1905: when the working class in Russia demonstrated its revolutionary nature

For the working class, a class whose consciousness is a vitally important weapon[1], learning from its own experience is of immense importance. Every time it reacts on its own terrain, on a broad scale, united and in solidarity and above all with a revolutionary impetus, it gives rise to important lessons for the future, lessons the class must understand and make use of in future struggles.

This was the case with the Paris Commune of 1871, after which Marx and Engels realised that the working class, in seizing power, could not use the bourgeois state to transform society towards communism. It had to destroy this state and construct a new way of organising society, with elected officials, instantly revocable.

This was also the case with the revolution in Russia in 1905, this year being its 120th anniversary. In this case, there was an even more valuable lesson learnt with the emergence of the mass strike and the creation of its organs of power: the workers' councils (soviets in Russian), which Lenin described as the “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

It is to this experience that we want to devote this article, to see how it can help us to understand the current dynamic of class struggle, which the ICC has described as a historic ‘rupture’ with that of the past decades.

January 1905

Before looking at the dynamics of the Russian Revolution of 1905, we need to briefly recall the international and historical context in which this revolution gained momentum. The last decades of the 19th century were characterised by the economic development that was clearly evident throughout Europe. It was against this backdrop that Tsarist Russia, a country whose economy was still marked by considerable backwardness, became the ideal location for the export of large amounts of capital to set up medium and large-scale industries. In the space of a few decades, the economy underwent a profound transformation. In Russia at the end of the 19th century, the growth of capitalism led to a high concentration of Russian workers located in a few large industrial regions. This greatly fostered the search for solidarity and the spreading of its struggle. It was these structural features of the economy which explained the revolutionary vitality of a young proletariat immersed in a deeply backward country where the peasant economy was predominant.

In January 1905, two workers at the Putilov factories in Petersburg were sacked. A wave of solidarity strikes was launched, and a petition for political freedoms, the right to education, the 8-hour day, opposition to taxes, etc., was drawn up to be taken to the Tsar in a mass demonstration. "Thousands of workers - not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects - led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the Tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people."[2]

It all came to a head when, on arriving at the Winter Palace with their request to the Tsar, the workers were attacked by the troops who "attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the Tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable.”[3]

It was this profound indignation of the workers of Petersburg towards the man they called ‘Little Father’, who had responded to their plea with deadly weapons, that gave rise the revolutionary struggles of January. A very rapid change of mood of the proletariat occurred in this period: "A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation […] The movement involved something like a million men and women. For almost two months, without any plan, in many cases without advancing any claims, stopping and starting, obedient only to the instinct of solidarity, the strike ruled the land.”[4]

This act of going on strike without any specific demands and in broad solidarity, was both an expression of and an active factor in the maturation, within the Russan proletariat of the time, of the consciousness of being a class and of the need as such to confront its class enemy. The January general strike was followed by a period of continuing struggles for economic demands that came and went across the country. This period was less spectacular but just as important. Bloody clashes broke out in Warsaw, barricades were erected in Lodz and the sailors of the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea mutinied. This whole period paved the way for the second major period of the revolution.

October 1905

"This second great action of the proletariat already bears a character essentially different from that of the first one in January. The element of political consciousness already plays a much bigger role. Here also, to be sure, the immediate occasion for the outbreak of the mass strike was a subordinate and apparently accidental thing: the conflict of the railwaymen with the management over the pension fund. But the general rising of the industrial proletariat which followed upon it was conducted in accordance with clear political ideas. The prologue of the January strike was a procession to the Tsar to ask for political freedom: the watchword of the October strike ran away with the constitutional comedy of Tsarism! And thanks to the immediate success of the general strike, to the Tsar’s manifesto of October 30, the movement does not flow back on itself, as in January but rushes over outwardly in the eager activity of newly acquired political freedom. Demonstrations, meetings, a young press, public discussions".[5]

A qualitative change occurred in October with the formation of the Petersburg Soviet, which was to become a landmark in the history of the international workers' movement. Following the extension of the typographers' strike to the railways and telegraphs, the workers took the decision in a general assembly to form the Soviet which was to become the nerve centre of the revolution: “The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people”.[6]

December 1905

"The fermentation after the brief constitutional period and the gruesome awakening finally leads in December to the outbreak of the third general mass strike throughout the empire. This time its course and its outcome are altogether different from those in the two earlier cases. Political action does not change into economic action as in January, but it no longer achieves a rapid victory as in October. The attempts of the Tsarist camarilla with real political freedom are no longer made, and revolutionary action therewith, for the first time, and along its whole length, knocked against the strong wall of the physical violence of absolutism".[7]

The capitalist bourgeoisie, frightened by the movement of the proletariat, lined up behind the Tsar. The government did not apply the liberal laws it had just granted. The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet were arrested but the struggle continued in Moscow: "The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organised and armed workers - there were not more than eight thousand - fought against the Tsar’s government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.”[8]

So what was the dynamic at work in 1905? That of the mass strike, of that “ocean of phenomena” (Luxemburg) made up of strikes, demonstrations, solidarity, discussions, economic and political demands, in a word all the expressions that characterise the struggle of the working class, manifesting themselves at the same time as the product of a maturation of the consciousness of the workers, a maturation that took place during the events themselves, but also, and above all, the fruit of a subterranean maturation, of an accumulation of experiences and of a deep reflection that at a certain moment became very pertinent. In fact, the events of 1905 did not come out of nowhere, but were the product of the accumulation of a succession of experiences and reflections that had shaken Russia since the end of the nineteenth century. As Rosa Luxemburg stated, "The January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike, which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense. The events of December in Baku were on their part only the last and powerful ramification of those tremendous mass strikes which, like a periodic earthquake, shook the whole of south Russia, and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902. This first mass strike movement in the continuous series of present revolutionary eruptions is finally separated by five or six years from the great general strike of the textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897.

The “rupture”, a product of subterranean maturation

This concept of the subterranean maturation of consciousness is found difficult to accept by a large proportion of groups in the proletarian political milieu, but also by a certain number of our contacts or sympathisers. Yet it has its roots in the writings of Marx[9], while Luxemburg referred to the “old mole”, and Lenin did so too,[10] While Trotsky, does not use quite the same vocabulary as the ICC to describe the phenomenon of ‘subterranean maturation’ of consciousness within the proletariat, he makes this very clear in his History of the Russian Revolution and the following passage illustrates this perfectly: "The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state-of-mind of the conflicting classes. […]Changes in the collective consciousness have naturally a semi-concealed character. Only when they have attained a certain degree of intensity do the new moods and ideas break to the surface in the form of mass activities".

But, above all, the essence of the processes of subterranean maturation is confirmed in all the important moments in the struggle of the working class. We saw it in 1905, we saw it again in 1917 in Russia, where the October revolution was preceded by strikes against the war, and we have also seen it at work at historic moments closer to home. It was evident in 1980 in Poland with the strike movement that saw “the re-emergance” of the mass strike on the historical stage. The Polish workers had already taken part in important periods of struggle in 1970 and 1976, struggles that had suffered a brutal and bloody repression at the hands of the Stalinist regime. So, armed with these experiences, which contributed to a real subterranean maturation of consciousness, the workers were able in 1980 to launch themselves into a powerful and immediate struggle, whose organisational links and co-ordinating groups across the country provided the basis for the mass strike. Faced with this situation, the authorities were paralysed and were forced to negotiate and grant concessions before then responding with repression when the struggle had subsided.[11]

It is in the tradition of all these experiences of the workers' movement that we interpreted the strikes in Britain in 2022 as the result of a new maturation of class consciousness, not as a random flash in the pan, but as the product of a deep reflection that we see continuing with the return of working class struggle after decades of apathy and lethargy. We have referred to these movements as a ‘rupture’ to emphasise this as a phenomenon of historical and international significance. The major struggles that followed this first manifestation and resurgence of workers' combativity, in France, the United States, elsewhere in the world and most recently in Belgium, confirm that the strikes in Britain were not a local and passing phenomenon but the result of this subterranean maturation that was finally coming to the surface. The various characteristics of the movements that have taken place over the last three years provide confirmation of our analysis:

- The widespread slogan “enough is enough” expressed the long-held feeling that all the promises made in the aftermath of the 2008 ‘financial crisis’ had turned out to be lies and that it was high time workers started making their own demands;

- The slogans ‘we're all in the same boat’ and ‘the working class is back’ expressed a tendency in the working class (still embryonic but real) to rediscover the feeling of being a class with its own collective existence and distinct interests, despite decades of atomisation inflicted by the generalised decomposition of capitalist society and aided by the deliberate  destruction of many traditional industrial sites that employed an experienced working class (mines, steel, etc.).

- In the French movement against the raising of pensionable age to 64, the powerful slogan “you say 64, we give you 68”expressed the reigniting of a collective memory, the memory of the importance of the mass strikes of 1968.

- The international development of minorities tending towards internationalist and communist positions where the majority of these elements and their efforts to unite are less the product of the immediate class struggle and more about raising questions about war, which is proof that the current class movements express something more than just immediate concerns about falling living standards. They express, often in a still confused way, concern about the future offered to us by this system of production, capitalism.

- Finally, further evidence that there is a process of maturation is reflected in the efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose its leadership and sew confusion within the working class through the unions and leftist organisations.  By conveying radical messages to the working class, it aims to subvert its thinking and strengthen its own control.

We are only at the very beginning of this renewal of combativity, of the resumption of the struggles of the class on its own terrain, of an accumulation of new experiences which could lead the class into radicalising its struggles to the point of giving them a more political character, that would call into question the system as such and not just the extent of its attacks and their immediate effects.

This will be a long, difficult process, full of obstacles, because we are no longer in the same situation as 1905 in Russia, when in the space of a year the class could go from a simple petition to the Tsar to an openly insurrectionary phase. The present situation is that of the decomposition of capitalism, the final historical phase of capitalism which is demonstrated not only in the putrefaction of the whole political life of the bourgeoisie, but which also weighs on the working class through phenomena whose effects are ideologically exploited by the ruling class to severely and insidiously undermine workers' consciousness:

“- solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

- the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

- consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch.”[12]

So, we must not be impatient, expecting a confirmation of this process at every moment. Revolutionaries have to intervene inside the class with clarity by taking a long-term view of the struggle and above all in helping minorities to understand what are the stakes of the situation and the alternative and inevitable consequences: either the bourgeoisie's threat to humanity's survival or the possibility for the working class to impose its perspective, that of a society without classes, without exploitation, without war, without the destruction of the planet, in short, a truly communist society.

Helis, 22 June 2025

 

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[1] The working class is the first class in history capable of developing a revolutionary consciousness of its own being, unlike the revolutionary bourgeoisie whose consciousness was limited by its position as the new exploiting class.

[2] Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 revolution”, January 1917

[3] Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution”

[4] Trotsky, 1905

[5] R. Luxemburg, Mass strike, the political party and the trade unions

[6] Trotsky, 1905

[7] R. Luxemburg, Mass strike, the political party and the trade unions

[8] Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution”

[9] For Marx, revolution is an old mole “who knows so well how to work underground and suddenly to appear”

[10] See his polemic against economism in What is to be done?

[11]  History reminds us of the spectacle of this negotiation between the strikers and ministers, where the talks between the workers' delegates and the ministers were transmitted live over loudspeakers to the workers massed in front of the government building. For a better understanding of this movement, see Mass strikes in Poland 1980: The proletariat opens a new breach, International Review 23 and Notes on the Mass Strike International Review 27

​[12] Theses on Decomposition, International Review 107