First published in: Iskra, Issue 72, 25 August 1904, signed L. Martov
Reprinted in: Za dva goda (St Petersburg, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 28–38
Translation and notes by: Edmund Griffiths (2026).
Markup by: Graham Seaman for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Licence: Creative Commons CC-BY. To satisfy this license you need only acknowledge MIA as the source of the material and Edmund Griffiths as the translator, and provide a link to this page.
File uploaded: September 2026.
For the first time, the congress in Amsterdam[1] represented socialists from every continent. At the same congress, however, an attempt was made to set the socialists of one region against those of another, to divide the members of the socialist family into ‘active’ and ‘passive citizens’, as Comrades R. Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Rakovski, Iglesias, and Katayama put it in their protest.
If it had not been for the mention of Spain, which the Belgian delegate Cde Anseele placed alongside Russia, Poland, the Balkan countries, and Japan, his speech would have presented us with the traditional opposition between the West and the East—but applied to the socialist proletariat.
This is what Anseele said, speaking against the so-called ‘Dresden’ resolution on tactics[2] that the congress went on to pass:
‘For socialists in Russia, Bulgaria, Spain, Poland, and Japan, refusing governmental responsibility is easy. Long years are sure to pass before they are offered it. If I were representing one of those countries, I would abstain on this question, instead of condemning a socialist tactic that I was too weak to put into practice in my own country.’[3]
You can’t put it more clearly than that... as long as you remain a socialist. As an open bourgeois, you can allow yourself to take the idea contained in these words all the way. And some bourgeois newspapers are doing just that, as they discuss with gritted teeth the defeat of ‘Jaurèsism’[4] at the international congress. Not only the democratic papers, but even the Bülow[5] government sheet (the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung) have tried to present the socialist ‘intransigence’ of the so-called ‘orthodox’ as a direct consequence of the fact that socialists in some countries cannot even dream of the little slice of the public pie that the ruling bourgeoisie in other states is prepared to offer the Millerands.[6] It’s just sour grapes... That is the whole explanation for the intransigent orthodoxy of the ‘Easterners’. No wonder that the bourgeois press, like Anseele, complains about all these Poles, Japanese, and Russians who have the temerity to take part in working out the tactical principles that will be binding on all social democrats.[7] And here, as in many other cases, the witty explanation of the bourgeois-reactionary and bourgeois-liberal press will undoubtedly coincide with the explanations offered by Messrs the anarchists.
As you see, the ‘new method’ proclaims itself to be an exact expression of the interests of the proletariat in the civilized and politically free countries, while its antagonist—‘orthodox’ Marxism—is presented as a legitimate offspring of the political barbarism and correspondingly weak and immature working class of countries remote from democracy. And the ‘new method’ socialist protests, in the name of a higher political culture, against being suppressed by the socialist barbarians of Japan, Russia, Poland, and Germany.
Yes, Germany! Anseele preferred not to mention it. But the leader of the congress’s ‘right’ wing, Jaurès, built his whole speech defending the ‘new method’ on counterposing the socialism of the free democracies to the socialism of the German workers’ party, whose tactics he thinks are weighed down by the German Empire’s backwardness. ‘Where,’ Jaurès asked the German comrades, ‘where has your resolution met the greatest resistance? In France, or at least in part of France; in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and I believe in England too; in other words, the freer and more democratic a country is, the more actively and effectively the proletariat there participates in parliament, the more it is hurt by your resolution, which will be a fetter on the development of international socialism.’[8]
The barbarous East, which knows nothing of democratic institutions, threatens to employ its votes at international congresses to suppress the advanced workers’ parties’ efforts to make use of the political influence they have acquired in their own countries. And at the head of this barbarous East stands German social democracy, powerless with its three million votes to play the role of a political factor in the life of the country, ‘masking its powerlessness in action by taking refuge behind intransigence in theoretical formulas’ (from Jaurès’s speech at the final session of the congress).[9]
The Jaurèsists—like their friends, the bourgeois radicals—are profoundly indignant at being thus suppressed by the Japono-Slavo-Germanic East. Parties that drag out a fictitious existence as long as they are tolerated by some monarch—these parties, exclaims Gérault-Richard, want to stop the French party reaping the fruits of its victories! And each speaker protesting against this suppression felt obligated to express particular indignation at the role of the Japanese delegation’s two votes in passing the Dresden resolution. Not for nothing, when the present war broke out, did the inimitable Gérault-Richard follow the Tsarist government and its French reptiles in speaking of ‘Japanese perfidy’! We may yet hear, from the ranks of Combes’s[10] yellow socialism, outcries against a new ‘yellow peril’... Attempts to divide world socialism into two camps, separated by some geographic or ethnographic criterion, are something new for the ‘new international’. But such attempts have been made before, in the days of the old international—and French socialism, with its specific characteristics, was set against German socialism then too. But—irony of fate!—we Slavs then appeared as allies of the Romance and Flemish socialists, the ‘extreme West’ of the European continent. The Romano-Slavonic ‘collectivism’ and anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin positioned itself against the ‘German-Jewish’ ‘state’ or parliamentary socialism of Lassalle and Marx. Then as now, this latter was said to derive from the enslavement of the individual by the German state system and the resulting non-revolutionary character of the German proletariat. The Slavs, with their characteristic sovereign contempt for state forms, were then seen as natural allies of the Romance nations. And when the ‘Marxist’ tactic of the world proletarian movement gradually took shape at the congresses of the international, the attacks that the defeated ‘Romano-Slavonic’ representatives launched against ‘German domination’ were sometimes just as chauvinistic as those put forward by today’s representatives of the ‘free West’. Gustave Rouanet, now an ally of Jaurès, once (in the early 1880s) an ally of Paul Brousse during the latter’s leap—in accordance with the natural laws of historical motion—from ‘bloody’ anarchism to reformist ‘possibilism’, could say something about that from personal experience. Back then, when the epigones of ‘Romance’ socialism were fighting against socialism of the ‘German’ variety, Guesde, Lafargue, and other Marxists were openly dubbed agents of pan-Germanism.
It is far from coincidental that this specifically ‘Romance’ variant of socialism has turned from being anarchistic and revolutionary to being opportunist and ministerial. Its petty-bourgeois class nature has remained unchanged throughout this evolution, and behind the shift in political mood—expressed in the transition from ‘revolutionism’ to its polar opposite—we can discern the same unchanged point of psychology: the desire to hoodwink the historical process, to stand outside it and above it, to sidestep its complex contradictions by way of a more or less adventurist tactic. It is considerably more instructive to note that the very Slavs who thirty years ago were intellectually akin to this Romance socialism have now broken with this socialism’s epigones, who count them among the adepts of German ‘doctrinairism’. And this makes perfect sense. The latest evolution of the European bourgeoise has led the opportunists, capitulating to the natural historical process, to practise the ‘new method’: the method of reconciliation with bourgeois society. This same evolution, in the countries newly drawn into capitalism’s sphere of operations, has been reflected in the extremely narrow and meagre political results from the progressive process transforming their economic and social relations. What, indeed, has this latest evolution of the European bourgeoisie been? It has been a gradual loss of every feature of a progressive social class, a gradual retreat from every democratic position it held when it was a fighting class, a class that in the process of its own emancipation had won some gains of culture and freedom for all humanity. But when this familiar movement reached its apogee, when there was no way to go further right without sacrificing the basic, vital interests of the whole bourgeois system, then the ruling classes began to display the reverse process: an effort on the part of particular strata to introduce some necessary correctives to the essentially inevitable liquidation of bourgeois progress, to take back some of what had been sacrificed—in panic flight from the ‘red spectres’—to the dark forces of feudal, monarchical, or clerical reaction. This new turn by the ‘advanced’ section of the bourgeoisie is the root fact of political history in recent years, the foundation for the ‘new method’ of socialist tactics in France, Italy, and Belgium. There is talk of a ‘revival of bourgeois democracy’. But if this ‘revival’ is carefully examined, it is not difficult to see that this local historical process has a much narrower and more limited objective goal than did the democrats of the 1840s and 1860s. Points that were common to all bourgeois republicanism, when they appeared in Gambetta’s Belleville manifesto, are now acceptable—and not even in full—only to the ‘republican democracy’ of the extreme left, which needs to heroically rename itself the ‘Radical-Socialist Party’ first. Something that in the late 1860s could be accommodated by the arch-moderate Jules Simon—a popular militia—is now a stumbling-block for almost all the bourgeois radicals. For the local process of a leftward shift among a small stratum of the ruling bourgeoisie is taking place on the basis of, in close association with, as a reflected result of the basic, inevitable, irreversible process of bourgeois society as a whole shifting to the right. This process is not due to the ill will of the Crispis and Mélines;[11] it is the reverse side of the development of the proletariat’s class movement, and, just like the latter, it cannot be turned aside by any incantations or clever tactics. On the basis of this general process of the reactionization of the bourgeoisie, any local indications of a ‘revival of democracy’ on that class’s extreme left flank can be of only transient significance. We in the East of Europe see this all too clearly at every step. The ‘revival’ of bourgeois democracy does nothing to weaken the reactionary pressure that the fully established bourgeois societies exert on ‘new’ countries, countries that have become part of the capitalist world only recently. The bourgeoisie of the advanced countries no longer brings any progressive ideas into world circulation; on the contrary, it is the active accomplice of every kind of reaction in the ‘East’, and its money, its reactionary ideological influence, and its no less reactionary foreign policy prop up our Asiatic regime, obsolete and condemned by history. This fact provides the main ‘excuse’ for our active involvement in questions of the international proletarian movement’s tactics. If the whole European bourgeoisie is a bulwark of our pre-bourgeois reaction, then we must have the right to engage the proletariat of the advanced countries—the true heir to the European culture that the bourgeoisie has betrayed—as an ally in the struggle against that reaction. But we cannot do this, we cannot link our ‘national’ revolution with the revolution of the world proletariat, if the latter dulls the edge of its revolutionary antagonism towards bourgeois society, if for a few crumbs of ‘social reform’ or in the name of the deceptive spectre of a ‘revival of democracy’ it takes on a share of responsibility for directing the state policy of the ruling bourgeoisie—a policy that, overall, is and cannot but be a policy of militarism and imperialism, a policy of intellectual and social reaction, a policy of colonial thievery and police corruption, a policy that is guilty of prolonging the age-old servitude of Poland, of the Jews, of the Balkan countries, of the Armenians, and which again and again produces cynical new forms of racial and national oppression. If the proletariat, in one country or another, takes responsibility for the direction of this policy, it will do irreparable damage to our propaganda—that of socialists in countries where the democratic regime enabling this ‘class collaboration’ is yet to be won. If the socialists of the democratic countries switch from being our class allies to being allies and accomplices of one of our class enemies (the French bourgeoisie, for example, is currently, in its capacity as an ally of the Russian government, a direct enemy of proletarians in Russia), they will undermine the foundations of our revolutionary socialist work, discredit the idea of socialism in the eyes of our proletarians, and thereby facilitate the growth of our ‘national’ revolutionary movement—which, if only in view of its national limitation, cannot escape a petty-bourgeois ideological colouring. Under the conditions of a backward political system, we socialists in the ‘East’ can only do our job of organizing the working class—and no struggle for freedom is now possible without it—if we have the whole ideological force of revolutionary socialism on our side, nullifying any attempted attack on the basic principle of the proletarian movement: its internationalism. And if our Western European comrades, absorbed with the struggle for local democratic reforms, have not yet forgotten the progressive worldwide effect that our success in joining the East to the world of bourgeois freedom would have, if they still see the importance of the dilemma ‘is Europe to be republican or Cossack?’,[12] then they must admit our right to ‘take to heart’ the destiny of the proletarian movement in those advanced countries where the ‘revival of bourgeois democracy’, whether promised or already begun, has not touched and is not intending to touch the basic foundations of the advanced bourgeoisie’s contemporary policy: a policy of preserving and strengthening in the East all the institutions and relations that were mitigated in rhe West by the revolution of the eighteenth century.
The ‘revival of democracy’ in France has made neither that country nor the countries under its influence any more hospitable towards the revolutionaries of Russia and Poland; it has not restricted the Russian police’s ‘freedom of action’ in Paris; it has not made the influential French press less cynical in ignoring Russian despotism’s crimes against the Armenians, Finns, Poles, Jews, and the Russian proletariat. The fact that Jaurès is leader of a ministerial party, and that the Belgian liberals have reconciled themselves to the prospect of a Belgian socialist taking up a similar position in the near future, makes no difference to the flood of gold that streams through the exchanges of Paris and Brussels into the bottomless tub of the Tsar’s treasury.
No, it is no surprise if the socialist parties of those countries whose proletariat still needs to gain its elementary political freedom, under conditions created by the worldwide reaction within bourgeois society, if these parties group themselves around so-called ‘German’ socialism—the socialism of intransigent class struggle and of revolutionary unity among the proletarians of the whole world. This fact is of colossal historic significance, and, if the common cause of the international proletariat has not become an empty sound, then those socialists in the ‘free countries’ who practise the ‘new method’ will need to reckon with it, just as they do with the important corrective in the direction of a ‘revival of democracy’. They will need to reckon with it to resolve their own dilemma: do they stand with the ‘reviving’ bourgeoisie against the world proletariat, or with the world proletariat against the unanimous, and unanimously anti-revolutionary, bourgeoisie?
It is not blind doctrinairism, therefore, but the real interest of the real movement that obliges us to distress Cde Anseele by speaking in the spirit of ‘German’ orthodoxy. Five years ago, when this orthodoxy’s contemporary struggle with revisionism was just beginning, we Russian social democrats understood especially clearly the words of those whose Amsterdam defeat of Jaurèsism comes as a deserved culmination of five years’ hard struggle. At the Paris ‘unity’ congress,[13] Jules Guesde said: ‘The ministerial policy will be even more disastrous from the international point of view. There is hardly any question today of continental wars... One might almost say the era of major European wars is already over; but there are other wars, and they break out every day and will continue to do so. They are the wars for markets, wars to make the Far East and Central Africa buy our goods. Wars of this kind, far from disappearing, threaten to become permanent; and this will be capitalist war par excellence, a war for profit waged by the capitalists of all countries, competing for the world market at the price of our gold and our blood. Now can you imagine a socialist, in the government of each European state, taking part in this kind of murder for robbery? Can you imagine an English Millerand, an Italian Millerand, a German Millerand, alongside the French one, and all of them involving the proletarians of each country in this capitalistic piracy?... On the day when Millerandism becomes a general phenomenon, we will have to bid farewell to any internationalism and become nationalists.’[14]
In the time since those oracular words were spoken, Millerandism in its pure form has not spread beyond France; but ‘Jaurèsism’—the ‘anonymous’ participation, as Adler puts it, of the entire socialist party in the policy of a bourgeois ministry, participation that places the whole party in a position of solidarity with that ministry just as definitely as it was placed by one of its members entering the cabinet—has spread all the more virulently. And the moment has come when the picture prophetically sketched by Guesde may any day become a reality. The Russo-Japanese war could easily, unstoppably, draw in one or several of the ‘civilized’ powers. The peace of Europe is now hanging by a hair of diplomatic wisdom.
What would become of socialism, if in a country that was fatally drawn into a world conflict the workers’ party should prove to be a political captive of the ruling class, if its opportunist leaders, due to this captivity they were in, had to provide passive or active support to their government’s military campaign? This question should have occurred to the French opportunists when they voted for the resolution of protest against the coming war. And if they had thought carefully about the meaning of that protest, they would not have been surprised that the representatives of Russian and Japanese socialism—directly implicated in that protest—all went on to vote for the ‘Dresden’ resolution, that logical conclusion from the class solidarity of the world proletariat.
The opportunists try to explain the fact we are so ‘revolutionary’ in terms of the specific national conditions under which our parties exist—conditions that they counterpose to the different national situation that determines the policy of the French, Italian, Belgian, etc. workers’ parties. All we can say on that score is: whatever the external cause that imposes this ideology on us and not another, it is this ideology, in its premises and its conclusions, that makes our politics international. The proof is the position of the Russian and Japanese socialists in the present war. And if it pleases you to call this politics ‘German’, we have nothing against that: the distinctive conditions under which German socialism arose, on the border between the age of capitalist revolutions in the West and the beginning of that age in the East, allowed it to express most clearly, within its national shell, the proletarian movement’s world content. But we are also aware that, unlike these ‘national conditions’, the conditions defining the character of your ideology make your socialism irretrievably national. This conclusion from Jaurès’s speech at the Amsterdam congress was delicately noted by the bourgeois Le Temps, which at once went on to laugh at the fact that this national socialism is to have as its literary organ a paper called ‘Humanity’ (L’Humanité).
National or international socialism: that is the issue between the right and left wings of the proletarian army. And we welcome the passage of the Dresden resolution as a sign that the international tasks of the proletariat’s class struggle have won out over the chance, temporary advantages of ‘national’ movements in particular sections. We respond in this way, first and foremost, as representatives of the class interest of the Russian proletariat, which, like the proletarians of other countries, has an interest in the development of the worldwide class struggle for social revolution, but also as representatives of the party whose task is to struggle against the bitterest enemy of world socialism: Russian autocracy.
1. The Amsterdam congress of the Second International, 14–20 August 1904 — Translator’s note.
2. The Dresden resolution ruled out socialist participation in bourgeois governments. — Translator’s note.
3. Translation verified against the German text in Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongreß zu Amsterdam 1904 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1904), p. 48. I am indebted to Graham Seaman for this reference. — Translator’s note.
4. The Dresden resolution was opposed by Jean Jaurès, whose French Socialist Party (not to be confused with the Socialist Party of France, led by Jules Guesde) was part of a coalition government entitled the Bloc of the Left. — Translator’s note.
5. Bernhard von Bülow, chancellor of Germany at the time. — Translator’s note.
6. Alexandre Millerand, whose decision in 1899 to accept the post of Minister of Commerce in a French coalition cabinet had sparked the controversy over socialist participation in government. — Translator’s note.
7. A reservation should be made: the defeat of Jaurèsism is only mourned by the part of the bourgeoisie that makes, or is prepared to make, power-sharing deals with the ‘governmental socialists’. By contrast, the factions that have lost out in that transaction (such as the French nationalists and the group of ex-radicals—now, incidentally, including Millerand) have expressed the utmost glee at Jaurès’s defeat. They cannot find the words to extol the moral beauty of the intransigent revolutionaries Guesde and Bebel. The organ of this group of radicals, Le Rappel, even writes in this context that ‘revisionism has already done more than a little harm’—harm, that is, to the groups of political hacks whom the revisionist leaders have squeezed out of the field of influence on state affairs.
8. Translation verified against the French text: Jean Jaurès, ‘Deuxième discours au congrès socialiste d’Amsterdam’. — Translator’s note.
9. Translation verified against the French text (see previous footnote). — Translator’s note.
10. Émile Combes, French prime minister at the time. — Translator’s note.
11. Francesco Crispi and Jules Méline, prime ministers of Italy and France respectively in the 1890s. — Translator’s note.
12. An allusion to the seventh chapter of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, where the ‘dilemma’ is attributed to Napoleon. — Translator’s note.
13. The General Congress of French Socialist Organizations, 3–8 December 1899. — Translator’s note.
14. Translation verified against the French original: Jules Guesde, ‘Participation ministérielle. Discours au Congrès général des organisations socialistes françaises’. The excerpt translated by Mitch Abidor ends before the section Martov quotes. — Translator’s note.
Last updated on 12 September 2026