Emancipation of Labour group (Освобождение труда) was the first Russian Marxist group. Founded by Georgi Plekhanov, Vasily Ignatov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and Pavel Axelrod in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1883. Leo Deutsch left the group in 1884 when he was arrested and sent to Siberia. Sergey Ingerman joined the group at 1888. The group did a great deal to translate Marxist works into Russian and distribute them, and later became the major adversary to the ideology of Narodism.
Two drafts (1883 and 1885) of a program for the Russian Social Democrats were written by Plekhanov and published by the group, marking an important step to what would become the building of the Russian Social-Democratic Party. From the first congress of the Second International in Paris (1889) onwards, the group represented Russian Social-Democrats.
Lenin later wrote that the group "laid the theoretical foundations for the Social-Democratic movement and took the first step towards the working-class movement in Russia." The group was later followed by the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (Союз борьбы за освобождение рабочего класса).
Famous quotes containing the words emancipation of, emancipation and/or labour:
“... women learned one important lesson—namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women’s feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Will women find themselves in the same position they have always been? Or do we see liberation as solving the conditions of women in our society?... If we continue to shy away from this problem we will not be able to solve it after independence. But if we can say that our first priority is the emancipation of women, we will become free as members of an oppressed community.”
—Ruth Mompati (b. 1925)
“A man’s labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.”
—William Booth (1829–1912)