The Second Congress¶
Core Argument¶
The Second Congress of the RSDLP, convened in July 1903 in Brussels and later London, marked a decisive advance from the movement’s earlier isolation, representing several thousand members with influence over hundreds of thousands of workers. The chapter’s core argument is that the Congress’s historic significance has been distorted by later mythology, which falsely presents Bolshevism as emerging fully formed from this gathering. In reality, the split between ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Mensheviks’ was not final but only an anticipation of future differences, and the real divisions only crystallised unexpectedly during the proceedings.
A central debate concerned the place of the Jewish Bund within the party. The Bund demanded a federal structure granting it exclusive rights to represent Jewish workers, justifying this on the grounds of their specific national and racial oppression. The chapter draws on Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to define the Bolshevik position: the party insisted on the right of nations to self-determination, including secession, while simultaneously demanding rigid centralism within the party itself, rejecting national federation as an organisational principle. Martov argued that national differences must play a subordinate role to common class interests, and that no section of the party could claim a monopoly on representing any national group. When the Bund’s pretensions were rejected, its delegates walked out, followed by the Economists, decisively shifting the balance of forces.
The chapter’s most sustained polemic is directed against the myth that Lenin stood for dictatorial centralism and a small conspiratorial party, while Martov represented a broad, democratic opening to the workers. The real dispute, it argues, was over Clause One of the party rules: who is a member? Lenin demanded “personal participation in one of the party organisations”; Martov proposed “regular personal cooperation under the direction of one of the party organisations.” The chapter exposes Axelrod’s revealing example of a professor who sympathises but will not join an organisation, arguing that this betrayed the pressure of alien class interests—the radicalised middle class and intellectuals unwilling to commit to revolutionary work. Plekhanov, siding with Lenin, demolished this position, quoting Engels on professors and insisting that those unwilling to join an organisation were not needed. Martov’s variant passed only because wavering Iskra supporters combined with the Economists, Bund, and the ‘Centre’ around Yuzhny Rabochii.
The chapter insists that organisational questions are never decisive from a Marxist standpoint; Lenin himself later argued for open party membership in 1912 when circumstances demanded it. The 1903 dispute was about laying solid foundations in a period of chaos, not about eternal organisational principles. The walkouts of the Bundists and Economists gave the Iskra camp a majority, but the split was not yet definitive—Lenin remained anxious to reach agreement, describing the difference as not “a matter of life and death for the party.”