as they did before beginning broad agitation.[1]
In fact, further research into Russian history shows that the opposite is true. The Russian Marxists turned much of their resources to broad mass agitation not at the point when much of the vanguard had been drawn into the party (which Stalin places ten years later), but at the point when they realized the severe limitations of propaganda circles and discovered what was then an innovative form of work–agitation. Here is what really happened, according to a sympathetic bourgeois historian:
Beginning as early as 1892, the objective conditions for fruitful activity among the Russian proletariat seemed at hand. . .. The young Marxists understood their task to be the education of the workers. Only recently smitten with “scientific socialism” themselves, they were eager to transmit their new learning to that proletariat which they believed history had cast as the creator of socialism. The desire to establish contact with representatives of the working class led a good many of them to participate in the work of the legal and respectable Committees of Literacy, which provided basic education for workers. Whether in this way or by a more direct approach, numbers of factory operatives were attracted into secret and illegal Social Democratic circles where education–although of a less innocent sort–continued to be the main business. As the saying went, the Social Democrats were attempting to rear the Russian Bebels[1a] of the future.
This phase in the development of Russian Social Democracy is generally referred to as the era of kruzhkovshchina–circle work. In effect, it involved the repetition among the workers of much the same type of activity employed for the recruitment and indoctrination of members of the intelligentsia. On this and other scores kruzhkovshchina came in for severe criticism toward the mid-nineties. Circle work, the critics contended, failed to fulfill the essential aim of Social Democracy among the workers–the creation of a mass movement. Experience demonstrated that abstract ideas of socialism, even when imbedded in such a rousing work as the Communist Manifesto, had little meaning to the average worker. In circle work, the Social Democrats contrived to narrow rather than broaden the scope of the movement. Instead of addressing themselves to the mass, the Marxists were simply drawing from it the most intelligent and able of the literate workers. In concentrating upon the education of a minority, the propagandists left the mass of workers untouched. Such tactics militated against the building of a mass movement, without which aspirations for political liberty and the ultimate triumph of socialism were chimerical.
Perhaps the Social Democrats vaguely envisaged a time when their proteges would themselves undertake to lead the mass of the workers in a struggle for Social Democratic goals. But in actual practice, the critics argued, the circle workers were so preoccupied with their pedagogical duties that they lost sight of what their real ends should be. Even assuming that they retained a vision of those ends, at what point would they or could they break out of the limits imposed by circle work and go over to mass activity? Circle work was likely to be self-perpetuating, inasmuch as the selected workmen who were raised to the intellectual levels of the radical intelligentsia showed a bias for continuation of the same methods. The Social Democrats, instead of calling into life an irresistible working-class movement, might wind up with nothing more to show for their efforts than a handful of worker-intelligentsia who, because of their education, were separated by a wide gulf from those they ought to be leading. If they persisted in such endeavors, the Social Democrats at least should be under no illusions as to the significance of what they were doing; the service they performed was hardly of greater moment than that of the Committees of Literacy.
A critical diagnosis such as this was propounded in an influential pamphlet written in 1894 entitled Ob agitatsii (On Agitation). It was based upon the firsthand experience of A. Kremer, a propagandist among the Jewish workers of Vilna. To break out of the enchanted circle, Kremer urged a shift in emphasis from the propagandizing of individuals to agitation among the masses. Theoretical instruction for the most capable workers need not be abandoned, for that would introduce an equally one-sided and false situation. But the chief efforts and forces of the Social Democrats should be directed to the mass of the workers, and this required a different approach. Agitation must rest upon an intimate knowledge of conditions prevailing in the factories. Social Democratic agitators must catch the pulse of the proletarians and attune their appeals to the keenly felt grievances and immediate needs of the workers in the mass. Conducting themselves in this way, the Marxists could mobilize masses of workers in defense of their interests, win their confidence in the course of joint struggles, by stages introduce them to the broader ideas and aims of Social Democracy, and finally organize them into Social Democratic battalions to be advanced into the political struggle.[2] Apart from its other patent advantages, Kremer argued, agitation required only a small expenditure of forces for large gains. A relatively small number of agitators could launch a movement of dimensions that the government would find difficult to control, whereas the circles with their high ratio of intelligentsia to working men were easily and repeatedly wrecked by the police...
Here was a program apparently well suited to the promotion of a Social Democratic mass movement. Sensitive to the force of the arguments against kruzhkovshchina, to the disparity between its attainments and the goals of the movement, active propagandists presently were won to the new strategy. Martov, and a little later Lenin, were particularly conspicuous in its popularization and translation into action.[3]
Other bourgeois historians present a similar picture, some stating that the propaganda circles were becoming tools for education and self-improvement of the more skilled and upwardly mobile workers, while leaving the masses untouched. One states that Lenin “was as vigorously opposed as Martov to what he called the old ’laboratory technique of the development of class consciousness,’ and just as convinced that the Social Democrats had to come to grips with the ’spontaneous working-class movement.’”[4]
Furthermore, we know some of the history of the Party of Labor of Albania and of the Communist Party of China, and we have learned of nothing in their experience that shows that it is a universal requirement that the process of fusion begin with propaganda work while agitation is, in the main, delayed. In fact, the new, 200-person Communist Party of Albania took up the struggle to build links with the masses by engaging broadly in propaganda, agitation, and organization among them.[5] Furthermore, the P.L.A.’s assessment of the work of the pre-party circles consistently praises efforts which some made to do broad mass work and attributes the failure of such work to be carried out more consistently to Trotskyite influence.[6]
But did not Lenin and Stalin write that the chief form of work in the party-building period was propaganda, to win the vanguard to communism? Yes, those were their words, but the organizations which justify their line by such quotations have the period wrong, totally misunderstand how the term propaganda was being used, and, in most cases, narrow the meaning of vanguard. The period which Lenin and Stalin spoke of was not only before the League of Struggle and other circles went over to agitation in the mid-’90’s. Stalin, accurately citing Lenin, states that the period did not end until the time of mass revolutionary action in 1905.[7] This period in which “propaganda” was the chief form lasted for 10 years after the Russian Marxists turned to doing widespread mass agitation as well![8] In the midst of that period Lenin wrote The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats and What is to be Done?, in which he approved of continuing broad economic agitation and called for the development of widespread and systematic political agitation among the masses of workers. But how could propaganda be the chief form of work for so long after the turn to broad agitation was made?
The answer is that Lenin and Stalin here used the term propaganda in its general sense of propagating ideas to the masses (through propaganda and agitation). Stalin did not contrast propaganda with agitation when he called it the chief form of work in this entire period, but with “practical action by the masses as a prelude to decisive battles.”[9] Lenin meant something similar when he made the oft-quoted statement,
As long as it was (and inasmuch as it still is) a question of winning the proletariat’s vanguard over to the side of communism, priority went and still goes to propaganda work; even propaganda circles, with all their parochial limitations, are useful under these conditions, and produce good results.[10]
Continuing, he said that propagandist methods are not enough for moving the masses in their millions into practical action in a revolutionary uprising. He had just said what else is required:
Propaganda and agitation alone are not enough for an entire class, the broad masses of the working people, those oppressed by capital, to take up such a stand [of support for a revolutionary vanguard ready to make the final assault on capital]. For that, the masses must have their own political experience.[11]
Comrades who think that we are wrong should read the entire section, pp. 92-94. It is clear that the one sentence always quoted to support the “propaganda-as-chief-form” line uses propaganda in its general sense of educational work among the masses. Lenin contrasted propaganda, in this sense, with mass revolutionary action as a form of struggle and a means for the masses to learn the correctness of the communists’ perspective, just as Stalin did later. Enver Hoxha, incidentally, recently interpreted Lenin’s remark the same way as we do.[12]
Although such a use of the term propaganda is uncommon among communists, it is not unheard of. For example, Lenin had earlier defined the word broadly, as spreading among the workers the results of Marxists’ study of the direction of social development among the workers, without specifying the means (as he explained how the slogan “study, propaganda, organization” expresses the correct merger of theory and practice).[13] Similarly, the History of the Party of Labor of Albania describes both “individual agitation” and leaflets as forms that the party’s “propaganda” took.[14]
Finally, not only do many comrades have the period wrong and misunderstand propaganda, but they think that the proletarian “vanguard” which Lenin and Stalin spoke of winning over is only the advanced workers. As we showed in Chapter III, this is incorrect. The vanguard also includes a multitude of intermediate workers who can be won over to membership in the party and active revolutionary work. Thus, “propaganda to the advanced,” as many paraphrase Lenin and Stalin, is not what they said or meant.
* * *
Properly understood, what were Lenin and Stalin saying? That in a period of bringing together, building up, and consolidating the best elements of the working class into a party under consistent Marxist leadership, educational methods (propaganda and widespread agitation) were the chief forms of the communists’ work, but that such methods alone do not suffice for bringing the broad masses to the point of support for, and participation in, a revolutionary upsurge. This is the only way in which “propaganda” was the chief form of work for the Russian Marxists for a decade after they rectified their early error and began committing a very large part of their resources to agitation.
The whole “propaganda-as-chief-form” episode in our movement gives one grounds for reflection. The fact that hundreds of U.S. communists could be so badly duped by two sentences, taken out of context, while many of us should have known perfectly well from the History of the CPSU(B) and What is to be Done? that the real work of the Russians in the period spoken of consisted largely of agitation, gives a frightening glimpse of the power of dogmatism among us.
[1] We show below that quotations from Lenin and Stalin about propaganda taking precedence in a time of winning over the vanguard do not contrast propaganda with agitation. Instead they mean propaganda in the general sense of educational work, and contrast it to the mobilization of millions of people in physical battle against the bourgeoisie.
[1a] August Bebel, an outstanding leader of the German Social Democratic Party, was himself a worker. [Footnote in original.]
[2] In publishing On Agitation abroad, the Emancipation of Labour group appended a statement by Axelrod criticizing the pamphlet’s tendency to neglect the role of agitation on political issues. (Note by P.C.)
[3] Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford Univ. Press: Stanford, 1963), pp. 147-49.
[4] Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Harvard Univ. Press: Cambridge, 1955), p. 73. See also pp. 71-73, and Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political Triumph of Communism in Russia (MacMillan: N.Y., 1965), pp. 117-21, and Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-97 (Harvard Univ. Press: Cambridge, 1963). This last book is devoted entirely to an examination of the mass work of the St. Petersburg communists. Pipes states that the Vilno Social-Democrats learned about agitational work from Social-Democrats who were using the technique in Poland.
All these histories agree on the role of Kremer’s pamphlet, On Agitation. So do Lenin and the editors of his works (What is to be Done?, LCW 5: 376 & n. 160), and his wife N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (International Publishers: N.Y., 1960), pp. 18-19).
[5] History of the P.L.A., pp. 90-91, 99, 102-13.
[6] Ibid., Chapter I, passim.
[7] He wrote,
“The first period [in the development of the RSDLP] was the period of formation, of the creation of our Party. It embraces the interval of time approximately from the formation of Iskra to the Third Party Congress inclusively (end of 1900 to beginning of 1905).
“. . .The principal task of communism in Russia in that period was to recruit into the Party the best elements of the working class, those who were most active and most devoted to the cause of the proletariat; to form the ranks of the proletarian party and to put it firmly on its feet. Comrade Lenin formulates this task as follows: “to win the vanguard of the proletariat to the side of communism” (see ”Left-Wing” Communism. . .). “The Party Before and After Taking Power,” SW 5: 103-04.
“To win the vanguard of the proletariat to the side of communism. . . [p]ropaganda.. . [was] the chief form of activity.” (“The Political Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists,” ibid., 83-84.)
[8] See The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, LCW 2: 329; “A Retrograde Trend. . .,” LCW 4: 279; and the sources cited in fn. 4, above.
[9] “Political Strategy and Tactics. . .,” pp. 82-83.
[10] “Left-Wing” Communism–An Infantile Disorder, LCW 31: 93-94.
[11] lbid., p. 93.
[12] Imperialism and the Revolution, reprinted in Proletarian Internationalism (COUSML journal), Vol. 1, #2, pp. 65-66.
[13] What the “Friends of the People Are”. . ., LCW 1: 298.
[14] p. 79.