After the Conference

Wellred

Core Argument

After the Prague Conference of January 1912, the schism between revolutionary Marxism and opportunism in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was consummated. The Mensheviks and allied groupings—including Plekhanov’s group, the Vperyodists, Trotsky’s faction, and the Bund—convened a rival conference in Paris on 28 February, denouncing the Bolsheviks for a ‘coup d’état’ and splitting activities. Their protests to the International Socialist Bureau were futile. The chapter argues that this rupture prefigured the 1914 collapse of the Second International, as Lenin, drawing on the Russian experience, already perceived the irreconcilable antagonism between Marxism and opportunism within the German SPD, predicting an inevitable conflict beneath its façade of unity.

Lenin hailed the Prague Conference as the party’s rebirth, writing to Gorky that they had finally revived the Party and its Central Committee despite the “liquidationist scoundrels”. Yet the process was fraught with difficulty. The exiles’ milieu was riven with bickering, even fisticuffs, as all groups united against the conference’s organisers. Worse, many Bolshevik activists inside Russia remained conciliatory. Lenin’s correspondence reveals acute anxiety: he lamented the “complete disorganisation” of contacts, the absence of resolutions from key centres like Tiflis and Baku, and the failure to demand Bolshevik funds held by the Socialist International. He rebuked supporters for not replying to the Liquidators.

Trotsky, seeking to salvage unity, convened a conference in Vienna in August 1912. Only the Liquidators attended, underscoring the hopelessness of his position. Trotsky later conceded that Lenin was right to refuse participation. The August Bloc was an unprincipled amalgam of heterogeneous tendencies—Mensheviks, Vperyodists, and Trotsky’s own isolated group—united solely by hostility to Lenin. Trotsky acknowledged that he had not yet grasped the necessity of a firmly welded, centralised party for revolutionary goals, and that his policy was adventurism. The bloc disintegrated within months; Trotsky soon stood organisationally outside it.

The chapter draws on Trotsky’s own retrospective verdicts, including his admission that he was “sick with the disease of conciliationism” and retained “traits of a petty-bourgeois revolutionist”. It also cites the correspondence of Axelrod and Martov, who expressed mutual hatred for Trotsky, revealing the bloc’s internal contradictions. The polemical thrust is directed against Stalinist falsifiers who later inflated the August Bloc into a weapon against Trotsky, ignoring Lenin’s Testament that Trotsky’s non-Bolshevik past should not be used against him. The chapter insists that the episode demonstrated the impossibility of unity between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and that Trotsky’s error, though genuine, was that of a revolutionary whose conciliationism was historically superseded by the logic of the class struggle.