(This article was first published in 1916 as a series of articles in the Poale Zion Yiddish weekly, Der Yiddisher Kaempfer in New York. The English translation is taken from Nationalism and the Class Struggle: A Marxian Approach to the Jewish Problem published in 1937. Footnotes are by Moshe Cohen, the book’s editor.)
I
The socio-economic structure of the Jewish people differs radically from that of other nations. Ours is an anomalous, abnormal structure. Stubborn Galut [1]champions have been wont to reject or ignore this truth. Recently, however, their eyes too have been opened; and although very few have been able to offer a satisfactory analysis of our economic abnormalities, no serious student of Jewish life can ignore them.
The case of the Jewish people is analogous to that of the patient who has complained of sundry aches and pains for a number of years, but whose physician has not been able to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis. There was no doubt about the patient’s illness, but in the course of the illness the body developed some measure of resistance to it. As the years progressed and new resistances were built up, the character of the disease changed, new symptoms appeared, and the physician found himself in a continuous state of bewilderment. Likewise, the Jewish nation has not been a passive patient awaiting his inevitable demise. Resistance to the disease has appeared at various times. There has always been the normal effort to regain organic equilibrium. It was not unnatural therefore that the diagnoses of our social "doctors" varied with the morphology of the disease.
Some thirteen or fourteen years ago, one such diagnosis, devised by a group of Jewish Socialists, appeared under the name of non-proletarianization. Its major thesis was that the Jewish proletariat could not be proletarianized. The obvious contradiction contained in the proposition "that the Jewish proletariat cannot be proletarianized," led the Poale Zion, who where the first to develop this theory, to also be the first to renounce it. The Zionist-Socialists (the Z.S.)[2] retained this illogical theory longest. However, they too attempted to remove some of its crudities by converting it into the "non-industrialization" theory.
Jacob Letshinsky, the leading economist of the Z.S., dedicated his book, The Jewish Worker in Russia, to the exposition of this theory. Its major thesis that "the Jewish worker cannot be industrialized" differed only slightly from its prototype. The book, like the principle around which it was built, was an indiscriminate mixture of sound ideas with grave errors.
It is absurd to assert that the Jewish worker cannot be "proletarianized." His being a worker is evident of the fact that he ceased to be an "owner," that he has placed his labor-power on the market, and has ipso facto become a member of the proletariat. The proposition, therefore, that Jewish workers cannot achieve their own proletarianization becomes an even greater absurdity when it comes from a Jewish Socialist Labor Party.
Nor is it less absurd to contend that Jewish labor cannot be industrialized. Jacob Letshinsky complained (in the book mentioned above) that around 1897 there did not exist a single factory which employed a thousand Jewish workers. However, the very handbook of statistics (published by ICA [3]) on which he based his work told us (Vol. II, p. 77) of a tobacco factory in Grodno, in the years 1898-99, in which 1,594 Jewish workers were employed. The same factory boasted a steam engine of 36 horse-power. Moreover, the literature of the general and Jewish labor movement in Russia contains detailed accounts of numerous strikes conducted by Jewish workers in the Russian Pale of Settlement.[4] The illegal literature of that period (1900-1905) records no less than fifty factories, each employing more than a hundred Jewish workers. The following outstanding examples are also worthy of notice: a millinery factory in Warsaw with 1,000 Jewish employees, a tobacco factory employing 500 Jews, and a glassware factory in Polonoye with 400 Jewish workers.