Does the Jewish Proletariat Need an ‘Independent Political Party’?¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s polemic, published on 15 February 1903, is a surgical intervention against the Bund’s claim, announced in Posledniye Izvestia No. 105, that the Jewish proletariat had already “formed itself into an independent political party”. Lenin seizes on this as a startling novelty, since the Bund had hitherto been a constituent part of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), bound by the 1898 rules. The immediate occasion is the Bund’s Foreign Committee attack on the Ekaterinoslav Committee of the RSDLP for issuing a manifesto to Jewish workers that made no mention of the Bund. Lenin defends the Ekaterinoslav Committee on two grounds. First, the manifesto was addressed specifically to Jewish workers in Ekaterinoslav, where the Bund had no organisation; the Bund’s own Fourth Congress had resolved not to form separate committees in southern cities where Jewish workers were already integrated into general party committees. The Ekaterinoslav Committee was therefore not obliged to mention the Bund, and to have done so would have violated party unity. Second, the Bund’s accusation that the manifesto spread a “dangerous fable” by linking antisemitism to bourgeois interests rather than to the working class is refuted. The Bund’s evidence—twelve scabbing workers in Zhitomir and workers’ participation in a Częstochowa pogrom—is dismissed as laughably thin. Lenin invokes Kautsky’s pamphlet The Social Revolution to argue that the social character of antisemitism is determined by its bourgeois function, not by the ignorance of isolated workers.
The core of Lenin’s argument is theoretical and organisational. He contrasts the 1898 system of autonomy—which gave the Bund full scope for Yiddish propaganda, literature, and congresses—with the Bund’s new demand for federation. Autonomy, he insists, provides everything the Jewish working-class movement needs; federation, by contrast, compels the Bund to declare itself an independent party and thus to fragment the proletariat along national lines. The attack on Ekaterinoslav is not accidental but the logical consequence of this federalist error. Lenin warns that the Bund’s course leads to “organising impotence”, isolating Jewish workers from the unified, centralised struggle against the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. The polemic is directed squarely against the Bund’s leadership, which Lenin accuses of substituting a sectarian nationalism for the class unity of the entire Russian proletariat, regardless of language or nationality.