The Third Congress¶
Core Argument¶
The Third Congress
The Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905, was the first genuinely Bolshevik Party Congress, convened in the white heat of revolutionary upswing following Bloody Sunday. Its dominant question was the armed insurrection. Lenin insisted that the Party had previously underestimated the inevitability of uprising and that attention must now be paid to its practical organisation. Lunacharsky opened the debate by arguing that the revolution had already begun in the sense that the masses had decisively entered the arena of struggle; what was needed was to give organised form to this semi-spontaneous movement, lest the heroism of the workers be dissipated in disorganised local uprisings.
The chapter draws heavily on the Marxist polemic against Blanquism—the conspiratorial conception of revolution as the work of a small minority, named after Louis Auguste Blanqui. The Russian Marxists, Plekhanov in the first instance, had previously attacked the Narodniks for this voluntarist error. Now, however, Martov’s accusation of Blanquism directed at the Bolsheviks was exposed as sophistry. The Mensheviks’ attitude flowed from their entire conception of the revolution as a bourgeois-democratic affair in which the working class must subordinate itself to the liberal bourgeoisie. The Bolshevik position was radically different: the proletariat must lead.
The Congress discussed technical details of insurrection—strategic maps, training of officers, fundraising—but Lenin insisted that the fundamental task remained winning over the masses. Without that, all talk of overthrowing tsarism was empty chatter. The Congress confirmed Lenin’s fears that Bolshevik activists inside Russia, the ‘committeemen’, had been slow to adapt. Accustomed to small, closed underground circles, they were ill at ease in the mass movement and used a formalistic conception of organisation to cover an innate conservatism. Lenin waged an implacable struggle against these tendencies, arguing for participation in legal organisations—trade unions, co-ops, even a rigged tsarist parliament—where the mood was for boycott. His flexible, dialectical understanding of tactics clashed with the unyielding dogmatism of the committeemen.
The most heated battle came over the resolution on relations between workers and intellectuals. Kamenev denied the question existed. Others argued there were no workers fit to sit on committees, citing What Is To Be Done? Yet Lenin, the author of that work, now answered his critics by appealing to the class instinct of workers. He deliberately shocked the Congress by referring approvingly to the participation of workers during the period of Economism, noting that the bearers of revolutionary ideas in that epoch had been workers, not intellectuals. He declared he would be pleased if, out of every two intellectuals on committees, there were eight workers. The committeemen booed him. Lenin’s resolution was rejected on the grounds that there was ‘no need’ for it. The chapter notes that many old worker-Economists subsequently joined the Bolsheviks, whereas the Economist intellectuals almost to a man joined the Mensheviks—a point never mentioned but nonetheless true.
Despite this setback, the Third Congress marked a historic landmark. The basic ideas of Lenin on the leading role of the proletariat, absolute class independence, and mistrust of the liberals were adopted without dissent. The agrarian question was radically changed to include confiscation of all big landlords’ estates and the setting up of peasant committees. The Party Rules were reaffirmed, but Lenin insisted they were not to be interpreted narrowly; the Party must be opened up to workers and youth. He also insisted on clear guarantees for the rights of minorities within the Party, subject only to the condition that raising differences should not disorganise practical intervention in the struggle.