After his return from abroad, Lenin established desultory contact with labor circles that were leading a precarious existence in the capital. He did some tutoring in Marxist theory, but he did not much care for educational work and he gave it up after a worker whom he was initiating into Das Kapital walked off with his overcoat.46 He preferred to organize workers for action. At the time, there operated in St. Petersburg a circle of Social-Democratic intellectuals which maintained contact with individual workers as well as the Central Workers’ Circle, formed by the workers themselves for purposes of mutual aid and self-improvement. Lenin joined the Social-Democratic circle, but involved himself in its work only late in 1895 when it adopted the technique of “agitation” formulated by Jewish socialists in Lithuania. To overcome the workers’ aversion to politics, the “agitational” technique called for inciting industrial strikes based on the workers’ economic (i.e., non-political) grievances. It was believed that once the workers saw how the government and the forces of order invariably sided with the proprietors of the affected enterprises, they would realize it was impossible to satisfy their economic grievances without a change in the political regime. This realization would politicize labor. Lenin, who learned of the “agitational” technique from Martov, joined in the distribution among St. Petersburg workers of agitational material which explained to the workers their rights under the law and showed how these rights were being violated by the employers. The output was meager, and the effect on the workers doubtfuclass="underline" but when in May 1896, 30,000 textile workers in the capital went on a spontaneous strike, the Social-Democrats had cause for jubilation.
By then Lenin and his comrades were in jail, having been arrested in the winter of 1895–96 for incitement to strikes. Nevertheless, Lenin felt that the “agitational” method of struggle had vindicated itself: “The struggle of workers with factory owners for their daily needs,” he wrote in the wake of the textile strike, “of itself and inevitably suggests to the workers problems of state and politics.”47 The task of the party Lenin defined as follows:
The Russian Social-Democratic Party declares its task to be helping the struggle of the Russian working class by developing labor’s class consciousness, assisting its organization, and showing it the real goals of the struggle.… The task of the party is not to invent in its head some fashionable methods of helping the workers, but to join the labor movement, to illuminate it, to help the workers in the struggle which they have already begun to wage themselves.48
During the investigation that followed his arrest, Lenin disclaimed authorship of a manuscript of his which the police had mistakenly attributed to an associate by the name of P. K. Zaporozhets. As a consequence, the latter drew two additional years of prison and exile. Lenin spent his three years of Siberian exile (1897–1900) in relative comfort and in constant communication with his comrades. He read, wrote, translated, and engaged in vigorous physical activity.*
As his term of exile drew to a close, Lenin was in receipt of disturbing news from home: the movement, which at the time of his imprisonment was going from success to success, was in the throes of a crisis not unlike that experienced by the revolutionaries of the 1870s. The agitational technique, which Lenin had expected to radicalize workers, turned into something very different: the economic grievances which had been intended to serve as a means of stimulating their political awareness had become an end in themselves. The workers struggled for economic benefits without getting politically involved, and the intellectuals who engaged in “agitation” found that they had become adjuncts of an incipient trade union movement. In the summer of 1899, Lenin received from Russia a document written by Ekaterina Kuskova and called “Credo” which urged socialists to leave the struggle against the autocracy to the bourgeoisie and concentrate instead on helping Russian labor improve its economic and social condition. Kuskova was not a full-fledged Social-Democrat, but her essay reflected a trend that was emerging within Social-Democracy. This incipient heresy Lenin labeled Economism. Nothing was further from his mind than to have the socialist movement turn into a handmaiden of trade unions, which by their very nature pursued accommodation with “capitalism.” The information which reached him from Russia indicated that the labor movement was maturing independently of the Social-Democratic intelligentsia and distancing itself from the political struggle—that is, revolution.
His anxiety was compounded by the emergence of yet another heresy in the movement: Revisionism. In early 1899, some leading Russian Social-Democrats, following Eduard Bernstein, called for a revision of Marx’s social theory in the light of recent evidence. That year Struve published an analysis of Marx’s social theory in which he charged it with inconsistency: Marx’s own premises indicated that socialism could come about only as a result of evolution, not revolution.49 Struve then proceeded to a systematic critique of the central concept of Marx’s economic and social doctrine, the theory of value, which led him to the conclusion that “value” was not a scientific but a metaphysical concept.50 Revisionism did not trouble Lenin as much as Economism for it did not have the same practical implications, but it heightened his fear that something was seriously amiss. According to Krupskaia, in the summer of 1899 Lenin grew distraught, lost weight, and suffered from insomnia. He now devoted his energies to analyzing the causes of the crisis in Russian Social-Democracy and devising the means to overcome it.
His immediate practical solution was to launch with those associates who had remained faithful to orthodox Marxism a publication, modeled on the German Sozialdemokrat, to combat deviations in the movement, especially Economism. Such was the origin of Iskra. But Lenin’s thoughts ran deeper and he began to wonder whether Social-Democracy should not reorganize as a tight, conspiratorial elite on the model of the People’s Will.51 These speculations marked the onset of a spiritual crisis which would be resolved only a year later with the decision to form a party of his own.
After his release from exile in early 1900, Lenin spent a short time in St. Petersburg negotiating with colleagues as well as Struve, who, although nominally still a Social-Democrat, was shifting into the liberal camp. Struve was to collaborate with Iskra and provide a good part of its financing. Later that year, Lenin moved to Munich where jointly with Potresov and Julius Martov he founded Iskra as an organ of “orthodox”—that is, anti-Economist and anti-Revisionist—Marxism.
The longer he observed the behavior of workers in and out of Russia, the more compelling was the conclusion, entirely contrary to the fundamental premise of Marxism, that labor (the “proletariat”) was not a revolutionary class at alclass="underline" left to itself, it would rather settle for a larger share of the capitalists’ profits than overthrow capitalism. It was the same premise that moved Zubatov at this very time to conceive the idea of police trade unionism.* In a seminal article published at the end of 1900, Lenin uttered the unthinkable: “the labor movement, separated from Social-Democracy … inevitably turns bourgeois.”52 The implication of this startling statement was that unless the workers were led by a socialist party external to it and independent of it, they would betray their class interests. Only non-workers—that is, the intelligentsia—knew what these interests were. In the spirit of Mosca and Pareto, whose theories of political elites were then in vogue, Lenin asserted that the proletariat, for its own sake, had to be led by a minority of the elect: