On a parallel line with the nationalistic ideology, which formed a counterbalance to the assimilationist theory of Western Europe, the doctrine of Socialism came gradually to the fore, emphasizing the principle of the class struggle in a more or less intimate connection with the national idea. The Jewish labor movement was born at the end of the eighties in Lithuania--in Vilna, and other cities; its adherents were recruited from among the Jewish workingmen who were mainly engaged in handicrafts. In the nineties, the movement spread to the growing manufacturing centers of Lithuania and Poland--Bialystok, Smorgon, Warsaw, and Lodz. At first, the labor societies were established with a purely economic end in view--the organization of strikes for fewer working hours, increased wages, and the like. The leaders of these societies who were recruited from among the young Jewish _intelligenzia_, some of whom had received a university education abroad, endeavored to model the movement upon the pattern of the West-European Social-Democracy. The doctrine of Marxian Socialism was applied, sometimes rather hastily, to the primitive stage of capitalistic production in the Pale of Settlement where it was still very difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the poverty-stricken "petty bourgeoisie," forming the bulk of the Jewish population, and the labor proletariat. In the second half of the nineties, the Jewish Socialistic societies were drawn into the maelstrom of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1897, all these societies were consolidated in the "League of the Jewish Workingmen of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia," known under its abbreviated name as _Der Bund_ ("The League"). The first secret convention of the "League" took place in Vilna in the month of September, just one month after the first Zionist Congress at Basle. Various party centers were organized in Russia--clandestinely, of course; the party organ, published in the language of the Jewish masses, in Yiddish, appeared abroad under the name of _Die Arbeiter Stimme_. It is worthy of note that the formation of the Jewish "Bund" gave a year later the stimulus to the organization of the "Russian Social-Democratic Party," which united the formerly existing Russian labor societies. The "Bund" now joined the ranks of Russian Social Democracy as a separate autonomous group, although a number of Jewish Social Democrats who had adopted the viewpoint of assimilation or cosmopolitanism occupied a conspicuous place in the leadership of the Russian party at large.