V. I.

Lenin

Wehave come into possession of a new confidential document—the
memorandum of the Ministry of Finance “On a revision of articles in
the law which make strikes and breaches of contract of hire punishable,
and on the desirability of instituting workers’ organisations for purposes
of mutual aid.” In view of the length of this memorandum and the need to
acquaint the broadest possible sections of the working class with it, we
are publishing it as a separate pamphlet. [1]
At present, however, we shall give a brief review of the contents of this
interesting document and point out its importance.

Thememorandum begins with a short survey of the his tory of our factory
legislation, mentioning the Laws of June 3, 1886 and June 2, 1897, [2]
and then proceeds to the question of the abolition of criminal liability
for leaving employment and for striking. The Ministry of Finance is of the
opinion that the threat of arrest or imprisonment for a worker’s leaving
work without permission or for a number of workers downing tools by
agreement among them selves, fails in its purpose. Experience has shown
that this does not ensure the maintenance of public order; this threat
merely embitters the workers, convincing them of the injustice of the
law. The enforcement of these laws is very difficult “in view of the
extreme burdensomeness of instituting hundreds and sometimes thousands of
proceedings” if every worker who leaves his job is to be tried, and
also in view of the fact that it is unprofitable for the factory owner to
lose workers if the latter are imprisoned for going on strike. Making
strikes a criminal offence leads to inordinately zealous interference by the police, which does more harm than good,
bringing the employers more difficulties and trouble than relief. The
memorandum proposes the complete abolition of the individual worker’s
liability for leaving a factory of his own accord, or for participating in
peace able strikes (unattended by violence or breaches of public law and
order, etc.). Following the example of legislation abroad, penalties
should be imposed only for “violence, threats, or defamation [!] practised by any employer or worker against the
person or property of a third person with the object of compelling the
latter, despite his free and lawful intentions, to work or to abstain from
working” on certain terms. In other words, instead of criminal
liability for participation in strikes the proposal is to make it a crime
to interfere with “persons desiring to work.”

Asto the mutual aid societies, the Ministry of Finance complains of
arbitrariness on the part of the administrative authorities (which, it
claims, is particularly noticeable in Moscow where the Society of

Mechanics [3] even claimed the right to “mediate” between workers and
management), and demands legislative enactment of proper regulations for
such societies and assistance in their organisation.

Thus,the general spirit of the new memorandum of the Ministry of Finance
is undoubtedly liberal, and its main point is the proposal to abolish
criminal liability for participation in strikes. We shall not analyse the
contents of the entire “Bill” in detail here (it will be more
convenient to do so after the memorandum has been published in full), but
shall merely call the reader’s attention to the nature and significance of
this liberalism. The proposal to give the workers a certain right to
strike and to organise is nothing new, not only in our liberal publicist
writings but even in projects coming from official government
commissions. In the early sixties, the Stackelberg Commission, which
revised factory and artisan regulations, proposed that factory courts
elected from among the workers and the employers be set up and that some
freedom of organisation be granted the workers. In the eighties the
commission charged with drafting a new criminal code proposed the
abolition of criminal liability for participation in strikes. However, the
present draft of the Ministry of

Finance differs substantially from the earlier projects, and this
difference will remain an extremely important sign of the times even if
the proposed new draft is pigeon-holed like all others before it. This
essential difference consists in the fact that the new draft rests on an
incomparably sounder foundation; in it you sense, not only the voice of a
few progressive theorists and ideologists of the bourgeoisie, but the
voice of an entire section of practical industrialists. This is no longer
the liberalism of “humane” government officials and professors
alone; it is the home-bred, native liberalism of the Moscow merchants and
manufacturers. Let me say frankly that this fact fills my heart with a
lofty patriotic pride: the twopenny-halfpenny liberalism of the merchant
means much more than the shilling liberalism of the government
official. And what is most interesting in the memorandum is not the
nauseating talk about freedom of contract and the interests of the state,
but the practical considerations of the manufacturers, which break right
through the traditional juridical arguments.

Thisis intolerable! We’re fed up! Keep out of it!—is what the
Russian manufacturer is saying to the Russian police through the medium of
the author of the ministerial memorandum. Just listen indeed to the
following line of reasoning:

“Tothe police authorities, who find support in the vagueness and
ambiguity of the existing law, every strike comes not as a natural
economic phenomenon, but invariably as a breach of public law and
order. If, however, a calmer attitude existed with regard to stoppages of
work at factories, and strikes were not made synonymous with breaches of
public order, it would be much easier to ascertain the true causes of
such, to separate lawful and justifiable grounds from those that are
unlawful and untenable and to take the necessary steps towards peaceful
agreement between the two parties. Given a more normal state of affairs
such as this, restrictive and repressive measures would be resorted to
only when disorder was patently in evidence.” The police do not go into
the reasons for a strike; they are concerned solely with cutting
It short, to which end they resort to one of two methods: either they
force the workers (by arrests, deportation, and other measures “up
to and including the use of armed force”) to return to work, or they prompt the employers
to make concessions. “It cannot be said that either of these methods
suits” Messrs. the Manufacturers: the former “embitters the
workers,” the latter “confirms the workers in the extremely harmful
belief that a strike is the surest way of getting what they want in every
case.” “The history of strikes during the last decade affords many
illustrations of the harm resulting from the efforts to suppress the
resulting complications rapidly and at any cost. Hurriedly made arrests
have at times so incensed workers who were completely calm until then that
Cossacks .had to be brought into action, and after that of course any
satisfaction even of the legitimate demands of the strikers was out of the
question. On the other hand, cases of prompt satisfaction of the workers’
unlawful demands by means of pressure upon the manufacturers did not fail
to evoke similar strikes in other industrial enterprises where it became
necessary to resort to military force rather than to a system of
concessions, which is sometimes entirely incomprehensible to the workers
and strengthens their conviction that the authorities are unjust and
despotic towards them...." That the police should ever satisfy even
unlawful demands of the workers by means of pressure upon the
manufacturers—that of course is a fancy of the Messrs. the
Capitalists, who want to say that in some cases they themselves, after
some bargaining with the strikers, would concede less than they have to
concede under the pressure of the grim prospect of “breaches of
state law and order." The memorandum has a dig at the Ministry of the
Interior, which in its circular letter of August 12, 1897, “issued
without agreement with the Ministry of Finance” (that is where the
crux of the matter lies!), prescribes both arrest and deportation in every
strike and demands that every case connected with strikes be dealt with as
required by the emergency regulations. “The higher administrative
authorities,” continues the memorandum, setting forth the complaints of
the manufacturers, “go still further [than the law] and flatly
regard all [italics in the original] cases of strikes as matters
of state importance.... Actually, however, every strike (of course if not
accompanied by violence) is a purely economic phenomenon, which is quite
natural and in no way jeopardises public law and order. In these cases law and order should be maintained in
the same way as during popular festivities, celebrations, performances,
and like occasions.”

Thisis the language of genuine Manchester Liberals, who proclaim that the
struggle between capital and labour is a purely natural phenomenon, who
with remarkable frankness put on a par “trade in commodities”
and “trade in labour” (elsewhere in the memorandum), demand
non interference by the state, and assign to this state the role of night
(and day) watchman. And, what is of particular importance, the Russian
manufacturers have been compelled to adopt this liberal standpoint by none
other than our workers. The working-class movement has spread so greatly
that strikes have really become “natural economic phenomena. The
workers’ struggle has assumed such stubborn forms that interference by the
police state, which prohibits all manifestations of this struggle, has
really begun to prove harmful, not only to the workers (to whom it has, of
course, never brought anything but harm), but even to the manufacturers
themselves, on whose behalf this interference was practised. The workers
actually deprived the police prohibitions of all force, but the police
continued (and in an autocratic state could not but continue) to interfere
and, feeling their impotence, kept going from side to side: from armed
force to concessions, from savage reprisals to blandishments. The less
effective police intervention proved, the more keenly did the
manufacturers feel the arbitrariness of the police, the more
inclined they were to believe that it did not pay them to support
this arbitrariness. The conflict between a certain section of the big
industrialists and the all-powerfull police became more and more intense,
assuming particularly acute forms in Moscow, where the system of flirting
with the workers had flourished most luxuriantly. The memorandum openly
complains of the Moscow authorities, who were carrying on a dangerous game
with workers’ conferences and the workers’ mutual aid society in the
engineering industry. In order to decoy the workers it became necessary to
grant the council of this society a certain right of mediation—and
the manufacturers immediately began to kick. “At first this
council,” the memorandum says at their dictation, “applied to the Factory Inspectorate, but, seeing
that the latter did not recognise its right to act as mediator, a role
which it had assumed on its own, it began to turn to the Chief of Police,
who not only accepts the tendered statements, but acts on them in due
course, thus sanctioning the rights which the council has arrogated to
itself.” The manufacturers are protesting against particular
administrative decrees and demand the legislative enactment of a new
system.

True,the manufacturers’ liberalism has not ventured so far beyond the
extremely narrow limits of their specific interests; their hostility to
police arbitrariness is limited to individual cases of police excesses
which are not to their advantage, and is not levelled against the
mainstays of bureaucratic despotism. But, by aggravating the class
antagonisms in the capitalist countries, the economic development of
Russia and of the whole world will foster the growth of this hostility,
provide greater grounds for it, and intensify it. The proletariat’s
strength lies precisely in the growth of its numbers and its solidarity as
a result of the very process of economic development, while the interests
of the big and petty bourgeoisie become more and more scattered and
divided. To take into account this “natural” advantage of the
proletariat, the Social-Democrats must closely watch all clashes of
interests among the ruling classes, using these clashes, not only in order
to gain practical advantages for one section or another of the working
class, but also for the purpose of enlightening the en tire working class,
for the purpose of deriving a useful lesson from each new social and
political incident.

Thepractical advantage which the workers stand to gain from the revision
of the law proposed by the liberal manufacturers is too obvious to be
dwelt on at length. It is an undoubted concession to a growing force, an
abandonment by the enemy of one of his positions, which the revolutionary
proletariat has practically captured already and which the more far-seeing
leaders of the hostile army no longer care to defend. Of course, this is
no big concession: first of all, it is ridiculous even to think that
real freedom, the right to strike, is possible without political
liberty. The police still retain the right to make arrests and to deport without trial, and will retain that right so long as the
autocracy continues to exist. And the retention of this right means
preservation of nine-tenths of the police interference, the outrages, and
the high-handedness, which are beginning to disgust even the
manufacturers. Secondly, even in the narrow sphere of factory legislation
itself, the Ministry of Finance is taking a very timid step forward,
copying the German Bill which the German workers have dubbed the
“Hard Labour”

Bill, [4] and preserving special penalties “for violence, threats, or
defamation” In connection with the contract of hire, as if
general penal laws covering these of fences did not exist! But
the Russian workers will know how to utilise even this small concession so
as to strengthen their positions, to intensify and extend their great
struggle for the emancipation of working humanity from wage slavery.

Asto the useful lesson taught us by the new memorandum, we must note
primarily that the protest of the manufacturers against the medieval
strike law affords us a small and particular example of the general
incompatibility of interests between the developing bourgeoisie and
moribund absolutism. This should give food for thought to those people who
(like the Socialist-Revolutionaries) have hither to timidly shut their
eyes to the elements of bourgeois opposition in Russia and who
continue to reiterate as of old that the “interests” (in
general!) of the Russian bourgeoisie are satisfied. It turns out that
police arbitrariness clashes now with some, now with other interests of
even those sections of the bourgeoisie that are most directly
protected by the tsarist police and are threatened directly with material loss by any loosening of the fetters placed on
the proletariat.

Itturns out that a real revolutionary movement disorganises the
government, not only directly by the fact that it enlightens, rouses, and
unites the exploited masses, but also indirectly by the fact that it cuts
the ground from under antiquated laws, destroys the faith in the autocracy
even of those who would seem to be its confederates, increases
“family squabbles” among these confederates, and replaces
firmness and unity in the camp of the enemy by dissension and
wavering. But in order to achieve such results one condition is
required,which our Socialist-Revolutionaries have never been able to grasp: it is necessary that the movement should be
truly revolutionary, i.e., that it should rouse to a new life ever broader
sections of the really revolutionary class, that it should actually
refashion the spiritual and political make-up of this class, and through
it, of all those who come in contact with it. If the
Socialist-Revolutionaries grasped this truth, they would understand what
practical harm is wrought by their ideological poverty and the unprin
cipledness of their approach to the fundamental problems of socialism;
they would understand that it is not the forces of the government but
those of the revolution that are disorganised by people who preach that
against the crowd the autocracy has its soldiers and against
organisations— the police, whereas individual terrorists who remove
ministers and governors are truly elusive.

Thenew “step” by the executive board of the manufacturers’
henchmen affords us still another useful lesson. This lesson is that we
must be able to make practical use of any liberalism, even of the
twopenny-halfpenny variety, and that at the same time we must be on our
guard lest this liberalism corrupt the masses with its false presentation
of questions. An example is Mr. Struve, an interview with whom we could
put under the heading: “How the liberals want to teach the workers
and how the workers should teach the liberals.” In No. 4 of
Osvobozhdeniye , which has begun publication of the memorandum
under analysis, Mr. Struve tells us, among other things, that the new
draft is an expres sion of “statesmanship,” which, be says, will
scarcely succeed in breaking through the wall of arbitrariness and sense
lessness. No, Mr. Struve. It was not “statesmanship” that
advanced the new strike Bill, but the manufacturers. This Bill has
appeared, not because the state “recognised” the basic principles of civil law (the bourgeios “liberty and equality”
of employers and workers), but because the abolition of criminal liability
for participation in strikes has become ad vantageous to the manufacturers . The juridical formulations and wholly conclusive
reasons now assigned by the Ministry of Finance “itself”
( Osvobozhdeniye , No. 4, p. 50) existed long ago in Russian
publications and even in the reports of government commissions, but it all
remained buried in oblivion until the captains of industry raised
their voices, after the workers had shown them in practice how absurd the old
laws were. We stress the decisive importance of the manufacturers’
advantages and interests not because we believe that this diminishes the
importance of the govern ment schemes—on the contrary, we have
already stated that this raises their importance in our eyes. But the
proletariat must learn above all to look at things squarely and soberly in
its struggle against the whole of the present-day system, to lay bare the
real causes behing “lofty acts of state,” and to expose
unremittingly the false and high sounding bombast about
“statesmanship,” etc., to which the sly police officials give
utterance deliberately, and the learned liberals short-sightedly.

Further,Mr. Struve advises the workers to be “restrained” in
their agitation for the abolition of criminal liability for participation
in strikes. “The more restrained it [this agitation] will be in
form,” Mr. Struve preaches, “the greater its significance will be.”
The workers should cordially thank this former socialist for such
advice. This is the traditional

Molchalin [5] wisdom of the liberals—to preach restraint at the very time when the
government has just begun to waver (on some particular question). More
restraint is needed so as not to hinder implementation of the incipient
reform, so as not to raise apprehensions, and to make use of the
propitious moment when the first step has already been taken (a memorandum
has been drawn up!) and when some government department’s recognition of
the necessity for reforms gives “irrefutable [?] proof both to the
government and to society [!] of the justice and timeliness” (?) of
these reforms. This is how Mr. Struve reasons with regard to the draft
under discussion, and this is how the Russian liberals have always
reasoned. However this is not bow the Social-Democrats reason. Just look,
they say, even some manufac turers have already begun to understand that
the European forms of the class struggle are better than Asiatic police
tyr anny. Our stubborn fight has forced even the manufacturers to doubt
the omnipotence of the myrmidons of the autocracy. Forward, then, more
boldly! Spread more widely the glad tidings of irresolution in the enemy
camp; take advantage of the slightest sign of wavering on the part of the
enemy so as to increase your demands rather than “restrain”
them in

the Molchalin manner. Against the debt the government owes to the people,
they want to pay you one kopek in every hundred rubles. Use payment of
this kopek in order to demand in louder and louder terms the whole sum, to
completely discredit the government and prepare our forces to deliver a
decisive blow at it.