Liberation of Labour

Liberation of Labour, first Russian Marxist organization, founded in September 1883 in Geneva, by Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. Convinced that social revolution could be accomplished only by class-conscious industrial workers, the group’s founders broke with the Narodnaya Volya and devoted themselves to translating works by Marx and Engels and to writing their own works emphasizing the need for economic and industrial development as a precondition for Socialism. They opposed terrorist tactics and revolution by violent means. In 1888 the group organized a Russian Social Democratic Union abroad (which became the Union of Russian Social Democrats in 1894). Finding that the union was losing its radicalism, they left it in 1900. Then, with Lenin, who had recently arrived in western Europe, the group published the newspaper Iskra and organized the Brussels–London congress (1903) of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. After the congress, Liberation of Labour joined that party and dissolved itself.