Rise of Menshevism (1895–1905)
The mid-1890s marked a new phase for Russian Marxism, as the movement began to gain adherents inside Russia, particularly in St. Petersburg. In 1895, Axelrod helped arrange for the young Vladimir Lenin's visit to Switzerland, where they agreed that Axelrod would edit a new journal for workers, Rabotnik (The Worker), to be supplied with material by the St. Petersburg Marxists. This expansion, however, also brought turbulence. A new tendency, known as "Economism", emerged, which argued that socialists should focus on the workers' immediate economic struggles rather than on political agitation against the autocracy. Axelrod became the leading opponent of Economism from abroad, seeing it as a dangerous deviation that would subordinate the socialist movement to a narrow trade-unionist perspective. In two major works, The Historical Situation and the Reciprocal Relations between Liberals and Social Democrats in Russia and On the Question of the Contemporary Tasks and Tactics of Russian Social Democrats (both 1898), he formulated the orthodox Marxist response. He argued that in autocratic Russia, the proletariat's primary task was to lead an "all-national" struggle for a constitutional regime, in alliance with progressive liberal elements, as a necessary precondition for any future socialist transformation.
The struggle against Economism led to the founding of the newspaper Iskra (The Spark) in 1900, with an editorial board that included Axelrod, Plekhanov, Zasulich, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov, and Alexander Potresov. The unity of the Iskra editors was short-lived. At the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, a dispute over the definition of a party member in the party statutes led to a split between two factions, which became known as the Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority). Although he and Martov did not initially appreciate the full implications of Lenin's organizational ideas, they sensed during the congress that Lenin intended to chart a "radically new course" for the party and harbored ambitions for personal predominance. Lenin proposed a narrow definition, restricting membership to those who personally participated in a party organization. Martov, supported by Axelrod, advocated a broader definition that would include anyone who provided regular personal assistance under the direction of a party organization.
Axelrod saw the dispute as a fundamental conflict over the nature of the party. He and Martov argued that the RSDLP was intended to be a class party of the proletariat, and that while a conspiratorial network was necessary under conditions of political terror, it should be "surrounded by a wider party" that included the broad mass of conscious workers. He feared that Lenin's model was a "conspiratorial organization" of professional revolutionaries that would lump together the concepts of "party" and "organization," effectively excluding the broad mass of workers. Though Martov's formulation initially won a majority, Lenin's faction secured control of the party's central organs after the withdrawal of several delegates, leading to the formal split.
In the aftermath of the congress, Axelrod became the chief ideologist of the Menshevik faction. In a seminal two-part article in Iskra in late 1903 and early 1904, he articulated the core principles of Menshevism. He diagnosed the party's crisis as a contradiction between its socialist aims and its organizational structure, which had transformed activists into "screws and wheels" of a centralized apparatus run by the intelligentsia. He called for a "revolutionizing" of party practices to encourage the political self-activity (samodeiatel'nost) of the proletariat, arguing that only through direct involvement in political life could the working class develop the consciousness needed for its historic mission. This article, which appeared as a "revelation" to many Marxists, clarified the schism not as a simple power struggle but as a conflict between two diametrically opposed conceptions of a Marxist party: a hierarchical party controlled from above versus a mass party controlled from below. This laid the foundation for the Menshevik program and solidified Axelrod's status as an independent leader.
