Georgi Plekhanov

Another movement was Black Repartition, which concentrated on propagandizing among the workers on the basis that only a mass movement would be successful in achieving socialism.

A few names here are Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and a man named Pavel Axelrod.

These were the key figures.

They were all forced to flee state repression abroad.

Plekhanov settled in Geneva, where he became a Marxist, convinced that Russia had to undergo capitalist development and that this transformation would create an industrial working class which could overthrow czarism.

So I don't know if you're familiar with this.

John, but Marxism has a place for capitalism as the kind of precursor to revolution.

as an orc.

Marxism was still really like getting off the ground, you know, starting from the ruins of the earlier revolutionary democratic movements.

You know, Plekhanov and his group, they were still, you know, picking off where earlier groups had started.

The earlier Marxist movement was pretty decentralized.

It was broken up into a number of small, loose committees and circles.

They were able to act as a general place where people could, you know, talk and hash things out between the various committees, the various, sometimes various tenancies and things like that.

ISCRA was used as a way to develop organization, to build organization around it.

agents distributing, you know, people contributing to it, writing about all their experiences, all the various social issues of society, of Russian society, of the Tsarist system, and was able to be used as a way to marshal support for, you know, for the more Plekhanovist side of the social democratic movement versus the more economic side.

It was able to become a mass or because it was used to not just build ordination and build the writers, build socialists and distribute it to workers and build them up too.

Shocked.

I cannot rule out that the harsh refusal to accept the well-deserved Plekhanov into the CEC in April 1917 was a kind of revenge for his anti-Bund referral to the tribe of Gad, which was mentioned in Lenin's publications.

Indeed, I cannot provide any other ex- any other explanation.

On July 21st, the fa- first all-Russian Congress of Soviets had issued a proclamation about a struggle against anti-Semitism, about the only resolution approved by the Congress unanimously without any objections or arguments.

If you ask socialism without the vast majority of the people on board, you end up with some kind of theocracy, even if it pretends to be an atheistic one.

In 1893, the Russian Marxist Georgy Plekhanov correctly predicted that if socialists would seize power without their goals being aligned with those of the vast majority of the population, that socialism would just turn into a theocracy, like the Incan Empire, with the socialists as the Incan priest class.

And that is exactly what happened after 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power and then quickly turned the vast majority of the population against them, for reasons that we'll look at when we continue the Russian Revolution series very soon.

I've got big episodes on the history of Israel and Palestine and the Russian Revolution coming and literally dozens of other ideas that I'm working on.

Yeah.

'Cause in our minds, sometimes we like to think of ourselves, our closest historical analogs are maybe, like, Bordiga before the Comintern and Plekhanov, and we're just waiting for Gramscis and Lenins to come along and get rid of us [laughs].

Mm.

You know, but, but that phase needs to be fulfilled, right? And to me, it seems like a lot of the current Leninist, the current communist left is much more interested in, you know, developing theories of the world, which is fair, and, you know, doing various organizing work, which is also fair.

And this is very Ulmanite, right? It's like, what are the, what, what, what perspective does this a- this article or this sort of approach to populism offer me, right? What, what, what potential insight am I able to glean from this theorization versus, you know, the opposite theorization, right? And I think, you know, what, what should be clear is that in real revolutionary practice, you're going to learn a lot from a lot of places, right? You're going to learn from the Neronics.

You're gonna learn from Cherneshevsky.

You're going to learn from Plekhanov.

You're gonna learn from the German social democrats.

In 1883, in Genev- in Geneva, appear, appears what can be considered as the head of the emerging social democracy, the Liberation of Labor group.

Its founders were, along with Plekhanov and Vera Za- Zazulich, L. Deutsch and P. Axelrod.

When, when Ignatieff died in 1885, he was replaced by Engerman.

In Russia comes to life a current that supports them.

To create a specifically Jewish workers' organization which will serve as a guide and instructor for the Jewish proletariat.

In the national character of the movement, Martov saw a victory over the bourgeoisie and with this, we are perfectly safe from nationalism.

In the following year, Plekhanov at the Congress of the International Socialists described the Jewish social democratic movement as, quote, the vanguard of the working class army in Russia.

It was later It was the latter which became the Bund, Vilnius 1897, six months before the creation of the Social Democrat Party of Russia.

Cool

... is, um, Ben, the, this kind of, uh, caricature of a position which you're, like, like, that, that you were lampooning is very much what the, uh, Narodniki said of the Social Democrats in Russia when, like, Plekhanov and, and, uh, and the early Marxists were talking about, um, how bourgeois development would actually-

Hmm

... create the conditions to actually transcend the things which the, the populace were fighting against.