Workers Struggles and Revolutionary Consciousness

(Quote of the Week)

Writing at the end of the 19th century, following a massive strike wave in tsarist Russia, V.I. Lenin polemicized against those Russian Social Democrats, as Marxists called themselves at the time, who argued that economic struggle would spontaneously lead to workers developing revolutionary political consciousness. Lenin underlined that it is the task of the revolutionary party to intervene into class and social struggles to bring socialist consciousness to the proletariat and prepare it for its historic task of overthrowing capitalist rule. Lenin cites Karl Kautsky, a Marxist leader at the time who would later betray proletarian internationalism and become a bitter opponent of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

“Every class struggle is a political struggle”—these famous words of Marx are not to be understood to mean that any struggle of workers against employers must always be a political struggle. They must be understood to mean that the struggle of the workers against the capitalists inevitably becomes a political struggle insofar as it becomes a class struggle. It is the task of the Social-Democrats, by organising the workers, by conducting propaganda and agitation among them, to turn their spontaneous struggle against their oppressors into the struggle of the whole class, into the struggle of a definite political party for definite political and socialist ideals. This is something that cannot be achieved by local activity alone....

Social-Democracy is not confined to simple service to the working-class movement: it represents “the combination of socialism and the working-class movement” (to use Karl Kautsky’s definition which repeats the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto).

—V.I. Lenin, “Our Immediate Task” (1899)