The Emancipation of Labour Group¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: The Emancipation of Labour Group
This chapter traces the formation and early struggles of Russia’s first Marxist organisation, arguing that its foundational role was primarily theoretical. The core narrative thrust is that the Emancipation of Labour Group, despite its tiny size, primitive organisation, and crushing isolation, supplied the indispensable ‘genetic information’ for the entire subsequent revolutionary movement. Theory is presented as primary: the group’s great contribution was to lay down the theoretical roots from which all later development stemmed, a process necessarily confined to winning individuals, training cadres, and hammering home Marxist fundamentals among a narrow circle of intellectual leaders.
Plekhanov’s writings—Socialism and the Political Struggle, Our Differences, and especially On the Development of the Monist View of History—are identified as masterly restatements of dialectical and historical materialism, classics whose importance Lenin himself later acknowledged by recommending their republication even after political rupture. The chapter documents the ferocious polemical battle against Narodism, whose leaders, unable to answer the Marxist case, resorted to accusations of sectarianism and of prioritising polemic over struggle against the Tsarist state. A bitter irony is noted: Tikhomirov, the chief Narodnik critic who accused Plekhanov of disrupting revolutionary unity, later became a monarchist renegade, publishing Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionary in 1888.
The historical context is the bleak reaction of the 1880s under Alexander III and Pobedonostsev—a period of rigid hopelessness, metaphysical mysticism, and cowardly apostasy. The Narodnik trend had collapsed into a policy of ‘small deeds’ and liberal philistinism. Against this stream, the Group endured extreme poverty, police infiltration (the spy Christian Haupt), the constant hazard of arrest and suicide among contacts, and complete political isolation among a hostile Narodnik exile majority. Plekhanov’s moral and intellectual authority held the ‘Family’ together, yet the chapter notes the tragic two-fold character of figures like Axelrod and Zasulich: long exile stultified their development, and the narrow propaganda-circle mentality that sustained the Group in its early years later became a limitation when the movement needed to transcend the propaganda phase.
The patient work eventually bore fruit. The chapter cites a worried 1887 letter from Ginsburg to Lavrov, reporting that Plekhanov’s works had crushed the importance of the individual and the intelligentsia in revolution, and were exerting a powerful influence on the youth. By the 1890s, the Group enjoyed enormous authority; Plekhanov’s name was known in every underground circle and every police station in Russia. The chapter’s polemical edge is directed against unprincipled ‘left unity’ and the accusation of sectarianism—a charge Marxism has always faced for insisting on theoretical clarity and clear demarcation from other tendencies.