The Position of the Bund in the Party¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, the central conflict between the Bund and the broader Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is dissected through a polemical exchange over the Bund’s demand for a federated structure. The Bund’s Fifth Congress argues that the party must be reconstituted as a federation of national organisations, with the Bund as an autonomous component. It claims that the 1898 Manifesto’s promise of autonomy is logically incoherent: either it is merely technical, reducing the Bund to the level of any local committee and denying its independence, or it is programme autonomy, which necessarily implies federation. The Bund further asserts that history has made it the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, breaking regional barriers, and that the Jewish proletariat, as part of a special nation, can only enter a federal party. Federation, it contends, guarantees equal rights and direct participation, whereas autonomy breeds indifference and conflict.
The reply systematically dismantles these claims as fallacies. The federation-versus-autonomy dichotomy is exposed as a sophistry: it treats “component of the party” as a sum of organisations under federation, but as each local organisation separately under autonomy. The division into programme and technical autonomy is absurd; specific demands are not singled out from general programme points but advanced in pursuance of them. The Bund’s historical claim is false: other organisations worked among Jewish workers, and the Bund itself weakened ties, as shown by its separate foreign organisation from 1903. Drawing a principle from five years of disunity is opportunism. The idea of a Jewish nation is scientifically untenable—Kautsky is cited to argue that a nation requires language and territory, which Jews possess neither—and politically reactionary, fostering a ghetto spirit hostile to assimilation, which is the progressive course across Europe.
The Bund’s resistance to the only possible solution to the Jewish problem—the ending of isolation through assimilation—drives it to propagate the notion of a Jewish nation and to federate Jewish and non-Jewish proletarians. This mistake leads Bundists to stir up distrust among Jewish workers towards non-Jewish proletarians. The text cites a Bund pamphlet claiming that denying representation on central party bodies to the proletariat of a whole nationality could only be advocated regarding the Jewish proletariat, which still has to fight for equality. The author calls this an outright falsehood, noting the same argument was made against the Polish Socialist Party and that representation was denied not only to Jews but also to Armenians, Georgians, and Poles. This tactic degrades the struggle from principles to suspicion and fans historical prejudices, revealing a lack of real ideas. The conclusion is that the Bund’s logical, historical, and nationalist arguments fail. Instead of fighting historically-evolved isolation, the Bund has elevated it to a principle using the sophistry that autonomy is inherently contradictory and the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation. Only by admitting this mistake and moving towards fusion can the Bund correct its path.