George Plekhanov

In this way the elemental movements of the mass gradually merge with the conscious revolutionary movement, and the idea that the Zemskii sobor [the Constituent Assembly] must be summoned becomes increasingly popular: the Russian people becomes more and more convinced that it must snatch its fate from the hands of tsarist officials. This is one side of things. On the other side we must ensure that the people, once it has risen against the existing order, should win political rights for itself and not political privileges for its exploiters... Direct universal suffrage is the first and most...

Eighth in a series of articles around the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) O ur Differences is the generative text of the working-class political movement that conquered state power in Russia in October 1917. In it Georgi Plekhanov expounded his analysis of Russian society in the form of a devastating and systematic examination of populism in all its sub-sections, Lavrovist, Bakuninist and Blanquist alike. It is one of the great books of revolutionary Marxism. It was published in 1885, from exile in Switzerland, as Plekhanov’s summing up of the new working-class...

In the competition between Narodnaya Volya and Black Redistribution after 1879, immediate success was all, and all-important. In terms of practical activity, Black Redistribution could do nothing. Its members either fell into inactivity, or defected to Narodnaya Volya. There was historical justice in that, because, as Plekhanov would later stress, Narodnaya Volya had moved ahead of them in the necessary turn to politics. The killing of the Tsar in 1881 did not unleash mass revolution, as some of them had hoped, or even reform. It unleashed a decade of mass reaction and repression. Six...

Fifth in a series of articles around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 In December 1877 an explosion occurred at one of the St Petersburg armaments factories. The workers there believed it to be due to the negligence of the management. Six workers were killed. An organised group of politically conscious workers had existed in the factory for some years. Stepan Khalturin, who would be the main organiser of the Northern Union of Russian Workers and who would be hanged for an attempt to kill the Tsar, had worked there. The armaments workers decided to turn the...

Second in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924. In the first instalment of this series ( Solidarity 697 ) I traced in broad outline the populist revolutionary environment in and from which Russian Marxism emerged. In the mid 19th century a great wave of radical, leftist, rebellion developed among the educated youth of Russia. It was “populist” in the sense of oriented to the working people as a whole, in the first place the mass of peasants and only secondarily the wage-workers. In 1874-6 the populists “went to the people” in the countryside with...

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...

Before the year 2018 reaches its end, the 100th anniversary of the death of Georgi Plekhanov should be noted and remembered. He is sometimes referred to as the “father” of Russian Marxism, and for good reason. Plekhanov was the most important figure in the early Russian Marxist movement, a major theorist and voice in the Second International; and, as a member of the editorial board of Iskra, a collaborator with Lenin in the first years of the twentieth century. Plekhanov and Lenin were to go their separate ways. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917 Plekhanov had moved considerably to...

The term "dialectic", as a description of a mode of reasoning, dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, and in general signifies a method of argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides, usually as a path to successive approximations to truth. Thus Plato presented his philosophical argument as a back-and-forth dialogue or debate, generally between Socrates and some other person. In what is now called "classic German philosophy", the pioneer, Immanuel Kant (fl.1781-1792) built some of his key philosophical ideas around a discussion of "antinomies"...