V. I.

Lenin

The Foreign Committee of the Bund has just issued a bulletin containing a
report on the Fifth Congress of the Bund, which took place in June (Old
Style). Preponderant among its resolutions are the “draft
Rules” on the position of the Bund in the Party. This draft is
highly instructive, and from the angle of definiteness and
“resoluteness” of content, nothing better could be desired. Strictly speaking, the first paragraph of the draft is so
striking as to reduce all the others to mere explanation or even to
entirely useless ballast. “The Bund,” declares § 1, “is a federative [italics ours] section of the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party.” Federation presupposes an
agreement between separate, entirely independent units, which
define their mutual relations only by voluntary consent of the sides
concerned. It is not surprising, therefore, that the “draft
Rules” speak repeatedly of the “contracting parties” (§§ 3, 8, 12). It is not surprising that, on
the basis of this draft, the Party Congress is not given the
right to alter, supplement or delete Rules relating to a
section of the Party. Neither is it surprising that the Bund
reserves to itself “representation” in the Central Committee
of the Party and permits this Central Committee of the Party to address
itself to the Jewish proletariat and to communicate with individual
sections of the Bund “only with the consent of the Central Committee of the Band.” All this logically stems from the concept of
“federation,” from the concept of “contracting parties,” and
had the Fifth Congress of the Bund simply resolved that the Bund is to be
constituted as an in dependent Social-Democratic national (or, perhaps,
nationalist Social-Democratic?) party, it would have saved itself (and others) much time, much labour, and much paper. On, the one hand, it
would have been clear at once without any circumlocution that an
independent, separate party could determine its relations with other
parties only as a “contracting party” and only on the basis of
“mutual consent.” There would have been no need to enumerate every
individual case when such consent will be required (and it is impossible
in fact to enumerate all such cases, while to give an incomplete
list, as the Bund does, is to open the door to a host of
misunderstandings). There would have been no need to do violence to logic
and conscience by calling an agreement between two independent units Rules
on the position of one section of the party. This apparently seemly and
suitable name (“Rules on the Position of the Bund in the Party”) is
all the more false in essence since the entire Party has in fact not yet
restored its full organisational unity, while the Bund comes out as an
already unified section, which wishes to take advantage of the
shortcomings in the general organisation in order to get still farther
away from the whole, in order to try and split up this whole into small parts for all time .

On the other hand, a straightforward treatment of the matter would have
relieved the authors of the notorious draft Rules of the necessity to
introduce clauses providing for rights already possessed by every
organised section of the Party, every district organisation, every
committee and every group, e.g., the right to solve, in accordance with
the Party programme, general problems on which Party congresses have not
adopted decisions. To write Rules including clauses such as these is
simply ridiculous.

Let us now appraise in essence the stand taken by the Bund. Once it has
stepped on to the inclined plane of nationalism, the Bund (if it did not
wish to renounce its basic mistake) was naturally and inevitably bound to
arrive at the formation of a particular Jewish party. And this is
precisely the direct object of §2 of the Rules, which grants the Bund
the monopoly of representing the Jewish proletariat. According to
this paragraph, the Bund is in the Party as its (the Jewish proletariat’s)
sole (italics ours) representative. The activities of the Bund
and the organisation of the Bund are not to be restricted by any
territorial limits. Consequently, complete separation and demarcation of the Jewish
and non-Jewish proletariat of Russia is not only here effected to the end with absolute consistency, but is endorsed by what may be called
a notarial agreement, by “Rules,” by a “basic” law (see
§ 12 of the draft). Such “outrageous” facts as the audacious appeal of the Ekaterinoslav Committee of the Paty to the Jewish
workers directly, not through the medium of the Bund (which had no special
organisation in Ekaterinoslav at the time!), should henceforth become
impossible, according to the idea of the new draft. However few the number
of Jewish workers may be in a given locality, however far away this
locality may be from the centres of the Bundist organisation, no section
of the Party, not even the Central Committee of the Party, dare address
itself to the Jewish proletariat without the consent of the Central
Committee of the Bund! It is hard to believe that such a proposal could
have been made, so monstrous is this demand for monopoly, especially in
our Russian conditions, but §§ 2 and 8 (footnote) of the draft
Rules leave no doubts whatever on this score. The desire of the Bund to
shift still farther away from the Russian comrades is apparent not only in
each clause of the draft, but is also expressed in other resolutions of
the congress. For example, the Fifth Congress has resolved to publish once
a month Posledniye Izvestia , issued by the Foreign Committee of
the Bund, “in the form of a newspaper which would explain the pro
grammatic and tactical position of the Bund.” We shall be looking forward
with impatience and interest to an explanation of this position. The
congress has annulled the resolution of the Fourth Congress on
work in the south. It is known that the Fourth Congress of the Bund
decided that “separate committees of the Bund shall not be set up” (italicised by the Bund) in the towns and cities in the
south, where the Jewish organisations are included in the Party
committees. The reversal of this decision is a big step towards further
isolation, a direct challenge to the comrades from the south, who have
been working and wanted to work among the Jewish proletariat, while
remaining inseparably connected with the local proletariat as a whole. “He who says A must say B”; one who has adopted
the standpoint of nationalism naturally arrives at the desire to erect a
Chinese Wall around his nationality, his national working—class movement; he is
unembarrassed even by the fact that it would mean building separate walls
in each city, in each little town and village, unembarrassed even by the
fact that by his tactics of division and dismemberment he is reducing to nil the great call for the rallying and unity of the proletarians
of all nations, all races and all languages. And what bitter mockery
sounds in the resolution of the same Fifth Congress of the Fund on
pogroms, which expresses the “confidence that only the joint struggle of the proletarians of all nationalities will abolish the
conditions giving rise to events similar to those at

Kishinev” [1] (italics ours). How false these words about joint struggle sound when we
are treated at the very same time to “Rules” which not only
keep the joint fighters far apart , but strengthen this separation
and alienation through organisational means! I should like very much to
give the Bund nationalists a piece of advice: learn from those Odessa
workers who went on a joint strike and attended joint meetings and joint
demonstrations, without first asking (ah, the audacity!) for the
“consent” of the Central Committee of the Bund for an appeal
to the Jewish nation, and who reassured the shopkeepers with the words
(see Iskra , No. 45): “Have no fear, have no fear, this is
not Kishinev for you, what we want is something else, we have neither Jews
nor Russians in our midst, we are all workers , life is equally
hard for us all.” Let the comrades of the Bund ponder over these words, if
it is not too late; let them think-well about whither they are going!

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Notes:
[1]
The reference is to the Jewish pogrom organised in Kishinev by the tsarist
government and the Black Hundreds in April 1903.