Rabochaya Mysl’¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter dissects the emergence and ideological character of Rabochaya Mysl’ (Workers’ Thought), the journal that crystallised the ‘Economist’ deviation within Russian Social Democracy in the late 1890s. Its core argument is that Economism represented a profound opportunist retreat from Marxism, masquerading as a democratic, worker-oriented alternative to Lenin’s alleged elitism. The chapter contends that the journal’s foundational position—that workers cannot understand politics and that the economic struggle is primary—logically dissolved the revolutionary party into the politically untutored mass, abandoning the task of raising working-class consciousness to the level of historical necessity.
Key claims are substantiated with direct quotation from the journal’s first issue, which asserted that “politics always docilely follows economics” and that political shackles are broken only “en route” through economic struggle. The chapter draws on the historical context of the 1890s, noting the rapid turnover of Social Democratic cadres due to constant arrests—the Bolshevik delegation to the 1904 Amsterdam Congress reported an average group lifespan of three to four months—which led to ideological dilution and the influx of inexperienced youth. This structural weakness, the chapter argues, fuelled Economism’s rise, as a party losing its theoretical “magnetic North” inevitably tail-ended the movement.
The polemical thrust is directed at two targets. First, contemporary bourgeois critics of Bolshevism, exemplified by A.K. Wildman’s The Making of a Worker’s Revolution, who distort the Economist controversy to paint Lenin as a conspiratorial elitist. The chapter exposes the contradiction in Wildman’s own account: despite the Economists’ rhetorical commitment to worker leadership, they failed to bring worker representatives into the League of Struggle. Second, the chapter attacks the Economists’ own practice, citing Wildman’s admission that the journal’s endless recitation of workplace grievances became “wearisome” and that workers, recognising it told them nothing new, stopped reading. A strike at the Maxwell and Paul factory in December 1898 is used as evidence: workers’ letters revealed a far more advanced and revolutionary consciousness than the Economists would credit, with one worker lamenting the lack of a banner and pistols. When local Social Democrats sent an enthusiastic article to Rabochaya Mysl’ abroad, the émigré editors appended a statement criticising the workers for exposing themselves to repression, so incensing the St. Petersburg group that they refused to distribute the journal for months.
The chapter situates Economism within a broader theoretical and international context, drawing on Kremer’s pamphlet On Agitation to show how the Economists one-sidedly elevated economic agitation into a panacea, abandoning revolutionary theory and producing the anti-Marxist “theory of stages.” This, the chapter argues, was analogous to the liberal Narodniks’ politics of “small deeds” and fitted perfectly with Legal Marxism, representing the left wing of bourgeois liberalism. Economism’s implicit fear of confronting tsarist authority meant abandoning the revolutionary struggle to the liberals—a scheme that flew in the face of tsarist repression, which broke up strikes with police and Cossacks regardless of political demands. The chapter concludes that Economism, while never a homogeneous trend, was not merely “ideological measles” in Russian youth but coincided with a far more serious international phenomenon of reformism.