We hereby present the brochure “Who lives off what?” from 1881 by Szymon Dickstein – one of the key pioneers of the Polish socialist movement.
Szymon Dickstein (in some sources ‘Diksztajn’) was born in February 1858 (exact date unknown, sources say February 8 or 14) into a Warsaw middle-class family. While studying at the University of Warsaw, he became involved with the socialist movement. On his initiative, the Faculty Delegates’ Circle adopted a resolution to allocate the money collected on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Copernicus’ birth to the Polish edition of the works of Marx or Spencer. He intensified his activity in the socialist movement after making acquaintance with young Ludwik Waryński (1856-1889), who came to Warsaw from Saint Petersburg, where he joined the movement. In the spring of 1878, the tsarist police began looking for Dickstein, so he fled first to Krakow, and from there to Heidelberg. Then he was invited by Polish socialist emigres to Geneva, where from the fall of 1879 he was the editor and typesetter of the first Polish socialist magazine “Równość” (“Equality”), and soon he also became one of the main contributors of the magazines “Walka Klas” (“Class Struggle”) and “Przedświt” (“Before Dawn”). Together with Waryński, S. Mendelson and K. Dłuski, he was the author of the first Polish Marxist program – “The Program of Polish Socialists” (also known as the “Brussels Program” due to the false place of printing given). He was the author of numerous pamphlets, including: “Who lives off what?” published under the pseudonym Jan Młot (John Hammer). It was extremely popular among workers and had numerous Polish editions and translations into at least several foreign languages, becoming one of the most popular publications of the international workers’ movement. He also translated into Polish the works of Marx, Engels, Lassalle and Darwin.
He cooperated with the so-called First Proletariat (also called the Great Proletariat in historiography), the first Marxist party on Polish lands (and in the Russian Empire), founded in August 1882 in Warsaw. Its founder was Ludwik Waryński, who returned from Geneva in December 1881, and activists of local socialist circles, Henryk Dulęba and Kazimierz Puchewicz. In April 1882, Waryński and Puchewicz issued the first unsigned proclamation supporting the strike of workers in the Repair Workshops of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway. In the summer of 1882, the organization prepared its first program as the “Appeal of the Workers’ Committee of the Social Revolutionary Party ‘Proletariat’”. In January 1883, the first Party Congress was held in Vilnius, at which a temporary leadership was appointed. In March 1883, the second congress was held in Warsaw, where the name “International Social Revolutionary Party ‘Proletariat’” was most likely adopted, which was used to sign party letters. However, the names “Social Revolutionary Party ‘Proletariat’” or “Social Revolutionary Party” were also used in the appeals. Power in the party belonged to the Workers’ Committee or, alternatively, the Central Committee, which were democratic, multi-person bodies.
Dickstein played an important role in the party’s activities as the author of propaganda pamphlets defining the nature of party agitation, a foreign correspondent of the party magazine “Proletariat” and a liaison with the Russian Narodna Volya.
However, the success of the First Proletariat was short-lived. In September 1883, a group of activists was arrested, including Ludwik Waryński. This was the beginning of a wave of repression from the tsarist regime that destroyed the party. In August 1885, the trial of 29 “proletarians”, selected from 190 arrested, began in Warsaw. In December, six of them were sentenced to death, eighteen to 16 years of hard labor, two to eight years of hard labor, and two to exile in Siberia. After appeals, the death penalty was upheld for four “proletarians”, who were executed on January 28, 1886 in the Warsaw Citadel (to this day, the Warsaw left organizes anniversary celebrations). In July of the same year, members of the last Central Committee of the party were arrested. Thus ended the history of the Great Proletariat.
Szymon Dickstein did not witness the end of the party – on July 6, 1884, he committed suicide in Geneva for personal reasons. However, he created a lasting monument with his literary legacy. His most popular work was the short pamphlet “Who lives off what?” (“Kto z czego żyje?”), which he wrote in 1881 while participating in translation work on the first volume of Marx’s “Capital”.
This work was extremely popular among workers and was repeatedly reprinted by subsequent generations of Polish socialist activists. And not only Polish – Dickstein’s pamphlet has been translated into many foreign languages. A year after his death, the first Russian translation of „Who live off what” was published in Geneva thanks to the efforts of Dickstein’s Narodnik contacts, who began to shift to Marxist positions and organized around G. Plekhanov into the Emancipation of Labor group. The Pole’s work was also popular among Russian workers. Two decades later, Lenin* pointed to the pamphlet by “ancient Dickstein” as a model of “good popular literature”. He heaped ironic scorn upon activists, who didn’t appreciate the worth of time-tested propaganda literature:
“The ancient Di[c]kstein pamphlets are being republished, when every girl in Paris and in Chernigov knows that ten new pamphlets (trash) are worth a hundred times more than one old pamphlet, even a good one. It is only the Germans who do things in such a way that, for example, in 1903 Bebel’s Our Aims, written thirty-four years ago, is being republished for the eleventh time!! That is so boring.”
Meanwhile, according to Lenin:
“the o n l y popular literature that is good, the only popular literature that is suitable is that which can serve for decades. For popular literature is a series of textbooks for the people, and textbooks teach the ABC, which remains unchanged for f i f t y y e a r s at a time.”
And in this respect Lenin put Dickstein in compant of Guesde, Lafargue, Bebel, Bracke and Liebknecht – the greatest Marxist writers of the 2nd International.
“Who lives off what?” has its limitations. “Proletariat” as a party drew ideologically not only from Marxism, but also from anarchism and narodnikism. Dickstein’s pamphlet, while remaining the ABC of the Marxist theory of value, at the same time makes concessions to Lassalle’s “iron law of wages” and remains quite vague about political means of achieving socialism, i.e. the proletarian state. It also reflects the economic backwardness of partitioned Poland, where the artisan sector was still of great importance.
Despite this, it remains a historically interesting book and even today it can be a model of a “textbook for the people”, teaching the “unchangeable ABC”.
Download links:
Download from the Internet Archive
*In “Some Reflections on the Letter from ‘7 Ts. 6 F.’” (1903).
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 