General Jewish Labor Union

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The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (אַלגמײַנער ײדישער אַרבײטערסבונד אין ליטאַ, פוילין און רוסלאַנד), generally called The Bund (בונד) or the Jewish Labor Bund, was a Jewish political party operating in several European countries between the 1890s and the 1930s. Members of the Bund were called Bundists.

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History

The Bund was founded in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) on October 7, 1897. It sought to unite all Jewish workers in the Russian Empire into a united socialist party. The Russian Empire then included Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and most of Poland, countries where the majority of the world's Jews then lived. The Bund sought to ally itself with the wider Russian social democratic movement to achieve a democratic and socialist Russia. Within such a Russia, they hoped to see the Jews achieve recognition as a nation with a legal minority status.

The Bund was a secular socialist party, opposed to what they saw as the reactionary nature of traditional Jewish life in Russia. Created before the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the Bund became a founding collective member of the RSDLP at its first congress in Minsk in March 1898. For the next 5 years, the Bund was recognised as the sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP, although many Russian socialists of Jewish descent, especially outside of the Pale of Settlement, joined the RSDLP directly.

At the RSDLP's Second Congress in Brussels and London in August 1903, the Bund's autonomous position within the RSDLP was rejected by a majority of the delegates and the Bund's representatives left the Congress, the first of many splits in the Russian social democratic movement in the years to come. The Bund formally rejoned the RSDLP when all of its faction reunited at the Fourth (Unification) Congress in Stockholm in April 1906, but the party remained fractured along ideological and ethnic lines. The Bund generally sided with the party's Menshevik faction led by Julius Martov and against the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Lenin during the factional struggles in the runup to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Bund strongly opposed Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of escapism. The Bund was internationalist in its socialist orientation, focusing on culture, not a state or a place, as the glue of Jewish "nationalism." In this they borrowed extensively from the Austro-Marxist school, further alienating the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The Bund also promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language and opposed the Zionist project of reviving Hebrew. Nevertheless, many Bundists were also Zionists, and the Bund suffered from a steady loss of active members to emigration. Many Bundists became active in forming socialist parties in Palestine, and later in Israel.

The Bund won converts mainly among Jewish artisans and workers, but also among the growing Jewish intelligentsia. It acted as both a political party (to the extent that political conditions allowed) and as a trade union. It joined with the Labor Zionists and other groups to form self-defense organisations to protect Jewish communities against pogroms and government troops. During the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Bund headed the revolutionary movement in the Jewish towns, particularly in what is now Belarus.

Like other socialist parties in Russia, the Bund welcomed the February Revolution of 1917, but it did not support the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks seized power. Like Mensheviks and other non-Bolshevik parties, the Bund called for the convening of the Russian Constituent Assembly long demanded by all Social Democratic factions. The Bund's key leader in Petrograd during these months was Mikhail Liber, who was to be roundly denounced by Lenin. With the Russian Civil War and the increase in anti-Semitic pogroms by nationalist and Whites, the Bund was obliged to recognise the Soviet government and its militants fought in the Red Army in large numbers. Given the polarised situation, the Bund split, losing its left wing led by Heifez to the Bolsheviks, who were soon followed by the center faction led by Moyshe Rafes. The rump was to join with the United Jewish Socialist Party in forming the Jewish Communist Bund or Kombund, which, in turn, joined the Bolshevik Party in 1921. By 1922 the Bund had ceased to exist as an independent party in the newly formed Soviet Union. Many former Bundists perished during Stalin's purges in the 1930s.

Poland and Lithuania became independent in 1918, and the Bund continued to operate in these countries, particularly in the heavily Jewish towns of eastern Poland. It also became active among the Jewish emigré community in New York. In Poland, the Bundists argued that Jews should stay and fight for socialism rather than emigrate. When the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky toured Poland urging the "evacuation" of European Jewry, the Bundists accused him of abetting anti-Semitism. Another non-Zionist Yiddishist Jewish party at the time in Lithuania and Poland was the Folkspartei.

During World War II the Bund continued to operate as an underground organization in Poland. In 1942, the Bundist Marek Edelman became a cofounder of the Jewish Fighting Organization that led the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and was also part of the Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa (Home Army), which fought against the Nazis in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

The massacre of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust destroyed both its base and, in the eyes of many surviving Polish Jews, its ideological validity. By 1945 few of the surviving eastern European Jews believed any longer in the Bund's particular vision of socialism or in a future for the Jews in Europe, and most of the survivors emigrated, to Israel or to America.

However, the Bund took part in the post-war elections of 1947 on a common ticket with the (non-communist) Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and gained its first and only parliamentary seat in its Polish history, plus several seats in municipal councils. Under pressure from Soviet-installed Communist authorities, the Bund's leaders 'voluntarily' disbanded the party in 1948-1949 against the opposition of many activists. The latter included Marek Edelman, who later was to take part in the Polish anticommunist opposition in the 1970s, and a member of the Sejm after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989.

The Bund survives as a minor political movement in Jewish communities in the United States, where from the 1950s on it operated a summer camp called Camp Hemshekh in the Catskills region of New York State, as well as in Canada and Australia. In the United Kingdom, the Jewish Socialist Group claims to continue the work of the Bund. The remnant of the original Bund remains an official affiliate of the Socialist International.

The politics of the Bund were influential amongst African American socialists and communists from the end of the nineteenth century Template:Fact.

In 1997 commemorative events were organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bund in New York City, London, Warsaw and Brussels, where the chairwoman of the Belgian chapter, herself 100 year old, was present.

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