“Within the Marxist camp, however, fissures soon developed that mirrored those in the Populist camp a generation earlier. These fissures concerned such thorny questions as the degree to which socialist activity should take place within the existing legal framework, the relationship between political and economic struggle, and the relationship between political and economic struggle, and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the masses (now the urban workers rather than the peasantry). Mindful of the successes of Social Democrats in gaining political influence in the freer countries of the West, some Marxists – Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky – concentrated their attention on the short-term objective which Marxists shared with the bourgeoisie, namely the winning of political freedoms and the undermining of autocracy [138; 139]. Not surprisingly, some of the ‘legal Marxists’, as these Marxists came to be known, were to lean towards the liberal camp and made important contributions to the volume entitled ‘Landmarks’ (1909) which criticized the tendency of the Russian intelligentsia to take up polarized ideological standpoints. A different position was taken by Kremer, another Jewish revolutionary from Vilna, who in his pamphlet ‘On Agitation’ (1894) argued that the intelligentsia should learn from the masses and represent their grievances. According to yet another point of view, adopted by some intellectuals such as Prokopovich and his wife Kuskova, socialists should strive primarily to win for the workers economic gains and material improvements of the sort that it seemed possible to achieve in some Western countries. Yet other socialists of the period, led by Takhtariov [Strákhov, ndr] and represented in the newspaper ‘Workers’ Thought’ (Rabochaia mysl’; 1897), continued abroad as ‘The Workers’ Cause’ (Rabochee delo), were concerned to build a mass labour movement rather than one dominated by Marxists in intelligentsia. These various heresies, actual or somewhat exaggerated for polemical purposes, are vehemently opposed by Lenin in his work ‘What is to be done?’ (1902). Taking his title from Chernyshevsky’s novel, which he greatly admired, Lenin argues in ‘What is to be done?’ that the working class, if left to its own devices, could achieve only a ‘trade-union’ consciousness which would bring no durable improvement in its conditions” [Derek Offord, Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy’, London, 1999] [J.L.H. Keep, ‘The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963; (139) Richard Kindersley The First Russian Revisionists: A Study of Legal Marxism in Russia, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962] [Lenin-Bibliographical-Materials] [LBM*]
- Categoria dell'articolo:Nuove Accessioni
- Articolo pubblicato:31 Maggio 2016