As was the case for many socialists of the Russian imperial borderlands, Kelles-Krauz hailed from a noble, landowning family. Born in 1872 in areas that are now part of central Poland, he followed a path that was typical for the Polish intelligentsia of his generation. Radicalized during his school years, he faced Russian state repression and divided his time between political organizing and writing for nonsocialist journals as a hired pen.

Having become a target for the tsarist political police, he left Russian-controlled Poland to join émigré circles in Paris and later Vienna. While looking for academic jobs, he did not abandon his political activism. His theoretical considerations resulted from particular conundrums that arose for socialist politics in the Russian imperial context during the period between two pivotal events, the 1892 Lodz Riot and the revolution of 1905.

The Polish workers’ movement emerged in a situation where there had been no Polish state since the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned between three ambitious continental empires, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, in the late eighteenth century. In 1892, the industrial powerhouse of Lodz, the country’s second-largest city and the most important textile production center in the entire Russian empire, witnessed an outburst of barely organized workers’ protest, and later a wave of anti-Jewish violence.

This experience was a cornerstone for the new wave of socialist organizing. The 1892 strikers faced predominantly German industrialists in the workplace and national repression by the tsarist regime outside the factory gates, not to mention the specter of interethnic violence. Under such conditions, socialists could not afford to ignore national issues. There were several possible answers to this challenge.

The Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) considered the goal of national liberation to lie at the center of its political project. From its inception in 1892, this variety of Polish socialism tried to combine class struggle with demands for national independence and saw the goal of a sovereign Polish state as being compatible with socialism. In this perspective, the labor struggle was a way of regaining independence, while independence offered a path toward socialism.

However, particular writers differed about the exact terms of the relationship between national and social liberation. Such tensions would eventually lead to a split in 1906. Meanwhile, a splinter group that had existed since 1893 opposed what it considered the “nationalist” tainting of the PPS altogether, resulting in the emergence of another socialist contender.

This organization called itself Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland. It later added Lithuania to its title — Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy in Polish, with the acronym SDKPiL. Rosa Luxemburg was the best-known leader and theoretician of the SDKPiL. It put forward class unity as the basic frame of reference, surpassing or even canceling out the national frame, and called for a common struggle alongside the Russian proletariat in pursuit of international socialism.

There was also a distinct story when it came to Jewish politics. In the big industrial centers, up to a third of workers were Jews. The main group that championed the mobilization of these workers was the Bund, which was probably the best organized socialist party before 1905. The Bund argued for class politics while simultaneously affirming a Jewish identity, communicating with its supporters through their everyday language, Yiddish.

The Bund called for a non-territorial form of Jewish cultural autonomy within a democratized Russian state. Although Zionism already existed as a rival current, it was not very influential among workers in Russian-ruled Poland. At the same time, the PPS also mobilized Polish-speaking Jews, and the SDKPiL promised the abolition of nationality for all.

Kelles-Krauz and the PPS sharply disagreed with the idea that the nation would wither away. The PPS put forward an anti-imperialist socialist platform, arguing that a socialist future would only be possible in a democratic Polish state and not in an oppressive Russian-dominated empire. At the same time, the party explicitly rejected the idea of (Polish) “national unity” as a smokescreen that would obscure the realities of class conflict.

For the PPS, only the working class could defend the nation and win independence, as its 1892 draft program stated:

Only the Socialist Party, precisely because it represents national interests, and not class privileges, adheres faithfully to the banner of international revolutionary thought, aiming for universal liberation. Only it can save the country from the suicidal policy which our upper class and petty bourgeoisie have imposed on us. Therefore it is clear that the Polish Socialist Party must ensure that the masses of workers achieve the proper political consciousness, and thus they must maintain their independent political organization.

Kelles-Krauz was one of the main figures who developed theoretical arguments in support of this position. In countless articles and pamphlets, he sought to articulate an “orthodox” Marxist case for national independence. “An independent Poland for the sake of the proletariat, not the proletariat for the sake of Polish independence” was the formula he devised to express this position.

For Kelles-Krauz, independence could only be won through the self-organization and mobilization of workers, since the local bourgeoisie was not very strong. Moreover, capitalists in Poland were usually of Jewish or German origin and not interested in Polish national aspirations. Even the nascent Polish factory tycoons and other members of the urban elites feared the idea of a popular uprising and were unwilling to engage in a fight for political democracy.

In contrast, he argued, the proletariat is always of a particular nationality and its members can be mobilized for struggle only by merging their class and national aims. Kelles-Krauz was convinced that economic struggle under tsarist rule was doomed to fail; in order to make any progress toward the liberation of workers, a nation-state was needed as an arena for successful bargaining. He declared national independence to be an “indispensable part of the notion of democracy.”

The national community was for him a realm of effective communication, mediated through language, and would facilitate a democratic process leading to socialism. This was unlikely to happen in a more fractured community where other lines of division would lead workers astray.

As a consequence, he rejected the multinational framework of the tsarist empire: for Kelles-Krauz, an empire would be unviable if truly democratic, and undesirable if it had to maintain its coherence by force. The national state, on the other hand, would offer enough secure common ground upon which to launch a socialist transformation backed up with democratic legitimacy. This would only be possible, he argued, “in one nation, with one language comprehensible for its members.”

Kelles-Krauz and his PPS comrades thus worked hard to gain the support of other European socialists for Polish independence. This position was consistent with the traditional view of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, although they had based their position on a sense of historical injustice and the antiauthoritarian potential of Poland’s democratic movement rather than a worked-out historical materialist analysis.

Luxemburg of the SDKPiL argued that such calls for national independence were a dangerous fantasy under conditions of economic integration within empires. In a series of articles for Karl Kautsky’s journal Die Neue Zeit, published in 1896, she rejected Marx’s old perspective on Poland on the grounds that the workers’ movement now made a struggle for political freedom across the whole empire possible. According to Luxemburg, the demand for independence conflicted with the imperatives of socioeconomic development on the imperial scale, and it could divide the workers’ movement into national factions.

The two sides of this controversy engaged in fierce battles, not hesitating to question the validity of the mandates proffered by their opponents at the congresses of the Socialist International. Kelles-Krauz, unlike some of his PPS comrades, did not question the need to cooperate with Russian revolutionaries. His activity reached a high point during the 1905 revolution.

While it is customary to refer to the events that unfolded in the middle of this decade as the (first) Russian Revolution of 1905, a large portion of the strikes, street demonstrations, and other forms of social unrest actually took place in the nationally diverse borderlands of the empire such as the Great Duchy of Finland, the southern Caucasus, or the Baltic littoral. It was in the urban centers of Russian Poland, with their robust yet crisis-ridden industrial economy, burgeoning class conflicts, and unresolved ethno-cultural tensions, that the upheaval was most intense.

More than a third of all strikes in the entire empire happened in this territory, and the strikes were generally on a bigger scale than elsewhere, with approximately nine out of ten workers striking at least once in 1905. These events prompted Kelles-Krauz to hope for a revolutionary overthrow of the regime that would pave the way for an independent socialist Poland. Before his sudden death from tuberculosis in June 1905, he wrote the following:

There is no reason to lose hope and to think that the unleashed Russian crisis will stop half way, at a constitution granted by Tsar, with a concession of autonomy for the Polish Kingdom; stupid resistance and hesitations by the government accompanied by the stirring up of masses allow us to maintain hope that the solution will rather be a revolution that will overthrow the Tsar and give the nationalities, at least in Poland as we see it, the opportunity to win independence . . . the party must communicate with those elements in Russian society that also want to lead the crisis across the entire Russian state to its furthest extent, and not let it stop half way.

This time, the revolution failed, by which time Kelles-Krauz himself was dead. But much of his analysis was later vindicated.

To imagine a national state on the post-imperial lands, it was necessary to address some paramount questions. The local population in these lands was very diverse, and it was clear that any Polish state would have to accommodate a variety of ethnic groups. A large proportion of the local population was Jewish, and Polish socialists were especially preoccupied with “the Jewish question,” as it was then called.

The Polish movement sought to mobilize Jews in the struggle for socialism while preventing antisemitism from attracting the support of Polish workers. Many members of the PPS, including those of Jewish descent, held the view that Jews would vanish as a distinct group through social assimilation, as was believed to be happening in West European countries with the development of modern capitalism. This assimilationist perspective was widely held among Marxists of the Second International.

However, in the Russian imperial context, assimilation into Polish society was less attractive since it did not offer access to the existing state structures or to desired professions. Growing Polish-Jewish antagonisms and the self-assertion of Jews around their own political projects made the assimilationist option even less plausible.

Kelles-Krauz got to grips with this state of affairs, presenting a developed analysis of Jewish national aspirations in his essay “On the Question of Jewish Nationality.” He argued that Jewish national consciousness — whether it was expressed through the Bund’s socialist project of cultural autonomy, or in the form of state-building projects such as the early Zionist movement — and the evolution of Yiddish as a modern language reflected the general tendency of capitalism to create nationalities.

In his view, one could not ignore these social processes while trying to mobilize Jewish workers, any more than one could ignore Polish national identity while advancing proletarian politics within the wider tsarist empire. This led him to the following conclusion: “The concept of civil equality for Jews should be extended to include the right to have their own nationality. We should recognize this nationality to the extent that Jews themselves recognize it.” Few people dared to make this argument at the time.

Kelles-Kraus further extended his theory of nationalism in the productive setting of Vienna, where socialists and others hotly debated possible solutions for the various national questions of the Habsburg empire. He went further than the Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer, who put forward the idea of cultural, non-territorial autonomy as a response to the demands put forward by Czechs, Croats, and other national communities under Habsburg rule.

For Kelles-Krauz, a fully accomplished form of national consciousness also requires political power and a state. This conclusion, he argued, was consistent with the “method of economic materialism,” which led him to a materialist understanding of the nation as a modern form of social affiliation that was stimulated by the development of trade and industry.

In his view, nations are themselves products of history and have a political character, contrary to theories that link national communities to primordial ties of blood or race. The language of distinctive groups gradually stabilized within natural geographic boundaries, helped along as people in that space banded together against enemies. This process sped up when the feudal order disintegrated, creating space for several overlapping social categories to express themselves.

In response to these destabilizing processes, uprooted individuals looked for a new constant and appeared to have found it in the native language:

The wrenching of individuals from their old, traditional, positions; their contact with each other in a new, constantly changing life; the great richness and complexity of new social relations all grant to the national language, in its capacity as a social unifier, its present unprecedented importance in the consciousness of nations.

At the same time, the complex forms of interaction in a capitalist society required an effective medium of communication: “Culture — heretofore the property of a small handful — must, in the very economic interest of capitalism be borne into the depths of the people, and in this goal must — through the use of the language of the masses — become national.” Arguing that “modern capitalism directly forms nationalities,” Kelles-Krauz predicted the rise of national aspirations even among peoples who did not have a recent history of statehood, such as the Ukrainians.

His historical argument dovetails here with his stipulations about the socialist national state: “The realization of the independence of nations must be the same consequence of modern economic development as the realization of democracy, with which it forms one inseparable whole.” Such a synthesis of research and politics characterized his entire project of socialist science.

In his materialist analysis of history, Kellez-Kraus built up a complex theory of determination, which had economic processes as its foundation, while at the same time allowing for autonomous dynamics to unfold within cultural and political spheres. This helped him to analyze the uneven development of capitalism in the Russian empire.

It was clear, he believed, that a revolution might be initiated by people who were motivated by ideas that originated in more “advanced” countries. Moreover, disadvantaged groups express their discontent by seeking support in the past, whether real or imaginary. Revolutionaries synthesize visions of the past to think of an alternative future.

Kelles-Krauz identified a “law of revolutionary retrospection” that could explain “the emergence of the revolutionary ideal that precedes economic development” in a way that was “completely consistent with the principles of economic materialism.” This means that the new regime will always be “similar in some ways to the abandoned one,” while the sympathies of those who seek revolutionary change “have something of the past.”

In his analysis of historical change, Kelles-Krauz insisted that political history can never be fully completed. Just as earlier stages of history have ultimately proved transient, so, too, will future political projects, which will never bring about a final and fully accomplished form of society. The political articulation of needs will not stop: every political order will satisfy some demands, but others will go unanswered, as “the preservation of new institutions starts to be considered more important than the fulfilment of needs.”
This spiral movement of social dynamics is constant and cannot be stopped. Against this backdrop, Marxism can only represent a step forward — the right one to take, based on scientific analysis, but hardly the last for humanity. We should thus apply the Marxist analysis of history and its critical sociology of human society to Marxism itself.

Drawing on the ideas of Immanuel Kant, Kelles-Krauz argued that one should consider the class-based conditions of cognition. Social groups, notably “the class to which individuals belong,” always left “a certain stamp on their consciousness . . . a certain conception of society and the world,” from which they could no more liberate themselves than from “the necessity of looking through a retina.”

There has always been a dominant social class, subjugating the others. Its needs are presented as if they were universal, and this class identifies itself with society as such, believing that its own rule represents the end of history. A positivist approach to science, which tries to depict social relations as if they were natural phenomena, is the result of such cognitive usurpation.

For Kelles-Krauz, Marxism is not a doctrine, but a method of studying society. Since the current class-based perspective that arises within capitalism — of which Marxism is also a product — will be changed as part of a wider social transformation, it is impossible to predict in advance the new framework that a classless society will produce.

This line of argument placed Kelles-Krauz in sharp opposition to most theorizing conducted within the ranks of the Second international, which sought to construct a Marxist science capable of describing human development. It preceded the “Western,” praxis-oriented Marxism kickstarted by György Lukács two decades later, as Timothy Snyder pointed out in his study of Kelles-Krauz.

Kelles-Krauz thus defied many of the preconceived notions of his age. At a time when most Marxist theoreticians adhered to a form of determinism, he put forward a nuanced understanding of historical development, emphasizing the significant role of independent traditions and human agency. While many of his peers followed Engels in viewing Marxism as a “dialectic of nature,” Kelles-Krauz argued that Marxism was primarily a set of research methods that were applicable solely to society.

Unlike the leading thinkers of the Second International, who focused on Marxism as a theory of the economy, he concentrated on exploring the alienation of individuals in capitalist society. In a period when sociology was emerging as a discipline influenced by positivist methods, he proposed using Marxism to move beyond the tendency of sociology to mimic the natural sciences.

Kelles-Krauz also broke with two mistaken perspectives on the national state, which either took it as a given that required no analysis or else wrote it off as an obsolete phenomenon. He offered instead a subtle theory about the capitalist formation of modern nations and a powerful set of ideas for anti-imperial democratic nationalism.