The Struggle Against Unemployment¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the Bolsheviks’ strategic response to mass unemployment in Russia following the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, when employers, having recovered their nerve, launched a coordinated offensive against the working class. Lockouts and mass sackings were used as weapons of economic terror, targeting the most advanced, skilled, and politically conscious sections of the proletariat — precisely those under Social Democratic influence. By January 1908, 36 per cent of engineering workers had been sacked; at the Neva shipyards, a thousand workers were dismissed across 1908–1909. The employers, in cahoots with the tsarist authorities, aimed to crush the militant vanguard that had led the revolutionary strikes.
In this context, the Bolsheviks organised a movement of the unemployed, most notably in St. Petersburg, where an Unemployed Workers’ Council (Soviet bezrabotnykh) was formed. The chapter draws heavily on a pamphlet by the Bolshevik worker Sergei Malishev, who chaired the Kostroma Soviet in 1905 and documented the St. Petersburg campaign. The central tactical innovation, suggested by Lenin, was to anchor the unemployed struggle firmly to the employed workers still in the factories. Lenin initially doubted that an isolated Unemployed Council could exert sufficient pressure on the bourgeoisie; he insisted that the Council be expanded to include 100–150 representatives from all factories and districts, creating a genuine proletarian leading body capable of confronting the City Duma and the employers. This principle — linking the unemployed to those in work — is presented as the cornerstone of Marxist tactics on unemployment.
The Council registered the locked-out workers, revealing that 54 per cent were highly skilled metalworkers — proof that the bosses deliberately targeted the most militant layers. The Council organised elections at factory gates and soup kitchens, established district councils, and drafted a petition to the St. Petersburg City Duma demanding public works, not charity. The petition’s language was deliberately forceful: “We demand not charity, but our rights.” Speakers were dispatched to factories at shift changes and lunch breaks to win support. Despite the demoralisation following the mass sackings, the petition received widespread sympathy. The movement also sought to enlist sympathetic sections of the middle class, though liberal support evaporated after the October Manifesto.
The chapter contrasts the Bolshevik approach with that of the liberals, who offered only charity and quickly withdrew. It also implicitly argues against any conception of the unemployed as a separate, pauperised stratum: the unemployed were workers, and their struggle had to be integrated with that of the class as a whole. The St. Petersburg Unemployed Council was finally broken up by the secret police in 1908, but its tactics — public works, unemployment benefit, and the organic link between employed and unemployed — are held up as a model of revolutionary Marxist practice under conditions of severe repression and economic crisis.