Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/351

Rh Socialism is not identical with Marxism, but Marxism is an extremely important and significant socialistic system.

HE Russian social democratic refugees formulated their first program in the year 1884.

Russia, they said (and we read here the Marxist diagnosis), is suffering from the development of capitalism, but likewise from the incompleteness of that development. The outcome of these conditions is the lack of a middle class, one competent to take the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. Consequently the socialist intelligentsia must take over this task, must assume leadership in the fight for liberation; their work is to secure free political institutions for Russia and to found a democratic constitution. In matters of detail the constitutionalist demands of the social democrats were essentially identical with those of the Narodnaja Volja.

The socialist intelligentsia is to lead; but to lead whom? There is no middle class, the peasant is conservative, so there remain only the operatives, the proletariat. This last must be organised by the socialist intelligentsia, prepared for the struggle against absolutism, but also for the struggle against the bourgeois parties of a coming day.

In addition to the preparatory work, the program recognises that there is need for a terrorist campaign against the absolutist government. The relationship to the terrorist party of the Narodnaja Volja is expressly based upon the divergent conception of the social democrats regarding "the so-called seizure of power by the revolutionary party and regarding the aims of the immediate activity of the socialists within the working class."

The mere name of the new group, which was known as the Group for the Liberation of Labour, recalls the phraseology of the Gotha Program which served in 1875 as the basis of a fusion between the Marxist "Eisenachers" and the Lassallists. In certain other respects, too, the Russian program is reminiscent of the German, but the most important resemblance of