Rabochee Delo

(The Workers’ Cause), an irregularly published journal of the Economism opportunist trend in the Russian Social Democratic movement; an organ of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. A total of 12 issues were published in nine volumes between April 1899 and February 1902.

The editorial board—V. P. Ivanshin, V. N. Krichevskii, P. F. Teplov, and, from 1900, A. S. Martynov—was located in Paris, and the printing house in Geneva. A statement of aims published in the first issue proclaimed the struggle for the economic interests of the proletariat as the basis of all Social Democratic activity and exaggerated the inevitability of the workers’ movement. Rabochee delo attempted to conceal the contradictions between revolutionary Marxists and the Economists. Claiming to be the theorists of Social Democracy, the members of the editorial board developed the “theory of stages” of the Social Democratic movement, according to which the political conflict was postponed to the distant future. V. I. Lenin criticized the position of Rabochee delo in the book What Is To Be Done?: “Rabochee delo... expressed fully and strikingly, not consistent Economism, but the confusion and vacillation which constitute the distinguishing feature of an entire period in the history of Russian Social-Democracy” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 6, p. 5).