Theory of Spontaneous Generation

The main viewpoint of the economist faction in the Russian Social-Democratic Party at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It belittled the role of the revolutionary theory in the labor movement and denied the leading role of the proletarian party. It was a variant of British unionism and Bernstein’s revisionism in Russia.

The main representatives of the theory of spontaneous generation were Martinov and Krzyzewsky. In September 1901, they published a commentary on the 10th issue of the journal Workers’ Cause edited by themselves, accusing the “Spark school” represented by Lenin of “belittling the significance of objective or spontaneous factors in the development process” and putting forward that “the strategy-plan is in contradiction with the basic spirit of Marxism” and “in the future, the emergence of a new social system will be most likely the result of spontaneous outbreaks regardless of what achievements the social science has achieved and how many conscious fighters have increased”. In 1924, Stalin formally called this erroneous theory “the theory of spontaneous generation” in his book The Foundations of Leninism.

The theory of spontaneous generation holds that the history of human society in the past and present is merely a spontaneous process, and the labor movement is only one aspect of the overall spontaneous process; therefore, it is absolutely impossible for any individual or political party to influence or accelerate this process. Spontaneous theorists did not understand or were reluctant to take that the spontaneous struggle of the working class cannot lead to socialist consciousness. They believed that the labor movement will spontaneously move towards socialism without the guidance of scientific socialism. And they opposed Lenin’s idea of establishing a proletarian party, the practice of combining labor movement with scientific socialism, the continuous infusion of the thought scientific socialism to the working class and the masses, and the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat to seize power.

Lenin severely criticized the theory of spontaneous generation for its mistake of belittling the revolutionary theory, expounded the dialectical relationship between the revolutionary theory and the revolutionary movement, fully affirmed the guiding role of the revolutionary theory to the revolutionary movement, and pointed out that: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”, “The role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory”.