The Bund and the Labour and Socialist International

The Bund and the LSI: proletarian emancipation and national emancipation The Labour and Socialist International (LSI), founded in May 1923, was the international organization of the social democratic parties until the Second World War. From the very beginning the LSI was confronted with numerous problems. The problem of Jewish emancipation was one of the main issues the international labor movement dealt with from the late nineteenth century forward. The Bund, as a radical revolutionary party, had no other choice but to join the LSI since the Bund’s conception of national emancipation of the Jews was incompatible with the assimilationist perspective of the Comintern. Within the LSI the Bund was confronted with the activities of left- wing Zionists. All these constellations led to debates and conflicts. From the time of its foundation in 1897 the Bund was concerned with the future of the Jews in the countries in which they lived, i.e. in Eastern and East Central Europe. The Jewish workers, the Bund insisted, should fight against anti-Semitism together with their non-Jewish comrades. The leading Bundists saw their party as the representative of the Jewish workers within the general labor movement. In the course of the revolutionary struggles against Czarism before 1914 the Bund no longer remained only a workers’ party; it had also become a national party. Its strength lay in the search for a dialectical synthesis between proletarian internationalism and the defense of an oppressed national culture. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.