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Title: Jan Waclaw Machajski Author: Marshall S. Shatz Date: 1989 Language: en Topics: Jan Wacław Machajski, intellectuals, anti-intelligensia, Russian Revolution Source: https://libcom.org/history/jan-waclaw-machajski-radical-critic-russian-intelligensia-socialism-marshall-s-shatz
It took Mama and Galya two weeks to walk to Kiev [in 1919]. They
deliberately dressed to look like beggars; in actual fact, this is what
they were. Galya went without glasses, and walked holding on to Mama's
shoulder, like a blind woman. No one would have believed them to be poor
if Galya had worn her glasses. Everyone treated people in glasses
suspiciously in those violent times. They thought them cunning enemies,
and hated them bitterly. It is amazing that this distrust of people
wearing glasses has persisted up to the present time.
- Konstantin Paustovsky,
The Story of a Life
Text from Class against Class
Jan Waclaw Machajski (1866-1926) is an exceedingly difficult figure to
classify, in intellectual as well as political terms. Born a Pole, he
repudiated the cause of Polish political independence early in his
career in favour of proletarian internationalism. University educated,
he made his mark on Russian history as a bitter critic of the
intelligentsia and its role in Russian political life. Although he drew
upon a number of the revolutionary currents that swirled through the
Russian Empire in the early years of the twentieth century, he belonged
to none of them and criticised all of them. One of the pillars of his
social and political theory was Marxism, but he came to regard the
Marxist movement as one of the greatest threats to the future well-being
of the working class. The other pillar of his thought was anarchism,
particularly its Bakuninist variant - so much so, in fact, that his
doctrines have generally been treated as part of the history of
anarchism. Yet he never acknowledged any influence of Michael Bakunin
and denounced the anarchists just as roundly as he denounced the
Marxists. He did not join any party but attempted instead, with little
success, to create his own revolutionary movement called the Workers'
Conspiracy.
This uncompromising sense of independence helps to account for his
obscurity. Although his views on the intelligentsia were widely known,
at least in general terms, little in the way of serious discussion of
them took place during his lifetime; he had few adherents but many
indignant critics. Even the term by which his doctrines were known
contributed to the obscurity. Almost universally, they were referred to
as makhaevshchina, formed from "Makhaev," a Russian corruption or
misunderstanding of his name,coupled with the disparaging ending
shchina.It might be translated as 'the notorious doctrines of Makhaev."
Throughout this study I have chosen to use the term Makhaevism. It is
essentially the name by which contemporaries knew this current of
thought, but in a neutral form and without the negative associations of
the Russian word; although it retains the corruption of its founder's
name, it may prove less taxing for the English reader than the more
accurate Machajskiism. In Russian, the disparaging label which its
critics pasted on it doubtless helped to discourage serious analysis of
just what it signified. It became simply a byword for hostility to the
intelligentsia, and Machajski was relegated largely to the footnotes of
Russian revolutionary history, usually in highly tendentious terms.
Why, then, should we be mindful of him? What is the justification for a
detailed examination of his thought and his political activity? In part,
it is the sheer originality of Makhaevism. Machajski adopted and adapted
various elements of anarchism, Marxism, and syndicalism, but he put them
together in a novel synthesis, with the intelligentsia as its
centrepiece. Makhaevism was not simply a variation of some other
doctrine but a unique creation. In turn-of-the-century Russia, where
political life often seemed little more than a recapitulation of every
idea and movement Western Europe had ever devised, this was an
impressive intellectual achievement, and, as such, deserving of interest
in and of itself.
The richness of this original doctrine in implications and
suggestiveness makes it possible to treat it from a variety of
perspectives. Paul Avrich, for example, has written on Machajski and his
ideas in the context of the Russian anarchist movement .~ While he did
not consider himself an anarchist, Machajski did share many salient
points with the anarchists; in other respects, he emphasised and
developed elements of anarchist belief which were latent in anarchism or
remained unexamined by the anarchists themselves. A second, closely
related aspect of Makhaevism is its contribution to the anarchist
dialogue with Marxism, and it is from this point of view that Anthony
D'Agostino has approached the subject. At least since Bakunin, anarchism
had engaged in a prolonged critique of Marxian socialism - indeed, to
some degree it fashioned its own identity in terms of its divergences
from Marxism. Machajski both drew upon that anarchist view of the
Marxists and made his own distinctive contribution to it. Yet a third
possible approach to Machajski is in terms of the relevance of his ideas
to the "sociology of intellectuals," the social, economic, and political
role of intellectuals in the world today and their relationship to other
classes. This was a concern of the late Alvin Gouldner, for example, who
was familiar with Machajski's basic views.It is a subject that includes
the concept of the "new class" as applied to the Communist rulers of
Eastern Europe, but its broader implications transcend the historical or
geographical boundaries of Eastern Europe, and some of its early roots
go back to Makhaevism.
Thus Machajski and his doctrines have something of significance to say
about anarchism, socialism, the "new class," the role of intellectuals
in the modern world. All of these themes will be dealt with to some
degree in what follows. What interests me most, however, in the history
of Makhaevism, is what primarily interested Machajski: the Russian
intelligentsia and its historical role in Russian life. For all the
ideological and sociological suggestiveness of Makhaevism, Machajski
himself was primarily a revolutionary (or a would-be revolutionary), and
the focus of his attention was the intelligentsia's domination (or,
again, would-be domination) of the socialist and labour movements in
Russia. Therefore, whatever else it may have been, Makhaevism was above
all a mordant critique of the Russian intelligentsia. Just as Marxism
sought to lay bare the class nature and ideology of the bourgeoisie,
Machajski set out to unmask the identity, class character, and ultimate
aspirations of the intelligentsia, not only in Russia, but in Russia
especially. This is the issue that gives Makhaevism its larger
historical significance and elevates it above the status of a minor
intellectual current or revolutionary sect; and this, I believe, is what
constitutes the principal justification for a book-length study of the
subject. That is not to say that Machajski's critique of the
intelligentsia was correct - though often penetrating, it was in many
respects far off the mark. Machajski is one of those historical figures
who are more important for the questions they raise than for the answers
they give. Machajski posed the issue of the Russian intelligentsia in
bolder and more novel terms than any of his contemporaries. A critical
examination and testing of his views against the historical reality of
the intelligentsia is the central focus of this study, and it is hoped
that the results will tell us as much about the intelligentsia as they
do about Makhaevism itself.
The purposes of this book are threefold. The first is to provide a
comprehensive biography of Machajski and history of Makhaevism; no
full-length study of the subject currently exists in any language. This
includes an account of Machajski's life, to the extent that it can be
reconstructed from the extremely sketchy and fragmentary historical
record; a detailed exposition and critical analysis of the doctrines of
Makhaevism; and the history of the various Makhaevist organisations and
the role they played in the Russian revolutionary movement. Though but a
small part of the political history of the Russian Empire in its last
decades and the Soviet Union in its first decades, Makhaevism and its
creator made a distinctive contribution to it, and their story deserves,
finally, to be told.
The second purpose is to examine the identity and the historical
significance of the Russian intelligentsia in the light of Machajski's
views. By no means did Machajski invent anti-intelligentsia sentiment;
instead, to a large degree he articulated and systematised a variety of
critical or hostile currents which preceded or paralleled his own. The
Russian intelligentsia was under attack from many quarters throughout
its existence, and Makhaevism helps to illuminate the sources of these
attacks and the forms they took. It is for this reason that I have
carried the story of Makhaevism past Machajski's own death in 1926 and
into the 1930s, for Stalin's Great Purge, with the massive toll it took
on the old intelligentsia, marks the real terminal point of this theme.
To deal with such a vast and amorphous subject as the history of
anti-intelligentsia sentiment in Russia - which amounts, one might say,
to an anti-history of the intelligentsia -I have had to rely largely on
familiar, or at least previously used, sources, as well as the works of
other scholars. While little of this information is actually new, it has
generally been presented in another context: labour history,
Social-Democratic or Communist party history, and so forth. When pieced
together to serve as the immediate background of Makhaevism, however, it
comes to be seen in a new and revealing perspective.
The third and final purpose is to identify Machajski's contribution to
the history of the concept of the "new class." This is the term that
began to be applied to the new Soviet ruling elite under Stalin in the
1930s, and in the 1950s was widely popularised in Milovan Djilas's
famous book. It has a long ideological and political pedigree.
Originating in the anarchist critique of Marxism, it was first
articulated by Michael Bakunin. It was Machajski, however, who gave it a
systematic formulation, elements of which can be found in subsequent
versions of it whose authors were quite unaware of Machajski. Without
attempting an exhaustive review of the voluminous literature on this
subject, I shall try to excavate the original foundations of the idea of
the "new class" and Machajski's contribution to its development. It is a
minor but oddly satisfying irony of history that despite the almost
total obscurity that ultimately enveloped him, his spirit continues to
be invoked, albeit unwittingly, whenever this now commonplace term is
uttered.
The analysis of Machajski's views which forms the core of this book
originated as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University under the
supervision of Marc Raeff. It is my great pleasure to thank Professor
Raeff for his unfailing courtesy, attentiveness, and critical insight,
qualities which have made him justly renowned among those privileged to
have been his graduate students. Professor Norman Naimark of Boston
University kindly read parts of the manuscript and gave me the benefit
of his considerable knowledge of Polish affairs. I owe a particularly
great debt to Professor Paul Avrich of Queens College of the City
University of New York, who has read this work in several different
versions and has contributed numerous suggestions for improving it. The
support he has given this project over the years has been unstinting,
and it is deeply appreciated.
I wish to offer a word of posthumous thanks to Max Nomad, who, already
well into his eighties when I was working on my dissertation, generously
supplied me with material from his archive as well as pieces of his
still sharp mind. While not always agreeing with what I had to say, he
gave a young American graduate student an invaluable glimpse into the
mentality and temperament of the Eastern European revolutionaries of the
early twentieth century, with whom virtually all living links have now
been severed.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the
International Institute of Social History (Internationaal Instituut voor
Sociale Geschiedenis) in Amsterdam for the kind assistance I have been
given on my several visits there; and to Gabriel Grasberg and the
reference staff of the Healey Library of the University of Massachusetts
at Boston for the friendly and efficient service they have provided.
Dates of events within the Russian Empire and Soviet Union have been
given according to the calendar in use there at the time: until early
1918 according to the Old Style or Julian calendar, which was twelve
days behind the Western calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen
days behind in the twentieth; and thereafter according to the New Style
or Gregorian calendar. Russian names and words have been transliterated
into English in accordance with the Library of Congress system, slightly
simplified. Exceptions have been made for a few figures well known to
English readers by a conventional version of their names, such as Leon
Trotsky and Maxim Gorky. Russian orthography has been modernised
throughout the work. For Polish names, I have endeavoured to retain the
Polish spelling for those individuals primarily active in Poland itself,
while using a transliterated Russian version for those principally
engaged in Russian movements or essentially Russified. In doubtful
cases, I have tended to use the Russian form, since this work is focused
primarily on Russian history.
Jan Waclaw Machajski was born poor, Polish, and a subject of the Russian
tsar, a set of circumstances not sufficient to make him a revolutionary
but certainly conducive to such a result. The place of his birth, on
December 15 (December 27, N.S.),1866, was the small town of Busko, in
Kielce gubernia, twenty-eight miles south of the city of Kielce. Kielce
gubernia was part of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, established in 1815
by the Congress of Vienna and attached to the Russian Empire.
Machajski's father, Konstanty, was a minor official and a former mayor
of the town. He died when Machaiski was still a child, leaving his large
family in considerable financial difficulty.The family must have had
aspirations, however, if not means, for Machajski received a good
education. He prepared for admission to a gymnasium, the educational
route to university training, first attending a progymnasium in the town
of Pinchow, where his family may have resettled. To supplement the
family's income he tutored fellow students whom his mother boarded in
the family apartment. He then attended the gymnasium in Kielce, from
which he graduated with a gold medal. In i886 he entered Warsaw
University, spending four years in the Natural Sciences Faculty and then
transferring to the Medical Faculty, which he never completed.
Machajski first became acquainted with socialist ideas in his student
days. It will be useful, therefore, to identify some of the distinctive
features of Polish socialism as Machajski encountered it in the 1880s,
in order to assess the contribution it may have made to the formation of
his later views.
Machajski came of age in a period of abrupt and far-reaching change in
Russian Poland, change both socio-economic and intellectual.The
traditional gentry domination of the Kingdom of Poland had been
shattered by the events of 1863 and 1864. The defeat of the 1863
insurrection against Russian rule discredited, at least for some time to
come, the romantic vision of a national uprising to restore the
independence of Poland and physically decimated the gentry class (the
szlachta) which had cultivated that vision and led the insurrection. A
further blow came in 1864, when the Russian government emancipated the
Polish peasants on terms considerably more favourable than those the
Russian peasants had been granted in their emancipation, thereby
successfully destroying the economic position of much of the middle and
smallholding gentry which had been the bulwark of Polish nationalism.
One major effect of the peasant emancipation was to open the way to
industrialisation by creating an urban labour force. In fact, industrial
development proceeded even more rapidly in Russian Poland than in
post-emancipation Russia itself, and the Kingdom of Poland quickly
became one of the leading industrial areas of the Russian Empire,
particularly in mining and metalworking and in textile manufacturing. In
response to this economic growth, as well as to the failure of the
insurrection, Polish thought turned away from romantic nationalism and
dreams of political independence and came to be dominated by the program
of "organic work." As articulated especially by the so-called Warsaw
Positivists, "organic work" promoted the virtues of peaceful social,
economic, and cultural development through education and productive
industrial and commercial activity, accepting Russian political
domination and taking advantage of Poland's access to the large Russian
market. It was this 'bourgeois" program, and its materialistic and
individualistic approach to things, that Polish socialism arose to
challenge in the 1870s.
A peculiar disparity had arisen by the seventies between development in
Russia and in Poland. For the moment, at least, industrial growth was
greater and an impoverished urban working class more in evidence in
Poland than in Russia, where industrialisation would achieve its most
rapid development only in the late eighties and the nineties. Thanks to
the severe political and cultural repression which the Russian
authorities exercised, however, socialism was slower to develop in
Poland; here, the political quietism of Warsaw Positivism prevailed even
as the populist movement was reaching the peak of its activity in
Russia. As a result of this disparity, when socialism did come to
Poland, it came largely from Russia. This was due in part to admiration
for the populists, particularly the Narodnaia Volia (People's Will
party), whose determination in hunting down and ultimately assassinating
Alexander II made a strong impression on many Poles. It was also a
result of the influence of Polish students from the borderlands of
European Russia, sizeable numbers of whom chose to study at Russian
universities rather than in the Congress Kingdom. There they were
introduced to radical Russian authors such as Chernyshevskii,
Dobroliubov, and Pisarev, then Lavrov and Bakunin, and to Lassalle,
Marx, and other Western writers. They also came in direct contact with
the Russian revolutionaries, and a number of them became active
participants in the Russian revolutionary movement. Others, however,
made their way to Warsaw, clustering particularly around Warsaw
University, to proselytise their new ideas - including the use of
terrorism as an instrument of political and social action which they
accepted from Russian populism.
With its militancy and acute sensitivity to social injustice, the
socialism of these radicalised students fell on fertile soil: increasing
impatience with the prosaic materialism of "organic work," and
increasing revulsion at the deprivations endured by the industrial
workers. By 1876 and 1877, various socialist groups and study circles
had arisen in Warsaw, not only in the student and intellectual milieu of
the university but among some elements of the working class as well.
(Like St. Petersburg, Warsaw was not only a cultural and administrative
centre but also a major industrial centre, particularly of the
metallurgical industry.) Despite a wave of arrests in 1878-1879, the
ideas of socialism continued to make headway both at home and in the
emigration, and in 1882 the first Polish socialist party was formed. It
called itself the Social-Revolutionary "Proletariat" party, more
familiarly known simply as the Proletariat party, or sometimes as Wielki
(Great)Proletariat to distinguish it from later parties of the same
name. Its leadership consisted largely of former students at Russian
universities, including the party's prime mover, Ludwik Warynski. The
party's ideology was strongly Marxist-inspired, emphasising class
division and class conflict rather than social or national solidarity,
and, most significant in the Polish context, staunchly rejecting
patriotism and the struggle for Polish independence in favour of
international class struggle. (Just as Plekhanov and the early Russian
Marxists had to ignore Marx's kind words about the Russian peasant
commune, these Polish Marxists found themselves more "orthodox" than
Marx and Engels themselves, who consistently supported the cause of
Polish independence as a way of striking a blow at the bastion of
European reaction, tsarist Russia.) In a manifestation of the party's
internationalism, the Proletariat co-operated closely with the remnants
of the Narodnaia Volia in Russia.
Such a rejection of the national issue, however, could hardly have
universal appeal in a country which was ruled by foreign conquerors and
whose very cultural identity was under attack.This is the issue that
runs like a great fissure through the Polish socialist movement from its
very beginnings: whether, and how, to combine national and social
objectives, and which should take precedence over the other. Even before
the founding of the Proletariat, Polish socialists had begun to divide
over the subject of the national struggle. In 1881 a group led by
Boleslaw Limanowski had formed the Lud Polski (Polish People), rejecting
Warynski's rigid class outlook and combining both socialist and
patriotic principles. The Proletariat itself proved short-lived: the
original leadership, including Warynski, was arrested in police
operations of 1883 and 1884. The party managed to keep going until i886,
but even before its final destruction the influence of Polish
nationalism had begun to reassert itself over some of the party's
adherents. It would remain the fundamental issue that Proletariat's
remnants and successors had to face, as well as the issue that
confronted Machajski as he attained political awareness.
It is not surprising that at first he was drawn to the patriotic
viewpoint. As a Polish gymnasium and university student, Machajski could
hardly avoid direct and forceful experience of what Russian rule over
the Poles meant. After the insurrection of 1863, the tsarist government
embarked on a ruthless policy of Russification, introducing a series of
measures designed to obliterate Polish national identity. The Kingdom of
Poland was integrated into the administrative structure of the empire,
losing not only its autonomy but even its name: it was now officially
referred to as Privislanskii Krai, the Vistula Territory. Russian was
made the language of the courts and administrative institutions, and,
increasingly, of the educational system as well. In 1867 Polish
educational affairs were placed under the control of a newly created
Warsaw Educational District, headed by an appointed curator directly
subordinate to the Ministry of Education in St. Petersburg. In 1869 the
Warsaw Central School, which had been established just seven years
earlier as the first comprehensive institution of higher education in
Russian Poland since the insurrection of 1831, was transformed into the
Russian-language Warsaw University. By i88~ the entire Polish school
system had become Russified: Russian was made the language of
instruction in all Polish schools for all subjects, with the exception
of religion and the Polish language. Machajski therefore was educated in
a system where even Polish history and literature were taught to Polish
students in Russian! In the spring of 1883, the so-called Apukhtin
affair occurred. When Aleksandr Apukhtin, the particularly repressive
curator of schools for the Warsaw Educational District, attempted to
implement new and harsher regulations in institutions of higher
education, he provoked a wave of student protests and street
demonstrations. Numerous students were suspended or arrested, and one
student (who was in fact Russian) became a national hero when he managed
to slap Apukhtin's face.With the school system a focal point of the
tsarist government's Russification policy, the students inevitably
became a focal point of resistance to that policy.
Fortunately for the historian, one of Machajskis closest friends both at
the Kielce gymnasium and at Warsaw University was the future novelist
Stefan Zeromski. Thanks to this famous literary figure, whose friendship
with Machajski continued long after their school days, some details of
Machajski's early life, and of his intellectual and political
development, have been preserved which would otherwise be unobtainable.
In Kielce, Machajski lived in a private home where he received room and
board in return for tutoring the two boys in the family.As in Russia,
students even at the secondary-school level in Poland developed a kind
of unofficial curriculum parallel to the official one, immersing
themselves in disapproved and even contraband readings and doctrines.
According to Zeromski, at the gymnasium in Kielce one of the students'
favourite extracurricular activities was to gather for nocturnal
readings of whatever literature they could lay their hands on. "We read
whatever came to hand, in any bookcase: Victor Hugo and Karol Libelt,
Slowacki and Turgenev, Henry Thomas Buckle and Brandes, Mickiewicz and
Draper, Quinet and Sienkiewicz."Machajski loved to declaim heroic
speeches from romantic plays and for a time even aspired to go on the
stage.Many years later, Zeromski penned this vivid and affectionate
portrait of Machajski as a schoolboy: <blockquote>
Jan Waclaw, always the best pupil and candidate for the gold medal,
imagined at that time that he was the most accomplished actor on the
face of the earth, a great tragedian and fiery artist. He wore his hair
long, so impermissibly and culpably long that he suffered more than a
few persecutions at the hands of the director of the gymnasium, . But
none of the latter's punishments, threats and blustering, foot-stamping,
or peremptory focusing of his spectacles on the long-haired culprit
could induce Jan Waclaw to cut his Absalom-like locks.</blockquote>
From exalted literature, students often went on to radical political and
social ideas, to which all the efforts of the tsarist censorship were
unable to bar their access. Machajski received at least some exposure at
the gymnasium to both the socialist and nationalist currents of thought
in circulation at this time. At one point in his diary for 1885,
Zeromski recorded that he and Machajski and another friend had stayed up
until 3:00 A.M. arguing about "socialism and patriotism," with Zeromski
defending "patriotism and republicanism against communism and
cosmopolitanism."
By the time Machajski reached the university, Proletariat had been
crushed and the revival of patriotism had begun to generate new currents
of thought and new organisations. In contrast to the gentry democracy of
the past, the goal of Polish political independence now appeared in
combination with various radical ideas, both populist and
socialist.Within this framework Machajski, as seen through Zeromski's
eyes, seems to have spent his first year or two in Warsaw experimenting
with different ideological positions - trying on a variety of
ideological roles, as it were. In his diaries for 1886 and 1887,
Zeromski rebukes his friend on a number of occasions for betraying his
ideals by adopting cosmopolitanism, materialism, and even a Bazarov-like
nihilism. In May 1887, for example, he recorded a quarrel with Machajki
over the latter's "cosmopolitan principles, his disrespect for
Mickiewicz, and his materialism."
In November 1886, however, Machajski told Zeromski that he accepted "the
program of Zagloba." "Zagloba" was the pseudonym of a student named Leon
Wasilkowski, who was associated with the periodical Glos (The
Voice).Begun in 1886, Glos was one of the first significant expressions
of the new patriotism, espousing a nationalist position with a strongly
populist tinge and emphasising the interests of the Polish peasantry. In
1887, this current gave rise to an organisation in Switzerland called
the Liga Polska (Polish League, reorganised in 1893 as the Liga
Narodowa, or National League, and, under the leadership of Roman
Dmowski, increasingly right-wing in orientation). The Liga Polska
combined the goal of political independence with socialist ideas and
accepted the use of anti-govemment terror. Shortly thereafter, the
student youth of Warsaw organised a parallel group called the Zwiazek
Mlodziezy Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth), known as Zet, which soon
affiliated itself with the Liga Polska.Wasilkowski was one of the
leaders of Zet, and both Machajski and Zeromski were drawn into its
activities.
Zet, like the Liga Polska, was predominantly patriotic in orientation
but with a socialist tinge, anticipating a democratic Poland based on
the working classes and especially the peasantry. Its socialism was
closer to English Fabianism than to revolutionary internationalism, and
it recognised the necessity of education and a considerable period of
preparatory work. Zet was organised along Masonic lines in a
three-tiered conspiratorial structure, and its combination of socialism
and nationalism proved highly appealing to Polish students. It
established branches throughout the Polish territories and the Russian
Empire, as well as in European cities where Polish students were
concentrated. The Warsaw section soon had at least several dozen
members.
They devoted themselves largely to educational activity among the
artisans and workers of the capital. (Zet branches in the countryside
conducted similar activity among the peasants.) Establishing secret
libraries and reading rooms, lecturing and teaching literacy in small
study-circles, they introduced the workers to the history and literature
of Poland, arousing their patriotic moral fervour and attempting to win
their support for Poland's independence.This was Machajski's first
venture into conspiratorial activity,and he threw himself into it
wholeheartedly, staying up nights to prepare maps, charts, and other
materials for his geography and history lessons to the workers.He proved
an able and effective teacher - and at the same time his activity among
the workers may have had a role in turning him away from idealisation of
the peasants and toward a greater awareness of the proletariat.
He was slow to take this step, however, even though he had the
opportunity to familiarise himself with the program of proletarian
socialism. Zeromski recorded that toward the end of 1888 a
representative of the Proletariat turned up at a meeting of Machajski's
worker circle and expounded the party's socialist program.The reference
presumably is to the short-lived Second Proletariat party, which,
revived in 1888, upheld the commitment of its predecessor and namesake
to class struggle and social revolution, and its opposition to
nationalism, as well as placing a particular emphasis on terror in its
tactical thinking.According to at least one source, however, when a
schism developed in 1889 within the Kielce student group in Warsaw,
Machajski was considered the leader of the "socialist-nationalists"
rather than the "international socialists."
Hence, he was drawn to the views of the Paris-based Gmina
Narodowa-Socjalistyczna (National-Socialist Commune). Founded in i888,
the Gmina had the active participation of Boleslaw Limanowski, among
others, and it was to some degree the successor to his Lud Polski; in
1889 it became a unit of the Polish League. As its name suggests, it was
dedicated, at least in theory, to combining patriotism with socialism,
regarding a revolution in Poland as the road both to national
independence and a socialist order.In 1890, Machajski had an opportunity
to make contact with the Paris émigré's: when the remains of Adam
Mickiewicz were exhumed in June of that year for reburial in Cracow's
Wawel Castle, Machajski and Zeromski travelled to Paris to attend the
ceremony as representatives of the youth of Warsaw.In the following year
he journeyed to Cracow and in April was arrested by the Austrian
authorities in Galicia while attempting to smuggle illegal literature
across the border into Russian Poland. After four months in a Cracow
prison he was expelled from Austrian Poland, and since the Russian
police were now aware of his activities and he could not return to
Warsaw, he emigrated to Switzerland and settled in Zurich.
Here he became acquainted with the Polish émigré' circles located in
Switzerland and the Polish student groups at the University of Zurich.
It was at this point that he finally began to turn away from the
nationalist sentiments which he had previously held. In January 1892 he
published a report on the work of the "national socialists" in the
Congress Kingdom. Entitled Underground Life in the Congress Kingdom," it
appeared in Pobudka (Reveille), the Paris journal of the Gmina
Narodowa-Socjalistyczna. As far as is known, this was Machajski's first
publication, and it marked a crucial step in his ideological evolution.
Some of the sentiments expressed in this article, as well as the
periodical in which it appeared, indicate that he had not yet broken
completely with the socialist-patriot position. Clearly, however, he had
begun to feel an acute contradiction between the socialist and
nationalist components of that position and was moving toward a
repudiation of the latter and a firm commitment to proletarian
socialism.
The article was highly critical of the patriotic student circles among
which he had lately worked in Warsaw. By contrast with the energetic
activities of the "social democrats, or internationalists, he found the
national socialists lethargic, lacking a clear political profile, and,
worst of all, narrowly concentrating on intellectuals and students while
refusing to participate in May Day demonstrations and remaining aloof
from the rising labour movement. <blockquote>
We agitate among the intellectual proletariat, or rather among the
youth. Although this is very receptive material for any revolutionary
activity (and therefore for socialist propaganda), as the basis for a
party it is very elastic, irresolute, and highly susceptible to the
blandishments of those parties which have nothing in common with
socialism. In particular, the symptom is distinctly appearing among us
whereby all strata of the people are in some measure in opposition to
the partitional regime and to the gullible may be viewed as
revolutionaries.
The main hindrance to the efforts of the national socialists was their
insistence on making common cause with democratic elements who held them
back from any effective revolutionary activity.
We have apparently gone blind and do not see that those who seem to us
sincere friends are our most dangerous enemies in the field of socialist
propaganda, that we are doing nothing at all through them, that they
hold us back from any bold step, and therefore above all from sincere
participation in the socialist movement; we do not perceive that each
one of those people is a skilled "secret Jesuit" who, represent-mg
himself to us as a socialist, at the same time behind our backs
paralyses the growth of socialism more effectively than the government
and the bourgeoisie.
</blockquote> He concluded with the hope that this blindness would clear
and that instead of joining forces with other "revolutionary" Polish
parties "we will come to understand that the labour question is not a
question of a single class . . . but a question of millions, a question
of whole societies." Then, "by the solemn celebration of the workers'
holy day, our youth will show the world that it understands the pulse of
the people's life, that it itself lives and that Poland lives!"
Now Machajski began to draw a firm line of demarcation between
patriotism and revolutionary socialism. According to his wife, Vera, he
later recalled his thinking in this period in the following terms: "The
patriots were becoming socialists. And I felt that they were becoming
socialists only in order to draw the masses of the people into the
struggle for the 'fatherland,' that these aristocrats were thinking not
at all about the liberation of the masses but about an independent
Polish state." Henceforth, his wife's account adds, he would reject "any
sort of 'national-liberation' movement, any struggle for the
fatherland."
He now joined a student organisation of the Second Proletariat party in
Zurich.In May 1892 the workers of Lodz, the major textile centre of
Russian Poland, organised a general strike which turned into a virtual
uprising. Lasting eight days, the strike involved over twenty thousand
workers, there were street battles with the authorities, and more than
two hundred people were killed or wounded and hundreds more arrested.In
June, Machajski set out for Poland bearing copies of an appeal to the
Polish workers; although the appeal urged no immediate action, it sought
to draw lessons from the events in Lodz and define the course that the
workers' movement should take in the future. The appeal was printed by
the Proletariat group and was signed "The Polish Social-Revolutionary
Party," but its author was in fact Machajski himself.The keynote of the
appeal was militant internationalism. It urged the workers not to rest
content with local strikes, but to organise a nation-wide general
strike - a tactic that would later reappear as a feature of Makhaevism.
"In the future, we will organise a strike not in one city but in the
entire country; we will carry our workers' banner to the farthest
corners, we will call all the working people to battle. And then our
strike and our struggle will last not eight days but as long as it takes
to obtain our demands."Cooperation with the Russian revolutionary
movement had been one of the central tenets of the original Proletariat
party, and Machajski echoed this principle in assuring the Polish
workers that bold action on their part would arouse the Russian workers
to a joint assault on the tsarist regime: "Then our brothers, the
Russian workers, seeing how weak the tsar is in the face of the people's
might, will awaken from their age-old bondage; they will call their own
rich men to account, and together with the Polish working people they
will crush the tsar, the greatest tyrant on earth."In contrast to the
principles he would adopt later, he still considered the autocracy the
workers' main enemy and the overthrow of tsarism the immediate objective
of the workers' movement; ultimately, he would reject political goals
entirely and urge the workers to confine their strike activity to
strictly economic demands. The militancy of this appeal, however,
including the acceptance of violence, would remain a permanent part of
his outlook. <blockquote>
In taking up the struggle with the factory owners, we are at the same
time calling tsardom itself to battle. To the fusillades of the troops
the workers of Lodz replied with rocks, and were therefore obliged to
retreat. In the future, we will reply to bullets with bullets and bombs,
and we will blockade the streets against cavalry attacks. And we will
bear in mind that in the struggle with a regime like the tsar's, any
means of battle that the mind and hand of man can devise is
noble.</blockquote>
Neither Machajski nor his proclamation reached Poland. On June 17 he was
arrested on the Prussian border by the tsarist police, and his
participation in the Polish socialist movement came to an end. Shortly
thereafter the national issue, which had preoccupied Polish socialism
for so long, finally produced an irrevocable split in the ranks of the
Polish socialists. In 1892-1893 the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish
Socialist party, or PPS) was organised and came under the leadership of
Jozef Pilsudski. The PPS squarely adopted a national approach to
socialism, with the struggle against tsarism for the resurrection of
Polish independence taking precedence over social revolution. It was, in
effect, the ideological culmination of Lud Polski, Zet, Liga Polska, and
other manifestations of the patriotic current which had been gathering
strength within the Polish socialist movement in the course of the
1880s, and even drew in some remnants of the old Proletariat party. The
minority who rejected the nationalist position and adhered to the
Marxist orthodoxy of internationalism, viewing themselves as the
ideological heirs of the Great Proletariat party, formed the
Socjaldemokracja Krolestwo Polskiego (the Social Democracy of the
Kingdom of Poland, SDKP; with the adhesion of the Lithuanian Social
Democrats in 1899, it became the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of
Poland and Lithuania, or SDKPiL). Rosa Luxemburg was its leading
light.Machajski could only follow these events from a distance, if at
all. He was imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel for a year and a half, and
then for another year and a half in the "Kresty" prison of St.
Petersburg. He was finally exiled for five years to Viliuisk, in the
Iakutsk region of Siberia.
In what ways, and to what degree, did Machajski's early political
experience in Poland influence the development of his later critique of
the intelligentsia? Some of the seeds of Makhaevism may well have been
planted in this period. The element of revolutionary militancy, for
example, a salient feature of Makhaevism, emerges clearly toward the end
of this period, especially in the 1892 manifesto. Doubtless, it was the
product of a personality already inclined in this direction interacting
with a political culture favourable to its development. The biographical
information available on Machajski is too thin to support any but the
most general kind of psychological profile. At the very least, however,
it can be said that Machajski was a highly intense, strong-willed
individual who made commitments passionately and wholeheartedly. "Even
in his childhood and youth," Zeromski wrote of him, "an unbridled
fanaticism characterised him. Initially it was adoration of the poetry
of Slowacki, of the theatre, then it was materialist, patriotic, social
fanaticism."Zeromski also attributed to him an "inflexible character and
iron will."At the same time, bitterness was easily bred in the Polish
situation, where political repressiveness and social injustice were
exacerbated by national oppression. The fact that the Polish socialist
movement developed in close ideological and organisational interaction
with the Russian Narodnaia Volia further encouraged in its adherents a
tendency to regard terror as an acceptable weapon of struggle. There was
no lack of heroic martyrs to serve as examples for the young Machajski:
at the beginning of i886, in fact, just a few months before he entered
the university, the Warsaw Citadel had been the scene of the execution
of four leaders of the Proletariat party.
A more specific element of the Polish scene may also have made a lasting
impact on Machajski. After the insurrection of 1863, there was a
noticeable tendency in Russian Poland for impoverished members of the
szlachta to enter the ranks of the intelligentsia. Considerable numbers
of them went into the professions or assumed managerial positions in the
new industries.The Proletariat party's newspaper, Proletariat, even
classified the "bourgeois-gentry intelligentsia" among the reactionary
and exploiting classes, with only a tiny segment (including, presumably,
the Proletariat's own leaders, many of whom, such as Ludwik Waryivski,
were drawn from this group) capable of becoming allies of the
proletariat.This phenomenon could, perhaps, have established the first
link in Machajski's mind between the intelligentsia and the privileged
classes, his unshakeable image of the intelligentsia as the servant of
the bourgeoisie. Although it may have been more pronounced in Russian
Poland, however, this social development was not unique to it and could
be observed in Russia itself. There, state service provided an
alternative for members of the gentry leaving the land (while in Russian
Poland state service was largely barred to non-Russians), but they were
also moving into the professional intelligentsia.
Finally, and most important, it was Machajski's Polish experience that
first opened his eyes to the possibility that forces within the
socialist movement itself were holding back the kind of all-out class
struggle to which he had become committed. As he picked his way through
the various Polish political groups and currents of the 1880s, he became
increasingly critical of what came to be known as the
"socialist-patriots." Most of all, he rejected their view of the nation
as an organic whole with certain common interests that transcended class
conflicts - a reprise of the notion of social solidarity which the early
Polish socialists had criticised so vehemently in the proponents of
"organic work." Machajski's growing militancy impelled him to repudiate
such an outlook because it seemed to pose the threat of reformism and
the restraint of working-class radicalism; this, too, would reappear as
a fundamental component of Makhaevism.
Given the position he had reached by 1892, it is easy to see why the PPS
would have had little appeal for him. The question arises, however, as
to why he did not ultimately throw in his lot with the SDKPiL. With its
Marxist internationalism and unremitting anti patriotism, it would seem
to have been the natural political destination toward which he was
headed at the time of his arrest. Yet he eventually rejected it, along
with all other forms of socialism, no less firmly than he rejected the
PPS. Quite possibly he would have joined the SDKPiL had he remained in
Polish politics. Fate - in the person of the Russian authorities
-intervened, however, and he emerged from his prolonged imprisonment and
exile with a different, and much broader, perspective than he had had
previously. This new perspective was based not merely on a
re-examination of Polish socialism, but even more on an analysis of
developments within the German Social-Democratic party, which he was
able to follow in Siberia. As the largest and apparently most successful
of Marxist parties, German Social Democracy had exemplary significance
for many other socialists, especially in Eastern Europe, who minutely
examined its evolution and heatedly debated its doctrines and practices.
It was his investigation of German Social Democracy that formed the main
subject of Machajski's first essays, and by the time these began to
appear at the end of the 1890s he was moving well to the left of Marxism
itself.
The relationship between Machajski's Polish experience and his later
views, therefore, was complex and somewhat indirect. Certainly it would
be a mistake to regard Machajski's critique of the intelligentsia and
socialism merely as a kind of projection of his earlier reaction against
Polish nationalism. This is the implication of Vera Machajska's
statement that Machajski's rejection of the socialist-patriots was his
"first lesson in how the intelligentsia was using socialism in its own
interests."Although revolutionaries in the Russian Empire did tend to
mature early, it should be kept in mind that Machajski was not quite
twenty when he entered Warsaw University, and only twenty-five when he
was arrested. Makhaevism was the product of an older man who had gone
through the fire of prison and exile, and not just the continuation of
an earlier path. Furthermore, it is worth noting that except for a brief
period after the 1905 revolution Machajski never again directly involved
himself in Polish affairs, in itself a reflection of the shift in his
interests and preoccupation's. Most significantly, however, it is a
considerable leap from rejection of Polish patriots to rejection of the
intelligentsia. After all, the Polish situation, where the national
issue was of paramount importance, was hardly typical of socialist
movements in general, and Machajski could not have been unaware of this.
It was only when he was forcibly removed from the Polish context that he
reached the conclusion that the threat of socialist reformism came not
just from some misguided or self-interested Polish nationalists but from
a much more widespread and significant social force, and, indeed, from
the theory and practice of Marxism itself. His early years in Poland may
have first raised in his mind the question of the "corruption" of
socialism, but the answer he arrived at, and began to voice in his
initial essays, was largely the product of his years in exile.
The Siberian exile to which Machajski was subjected was neither a
desired nor a desirable experience, but it had little in common with the
Gulag of Stalin's time. For the most part, the tsarist government was
interested in isolating from the Empire's population centres those whom
it considered to be political subversives, not in brutalising them or in
exploiting their labour. Isolation was certainly accomplished: the
Iakutsk region, or Iakutiia, comprising most of eastern Siberia, was an
area about two-thirds the size of European Russia and very sparsely
settled. Political exiles were dispersed in small groups, or "colonies,"
across this immense and nearly empty space. For some, that was
punishment enough; loneliness and inactivity drove a number of exiles to
madness or suicide.
For those able to withstand the isolation, the living conditions, the
boredom, and, in the northernmost settlements, the winter-long Arctic
darkness, exile was, at worst, tolerable, and, at best, provided a kind
of graduate course in political science. In the prisons and convoys en
route to their places of exile, the "politicals" were separated from the
common criminals and were generally treated more carefully and more
respectfully by their keepers. Although the exiles were subject to
police surveillance, climate and lack of transportation made escape from
the more remote settlements unlikely (though not impossible), and there
the exiles were left pretty much to their own devices. There was no
shortage of books, even on sensitive subjects, and there was plenty of
time for political debate, which could be carried on with a greater
degree of freedom and openness than at home. Especially if an exile
received financial help and reading matter from family and friends,
Siberia could prove a refreshing and educational respite from the
anxieties of underground life. Those who resumed their political
activity when their term of exile was over were no less determined to
overthrow the tsarist government, but, thanks to their reading and their
discussions with other exiles, they were often much better informed as
to how to go about doing it. Lenin provides the most famous example:
during his term of exile his relatives kept him well supplied with books
and journals, and in between salubrious outdoor activities he was able
to compose a series of Marxist treatises and articles for publication in
St. Petersburg. Even for Machajski, in a much more remote and
uncomfortable location than Lenin, Siberian exile had positive benefits.
It gave him the leisure (albeit enforced) to work out his new ideas,and
it gave him the opportunity to disseminate them to a receptive audience
of fellow exiles. Far from hindering him, the conditions of Siberian
exile played a decisive role in enabling him to develop Makhaevism and
to introduce it into the Russian revolutionary movement.
Viliuisk itself was hardly a spot that any revolutionary would have
chosen as a place of residence. Though not as far north as some of the
exile communities (it was at least below the Arctic Circle), it was one
of the more remote locations to which political exiles were sent,
situated several hundred miles Northwest of the town of Iakutsk. It had
a total of fifty buildings and contained, according to the 1897 census,
all of 609 inhabitants. Even the pre-Revolutionary Russian encyclopaedia
which soberly reported these statistics could not refrain from
characterising Viliuisk as a "sorry settlement." Its chief claim to fame
in radical circles was that Chernyshevskii had endured eleven years of
exile there. When Machajski arrived, however, he was greeted by a small
but lively and harmonious community of exiles. According to Mikhail
Romas', who was living there when Machajski reached the settlement in
the winter of 1895, there were some two dozen exiles in and around
Viliuisk, including several whose wives had accompanied them.If the
political exiles in lakutiia as a whole formed a broad cross-section of
the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, the Viliuisk colony
reflected that movement in microcosm: there were Poles and populists,
and Social Democrats of various stripes. Henryk Duleba, for example, had
been a member of the old Proletariat party, while Romas' himself was a
narodovolets. A bit later came the Social-Democratic "economists":
Liubov' Aizenshtadt, who, according to Vera Machajska, became one of
Machajski's adherents, was of this persuasion. Most of the exiles
managed to find some work, such as giving lessons, or kept themselves
busy in other ways, and were on friendly terms. "Only Machajski, a man
of great intellect and crystal-clear soul, immediately upon his arrival
pounced upon the books and refused any work or assistance; he was in
very great material need. Quite often, especially in the winter, we
gathered in one apartment or another, and arguments and endless
discussions would begin. Iudelevskii [a populist exile] and Machajski,
who were studying Marx, often did not see eye-to-eye on the
interpretation of one or another of his positions."
Machajski had no lack of books to pounce upon, now that his years of
imprisonment had come to an end. "As far as books were concerned," his
wife wrote, "conditions in Viliuisk were exceptionally favourable," with
the exiles in possession of "not only the basic works of Marx, Engels,
and Kautsky, not only Russian journals, but whole runs of Neue Zeit for
several years."New books arrived as well, including Eduard Bernstein's
works of Social-Democratic revisionism, which played a crucial role in
the formation of Machajski's ideas. Bernstein's Voraussetzungen des
Sozialismus was circulating in Iakutiia in 1899, the year of its
publication, and copies of it quickly made their way to Viliuisk.
Between 1898 and 1900, Machajski composed the first two of the essays
that were to form his major work, The Intellectual Worker (Umstvennyi
rabochii). His fellow exiles in Viliuisk helped him to duplicate them on
a hectograph and send copies to other exile colonies.The exiles seem to
have had a remarkably effective distribution network for what would
today be termed samizdat literature, for Machajski's work quickly made
its way across the vast spaces of Siberia. The effect of these
hectographed pamphlets was electrifying, and for months they dominated
the exiles' discussions. To some degree, Makhaevism aroused interest
simply as an intellectual novelty, bringing a breath of fresh air into
the stale ideological debates of the exiles. In some cases, however, its
criticism of the intelligentsia caught the conscience of individuals
who, of course, were themselves intelligenty. "On many people it made an
enormous impression. Not a few exiles became 'Makhaevists' under its
influence."
There is ample evidence of the widespread circulation of Machajski's
essays in the Siberian exile community. To the north-east, in the
Verkhoiansk colony, "the question of the intelligentsia" became an acute
issue, thanks to Machajski.By the end of 1899 a copy of the first part
of The Intellectual Worker had reached the Polish socialist Jan
Strozecki in the settlement of Sredne-Kolymsk, in the far northeastern
corner of Iakutiia. Strozecki, a schoolmate of Machajski's in Kielce and
Warsaw, had been associated with the Second Proletariat party and
subsequently with the PPS; he referred to Machajski's essay in a letter
dated December i6, 1899 (N.S.).58 South of Viliuisk, in Olekminsk, the
pamphlets came into the hands of B. I. Gorev, a Social Democrat who
would later write on the history of anarchism - and at one point Gorev
helped to bury them in the ground in anticipation of a police search.Far
to the southwest, the pamphlets reached Leon Trotsky, then in exile in
Ust'-Kut, in Irkutsk gubernia.
< blockquote>Down from Viliuisk, Machajski's lithographed booklets were
delivered to us. The first booklet, in which he subjected the
opportunism of Social Democracy to criticism, made a great impression on
everyone with its array of facts and quotations. The second booklet, as
far as I remember, was in the same mode, but weaker. The third one,
however, in which the author spelled out his positive program, slipping
in part into revolutionary syndicalism and in part into trade-unionism,
seemed to me, as it did to the majority of the Social-Democratic exiles,
extremely weak. Machajski had a few followers, primarily from the
Viliuisk colony. The old populists seized upon his criticism as a weapon
against Social Democracy in general, without worrying unduly about his
conclusions.</blockquote>
This was not the last of Trotsky's encounters with Makhaevism. In fact,
he later had the opportunity to become personally acquainted with its
creator. On a visit to Irkutsk in the summer of 1902, he was present at
an evening-long argument between Machajski and K. K. Bauer, an adherent
of the Legal Marxist and liberal Peter Struve. When Trotsky tried to
intervene in the debate, both of its participants turned on him, and, in
what was certainly a rare act of forbearance on Trotsky's part, he
deemed it best to keep his silence.
From Siberia, the exiles subsequently carried word of Machajski's views
to their revolutionary comrades in Russia and Europe. Trotsky provides a
noteworthy example. When he turned up on Lenin's doorstep in London late
in 1902, the two strolled around the city while Trotsky filled Lenin in
on the news from Siberia, telling him, among other things, "about the
three essays by Machajski."
Shortly after composing these essays, Machajski himself was able to
begin disseminating them to a somewhat broader audience, and to begin
creating an organisation based on them. He was released from exile in
1900, but in the course of his journey westward he was accidentally
arrested, having been mistaken for the future Bolshevik (and biographer
of Michael Bakunin) luni Steklov, who had escaped from Iakutsk exile in
November 1899. When the police found a number of copies of The
Intellectual Worker in his possession, they put him in jail. A group of
exiles in the city of Irkutsk put up 5,000 rubles in bail for him, which
facilitated his release from prison but prevented him from fleeing the
city. He remained in Irkutsk under police surveillance .
In Irkutsk, Machaj ski formed the first group of "Makhaevists" and began
to make contact with the railroad workers, bakers, and typesetters of
the city.The Intellectual Worker was reproduced on a mimeograph, a small
printing press was established, and in April 1902 the group printed a
May Day appeal to the workers. This manifesto embodied the basic
Makhaevist position that the workers must struggle solely for their own
economic demands and not for political goals, which would benefit only
"educated society." It berated the Social Democrats for politicising the
workers' movement, and it called for mass economic strikes and
demonstrations.
At the beginning of 1903, the Makhaevist group was broken up by
arrests - although, as the Social Democrats were to discover, it left
lasting traces on the labour movement of Irkutsk. According to one
source, the immediate cause of the arrest of Machajski and his adherents
was their organisation of a bakers' strike and their publication of
leaflets calling for an "insurrection of the hungry."Machajski and three
of his associates were sentenced to six years of exile each in the
forbidding settlement of Sredne-Kolymsk.First, howeyer, they were taken
to Aleksandrovskii Tsentral, a transit prison located a few miles
outside Irkutsk where the warden was instructed to keep them under the
strictest surveillance as especially dangerous persons."
The starosta, or elected spokesman, of the political prisoners at the
time of Machajski's arrival at Aleksandrovskii Tsentral was the Social
Democrat Petr Garvi, whose memoirs provide a detailed account of
Machajski's stay there. Machajski's ideas had by now created such a
sensation throughout Siberia that Garvi himself had heard about him
while en route to the prison; when Machajski was brought there he was
received by the other politicals almost as a celebrity. A hectographed
copy of his Intellectual Worker circulated among them and was read "to
shreds," provoking, as usual, heated debates, and overshadowing even the
old arguments between the Marxists and the populists.
Machajski himself made a vivid, and for the most part favourable,
impression on his fellow prisoners. When he arrived, an agreement was in
effect between the prison administration and the political prisoners
which gave the latter certain liberties in return for their promise not
to attempt escape. Machajski, though he expressed disapproval of such
arrangements in principle and was in fact hoping to make an escape,
agreed to abide by the arrangement - and Garvi adds that he soon came to
realise that Machajski was a man who would not go back on his word. As
Garvi describes him, Machajski had considerable personal charm. "Of
medium height, well built, with the eyes of a Polish revolutionary
fanatic set in an energetic face framed by a thin beard, he had a
striking vitality." Though unyielding when it came to defending his
views, he was extremely cheerful, delighting in gymnastic tricks, chess,
and dancing. He also turned out to be an excellent cook and considerably
upgraded the prisoners' cuisine -which was perhaps just as well for his
own health, for Garvi also noted in him a weakness for alcohol.
During the few months that Machajski spent at Aleksandrov-skii Tsentral,
a dramatic confrontation took place between the political prisoners and
the prison administration. Following a precedent set by the previous
year's batch of exiles, the prisoners bound for the various colonies in
Iakutiia demanded to be told their precise destination before their
departure instead of en route, in order to notify relatives and maintain
uninterrupted mail deliveries. When the authorities in Irkutsk refused
their request, the prisoners barricaded themselves in their barracks -
and then faced the question of what to do next. Garvi depicts Machajski
as a firebrand in this episode, and not just figuratively speaking. If
Garvi is to be believed, Machaj ski first argued that the prisoners
should offer armed resistance to any attempt to storm the barracks, even
though they had only a few revolvers and knives amongst them. Then he
proposed that the prisoners threaten to burn down the barracks, with
themselves inside, rather like the Old Believers of yore, if their
demands were not met. He must have had considerable powers of
persuasion, because a majority of the prisoners adopted his proposal,
over Garvi's strenuous objection, and an ultimatum was issued to the
authorities. It worked, in a manner of speaking: after two weeks, the
prisoners were finally informed of their specific destinations - but in
many cases discovered that those destinations were now more remote than
their original sentences warranted.
With this episode, the gentlemen's agreement between the prisoners and
the warden broke down, and Machajski was now morally free to make an
escape attempt. He was assisted by one of his adherents, A. Shetlikh,
who had met him in prison in St. Petersburg and been exiled with him to
Viliuisk. Shetlikh, having been released from exile, now came to the
area and helped to organise Machajski's escape.At the end of May or
beginning of June, on the very day the prisoners were to set off from
the transit prison under armed guard (thus making flight virtually
impossible), Garvi persuaded the too-trusting warden to allow him to go
into the free settlement to buy provisions for the journey, accompanied
by Machajski and his comrade Mitkevich. They talked their guard into
allowing them to pay a last visit to a "sick" friend who lived in the
village, and while Garvi sipped coffee with the guard in the next room,
first Machajski and then Mitkevich climbed out the invalid's bedroom
window and down a ladder. Even at such a delicate moment, Machajski had
sufficient aplomb to wave good-bye to Garvi, behind the guard's back, as
he climbed over the windowsill. Garvi learned later that after wandering
about in the taiga for some time, the two made their way back to
Irkutsk, where they found refuge with friends and completed their
escape. Machajski returned to European Russia and from there went
abroad, finally settling in Geneva. "In 1904," Garvi concludes his
narrative, "I met him-very warmly-in Paris."
During the next two or three years Machajski published most of his major
writings, developing the theoretical foundations of Makhaevism that he
had first laid out in his Siberian essays. It is clear, however, that
even before he left Siberia, Makhaevism was already very well known. The
hectographed and mimeographed copies of his writings continued to
circulate. Familiarity with Makhaevism had begun to seep into the
various branches of the revolutionary movement and, thanks to the
Makhaevists' efforts in Irkutsk, into the labour movement as
well.Whatever the degree of obscurity that may have enveloped Machajski
subsequently, in the early years of the twentieth century his criticism
of the intelligentsia as a "new class" of exploiters, and of socialism
as its class ideology, were the subject of widespread interest,
discussion, and debate.
From 1903 to 1906, when the revolution in Russia permitted him to live
briefly in St. Petersburg, Machajski remained in Switzerland. Now
married to a Russian woman who went by the name of Vera and had been a
fellow exile in Siberia, Machajski devoted himself mainly to elaborating
the theoretical foundations of Makhaevism. At the beginning of 1904, he
turned for financial assistance to his old friend Stefan Zeromski, who
had now achieved fame as a novelist. They had not been in contact for
thirteen years. In a letter of February 24, written from Geneva,
Machajski described himself as destitute. Not surprisingly, his views on
the intelligentsia had alienated all political groups both in Russia and
in Poland: "Here in emigration I have not counted, nor can I count, on
any co-operation at all from the Polish and Russian intelligentsia." He
had found some occasional work as a translator from German into Russian
and as a type-setter at one of the Russian presses, but now even these
odd jobs were no longer available to him. He seemed less concerned with
subsistence, however, than with the publication of his writings,
including one which he described as "a comparison of my own views with
the latest currents." Among other money-making projects which he had in
mind, he asked whether Zeromski might commission him to translate one of
his works into Russian, providing an advance large enough to enable him
to survive and to print a book some two hundred pages in length.In
subsequent letters he told Zeromski that he had worked as a
house-painter and again as a typesetter. He also tried giving lectures
in Geneva and Bern, and, through Russian émigré' circles, in Berlin as
well, but few paid to come and hear him.
Although the translation project did not come to pass, Zeromski on more
than one occasion did supply financial assistance. Another source,
however, casts some doubt on the degree of deprivation Machajski was
suffering. Max Nomad met Machajski in Geneva in 1905 and for several
years was an adherent of his views and an activist in Makhaevist groups.
As Nomad describes him, Machajski had a compelling physical presence:
"He was thirty-eight at that time, but looked at least fifty. His
ascetic face reminded me of the pictures of John the Baptist." According
to Nomad, however, while Machajski and his wife were in Geneva their
living expenses and the printing of Machajski's writings were financed
by "a rich convert." This was a young woman named Janina Berson, the
daughter of a Petersburg banker. Having been won over to Machajski's
views by Vera Machajska, Berson contributed a large part of her
allowance to the Makhaevist cause. Like the Bolsheviks and other Russian
revolutionaries, Machajski was able to find at least one wealthy "angel"
willing to back the destruction of her own class.
By one means or another, Machajski succeeded in getting his writings
into print. The work in progress that he mentioned to Zeromski was
probably part 3 of The Intellectual Worker, comprising two sections
entitled "Socialism and the Labour Movement" and "Socialist Science As a
New Religion." They joined the two Siberian essays, "The Evolution of
Social Democracy" and "Scientific Socialism," which, respectively,
formed parts 1 and 2. All three parts of The Intellectual Worker, the
major theoretical exposition of Makhaevism, appeared in Geneva in
1904-1905.Also in Geneva in 1905, Machajski published two shorter works:
The Bourgeois Revolution and the Workers' Cause (Burzhuaznaia
revoliutsiia i rabochee delo), which was reprinted in St. Petersburg in
the following year, and The Bankruptcy of Nineteenth-Century Socialism
(Bankrotstvo sotsializma XIX stoletiia). Two other works round out his
theoretical writings. In 1906, he published in St. Petersburg a
translation of excerpts from Marx's The Holy Family, with extensive
notes by the translator. Finally, there is an unpublished manuscript,
written in Polish in 1910-1911 and subsequently translated into Russian
by Vera Machajska. Two journals, each of which appeared in only a single
issue, complete the corpus of Machajski's writings: Rabochii zagovor
(The Workers' Conspiracy) of 1908, devoted mainly to revolutionary
tactics, and Rabochaia revoliutsiia (The Workers' Revolution),
Machajski's response to the Bolshevik seizure of power, dating from
1918.
Thus, around the time of the 1905 revolution, Machajski's writings began
to circulate in print, both within Russia and in emigration. For the
most part, however, all of his subsequent writings amounted to
restatements and minor amplifications of the basic positions he had
worked out in Siberia. For an analysis of the theoretical bases of
Makhaevism, therefore, his body of writings is best taken as different
expressions of the same fundamental set of ideas rather than as a
chronological progression.
His views did undergo one major shift, however, as he was writing his
very first essay, "The Evolution of Social Democracy." The question that
preoccupied him in Siberia was why Marxism, particularly in Germany,
seemed to have lost its revolutionary impetus. The essay was devoted to
this subject, beginning with a lengthy analysis of the German party and
then proceeding to consideration of the PPS, the Bund (the General
Jewish Workers' Union in Russia and Poland), and the Russian
Social-Democratic party. All these parties, according to Machajski, had
succumbed to the fatal preoccupation with winning political freedom that
Marx himself had introduced into the movement. In the Communist
Manifesto, Marx had urged the communists to "labour everywhere for the
union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries," and, as
the first step of the proletarian revolution, "to raise the proletariat
to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy."
Machajski maintained that only a revolutionary, economic struggle could
further the workers' cause, not a democratic, political one. It was
utopian to believe that the proletariat could utilise legal
institutions, howsoever democratic, to attack the property structure of
capitalist society. "The economic foundations of the bourgeoisie's
exploitation and domination can be destroyed only by the domination of
the proletariat, only by its 'despotic attack on the right of
property,"' as he felt the Communist Manifesto had much more accurately
phrased it in another passage.
Machajski claimed that Marx had formulated just such a policy in his
militant Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League of
1850.That statement had urged the German communists to break with the
democratic parties rather than to make common cause with them, and it
contained the famous reference to "permanent" revolution. Here,
Machajski declared, the communists had no thought of trying to use the
legal rights and institutions of the class state to express the will of
the proletariat. But the tactics outlined in the Manifesto rather than
the positions taken in the Address had determined the future policy of
Social Democracy. That policy was expressed in the formula: "the
proletariat can fight for its emancipation only by using the political
rights of the democratic state." Its adoption by the First International
had been the source of the Bakuninist opposition to Marx. The workers
who supported that opposition were not protesting against the
centralization that Marx had imposed on the International, as Bakunin
and his anarchist followers claimed, but against the fact that this
centralization lacked revolutionary content. It arose not because the
General Council, the leadership of the International which Marx
controlled, consisted of 'jacobins" who were plotting their own
dictatorship on the morrow of the revolution, but because it did not
consist of revolutionaries.
The emphasis on politics had led the International to concentrate on
separate national revolutions. The Communist Manifesto made the first
step in the workers' revolution nationalist in form: the proletariat of
each country must contend with its own bourgeoisie. The International
had continued this policy of encouraging the proletariat to participate
in the political life of individual countries. But the seizure of power
by the proletariat must be an international act; it could result only in
reformism if confined within national limits.Whether the objective was a
parliamentary majority, as in the case of German Social Democracy, a
constitutional replacement for autocracy in the case of Russian Social
Democracy, political independence for Poland or equal rights for the
Jews, such a pursuit inevitably led to a compromise between the cause of
the proletariat and the cause of the liberal and radical bourgeoisie.
The results of such political compromises were necessarily fatal for
social revolution. Only the Polish Proletariat party - to which
Machajski himself, of course, had belonged - won his praise as a "party
of revolutionary Marxism," for it had devoted itself not to gaining the
independence of Poland but to immediate economic revolution. (He also
had a good word to say for Rosa Luxemburg as a critic of opportunism
within the German Social-Democratic party.) The workers themselves would
respond eagerly if Social Democracy changed its ways and pursued truly
revolutionary objectives, Machajski argued, as the Lodz May Day strike
of 1892 had clearly demonstrated.
Machajski began this first essay as a Marxist revolutionary, an
impatient but loyal critic of Social Democracy. His critique reflected
the experiences and preoccupation's of his Polish period: his rejection
of the increasingly nationalist orientation of the Polish socialist
movement, the impression made on him by the 1892 Lodz strike. It was not
a particularly unusual or original critique. The Address of the Central
Committee to the Communist League, which Marx composed at a moment when
his expectations of revolution were at a high point, was a favourite
text for Marxist militants opposed to the political pragmatism of other
Marxists.Machajski's essay assumed that the "opportunism" of the Marxist
parties in Germany and the Russian Empire was merely an ideological or
tactical error which could be corrected; his purpose was to persuade
them to renounce their absorption in legal tactics and political goals
and return to their true Marxist labour of overthrowing the economic and
social system of capitalism. It was an objective many of Machajski's
Social-Democratic readers in Siberia, such as Trotsky, shared, and they
could welcome his essay as a useful salvo in the battle against
Revisionism. There was little in it that was distinctively "Makhaevist."
By the time he reached the conclusion of his essay, however, Machajski
had become convinced that persuasion was useless, for Social Democracy's
turn to "opportunism" stemmed from a more fundamental source of
corruption than mere tactical errors or loss of nerve. In a newly
written preface to the Geneva edition of this essay, he warned his
readers that he had worked out his point of view only in the course of
writing the work and had expressed it clearly only in the conclusion.
The earlier parts of the essay, he conceded, displayed a serious defect:
"the author kept trying to find a way to turn Marxism away from its
errors and onto the true revolutionary path, an effort which later
investigation showed was completely utopian." Only in the conclusion had
he realised that the evolution of Social Democracy revealed the presence
within the movement of "forces which, by their very nature, cannot wish
the abolition of the capitalist contradiction." The doctrines of Marxism
permitted the "continual penetration of non-proletarian elements into
the revolutionary army of the proletariat, elements which hinder its
development and its definitive attack on the bourgeois order."
In the course of the essay Machajski had made some passing references to
these elements but had not singled them out for special attention. He
had referred to "the ruling bourgeois classes" as comprising "not only
the owners of industrial and commercial capital, but also the privileged
employees of the capitalist stateoliticians, journalists, scholars, and
all the 'noble' professions."In regard to the June Days of Paris in
1848, he argued that the Suppression of the workers by the newly
established republic "showed the proletariat that its enemy was not just
the owners of capital . . . but the whole mass of privileged employees
of the capitalist state: lawyers, journalists, scholars." Finally,
however, he realised that he had made a fundamental discovery:
socialism, and particularly Marxism, represented the class interests not
of the workers but of a rising new class - the intelligentsia, or, as he
termed them, the "intellectual workers," who sought a profitable
accommodation for themselves with the capitalist order rather than its
definitive overthrow. This now became the core idea of Makhaevism, the
doctrine which gave it its unique character and distinguished it from
other revolutionary currents in the Russian Empire.
The key that unlocked the true nature of Social Democracy for Machajski
was a series of articles which Karl Kautsky had published in Die Neue
Zeit in 1894-1395. Under the conditions of capitalist production, the
German Social-Democratic theorist wrote, "intellectual work becomes the
special function of a particular class, which as a rule does not
directly - nor, by its nature, necessarily-have an interest in
capitalist exploitation: the so-called intelligentsia [Intelligenz],
which makes its living from the sale of its special knowledge and
talents."To some extent, the intelligentsia provided a refuge for ruined
small property- owners: "A new, very numerous, and continually growing
middle class is formed in this way," masking to some degree "the decline
of the middle class as a whole."The end result was a significant new
socio-economic formation: "in the intelligentsia a new middle class is
arising, growing in part because of the requirements of the capitalist
process of production, in part through the decline of small business, a
middle class whose size and significance in relation to the petty
bourgeoisie is steadily increasing, but which is also more and more
depressed by the mounting oversupply of labour and thereby is
permanently discontented."Both the power of the intelligentsia and the
power of its discontent merited the attention of Social Democracy.
Having identified this "new middle class" and its growing numbers,
Kautsky proceeded to deny it any independent significance. The
intelligentsia was a very heterogeneous group, composed of many
different strata; it had no specific class interest of its own, only
professional interests within a particular speciality. An actor and a
clergyman, a doctor and an attorney, a chemist and an editorial writer
could have neither intellectual nor economic interests in common.What
distinguished the intelligentsia from the proletariat was a kind of
caste or guild mentality, a sense of the intelligentsia's privileged
position as the "aristocracy of the spirit," and a desire to maintain
that exclusiveness by limiting entry into the intelligentsia.A good part
of the intelligentsia, Kautsky felt, could be won over to the side of
the proletariat. Excepted were those groups whose work required them to
justify the bourgeoisie and share its sentiments: certain kinds of
teachers and journalists, legal and administrative officials, direct
participants in the extraction of surplus labour from the workers
(Kautsky seems to have had managers in mind here). By and large,
however, the intelligentsia was a potential ally of the proletariat by
virtue of its role as a bystander in the process of capitalist
exploitation, its lack of a homogeneous class interest, and its broader
intellectual horizon, which gave it a greater capacity than any other
part of the population for rising above its own interests and looking at
the needs of society as a whole.
Machajski viewed the position of the intelligentsia in an entirely
different light. He maintained that Kautsky had revealed the existence
of a new class of exploiters but had refused to draw the appropriate
conclusions. The doctrines of Social Democracy denied the possibility of
the growth of the middle classes and insisted that the fruits of
capitalism were being usurped only by a small number of capitalists and
large landowners.
Meanwhile, the evolution of capitalism displays the indisputable growth
of bourgeois society. Even if small enterprises inevitably perish, the
middle classes of bourgeois society, in the form of the continually
growing number of privileged employees of capital, increase all the
same, and so "all the advantages of the gigantic growth of productive
forces are monopolised" not by a "handful" of plutocrats alone, but by
the continually growing bourgeois society.
Here was the real enemy of the proletariat: "the privileged employees of
the capitalist order, . . . the 'intelligentsia,' the army of
intellectual workers,"no less interested than the capitalists themselves
in the continued exploitation of the manual workers. In Marxism, the
crucial factor determining class relationships is ownership of the means
of production. Machajski, however, denied the central importance of
property ownership. The intelligentsia owned neither factories nor land,
and yet, he observed, it bore the same relationship to the workers as
the property owners did.
In every country, in every state, there exists a huge class of people
who have neither industrial nor commercial capital, yet live like real
masters. They own neither land nor factories nor workshops, but they
enjoy a robber's income no smaller than that of the middling and large
capitalists. They do not have their own enterprises, but they are
"white-hands" just like the capitalists. They too spend their whole
lives free from manual labour, and if they do participate in production,
then it is only as managers, directors, engineers. That is, in relation
to the workers, to the slaves of manual labour, they are commanders and
masters just as much as the capitalist proprietors .
Although the intelligentsia did not own the means of production, it did
possess and exploit a special form of "property," namely, education.
A larger and larger part of bourgeois society receives the funds for its
parasitical existence as an intelligentsia, an army of intellectual
workers which does not personally possess the means of production but
continually increases and multiplies its income, which it obtains as the
hereditary owner of all knowledge, culture, and civilization.
Hence the fundamental class conflict in contemporary capitalist society
was not the antagonism between the owners and nonowners of the means of
production: it was the larger conflict between those who did manual
labour and those who did not, between the uneducated and the educated.
As Machajski summarised his position several years later, the
intelligentsia consisted of all those who had any sort of higher
education, in short, of everyone with a diploma. Each year the secondary
and higher educational institutions of every country turned out tens of
thousands of people who would occupy a privileged position in society,
free from the yoke of manual labour. Only a small minority were
capitalists; the vast majority, the "professional intelligentsia,"
received not a return on their own capital but a comfortable income in
the form of a "salary" or "fee." "Some of the more able or more cunning
of those equipped with diplomas, in state administration or industry, in
public or literary careers, attain such high posts that they live in no
less luxury and wealth than any big capitalist."Throughout the world,
"knowledge, just as much as land or capital, furnishes the means for the
parasitic lordly existence of the present-day robbers."
Kautsky was wrong, Machajski declared, in claiming that the various
components of the intelligentsia did not share a common class interest.
The class interest of the intelligentsia was the preservation of its
hereditary monopoly on education, the source of which was the economic
exploitation of the proletariat. Marxism regarded the higher income of
nonmanual workers as a just reward for their "skilled labour power."
Machajski maintained a much stricter interpretation of the labour theory
of value and refused to admit that nonmanual workers could create value.
Such workers lived on "net national profit," the total national sum of
the proletariat's surplus labour. This fund constituted the hereditary
property of bourgeois families and enabled successive generations of
intelligenty to educate themselves. Then, in the form of payment for
their skilled labour, they too acquired the right to appropriate the
unpaid labour of the proletariat. "Bourgeois society passes on to its
offspring surplus value appropriated under the guise of a reward for
labour 'of a higher quality,' and the greatest riches of mankind -
knowledge, science - become the hereditary monopoly of a privileged
minority."
The position of the European proletariat as a whole had not
significantly altered in the half-century of Social Democracy's
existence, according to Machajski; the contradictions of capitalism were
no weaker than before. The evolution of Social Democracy, therefore,
must reflect something else: the changing composition of "bourgeois
society" itself, namely, the rise of the "intellectual workers" and
their growing stake in the capitalist order. The task of a truly
revolutionary socialism was not to deny the rise of this new class but
to declare it "the new enemy of the proletariat."
In developing his theory that the intelligentsia was a rising new class
of "intellectual workers" using socialism to pursue its own interests at
the expense of the workers, Machajski utilised basic Marxist principles
of social analysis. He adhered to Marx's economic materialism and class
theory, broadening and adapting them somewhat and turning them against
the Marxists themselves. Nor did he have to go outside the Marxist
movement itself to find inspiration for his initial criticism of
Social-Democratic policies. He could draw, for example, on the revolt of
the so-called Jungen (the Young Ones), or Independents, within the
German Social-Democratic party in the early 18905.40 The Jungen were
young intellectuals of a radical bent whose criticism of the party
leadership broke into the open with the party's decision in 180 to
reject a general walkout of the German workers on May 1 and to limit
observance to after-work meetings and peaceful festivities. This alone
would have been enough to attract Machajski's attention. The celebration
of May Day played a particularly important role in early Polish
socialism,and Machajski himself placed great emphasis on May Day strikes
and demonstrations as a way of mobilising the working class. The
controversy regarding May Day brought to the surface deeper frustrations
over the German party's seeming loss of revolutionary spirit, and the
Jungen erupted with accusations that the socialist movement and its
leadership had been corrupted by the preoccupation with parliamentary
practices. The Jungen voiced their criticism at the Halle Party
Con-gress of 1890 and the Erfurt Congress of 1891, where they were read
out of the party. Machajski had become familiar with their views while
living in Zurich before his arrest and sympathized with their position.
He referred approvingly to them in the early pages of his first essay.
His ultimate rejection of Marxism itself, however, raises the complex
issue of just how much Makhaevism owed to anarchism. Machajski's
unyielding opposition to political activity strongly echoed the central
tenet of anarchism, while his emphasis on the general strike as an
instrument of working-class action was closely reminiscent of
anarchosyndicalism. His preoccupation with the intelligentsia, however,
was not present in the same form, or to the same degree, in anarchism,
and this was enough to give Makhaevism a distinctive profile. For his
part, Machajski never considered himself an anarchist, and he denounced
anarchism in much the same terms that he applied to Marxism.
Nevertheless, not only was there a considerable degree of doctrinal
similarity, but when Makhaevism as an organised movement got under way
there was a good deal of exchange of personnel between Makhaevist groups
and anarchist groups. Of particular interest is the question of
Machajski's familiarity with the writings of Michael Bakunin. Though
Marxism formed the starting point of Makhaevism, its general tone and a
number of its specific features seem to have been inspired by, if not
directly borrowed from, Bakunin. Machajski admitted no indebtedness to
Bakunin and rarely mentions him at all in his writings (though even when
he wrote his first essay he displayed some familiarity with Bakunin's
criticism of Marx in the First International). Nevertheless, Bakunin
appears to have been the main intellectual precursor of Makhaevism. Most
notably, it was Bakunin who first raised the issue of a connection
between the personal interests of the intellectuals and the ultimate
objectives of Marxism. In a number of scattered but trenchant passages
in his writings, he adumbrated much of what Machajski was later to
develop.
One significant theme that was to figure prominently in Makhaevism
appeared in a series of articles that Bakunin wrote on the subject of
education for the Swiss socialist newspaper L'egalite in 1869. Here he
argued that educational inequality contributed to the exploitation of
the workers, and that unequal knowledge could of itself generate class
inequality.
One who knows more will naturally dominate one who knows less; and
should there exist at first between two classes only this one difference
of instruction and education, this difference in a little while would
produce all the rest. The human world would find itself back where it is
now, i.e., it would be divided anew into a mass of slaves and a small
number of rulers, the former working as they do now for the latter.
Instead of just more education for the workers, Bakunin demanded
complete equality of educational opportunity, "integral and complete
education" for the proletariat, so that "there may no longer exist above
it, to protect it and direct it, that is to say, to exploit it, any
class superior by virtue of its knowledge, any aristocracy of
intelligence."
The present domination of the bourgeoisie, according to Bakunin, was in
large part a result of its educational superiority. All the inventions
of science, and all their applications to social life, had profited only
the privileged classes and increased the power of the state apparatus
through which they ruled.
By what force do the privileged classes maintain themselves today
against the legitimate indignation of the masses? Is it by an inherent
force? No, it is solely by the force of the state, in which, moreover,
their children occupy today, as they always have, all the ruling posts
and even all the middle and lower posts, minus those of worker and
soldier. And what is it that today chiefly constitutes the power of
states? It is science.
Since the existing social structure enabled only the bourgeoisie to
receive an education, it alone was able to participate in the march of
civilization; the proletariat was condemned to ignorance, just as the
progress of industry and commerce condemned it to poverty. Intellectual
progress and material progress contributed equally to the workers'
enslavement. Therefore, Bakunin concluded, the destruction of the
existing social order was necessary in order to make both cultural and
material wealth the patrimony of all men.
When Bakunin spoke of "knowledge" and "education" he usually had in mind
not technical or professional expertise but an abstract, theoretical
comprehension of social and political principles. He defined "the man
who knows more" as the man "whose spirit [has been] enlarged by science,
and who, having better understood the associations of natural and social
facts, or what are called the laws of nature and society," can more
easily understand the character of his environment.For all his respect
for such knowledge, a recurrent theme in his writings toward the end of
his life was a rejection of all claims to power based on scientific
understanding. On this count he vigorously criticized the followers of
Auguste Comte, rejecting the elitist pretensions of "savants" who
claimed superior sociological insight. As his struggle with Marx in the
International intensified, he began to criticise the "scientific
socialists" in the same terms. "The government of science," he wrote in
an essay that was to achieve wide circulation, "and of men of science,
whether they call themselves positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or
even disciples of the doctrinaire School of German Communism, can only
be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploitative, and
malicious."Although he valued the liberating effect on the individual of
knowing "the laws of nature and of society," he held that any attempt to
force a society to conform to such laws would result in the sacrifice of
the individual to bloodless abstractions. The liberty of man consisted
in obeying natural and social laws because he recognised their
legitimate authority, and not because they were forced on him by
another's will."Monopolists of science" formed a distinct caste, he
declared, and they were interested not in individuals, not in "Peter or
James," but in abstractions; they regarded living individuals merely as
the flesh of intellectual and social development. True to form as the
arch-rebel of his age, Bakunin preached "the revolt of life against
science, or, rather, against the government of science. "
As he continued his attack on the Marxists, he began to use the term
"new class" in regard to them, warning that those who claimed to possess
scientific socialism" might use this claim to assert political power.
Bakunin may well have been the first to apply the phrase "new class" in
this now familiar fashion. In an unpublished fragment of the work just
cited, he wrote: "The partisans of the communist state, as their name
alone indicates, are partisans of collective, communal property,
administered and exploited by the state for the benefit of all the
workers." The result, even if based on universal suffrage, would
necessarily be a new form of tutelage, "the creation of a new political
class, the representative of the domination of the state."In another
such fragment, written in 1872 but published only decades later, Bakunin
was even more explicit.
In the popular state of Mr. Marx, we are told, there will be no
privileged class. Everyone will be equal, not only from the legal and
political but also the economic point of view. At least, that is what
they promise, though I doubt very much that their promise can ever be
kept, given the path they wish to follow. There will be no classes, but
a government, and, mind you, an extremely complex one, which will not
content itself with governing and administering the masses politically,
as all governments do today, but will also administer them economically,
concentrating in its hands the production and the just distribution of
wealth, the cultivation of the earth, the establishment and development
of factories, the organisation and direction of commerce, and, finally,
the application of capital to production by the sole banker the state.
All this will require immense knowledge. . . . There will be a new
class, a new hierarchy of real and fictitious savants, and the world
will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of science and an
immense ignorant majority.
Bakunin gathered together his charges against the Marxists in somewhat
more systematic fashion in an important work entitled Statism and
Anarchy (Gosudarstvennost' i anarkhiia), which he published in 1873 in
the aftermath of his defeat by Marx in the International. In the
disorderly but sometimes strikingly penetrating manner characteristic of
his writings, he made the bold prophecy that the triumph of Marxism
would produce a scientific" and technological elite to rule over the
workers.
Because they believed that thought precedes life and that sociology must
therefore be the starting point of all social reform, idealists,
metaphysicians, positivists, and "doctrinaire revolutionaries" -
Bakunin's term for the Marxists - considered the state a necessity. The
small minority possessing scientific theory must direct the
reconstruction of society after the revolution, representing their
dictatorial regime as the will of the people.
Now it is clear why the doctrinaire revolutionaries, who have as their
objective the overthrow of the existing governments and regimes in order
to found their own dictatorship on the ruins, have never been and will
never be enemies of the state. . . . They are enemies only of the
existing authorities, because they want to take their place, enemies of
the existing political institutions because these preclude the
possibility of their own dictatorship. But at the same time they are the
warmest friends of state power, for if it were not retained the
revolution, once it had truly liberated the masses, would deprive this
pseudo-revolutionary minority of all hope of putting them in a new
harness and conferring on them the benefits of its own governmental
decrees.
Adding a reference in the next paragraph to "the doctrinaire
revolutionaries under the leadership of Mr. Marx," Bakunin left no doubt
as to the specific target of these accusations. Some pages later,
Bakunin raised the question of the real meaning of Marx's concept of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Marx had spoken of raising the
proletariat "to the level of a ruling class." But retention of the
state - instead of its immediate abolition, as Bakunin advocated - would
necessarily mean government of the people by a new elite, even if that
elite consisted of workers.
Yes, of former workers, perhaps, who as soon as they become rulers or
representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will start
viewing the labourer's world from the heights of the state; they will no
longer represent the people, only themselves and their pretensions to
rule the people. Anyone who doubts this is just not familiar with the
nature of man.
Nor would the commitment of these new rulers to socialism have any
significance. Marxist terms such as "scientific socialism" only
indicated all the more that the new order would be "a highly despotic
rule of the masses by a new and highly restricted aristocracy of real or
pretended scholars." Since the people lacked learning, they would be
relieved of the difficult burdens of government. Up to this point,
Bakunin had painted a picture of the Marxists imposing their dictatorial
will on the masses in order to realise their abstract schemes of social
reorganisation. Now he added to his prophecy the vision of a
technological elite taking firm control of the economic forces of
society, militarising the workers, and concentrating on the development
of the national economy as well as the consolidation of its own
privileged position. According to Marx's theory, Bakunin wrote, the
proletariat must seize the state and then hand it over to its guardians
and teachers, "the communist party chiefs, in a word, Mr. Marx and his
friends." The latter would then proceed to 'liberate" the workers in
their own fashion.
They will gather up the reins of government in a strong hand because the
ignorant people need strong guardians; they will establish a single
state bank, concentrating in their own hands all commercial and
industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production; and they will
divide the mass of the people into two armies, one industrial and one
agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a
new privileged scientific-political caste.
In typical fashion, Bakunin failed to pursue this particular line of
criticism of the Marxists, and his book veered off in another direction.
In linking the "men of science" with "state engineers," however, Bakunin
foreshadowed the connection Machajski was to draw between the socialists
and the "intellectual workers." Machajski by no means adopted the whole
of Bakunin's position. Most important, he did not share the anarchist
conviction that immediate abolition of the state would be sufficient to
prevent the rise of a new form of oppression. But much of what Bakunin
had hinted at, implied, and touched upon fleetingly, reappeared in
Makhaevism, now placed within the framework of a Marxian class analysis.
The result was the first systematic theory of socialism as the ideology
not of the proletariat but of a new class of aspiring rulers. Throughout
his attack on the new class, Machajski used the terms intelligentsia and
intellectual workers interchangeably. In the Russian context, however,
such usage was fraught with contradiction and confusion. The subject of
the intelligentsia was of enormous importance in Russia because of its
crucial position in the country's cultural and social life as well as in
the revolutionary movement. For all its importance, however, there was
great uncertainty about how to define it or even whom to include among
its members. This uncertainty could be measured in sheer bibliographical
terms, for the question "'What is the intelligentsia?" generated a
distinct literature of ever-expanding magnitude.Machajski entered the
discussion at a time when both the concept and the social reality of the
Russian intelligentsia were undergoing far-reaching changes. Makhaevism
did not resolve the ambiguities of this term; rather, it embodied them
and sought to exploit them. Machajski's usage, therefore, needs to be
set against the broader background of the intelligentsia's role in early
twentieth-century Russian life.
By the turn of the century, the term intelligentsia had come to be used
in at least three major ways that are of relevance here (though they by
no means exhaust contemporary applications of the word). The broadest
connotation was a cultural one, referring loosely to Russia's
Western-educated minority. In this sense the intelligentsia traced its
origins at least as far back as Peter the Great and his imposition of
Westernising reforms on a back-ward-or, as we would term it today,
underdeveloped-Russia. Under Russian conditions, the result was the
emergence of "two cultures," an elite which had more or less assimilated
Western culture and modern habits of life and thought, and the bulk of
the population which still lived in many respects according to the
precepts and practices of medieval Muscovy.The term intelligentsia came
to designate the Russian "public," or "public opinion" (obshchestvo),
the "conscious," more or less culturally Westernised segment of the
population. It is in this way that an Okhrana official, reporting on the
political atmosphere in the Russian countryside on the eve of the 1917
revolution, employs the term: "According to insurance agents, teachers,
tradesmen and other representatives of the village intelligentsia,
everybody is impatiently awaiting the end of this 'accursed war."'
Used in this way, the word inevitably carried an association with social
privilege. Throughout the eighteenth century and the first half of the
nineteenth, Western education and cultural exposure was virtually the
monopoly of the court and the nobility. Even as educational
opportunities began to open up to segments of the population lower down
the social scale after the emancipation of the serfs, a university or
even secondary-school education was still enough to place its recipient
worlds apart from the ordinary Russian peasant or worker. To the latter,
the educated individual was simply another beloruchka, or "white-hand,"
a representative of the privileged classes. Strikingly, however, it was
intelligenty themselves who decried in the most vehement terms the
privileged status of the educated. Over and over again, Russia's
foremost writers and molders of public opinion gave vent to eloquent
outbursts of guilt that the higher consciousness and cultural
development they enjoyed had been achieved in an exploitative, parasitic
fashion, wrung from the labour and sufferings of the downtrodden. As
early as 1848, Alexander Herzen wrote: "All our education, our literary
and scientific development, our love of beauty, our occupations,
presuppose an environment constantly swept and tended by others,
prepared by others; somebody's labour is essential in order to provide
us with the leisure necessary for our mental development." Another
example, which had an enormous impact on the young populists of the
1870s, was Peter Lavrov's Historical Letters (Istoricheskie pis'ma),
which referred to "the long line of generations who have toiled" to
support the members of the educated minority, and "the capital in blood
and labour which has been lavished on their cultivation."The "repentant
nobleman" who became a familiar figure in the nineteenth century was at
the same time, and even more so, a "repentant intelligent," more
conscience-stricken over his cultural and intellectual advantages than
his material privileges.
A second, somewhat narrower definition of the intelligentsia viewed it
more in ideological than in cultural terms. In this sense the
intelligentsia consisted of those people who were haunted by the
contradiction between the ideals and models their Western education
offered them and the Russian conditions in which they lived, and
demanded that those conditions be changed - whether the change be
liberal, radical, or, ultimately, revolutionary. Beginning with
individuals such as Alexander Radishchev at the end of the eighteenth
century, through the Decembrists who attempted the rebellion of 1825, to
the intellectual circles of Moscow and Petersburg in the reign of
Nicholas I, the tension between Western ideals and Russian reality
generated an increasingly frustrated and radicalised set of individuals
steeped in various Western-inspired ideological systems. By the second
half of the nineteenth century, this intelligentsia had come to regard
itself as the essential impetus to change and betterment against a
selfish and stagnant establishment; to use Lavrov's popular term, they
were the "critically thinking individuals" who were essential for
progress and enlightenment. This phrase was particularly associated with
the populist movement, and the populist revolutionaries of the sixties
and seventies saw their mission in precisely these terms.
It was the populist critic and historian Ivanov-Razumnik who provided
one of the most influential, albeit idealised, formulations of the
intelligentsia's role in Russian life, in the introduction to his
History of Russian Social Thought (histonia russkoi obshchest-vennoi
mysli). He asserted the disinterested, nonclass character of the
intelligentsia: since the eighteenth century it had stood outside of any
estate or class "in its tasks, objectives, and ideals," and, he
maintained, since the 1860's, in its social origins as
well.Ideologically, it was dedicated to the emancipation and development
of the individual personality. Sociologically classless and ethically a
defender of individualism, the intelligentsia was "the organ of national
consciousness and aggregate of the people's vital forces."It was as the
selfless defenders of progress, enlightenment, and liberation against
the forces of injustice and obscurantism that most intelligenty saw
themselves and their mission in Russian life.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, two developments occurred
which began to alter this image of the intelligentsia. One was the rise
of Marxism, which was now challenging populism as the dominant form of
socialism in Russia, and, as part of that challenge, rejected the
populist conception of the intelligentsia. With their economic
definition of classes, Russian Marxists denied the independent
significance of the intelligentsia as a special ideological or
"spiritual" force transcending the class divisions of society. Like
Kautsky, they held that economic classes alone had social significance,
and the intelligentsia was merely a subordinate element of the class
structure. Peter Struve, one of the foremost "legal Marxists" of the
1890's, succinctly expressed the Marxist view of the intelligentsia: "If
social classes are the expression of the economic differentiation of a
given social milieu, and if all social groups represent a real force
only to the extent that they have such a character, i.e., either they
coincide with social classes or belong to them, then it is obvious that
a 'classless intelligentsia' is not a real social force."Referring to
the populist faith in ethical individualism, Struve in a phrase that
became famous declared that "idealists," from a sociological point of
view, were a quantite negligeable: for all their intellectual and moral
significance, their actions could "create nothing solid in defiance of
what is being advanced by the elemental historical process."
Although the phenomenon of intelligenty who defended the interests of
classes other than their own might seem to contradict the economic
determinism of their doctrines, Marxists attached little theoretical
importance to it. These were merely individual exceptions, like Marx and
Engels themselves, not evidence of a classless intelligentsia espousing
transcendent ideals. Following Marx, the Russian Marxists used the term
"ideologists" (ideologi) to designate such individuals, maintaining that
the ideals they adopted were class ideals determined by the class
structure of society. If they had abandoned the ideals of their own
class and adopted those of the proletariat, it was because they had
perceived that the latter were the wave of the future.
A second development, the evolution of Russian society in the latter
nineteenth century, seemed to support the Marxist view of the
intelligentsia's significance (or lack thereof). This period saw the
rapid growth of professional, technical, and managerial personnel, a
product of the social reforms and industrial growth that followed the
emancipation of the serfs.Whatever the Russian intelligentsia might have
been in the past, increasingly, it appeared, it was being drawn into the
economic structure of a modernising country and was turning into the
kind of new middle class Kautsky had described as a feature of
capitalist development. As a result, Russian Marxists anticipated that
with further economic progress the intelligentsia would be fully
absorbed into the primary classes of the capitalist system, its upper
strata assimilated into the bourgeoisie and its lower ranks falling into
the proletariat.
The elusive Russian intelligentsia, however, continued to evade the
various theoretical formulations that attempted to pin it down. In their
debates with each other - and, as Makhaevism began to make its
contribution to the question "What is the intelligentsia?", with the
Makhaevists as well - neither populists nor Marxists were able to
maintain their position with much consistency. The problem the populists
faced was that the intelligentsia as a social force was no longer
confined to the narrow stratum of disaffected intellectuals that it had
been in the sixties and seventies; to continue to identify it as a
disinterested, "critically thinking" element of Russian society seemed
increasingly obsolete and remote from reality. Vasilii Vorontsov, one of
the leading populist writers of the latter nineteenth century, provides
an example of the contradictions that could result.
As early as 1884, Vorontsov recognised the growing importance of the
professions in Russia and devoted an entire article to the
"representatives of intellectual labour." Entitled "Capitalism and the
Russian Intelligentsia" ("Kapitalizm i russkaia intelli-gentsiia"), it
took as its subject "the fate of those persons who belong to the
so-called free professions, i.e., those persons who derive their means
of subsistence from their work in the fields of medicine, law, teaching,
engineering, etc."For the purposes of this article, at least, these were
the people Vorontsov meant when he referred to the intelligentsia,
sometimes modifying it to the "working intelligentsia."
Vorontsov's purpose was to persuade Russia's professional men that their
own economic interest, even apart from moral considerations, should
impel them to support the populist program of national development.
Reflecting the familiar populist position that capitalism was an
artificial implant in Russia which could not thrive on such alien soil,
he argued that improvement of the peasant economy offered the
intelligentsia greater opportunities for employment than capitalism
could generate. Now that the major governmental reforms of the post
emancipation period had been completed, he predicted that the state's
demand for professional personnel would decline. "Two competitors
remain-the zemstvo and capitalism, or, rather, the people and the
bourgeoisie. . . Which of the two will be the Russian intelligentsia's
breadwinner?"Maintaining that Russian industry was progressively
reducing its need for the services of professional specialists,
Vorontsov tried to convince them that the growth of peasant prosperity
offered them better job prospects and economic security.
Although Marxists drew precisely the opposite conclusion in regard to
Russia's economic future, they could hardly have objected to Vorontsov's
discussion of the intelligentsia as a group of persons with definite
economic interests and motivations. Elsewhere, however, this same author
reverted to the more traditional, but quite different, conception of the
intelligentsia as selfless idealists moved by ethical considerations. He
allowed that an intelligentsia is the product of a definite class, and a
privileged one at that, and that its social thought may therefore
reflect its class origins. In contrast to developments in the West,
however, the Russian intelligentsia was notably free of this disability.
The class from which it sprang, the service nobility, was a servant of
the state and had neither political and economic independence nor an
independent ideology. It was unable to represent the aspirations of the
nation, and therefore the educated Russian had quickly abandoned the
class which produced him. 'As soon as enlightenment began to take root
in Russian soil and the intelligentsia became differentiated into an
independent social stratum, it immediately came in conflict with some of
the existing forms, not in defense of the interests of some privileged
minority but in the name of the ideas of justice and humanism."Vorontsov
presented the intelligentsia here not as a socio-economic group but as
an intellectual and moral entity. Its impact on society stemmed from its
role as a teacher, as the bearer of enlightened and progressive ideas.
Marxist-inspired efforts to reduce the intelligentsia to a strictly
socio-economic category were even less consistent. Inevitably, they had
to confront the fact that the Russian intelligentsia had played, and
continued to play, an ideological role distinct from, and even in
contradiction to, its economic position. An example is the article "The
Intelligentsia As a Social Group" ("Intelligentsiia, kak sotsial'naia
gruppa"), published in 1904 by A. S. Izgoev, a legal Marxist in the
nineties and now a liberal journalist. Izgoev began by rejecting as
"subjective" and sentimental Mikhailovskii's definition of the
intelligentsia as those whose "hearts and minds" were "with the
people."For an objective sociological definition of the intelligentsia,
one must turn to the material foundations of society, to the sphere of
socio-economic relations. Its spiritual life aside, the intelligentsia
consisted of people who must engage in economic activity in order to
make a living. This raised the question of whether the intelligentsia
constituted a distinct class; to answer it, a precise understanding of
the term class was required.
Turning to Marx, Izgoev (like Machajski) found his division of classes
inadequate for resolving the issue. At the end of the third volume of
Capital, he wrote, Marx had set out to define the concept of class, but
there the manuscript broke off. Among other things, Marx had failed to
clarify the position of such individuals as doctors and officials within
the threefold class division of landowners, capitalists, and
proletarians. Were they members of these classes, or something separate?
Marx's confusion,Izgoev decided, stemmed from the fact that he had
identified the entire fabric of social life with the process of material
production alone. A broader view of socio-economic life was needed in
order to yield an adequate definition of class.
Izgoev identified four ways in which people enter into economic
relations with each other: landowning, the possession of capital,
physical labour, and intellectual work. Corresponding to these functions
were four distinct classes. "Contemporary society, in contrast to what
Marx supposed, is divided into not three but four great classes:
landowners, capitalists, physical labourers, and intellectual workers."
But in fact the class of "intellectual workers" was not the
intelligentsia. Izgoev now proceeded to distinguish from the
intellectual workers "that social group which can be called the
'intelligentsia."
The feature which allows us to differentiate a certain number of
individuals from the class of intellectual workers and unite them into a
special social group, the intelligentsia, is the element of the didactic
/uchitel'stva], in the broad sense of the word, which is inherent in the
professional activities of these persons, the transmission of
information and accumulated knowledge with the goal of instruction. It
is a fully objective feature, which explains the material bases of the
"intelligentsia's" existence without including such subjective
requirements as the demand that the "heart and mind" of a representative
of the intelligentsia be "with the people."
It was not the transmission of information or expertise that lzgoev had
in mind as the intelligentsia's most important function, however, but
the struggle for individual and social freedom. In order to pursue its
task of spreading knowledge, the intelligentsia came to demand
self-respect and conditions of spiritual freedom. "The intelligentsia's
feeling of its own dignity forces it to demand freedom, to defend its
own independence and, even more, to defend freedom for hostile opinions,
for its own opponents." Hence, Izgoev concluded, under conditions of
political repression the intelligentsia comes to play a leading role in
society, representing the nation's demand for emancipation of the
individual and freedom of the human spirit.For all Izgoev's efforts to
apply a precise socio-economic class analysis, by the end of his article
the protean intelligentsia had once again turned into something
suspiciously resembling the classless "critically thinking individuals"
who marched through populist literature.
After the 1905 revolution, as Machajski's views became better known,
both Marxists and populists tried to clarify their own positions on the
question of the intelligentsia by criticising Makhaevism. At this point
it is necessary to introduce another con-tributor to the history of
Makhaevism, Evgenii Lozinskii. He was instrumental in making Machajski's
views a subject of discussion in the Russian press. A prolific writer
and intellectual dilettante, Lozinskii mirrored a number of the
political and cultural fads of the Russian extreme left in the years
before 1917. He had some ties to the revolutionary underground, but he
also turned out an array of non-political works on subjects ranging from
educational theory to vegetarianism. Most important, he served as what
might be termed the chief "legal Makhaevist"; like the so-called legal
populists and legal Marxists of the 1890s, he popularised Machajski's
views in legally published books and articles. Their publication was
underwritten by the same banker's daughter who had financed the printing
of Machajski's works in Geneva.Although Lozinskii was Machajski's
best-known disciple, relations between them were frosty. Machajski, in
fact, barely acknowledged Lozinskii's existence - perhaps because
Lozinskii scarcely mentioned Machajski in his major writings and fafied
to give him proper credit for the views he was elaborating. Most of
Lozinskii's readers, however, seem to have been well aware of the source
of his views. Lozinskii added little to Makhaevism and toned down its
revolutionary rhetoric for purposes of publication, but he conveyed its
main doctrines accurately and succeeded in disseminating them to a wider
readership than they had reached previously. Although the first two
parts of Machajski's The Intellectual Worker and one of his shorter
works were reprinted in St. Petersburg in 1906, most of his writings
were available in printed form only in obscure émigré' editions. In the
years between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, therefore, Makhaevism as
discussed in Russian publications often meant Machajski's basic
positions as they had been reformulated and spelled out in Lozinskii's
writings.
Lozinskii's principal Makhaevist work was a book entitled What, Then, Is
the Intelligentsia? (Chto zhe takoe, nakonets, intelligentsiia?), which
appeared in 1907.81 Dissatisfied with what he considered to be
Machajski's lack of precision in defining the intelligentsia as a class,
Lozinskii tried to work out a more rigorous "scientific" definition.
Accepting, like Machajski, the Marxist doctrine of class struggle -
class interest was "the lever that moves and makes history" - he
distinguished five economic classes in contemporary society: landowners,
capitalists, petty proprietors, intellectual workers, and manual
workers.This was very close to Izgoev's fourfold class division, which
may well have been Lozinskii's starting point - he even used Izgoev's
term umstvennye rabotniki for "intellectual workers" rather than
Machajski's umstvennye rabochie. (Perhaps he felt that rabotnik had less
of a proletarian connotation than did rabochii.) He acknowledged that
Izgoev, unlike other Marxists, distinguished the intellectual work-ers
as a separate class but complained that he had then proceeded "despite
all logic" to single out the intelligentsia as a special group and
surround it with "a halo of ideological holiness."To Lozinskii, the
intellectual workers were the intelligentsia, at the basis of whose
existence lay "intellectual labour, knowledge, the arts and sciences,
accumulated over the centuries and concentrated in its hands."The salary
or fee received by the intellectual worker constituted a return on the
"capital" which he had invested in his long years of education and
practical training. That "capital," in turn, was a product of the
exploitation of the manual workers, despite the contention of the Social
Democrats that the intelligent, like the proletarian, lived solely by
his own labour.Thus the intelligentsia constituted a class, owning
property of a special kind (knowledge, diplomas) which provided its
owners with a privileged and parasitic economic status.
In the following year, a critique of Makhaevism in traditional Marxist
terms appeared, D. Zaitsev's "Marxism and Makhaevism." Admitting that
there was some disagreement among the Marxists themselves on the
question of the intelligentsia, Zaitsev held that this did not
invalidate the Marxist concept of class but merely demonstrated the
failure of some Marxists to understand it correctly. He pointed out that
Marx's definition of class was based on the principle of production, not
distribution. Hence there could be only two classes in capitalist
society: the proletariat, consisting of both manual and intellectual
workers, and the bourgeoisie, including both landowners and capitalists.
Lozinskii, however, had distinguished classes according to source of
income, that is, on the principle of distribution rather than production
of goods; therefore his conclusions, in Zaitsev's opinion, were
scientifically unsound.
Furthermore, it was impossible to draw a firm dividing line, as the
Makhaevists tried to do, between physical and intellectual work, between
transport workers and telegraphers, on the one hand, and, say, teachers
and nurses on the other. The latter often received less pay than the
average factory worker, and their working day was no shorter. Like those
proletarians who continued to own plots of land in the villages, highly
skilled workers occupied two class positions at the same time: they were
both sellers of labour and owners of means of production. (Zaitsev here
seemed to imply acceptance of Machajski's contention that knowledge was
a form of capital.) Their role in the contemporary class structure did
present analytical difficulties, but the Makhaevists' way of resolving
them was in no way justified.
The intelligentsia was not a separate class, Zaitsev maintained, but a
heterogeneous collection of representatives of the existing social
classes. It consisted of the conscious strata of the various groups
which belonged to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively, and
it was therefore divided into a "bourgeois intelligentsia" and a
"proletarian intelligentsia."The intelligent was simply a "conscious"
member, a spokesman, of the group or class to which he belonged by
virtue of his relationship to the means of production.
But how was one to classify the intelligent who defended the interests
of a class or group to which he did not belong, in particular the
revolutionary socialist? Zaitsev reverted to the familiar concept of the
"ideologist." Both intelligenty and ideologists were characterised by a
consciousness of certain class interests. But not all intelligenty were
ideologists. The intelligent belonged to a definite social group and
served as a spokesman for it. The ideologist, however, had abandoned his
own social group and identified himself with another one; he was a man
who had forgotten his origins.The rise of ideologists followed the same
laws as the rise of geniuses - but unfortunately, Zaitsev conceded,
contemporary science was as yet unable to explain these laws.
Nevertheless, Russia had witnessed numerous examples of people who had
renounced the interests of their own class to take up those of another.
And foremost among them were the adherents of Marxism, the ideology of
the proletariat.
It was precisely at this point, the populist Ivanov-Razumnik objected,
that any socio-economic analysis of the intelligentsia severely
contradicted itself. In his study of Makhaevism, he investigated the
efforts of the Marxists and the Makhaevists to define the Russian
intelligentsia in class terms and concluded that both were futile. In
trying to take the Marxist approach to the intelligentsia to its logical
conclusion, Makhaevism had succeeded only in reducing it to a logical
absurdity.
This approach broke down whenever those intelligenty who applied it to
the rest of the intelligentsia came to speak about themselves. They were
forced to regard themselves as exceptions to the rule, as the sole
who had managed to surmount their class background and sincerely adopt
the interests of the workers. There were Marxists who maintained that
the intelligentsia on the whole belonged to the bourgeoisie, but then
exempted from this dictum the "ideologists of the protelariat."Now the
Makhaevists came along, claiming that the intelligentsia constituted a
separate class of exploiters. But what of the Makhaevists themselves?
According to Lozinskii, they were a "rare exception," the very few
intelligenty who were able to overcome their "wolf-like nature" and
become the true friends of the proletariat. Like the Marxists, the
Makhaevists tried to escape from the logical implications of their
socio-economic definition of the intelligentsia by making a "dizzy leap"
to an ethical, or ideological definition.
Ivanov-Razumnik concluded that the intelligentsia had always been, and
remained, an ideological group to which the criteria of an economic
class did not apply. Even if everything else the Makhaevists said were
irrefutable, they would have proved only that the "intellectual
workers" - but not the intelligentsia - formed a separate class. Anyone
could belong to the intelligentsia, he affirmed, both the manual worker
and the intellectual worker, the half-literate labourer and the
professor, as long as he held certain views and shared a certain
outlook.
The debate over the nature of the intelligentsia had now come full
circle. Despite the quantities of ink and intellectual energy expended
on the issue, no satisfactory resolution proved forthcoming. The
intelligentsia itself, whether populist, Marxist, or Makhaevist,
typically sought a single "scientific" key that would unlock the puzzle
of the intelligentsia's place in Russian history and resolve its
contradictions. To borrow Isaiah Berlin's well-known characterisation of
Tolstoy in The Hedgehog and the Fox, the intelligentsia knew many things
about itself but wanted to know one big thing. This eluded its grasp,
for the question of the intelligentsia would not admit of a single,
unambiguous answer. It was not merely a semantic debate over
definitions, although the highly elastic usage of the term certainly
contributed to the problem. It was the actual historical role of the
intelligentsia in Russia that was so contradictory and open to such a
broad range of evaluations. Under the conditions of relative
backwardness that characterised Russia in the modern era, the
intelligentsia (whether identified as the Western-educated stratum or as
a certain part of it) played a number of different historical roles; it
had no direct counterpart in the countries of Western Europe. Depending
on how those roles were perceived, the intelligentsia could mean very
different things to different people. It was the cutting edge of Western
influence, which some viewed as a beneficent source of progress and
others as a menacing force; it was the creator and mainstay of the
socialist parties and the revolutionary movement against the autocracy,
though, as such, it seemed to be acting contrary to its own material
interests; it had sprung originally from the privileged, serf-owning
segments of pre-reform Russia and was now becoming a well-paid
instrument of Russia's industrial development - thus serving as an agent
of economic progress or as a "tool of capitalism," depending on one's
point of view.
Because the intelligentsia was such a distinctively Russian phenomenon,
at the risk of irritating the reader with the repeated use of a foreign
word this study consistently refers to members of the intelligentsia by
the Russian term intelligenty (singular: intelligent) rather than as
"intellectuals," the usual English translation. The term intellectuals
is misleading in the Russian context in two respects. First, it is much
more restricted in its English meaning than the term intelligenty is in
Russian, for it refers to "thinkers, people who spend their time engaged
in creative thought and writing about intellectual matters. A modicum of
Western education and a more or less radical perspective, which
generally sufficed to qualify Russians as intelligenty, hardly made them
intellectuals (although, of course, some of them were). Secondly, the
anti-intelligentsia sentiment which was so widespread in the lower
reaches of Russian society, and which gave Makhaevism much of its social
and political resonance, did not stem from hostility to intellectuals.
Few Russian workers, much less peasants, had enough contact with
intellectuals or their work to dislike or resent them as intellectuals.
Their anti-intelligentsia sentiment stemmed from the broader
associations which the word intelligentsia carried in Russia and which
intellectuals cannot convey: association with a foreign, or at least
alien and perhaps threatening culture; social and economic privilege; a
sense of superiority to the masses and perhaps a desire to dominate
them. These were the associations that brought teachers and university
students, doctors, lawyers, and engineers, revolutionary propagandists
and labour organisers together under the rubric of intelligentsia.
This was the context within which Machajski formulated his answer to the
question "'What is the intelligentsia" He denied that there were any
contradictions or ambiguities in the intelligentsia's social role: the
intelligentsia was a rising new class of "intellectual workers" which
enjoyed a privileged position under capitalism. Furthermore, and of
crucial significance, the intelligentsia was not merely a socio-economic
phenomenon whose role in the class structure of capitalism could be
endlessly debated, but a growing political force, manipulating the
socialist movement not to liberate the workers from economic bondage but
to secure and perpetuate its own advantages.
Having turned his attention to the intellectual workers, Machajski
became convinced that Social Democracy's shift from revolutionism to
evolutionism reflected not the changing circumstances of the proletariat
under capitalism, as the Marxists claimed, but the changing position of
the educated classes. Therefore, the critique of socialism embodied in
his second essay ("Scientific Socialism," which became part 2 of The
Intellectual Worker) and all of his subsequent writings differed
radically from the approach he had taken in his first essay. He noted in
his preface to part 2 that in the previous year (1899) a French Social
Democrat, Alexandre Millerand, had accepted a ministerial post in the
French government. Here was good evidence that a movement which not long
ago had promised to abolish the class system was beginning to help run
it.He now proceeded to rewrite the history of socialism, in Western
Europe and in Russia, with the purpose of revealing how socialism served
the intelligentsia as an instrument for enhancing its own position in
the bourgeois economic and political system. In Lozinskii's more
colourful language, there existed "a conspiracy of the contemporary
socialist intelligentsia throughout the world," and the purpose of
Makhaevism was to unmask the intelligentsia, "to lay bare to everyone
its diabolically clever tricks, to reveal its exploitative class
interest in the contemporary socialist movement."
Socialism as Machajski perceived it was in essence the product of a
family quarrel between the "educated bourgeoisie" and the "bourgeois
aristocracy," the latter being the big capitalists under the protection
of the absolutist state.
Socialism of the past century was created by those middle strata of
capitalist society who can hope for their own emancipation even without
the destruction of the worker bondage, who can hope to attain a master's
position for themselves in the bourgeois order. They are primarily the
educated part of the bourgeoisie, and chiefly the professional
intelligentsia. They are that part of privileged, ruling society which
hopes to achieve its full sway if only absolutism be destroyed, i.e.,
the old, strong, centralised regime which usurps the growing national
wealth; if only a sufficient degree of representative government be
developed, with the help of which these future masters hope to restrain
and limit the magnates to their own advantage.
As long as the educated bourgeoisie saw the possibility of achieving
political reforms through its own efforts, its objectives remained
democratic rather than socialist. It promised only "liberty, equality,
and fraternity" after the overthrow of the monarchy and the
establishment of a democratic republic. Only when the old regime refused
to give way sufficiently, and, at the same time, the manual workers had
grown into a significant social force, did the intelligentsia become
anticapitalist and turn to socialism. It now sought to draw the workers
into its struggle by promising them the expropriation of the rich and
the reorganisation of the economy once full democratic freedom was
achieved.
As evidence that nineteenth-century socialism was basically a demand for
political power by the educated bourgeoisie, Machajski cited the
American case. In the United States, socialism had not developed because
it had been unnecessary to combat absolutism.
in America, socialism did not manifest itself during the [nineteenth]
century because absolutism had never existed there. The bourgeoisie,
consisting of immigrants from the Old World, from the very start built
its own state on a foundation of political liberty. But in each of the
European countries where centralised state power had formed and
concentrated over the centuries, there was a point at which it became
obligatory for bourgeois educated society to declare itself socialist.
This occurred when it became necessary to draw the working masses into
the struggle with the absolute monarchical regime or with the remnants
of the old sway of the nobility. In England, he believed, this point had
been reached with the Chartist movement.To a greater degree than in
England, however, the intelligentsia of France and Germany began to
profess socialism. In Germany particularly, "the intelligentsia declared
itself the implacable enemy of the capitalists and their economy."Moving
further east, Machajski saw the political activity of the Polish
nobility of Galicia before 1848 as an attempt to restore its undivided
possession of the riches of Poland by upholding democracy and even
socialism against the rule of the Austrian emperor. "Thus, by means of
socialism, by means of socialist promises of full property equality
among men, educated bourgeois society in all these Western European
countries inveigled the working class into a struggle with the old
regime, which offended these liberal gentlemen.
But their promises to the workers evaporated as soon as the absolutist
state and capitalism began to open their doors to the intelligentsia.
Once it was admitted to the spoils of capitalism, the intelligentsia
shed its revolutionism and became a staunch supporter of the existing
order.
As absolutism was destroyed or limited, and along with it the sway of
the crudest and most ignorant magnates, the learned people of Western
Europe increasingly secured and multiplied the fat incomes of masters,
both in state service and in the whole capitalist economy. From the
socialist enemy of the capitalists the intelligentsia turned into their
best friend, a learned counsellor, the director of all bourgeois life.
This unchanging history of the intelligentsia has been repeated in all
the Western European countries in turn: a rosy socialist youth and then,
once it has received a sufficient salary for a parasitic existence, a
full and equal bourgeois life.
Machajski regarded 1848 as the turning point in this process, and
specifically the June Days of Paris. He returned to this episode again
and again in his writings, for he considered it the great watershed in
the relations between the intelligentsia and the workers, and in the
development of socialism. The suppression of the workers by the forces
of the newly proclaimed republic proved conclusively that the class
struggle within capitalist society was deeper than the antagonism
between capitalists and workers which the Communist Manifesto had
depicted.
The aim of the "educated French bourgeoisie," whom Machajski identified
as the instigators of the February Revolution, had been to wrest power
and the wealth of France from Louis Philippe, "the king of the
plutocrats." The bourgeoisie won the support of the workers by
convincing them that universal suffrage would solve the problems of the
proletariat. As in Russia later, the students and intellectuals
fraternised with the workers and admitted them to their secret
societies, which had as their goal the attainment of a democratic
republic. Once the republic had been achieved, the bourgeoisie, to
pacify the workers, "as a joke" created the national workshops to
provide jobs for the unemployed. But then the chamber of deputies,
elected by universal suffrage, assembled in Paris and voted to close the
national workshops. The suppression of the workers' insurrection that
followed the closing of the workshops showed once and for all the
hollowness of the principles of political democracy. The June Days
demonstrated that "democracy, the democratic republic, is just a
reinforced prison for the workers, and the struggle for universal
freedom is a bourgeois deception."
Machajski laid the blame for the June Days squarely on the
intelligentsia, and particularly the socialists. The workers "were
demanding only a very simple thing - security henceforth from hunger,
from unemployment."But the socialists were no more prepared than the
republicans to support this demand, for their plans called for the
fulfilment of such goals only in the distant future, on the first day of
the socialist order. The steadfast insistence of the workers on an
immediate guarantee against starvation terrified not only the government
and the liberal parties, but even the hitherto revolutionary circles of
the socialists. As a result, the workers found arrayed against them not
just the National Guard but "all of their allies of yesterday - the
students, the intelligentsia, the parties and organisations in which the
workers had so recently participated."Woe to June!' cried the
revolutionary socialist intelligentsia, the students, as well as
Cavaignac."
The June Days completely transformed the attitude of the intelligentsia
toward the workers and ushered in a new phase of the history of
socialism. Before 1848 the socialist intelligentsia of France, Germany,
and Austria, in its struggle against the "feudals and plutocrats," had
promised the workers an immediate end to capitalist tyranny. But the
threat of an independent uprising of the workers, with its immediate,
concrete economic demands, now came to haunt the consciousness of all
revolutionary intellectuals.
The delicate task of utilising the workers' movement to elevate the
intelligentsia to a more advantageous position within the bourgeois
order, while at the same time restraining the workers' demand for the
total destruction of that order, now devolved on Marxism.
Marxism became the predominant brand of socialism after 1848, Machajski
explained, because it was best suited to defend the interests of the
intelligentsia under the conditions of the later nineteenth century.
Unlike those who renounced their socialist dreams, satisfied with the
democratisation introduced in 1848, the Marxists demanded more and more
concessions for the intelligentsia from the existing order. But two
things had happened in 1848. First, the workers had indicated that they
were not interested in the construction of a "new society" - the matter
that was of central concern to the intelligentsia, which would rule it.
Instead, the workers had shown their "unpreparedness" for socialism by
demanding concrete and immediate improvement of their position. From
that time on the socialists realised that they had to abandon their call
for the immediate revolutionary transformation of society and
concentrate on the long-term education of the workers to support the
socialists' demands.
Secondly, the triumphant bourgeoisie after 1848 began to display a more
generous attitude toward the intelligentsia. It realised that the reason
for the latter's revolt was the concentration in a few hands of the
wealth of the whole bourgeoisie, and that the intelligentsia's appetite
for communism could be satisfied by admitting the intelligentsia into
the ruling circles. Taking the "learned world" into its midst, the
bourgeoisie made the further development of capitalism highly
attractive, a prospect which rendered meaningless the old revolutionary
plans of the socialists. Why destroy the capitalist order now? the
socialists reasoned. Instead of eliminating the old middle classes,
capitalism had created a huge new middle class in the form of the
intelligentsia and had given it a privileged position. Not the overthrow
of capitalism but its further development now became the task of the
socialists.
The doctrines of Marxism proved flexible enough to take these
circumstances into account. For Marxism taught that capitalism did not
just rob the workers but performed a great historical mission as well:
it inevitably prepared the way for socialism. Original "revolutionary"
Marxism was able to transform itself without difficulty into the more
modem "evolutionary" Marxism by stressing the positive side of
capitalism, capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of
socialism. Now it became the first duty of the socialist - and of the
workers he schooled - to wait patiently for the fruit of socialism to
ripen, for any attempt to pluck it too soon might damage it. With the
benefits of capitalism now accruing steadily to the intellectual
workers, who were growing richer and more numerous, capitalism itself
was increasingly fulfilling the original "communist" aspirations of the
intelligentsia. Socialism, Machajski charged, had become a screen behind
which "the class of intelligentsia and its defenders, the socialists"
promoted the further development of capitalism.
In this fashion Machajski "unmasked" socialism as a campaign to
emancipate not the proletariat but the intelligentsia. Socialism was the
protest movement of the "army of privileged 'employees' of capital and
the capitalist state, who find themselves in antagonism with the latter
over the sale of their knowledge and therefore appear, at certain
moments of their struggle, as part of the anticapitalist proletarian
army, as a socialist detachment."Political democratisation was the means
by which the intelligentsia made its peace with capitalism. As soon as
it had achieved that goal it abandoned the economic protest of the
workers, for the exploitation of the manual workers was as vital to the
"owners of culture and civilisation" as it was to the owners of the land
and factories. Western European Social Democracy was the ideological
vehicle of the intelligentsia's accommodation to the existing order.
"Science receives an honoured place and an appropriate salary, and the
bourgeoisie rules the minds of the proletarians with the aid of science.
This result is expressed in the determined aspiration of Social
Democracy in the nineties to become 'the one party of order!""' Hence
the evolution of Social Democracy to its present emphasis on legal
tactics and the acquisition of political power reflected not the
changing nature of capitalism or the improved position of the workers
within it, but the evolving class interests of socialism's creator, the
intelligentsia.
When he turned his attention to Russia, Machajski found the pattern of
development he had discerned in Western European socialism recapitulated
precisely in the history of the Russian socialist movement. In Russia,
also, socialism had been generated by the friction between the
intellectual workers, on the one hand, and the capitalist magnates and
the absolutist state on the other. The conflict came to a head in the
early 18705. In this era of nascent Russian capitalism, "educated
society," swollen by increasing numbers of intellectual workers and
disappointed by the failure of the reforms accompanying the emancipation
of the serfs to democratise the political order, turned to the idea of
using socialist revolution as an instrument against the big
industrialists.
Russian educated society in the sixties dreamed of emancipating itself
from the Asiatic regime in the same way that this was being done in the
advanced countries of Western Europe: by means of a simple
democratisation of the state in defence of the "rights of man," leaving
the "social question" completely untouched. But in this period the
antagonism between educated society and its plenipotentiaries, the
capitalists, had already reached a high degree of intensity in the
civilised world. Within a few years after the abolition of serfdom, this
antagonism, this "capitalist contradiction," made itself felt in Russia,
too. With the aid and protection of a strong government, the phase of
"primitive accumulation" occurred here more rapidly than anywhere else,
and innumerable kulaks arose. At the same time, the progress of
capitalism was accompanied by the rise of numerous cadres of
intelligentsia, of intellectual workers. Progressive society could not
be content with the Asiatic regime and the sway of the kulak: too plain
were the viands it was offered, and the kulak only inflicted insults on
the intelligent. In the seventies, the progressive Russian
intelligentsia in large numbers began to adopt Western European
socialism.
In Machajski's view of Russian history, populism corresponded to the
pre-1848 phase of Western socialism, the effort to achieve an immediate
socialist transformation of the existing order. Western European
socialism provided the Russian intelligentsia with a revolutionary
device that might enable it to draw the people into its own struggle.
"Western European socialism, which had reduced the proletariat's task
from seizing the property of the possessing classes to transforming the
mode of production, inspired the Russian socialists with the thought
that all the West's misfortunes stemmed from the fact that people there
laboured separately and not in associations."It became a cardinal tenet
of populism that backward Russia had the opportunity to proceed
immediately to the construction of an agrarian form of socialism based
on the peasant commune, without having to endure the horrors that
industrialisation was inflicting on the West. Therefore the populists
argued that capitalism should not be allowed to develop in Russia, and
later they maintained that because of the structure of the Russian
economy it could not develop. As Machajski noted, Alexander Herzen had
been deeply affected by the June Days of Paris, which he witnessed, and
had determined that Russia must avoid the rise of a proletariat. But
Machajski interpreted the populists' program of agrarian socialism as a
desire to avoid not the spectacle of proletarian suffering, as the
populists themselves claimed, but the spectre of proletarian revolution,
the only kind of revolution that threatened to expropriate the entire
bourgeoisie, including the intelligentsia. A non proletarian socialist
revolution in the name of the peasant commune would permit the
intelligentsia safely to mobilise a mass force for its own purposes.
The failure of the "going to the people" movement in the 18708
represented the negative response of the masses to the intelligentsia's
plans, a Russian analogue of the June Days. When it became clear that
the peasants were not attracted to the vision of a socialist
transformation, the populists realised that they would have to be
indoctrinated over a long period of time. At this point, however, the
Russian socialist movement entered a new, Marxist phase. The Russian
intelligentsia reached the same conclusion that Machajski had imputed to
its Western counterpart: the fruits of Russian capitalism proved so
tasty that the intelligentsia outgrew the fancies of its youth.
Abandoning its plans for the immediate introduction of socialism, the
intelligentsia realised, with the assistance of Marxism, that its real
task was a political, or bourgeois revolution, and the further
development of capitalism in Russia.The Russian Social-Democratic
movement, which arose in the 1880s and 1890s, undertook precisely this
task.
While the populists tried to hold back the proletarian movement by
claiming the impossibility of capitalist development in Russia, the
Marxists did the same on the pretext of Russian capitalism's
underdevelopment. The Russian Social Democrats contended that because
Russian capitalism was backward, further economic and political progress
was necessary before socialism could be achieved. Marxism brought up to
date and "Europeanised" the populists' attempt to ward off the
occurrence of a proletarian revolution. Therefore it became the new
ideology of the social force which had earlier clothed itself in
populism: the intellectual workers, whose aim was to distribute the
profits of capitalism more equitably among the various strata of
bourgeois society.
The Russian Social Democrats realised that the proletariat offered the
intelligentsia a more effective instrument for freeing itself from the
tsarist yoke than did the peasantry. They believed that if they helped
the workers wring some concessions from their employers, the workers in
gratitude would help their educated mentors attain a constitution. The
Russian Social Democrats hoped to profit from the successful experience
of their counterparts in the West, where "all sorts of liberal parties
of offended gentlemen in precisely this way have been rising to power on
the backs of the workers for a hundred years."
Two developments persuaded the Russian intelligentsia that the Marxists'
calculations were well founded: the evolution of European Social
Democracy, with its insistence that an armed uprising of the proletariat
was unthinkable and that Social Democracy must be the one party of
order," and the growing success of the Russian Social Democrats in
convincing the workers to turn against the autocracy and demand
political reforms. In the 18908, therefore, Marxism grew steadily within
the Russian intelligentsia, for it now felt the proletariat could be
counted on to accomplish the bourgeois revolution - which was to be "the
direct result of half a century of the socialist movement!"Thus the
intelligentsia's long search for a revolutionary force that would enable
it to "tear the incalculable and incalculably growing wealth of the huge
empire out of the hands of a few tsarist generals, bureaucrats,
dignitaries, and kulaks, and use it to nurture educated society as
freely as in the West" seemed to have been crowned with success.
Although the Marxists were Machajski's principal object of criticism, he
attacked all other schools of socialism in much the same terms. Like the
Marxists, he regarded the landowning peasantry as part of the
bourgeoisie, and he interpreted the peasant-oriented programs of the
Socialist-Revolutionary party and the anarchist followers of Peter
Kropotkin as evidence that these groups wished merely to ensure the
continued existence of the bourgeois order. They maintained that if the
Russian peasants were supported in their desire to take over the
nobility's land, their communal traditions would lay the foundations for
a socialist order. Machajski had no faith at all in those traditions.
The peasants' ambition to acquire property bound them firmly to the
existing order instead of turning them into its enemies. The very
possession of land, which was a form of property, led to exploitation,
whether the land be held by an individual peasant, an entire household,
or a commune. The end result of any program of peasant socialism would
be the creation of a strong rural bourgeoisie, while the plight of the
landless rural proletariat would remain unchanged.
Machajski shared with the anarchists their repudiation of politics, but
he felt that they had wilfully abandoned their own principles. He
dismissed the French anarchosyndicalist movement as little more than a
variety of legal trade-unionism.He found a similar tendency toward
reformist accommodation with the existing order in the ideas of
Kropotkin, who had expressed a positive attitude to political freedom as
a means of educating the masses and encouraging co-operative
principles.The anarchist movement was betraying its revolutionism and
becoming merely another reformist current. "There is not a single
anarchist theoretician who would firmly take the position that the
emancipation of the working class is conceivable only as a violent act
of revolt, the preparation of which requires a conspiracy hidden from
the eyes of the law throughout the civilised world." There were some
anarchist groups and individuals, he conceded, who, "when sudden major
outbursts of the worker masses do occur, try to broaden them as much as
possible and in this way achieve a workers' revolution," but they were
only isolated instances.
In the end, Machajski found in the anarchists' hostility to the state
merely an indication that they too, like the Social Democrats,
represented a new ruling class seeking its own emancipation from the old
regime. "The anarchists," he wrote, "declare war only on the oppression
from the state which privileged society itself undergoes, which the
Greek slaveowners suffered from the Macedonian emperors, the Roman
patricians from their own emperors, the bourgeoisie and nobility of the
Middle Ages from the absolute monarchs who began to infringe on their
'golden freedom."'They were little more than extreme liberals, their
real goal being a check on the powers of the bureaucratic state over
them. "The limitation of the old bureaucracy is a necessary task for all
liberals, for all new masters, and every bourgeois revolution has its
'anti-state' slogans."
The socialist parties of the non-Russian peoples of the empire fared no
better at Machajski's hands. Adjusting the criticism of these parties
that he had begun in his first essay, he no longer charged them merely
with pursuing a misguided policy, the attainment of political freedom
within national boundaries. The Polish Socialist party, with its goal of
national independence for Poland, was really seeking the political
emancipation of the Polish educated classes. Meanwhile, the Bund, the
Jewish Social-Democratic party, was "drawing the Jewish workers into the
struggle for the masters' rights of the Jewish intelligentsia." The
educated strata of the minority nationalities had their individual
quarrels with the tsar, but they all agreed that they would receive
their own right to rule when the Russian intelligentsia had succeeded in
curbing the tsarist government.
It was in these terms that Machajski analysed the 1905 revolution, which
illustrated the difficulty of exploiting the workers' movement without
permitting it to get out of hand. The intelligentsia needed the workers
to exert pressure on the tsarist regime for political liberties, but at
the same time it had to restrain the workers' own economic demands, the
full satisfaction of which would undermine the privileges of the
intelligentsia itself. The inability of the socialists to carry out this
delicate managerial task, Machajski believed, accounted for the ultimate
failure of this attempt at a "bourgeois revolution.
Writing in 1905, Machajski viewed the developing revolution as the
culmination of the long conflict between the intelligentsia and the old
regime. The tsar had refused to renovate his obsolete system of
government, and instead of allowing "learned people" into the
administration he had left everything in the hands of "ignorant
generals, gendarmes, and priests." As a result, more and more of the
educated bourgeoisie had in recent years gone over to the side of the
revolutionaries. Now they hoped that the military defeat in the Far East
and a nationwide uprising would force the tsar to stop "insulting" the
educated and call on them to help him rule.
Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), when the workers of St. Petersburg came
to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar, seemed to be evidence that
the socialists could mobilise the working class to demand political
reform. Bloody Sunday, he wrote, persuaded the educated bourgeoisie that
the workers had at last ceased to believe in their old masters and were
seeking new ones, new leaders and governors. Now even the most pacific
"learned people" favoured an insurrection.
Since the ninth of January the whole educated bourgeoisie has been
calling the workers to arms and to a violent revolution against the
government. Not just the students of the secondary schools, not just the
university students, but the most respectable gentlemen, professors,
writers, engineers; not just that part of the bourgeoisie which
constitutes the so-called professional intelligentsia, but the
enlightened strata of the various small capitalists; not just this petty
bourgeoisie but some of the large proprietors, zemstvo gentry, even real
counts and princes.
Only the most naive individuals could maintain that all these groups
were struggling for the emancipation of the workers. This was indeed a
bourgeois revolution, he concluded, a revolution of the "white-hands"
who were trying to establish their own rule over the Russian Empire.
At the end of 1907, Machajski took up the question of why the revolution
had failed to overthrow the monarchy. In essence, he held that the
promise which the intelligentsia saw in Bloody Sunday had not been
fulfilled; in the end, the socialists had proved unable to muster the
popular forces necessary for a successful political revolution. In part,
it was because the working class as a whole had remained indifferent to
the revolution's political objectives. The workers had not been tempted
by the prospect of political freedom, "which promised them the free
chatter of the intelligenty instead of bread."Only a revolution which
promised them the satisfaction of their economic demands could have
aroused their enthusiasm.
That, however, was precisely what the socialists wished to avoid, for
they feared a workers' uprising for economic goals even more than a
continuation of absolutism. In the midst of the revolution the
intelligentsia had been seized with terror at the thought that its own
position might be jeopardised by the complete destruction of the old
order within which it had developed. There was no guarantee that the
rebellious workers, having overthrown the autocracy, would then leave
the "white-hands" in peace. Therefore in large part the revolution had
failed because the autocracy found support not only in the classes
closely tied to the old regime but in the educated bourgeoisie.
Unpleasant as it might be to the "freedom-lovers," it turned out that
the intelligentsia itself needed the autocracy.The Russian socialists
had demonstrated that they were much too faithful and avaricious
guardians of the existing order to want to submit it to a fundamental
risk. Only a general economic strike that would have mobilised the
workers in town and countryside alike, "the hungry millions of Russia,"
could have accomplished the complete overthrow of the old regime.The
socialists themselves had helped to avert such a development, however,
for any real threat to the stability of the bourgeois order threatened
the economic interests of the class they represented.
The crucial step that Machajski took in the formation of Makhaevism was
to claim that socialism embodied the interests not of the labouring
classes whom it claimed to defend, but of the intelligentsia which had
created it and propagated it. Did his theory have validity, and, if so,
in what sense and to what degree? Machajski's analysis was seriously
flawed by his search for strict Marxist answers to the questions he
raised. Even after he had rejected Marxism as a political movement he
continued to view the world through Marxist glasses. He looked only for
the ideologically masked interests of economic classes, and this led him
to conclude that socialism both in Western Europe and in Russia was
merely a campaign by the class of intellectual workers, themselves a
product of modern industry, for a larger share in the profits of
capitalism through political democratisation. The most serious weakness
in his theory was that the flowering of socialism in the nineteenth
century did not coincide exactly with the rise of industrial capitalism
and hence of the intellectual workers, either geographically or
chronologically. Instead, the two phenomena overlapped and intertwined,
but remained distinct - most of all, in Russia.
Machajski himself pointed this out in his account of the origins of
socialism, though without acknowledging it as a problem that required
explanation. First, he conceded the absence of socialism in the United
States, a country where capitalism was well developed. Secondly, he
discussed the rise of Russian socialism mainly as a phenomenon of the
18708, failing to explain the growing impact of socialism (of which he
was well aware) as early as the 18405, on such individuals as Herzen and
Bakunin - well before the post emancipation industrial boom began.
Capitalism, and with it the intellectual workers, flourished in the
United States while socialism did not, and socialism arose in Russia in
the absence of either one. Machajski perceived the increasing commitment
of the intelligentsia to socialism as one moved from west to east in
mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Capitalism, however, did not grow in
strength in this direction but, on the contrary, became relatively
weaker.
At least one of Makhaevism's critics, Ivanov-Razumnik, perceived that
Machajski's presentation of the American case involved a serious
contradiction. If socialism was a revolt of the "intellectual workers"
against "capitalist robbery," as Machajski claimed, then how could he
attribute the absence of socialism in that capitalist land to America's
freedom from absolutism?This is in fact the key to Machajski's theory of
socialism. In his analysis the primary condition for the appearance of
socialism is not really capitalism but absolutism. He cited a number of
movements which, to one degree or another, partook of socialist ideas:
English Chartism, French and German communism, the activity of the
Galician Poles, and Russian populism. He attributed these movements to
the more or less educated elements of European society who were
dissatisfied with the hardships imposed on them by the regimes under
which they lived. By no stretch of the imagination can capitalism be
numbered among those hardships in all cases, nor can the supporters of
these movements be considered intellectual workers in Machajski's sense
of the term. The "hardship" they all endured was political or civil, not
economic; it was a lack of political freedom and participation, not an
overdose of capitalism.
Nowhere was this more striking than in the Russian intelligentsia's
opposition to autocracy. Some of Machajski's own statements suggest that
he realised this. He referred, for example, to "the hundred-year search
of the liberal intelligentsia" in Russia for an effective weapon against
the established order, a search culminating in the socialists' program
for a "bourgeois revolution."What the intelligentsia had been seeking
for a hundred years, from Radishchev and the Decembrists to the Social
Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries was, to use Machajski's words,
liberation from the "tsarist generals, bureaucrats, and dignitaries" -in
short, from the oppressiveness of autocracy. In this sense Russian
socialism was but the latest expression, though a highly radicalised
one, of a campaign the Western-educated elite (or at least a segment of
it) had been waging since the latter eighteenth century.
The contradictions and inconsistencies in Machajski's theory of
socialism arose from his insistence on identifying the intelligentsia
with the intellectual workers. In Russia these were two separate groups,
and only toward the end of the nineteenth century were they beginning to
overlap to any significant degree. An appreciable body of disaffected
intellectuals with a growing interest in socialist ideas had emerged in
the 1840s, and a revolutionary movement adhering to some of these ideas
began to take shape in the 1860s; neither these developments nor the
populists of the 18708 and the first Russian Marxists of the 188s, for
all their hostility to capitalism, were the products of a capitalist
economy. It was only in the 1890$ that a professional and managerial
class in sizeable numbers began to appear on the Russian scene -and when
it did, its members were not necessarily socialists, much less
revolutionaries. Machajski's analysis suffered from his effort to fit
the Russian intelligentsia and Russian socialism into the Procrustean
bed of economic materialism. At the same time, this effort obscured the
real value and originality of his theory: the realisation that the
ultimate objectives of revolutionary socialism - the overthrow of
autocracy and the socialist transformation of the economic order
-precisely because they were objectives devised by the intelligentsia,
might in fact diverge from the interests of the workers themselves. The
potential divergence was not a narrowly economic one, however, as
Machajski unquestioningly assumed. Under the old regime the educated
elite, including even its wealthiest members, suffered from a lack of
personal autonomy, freedom of expression, influence over the most vital
decisions affecting its society. The ideals of socialism, reflecting the
consciousness of their intelligentsia creators, who felt these
frustrations most keenly, tended to be cast in sweeping terms of human
liberation. In the words of Martin Malia, whose excellent biography of
Alexander Herzen helps us to clarify Machajski's insight, "socialism,
when stripped of all programmatic contingencies, is quintessential
democratic protest against an old regime." Socialism represents the most
extreme expression of such generalised protest, "of which the
proletarian reaction against early industrialism, where it existed, is
only a part."Allan Wildman, referring to a later period, also sees
Russian socialism as essentially a reflection of the intelligentsia's
own sense of alienation.
The primary commitment of the Social Democratic intellectual, like that
of his Populist counterpart, had always been to the mystique of
revolution itself, to the vision of a faultless society purged of the
anomalies of the existing order in which the "intelligentsia" had no
place. The workers' movement had always served him as a vehicle through
which the world of values he rejected could be overthrown.
The proletariat's grievances against the harsh conditions of early
industrial life could serve as one mode of expression of socialist
values, but they were only an element of the broader and deeper
rejection of the established order that socialism represented. Therefore
socialism could appear in Russia long before either industrialisation or
the proletariat, among gentry intellectuals like Herzen who bore no
resemblance to Machajski's intellectual workers.
Machajski's theory implied, then, that socialism originated as an
extreme form of liberalism, appearing with the greatest intensity in
those countries where liberalism was an insufficient battering ram
against the old regime. And it suggested that the evolution of socialism
followed the course of political liberalisation more closely than the
course of capitalism (although the two were intricately related). As
Machajski observed, to his great displeasure, by the turn of the century
the process of moderation was well under way in the West. With
socialists occupying ministerial posts in France and leading a large and
respectable parliamentary party in Germany, the Social Democrats were
increasingly disinclined to raze to the ground a system which now
offered them considerable scope and influence. (What Machajski refused
to consider, of course, was that democratisation might be moderating the
outlook of the workers as well, by granting them increasingly effective
legal methods of improving their position.) The political reforms
stemming from the 1905 revolution would help to determine whether
Russian socialism was to follow the same path.
But what of the labouring classes, in whose name the socialists spoke?
The early industrial workers, and in Russia the peasants as well, had no
fewer or less severe complaints against the existing order than the
intelligentsia did, and the stated objective of socialism was to satisfy
those grievances once and for all. Machajski insisted, however, that the
achievement of socialism would satisfy only the complaints of the
intelligentsia, not those of the labouring classes. But it was not
simply material interests that might diverge in the future (although
Bakunin had pointed out that intellectuals were not inherently immune to
the temptations of power and privilege). As Malia argues, while
socialism embodied a quest for liberation, personal, social, and
political, through a total remaking of the existing order, the masses
were necessarily more concerned with the struggle for material survival
and immediate, concrete improvement in their circumstances. They "want
primarily to live, to achieve security, and ultimately to advance in
terms of the situation in which they find themselves." Unlike the
intelligentsia, "they are most vitally concerned with their own lot
rather than with that of all mankind."The intelligentsia sought the
creation of a new world in which the alienation it experienced so
acutely could be resolved, one in which every individual would have the
means and the freedom to develop his consciousness, to lead a fully
human existence. The intelligentsia craved the definitive liberation of
suffering man; the workers wanted improvements in the conditions of the
deprived proletarian. These two sets of aspirations might come together
long enough to bring down the old regime. Ultimately, however, the
intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the workers and peasants on the
other, might prove to have very different, and fundamentally
incompatible, images in mind of the new order that was to arise with the
overthrow of autocracy and capitalism.
Interestingly enough, the one Russian Social Democrat who was able to
break out of the confines of Marxist dogma and realistically evaluate
the intelligentsia's role in the history of socialism was Vladimir Ilich
Lenin. In doing so, Lenin articulated a theory of socialism that was
remarkably similar to Machajski's, though he drew precisely the opposite
conclusion from it. In perhaps the most famous passage in all his
writings, Lenin in What is to Be Done? (Chto delat'?) asserted that
socialism originated not with the workers but with the intelligentsia,
and that the workers, on their own, could never rise above a reformist,
or "trade-union" level. It is worth quoting these familiar words against
the background of Machajski's theory.
We said that there could not be Social-Democratic consciousness among
the workers [in the Russian strikes of the nineties]. That consciousness
could only be brought to them from outside. The history of all countries
shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is capable
of developing only trade-union consciousness, i.e., a realisation of the
necessity of joining together in unions, fighting against the employers,
striving for passage by the government of necessary labour legislation,
etc. The doctrines of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical,
historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated
representatives of the propertied classes, the intelligentsia. The
founders of contemporary scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, by their
social status themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
Similarly, in Russia, the theoretical doctrines of Social Democracy
arose entirely independently of the spontaneous growth of the labour
movement; they arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the
development of ideas within the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.
With these words, Lenin took a subtle but significant step beyond the
usual Marxist conception of the intelligentsia's relationship to the
working class. It is not simply that the intelligentsia, by virtue of
its education, is able to articulate the proletariat's own consciousness
of the historical necessity of socialism, casting it in precise
"scientific" language and thereby serving, to use Marx's term, as the
proletariat's "ideologists." In Lenin's formulation, socialism is a
product of the intelligentsia's consciousness, not that of the workers,
and the intelligentsia has to instil it in the working class, which
otherwise would fail to understand the need for carrying out to the end
the revolutionary transformation of the existing order and the
attainment of socialism. To be sure, What Is to Be Done? goes on to urge
the creation of a party of workers, not just of intelligenty, but these
are to be carefully schooled workers who have been raised to the
intelligentsia's level of "socialist consciousness." For good reason,
the passage quoted above is often considered to be the very foundation
of "Leninism," for it asserts the principle of the leadership role of
the "vanguard party," Lenin's most distinctive contribution to Marxism
as well as the core of the future Soviet political system.
Needless to say, Lenin believed that only with the fulfilment of the
socialist program would the true interests of the working class be
realised, something which the workers' economic struggle by itself could
never hope to achieve. Machajski, by contrast, believed that the goals
of socialism served the interests only of the intelligentsia by
deflecting the workers' direct attack on economic inequality, which
alone could alter the inferior position of the working class. In short,
Lenin placed his revolutionary hopes on the "consciousness" of the
intelligentsia, while Machajski placed his on the "spontaneity" of the
workers. Both, however, perceived the critical difference - along with
the possibility of tension, and even of conflict - between them.
This inevitably raises the question of whether Lenin might have been
familiar with Machajski's views, the earliest expression of which
antedates the composition of What Is to Be Done? by at least a year or
two. The answer, to the extent that it can be determined, appears to be
no. To be sure, Lenin could have learned of Machajski's views by this
time. Lenin had been exiled to Siberia from 1897 to January 1900,
returning then to European Russia until he went abroad in July 1900.
This was just about the time Machajski's Siberian essays were beginning
to circulate. Although Lenin's place of exile was considerably to the
west and south of Machajski's location, he had extensive contacts with
other exiles, and we have seen how quickly Machajski's hectographed
pamphlets spread through the far-flung exile colonies. It is possible
that through these contacts the pamphlets could have reached Lenin
either before or after he went abroad.
There is no evidence in Lenin's writings, however, that such was the
case. We know that Trotsky told Lenin about Machajski's essays upon
reaching London after his escape from Siberia (see above, p.22), but
that was not until the autumn of 1902, and What Is to Be Done? was
published in March of that year. The first mention of Machajski in
Lenin's writings dates from December 1902-January 1903. In a preparatory
document for the upcoming Second Congress of the Russian
Social-Democratic Party, Lenin listed a number of issues that he felt
should be reported on at the congress, including relations with
non-Social-Democratic opposition groups; among the groups whose views
and whose attitude toward the Social Democrats ought to be discussed he
listed, without further comment, the makhaevtsy.It is of interest that
Makhaevism at this early point in its history had already gained
sufficient recognition for Lenin to feel it merited a going-over at the
Second Congress - but aside from putting the Makhaevists on his list, he
says not another word about them. The second - and last - reference to
Makhaevism in the fifty-five volumes of Lenin's collected works does not
occur until 1921, when Lenin uses the term as an epithet against the
Workers' Opposition.These two passing mentions indicate that although
Lenin had heard about Makhaevism by late 1902, either from Trotsky or
from some other source, he attached little importance to it. Given
Lenin's tendency to attack, defame, and, if possible, destroy those with
whom he disagreed, it would have been out of character for him to
maintain silence about someone he considered to be a serious ideological
opponent or rival. For his part, Machajski ignored Lenin as completely
as Lenin ignored him. He scarcely mentioned Lenin in his writings before
the 1917 revolution, and when he did it was clear that he saw little to
distinguish him from other Russian Social Democrats - a serious
misperception, to be sure, but one that he shared with a great many of
his contemporaries.
The striking similarity of Machajski's and Lenin's views on the origins
of socialism, therefore, seems to have been a case of parallel but
independent development. This in itself, however, is worthy of note.
That both a leading proponent of Russian Marxism and one of its most
vehement critics felt it necessary to assign such importance to the
intelligentsia affirms once again the intelligentsia's crucial role in
Russian socialism, in the Russian revolutionary movement, in Russian
life.
Machajski’s rejection of Marxism as a revolutionary movement went deeper
than just a repudiation of its political tactics and its immediate
objectives of parliamentary power in the West and a bourgeois
revolution" in Russia. He accused it of defending the interests of the
intelligentsia even in its basic philosophical assumptions and
psychological outlook. Those interests would find their realisation with
the achievement of Marxism's ultimate objective, the "socialisation of
the means of production," which, far from satisfying the aspirations of
the proletariat, would consolidate the economic power of the new ruling
class of intellectual workers. Using Marxism, and to some extent
anarchism, as a foil, Machajski worked out an alternative revolutionary
theory and program. Instead of socialisation of the means of production,
it would result in what he called the "socialisation of knowledge."
Machajski attacked Marxism for the very reason that so many
intellectuals were attracted to it: because it formed an entire
philosophical world-view, a comprehensive explanation of the nature of
society and the historical process. Although Marxism declared that it
wanted to change the world, it also wanted to understand it, and to do
so it had to stand back intellectually from the class struggle and its
moral claims, to view it from the philosophical vantage point of society
as a whole, or of universal human history. Thereby, Machajski believed,
it rendered itself incapable of representing and defending the specific
economic interests of the working class. It was not possible to achieve
an objective comprehension of the class struggle and at the same time to
embrace the subjective sentiments of one of the parties to it, to be
both a dispassionate social scientist and a passionate spokesman for
society's victims. These were two very different perspectives which
created mutually exclusive loyalties and commitments. For Marxists, the
interests of society as a whole - and, therefore, of its rulers and
guardians - inevitably took precedence over the interests of the working
class.
This aspect of Makhaevism displays not only anti-intelligentsia
sentiment, that is, hostility to the presumed economic and political
designs of the intelligentsia, but also an element of
anti-intellectualism, hostility to the kind of thinking associated with
intellectuals. This was an important component of Machajski's critique
of other revolutionary currents, closely resembling Bakunin's earlier
strictures against Comte and Marx. It marks out yet another area in
which Bakuninism may have served as a source of inspiration, or at least
as a precursor of Makhaevism.
In 1906, Machajski published in St. Petersburg a Russian translation of
selected passages from Marx's The Holy Family. The notes he supplied to
this translation - actually, Makhaevist glosses on certain key phrases -
go to the heart of his opposition to the Marxist world-view. In The Holy
Family, he argued, Marx and Engels had started out on the right foot to
develop a truly materialist view of history. For example in criticising
Bruno Bauer and his idea of "progress," Marx declared that the concept
of progress was "completely empty and abstract," that historical
development had hitherto proceeded against the great mass of humanity
and had reduced it to "an ever more dehumanised predicament. "Machajski
regarded this passage as a precise expression of the proletariat's class
consciousness. But instead of adhering to this position, he complained,
Marx had gone on to construct a theory designed to show that there was
absolute progress in history. The theory of mature Marxism, that history
is the ceaseless development of mankind's productive forces,
contradicted what the young Marx had correctly suggested. The Marxist
doctrine that society arose to meet the productive needs of man stemmed
not from a materialist point of view but from idealism, "from the
idealist fiction that civilised society is a single economic
co-operative, an involuntary collaboration."
The rest of Machajski's notes elaborated the same point. "Scientific
socialism" had by no means surmounted the utopianism of earlier
socialist theories, as it claimed, but had incorporated it, camouflaging
it with a facade of objectivism. Instead of recognising that history is
in fact "exclusively a matter of human hands, exclusively a result of
human will," Marxism, in its attempt to marry German philosophy to the
labour movement, placed its emphasis on "historical necessity,"
objective economic forces, laws of social development that were
independent of human will.Like any idealist or even religious system,
Marxism began to pay superstitious homage to historical necessity,
turning it into a kind of socialist providence which over the centuries
has been preparing paradise on earth. As a result, it obscured what
those few phrases of The Holy Family had momentarily made clear, that
history over the centuries had created "not collaboration but slavery,"
that the historical process had no other meaning than the progressive
enslavement of the majority of men.To perceive the true class position
of the workers, a Marxist would have to renounce the Hegelian notion of
"an historical, objective, economic justification for every historical
era." He would have to acknowledge instead that "the Marxist doctrine of
the productive needs of society, the productive requirements of mankind,
contains not economic materialism . . . but the old utopian viewpoint of
a single society, a single mankind."
From Machajski's point of view, human history began with conquest and
had never been anything other than the succession of one ruling class by
another over the toilers of the world. From antique slavery to medieval
serfdom to modern industrial capitalism, the position of the labourers
had remained unchanged.Civilization had been built not on force alone,
however, but on force supplemented and reinforced by the superior
knowledge of the rulers. Throughout history, knowledge had been the
monopoly of the ruling class, and "the intellectual workers of every
age, of every country, have been the masters and the manual workers
their slaves."Even at the dawn of history, the more advanced tribes had
been able to subjugate the backward ones through greater mastery of the
secrets of nature The fruits of civilisation had always fallen to the
masters, while the vast majority of men were condemned to lifelong
ignorance and turned into beasts of burden. "The capture of civilisation
by robbers - this is the essence of the workers' bondage."
If history was entirely the product of force, deceit, and calculation,
then it was a case of every class for itself. If economic oppression
stemmed entirely from the conscious will of the oppressors, then it
could be cast off by an act of will on the part of the oppressed,
galvanised by their suffering and resentment. Any doctrine which tried
to transcend these raw feelings and concern itself with the interests of
society as a whole inevitably stifled the rebelliousness of the workers,
and this was precisely the course Marxism had taken.
Marxism proudly proclaimed itself a "social science." But a social
science, by its very nature, cannot be the enemy of historical
development and the system of bondage it has produced. Instead of
rebelling against the existing order, Marxism tried to understand and
explain it. It is impossible, Machajski maintained, to interpret social
development and at the same time speak for the masses who are revolting
against it. In its effort to be dispassionately scientific, Marxism
preoccupied itself with the "law<' of historical progress. But "it is
impossible simultaneously to perform this philosophical, scientific
function of the guardians of history and to assert that 'the whole of
past historical development contradicts' the great majority of mankind,"
as Marx and Engels stated in The Holy Family.The workers' revolution, as
Machajski conceived it, was not the final step in the orderly march of
history, but a revolt against history as it had hitherto unfolded. "The
workers' revolution is a revolt of the slaves of contemporary society
against historical laws, which to this day have turned the whole earth
into their prison."
Not only historical and sociological constructs but ethical and social
ideals served to curb the resentment of the workers. All such ideals
merely sanctified the conduct of the ruling classes and condemned those
who rebelled against them. By its very nature, no ideal can promote the
emancipation of the "slave class," for an ideal is universal; it
concerns itself with the welfare of all humanity, and to consider the
interests of just one class would violate it. Neither Christian,
socialist, communist, nor even anarchist ideals could adequately
represent the needs of the underdog, for they were cast in terms of
"society" or "mankind" as a whole. In a lengthy critique of Kropotkin's
ideas, Machajski determined that the anarchist world-view differed
little from that of Marxism. To the extent that the anarchist adhered to
such sentiments as "solidarity" and the inherent socialism of the
Russian peasants, drew on contemporary science to substantiate his
ideals, and sought to adjust anarchist goals to the relative level of
development of different societies, he fell prey to "a special anarchist
objectivism." Like Marxism, anarchism "establishes the same laws of
historical development and historical continuity emanating from the
historical conditions of existence of each 'country' that are
independent of the will of contemporaries," leading the anarchists to
agree with the Marxists that the impending revolution in Russia would be
limited to the establishment of bourgeois democracy.Inexorably,
therefore, anarchism helped to undermine and restrict the revolutionary
energies of the working class. "Anarchist science . . . paralyses the
tendency of the contemporary labour movement to a world-wide conspiracy,
to a universal uprising of the workers with a single goal. Science, in
both its Marxist and its anarchist application, proves to be a force
that does not assist but hinders the uprising of the slaves of the
civilised world."
Regarding the existing order as the womb of the future, a necessary, and
therefore justifiable, stage that mankind must pass through on the way
to a better life, Marxism, far from the science it claimed to be, had
actually become a new religious faith. Machajski in fact entitled one of
the two essays that formed part 3 of The Intellectual Worker "Socialist
Science As a New Religion." Instead of demanding the immediate
alleviation of the plight of the workers here and now, Marxism, like
Christianity before it, persuaded them to accept the trials of the
present as the promise of future happiness. The believing socialist no
longer viewed the existing order as a modern form of robbery - he began
to cherish it as a preparation for the workers' ultimate emancipation.
He had no doubt that bondage and exploitation were the roads leading
humanity to the fraternal community of the future. "Socialism is a
homily on happiness, on the just life, on the universal equality of
future generations of humanity. It is a homily which forces those who
believe it to broaden and strengthen the age-old system of robbery so as
to attain this future happiness in the fastest way." Just like priests,
Machajski charged, the socialists consoled their listeners with the hope
that future generations would inherit the earth. Socialism served as a
religion for the slaves of the bourgeois order.
It is in this context that Machajski's critique of Marx's economics can
best be understood, for it stemmed directly from his rejection of
Marxism as a "scientific" world-view. Machajski devoted much of part 2
of The Intellectual Worker to Marx's analysis of the capitalist system
and to the consequences that would follow from Marx's objective of the
"socialisation of the means of production." Machajski's discussion took
the form of an exegesis of volume 2 of Capital, accompanied by arcane
formulas, equations, and terminology. Max Nomad wrote that aside from
the rigors of imprisonment, reading part 2 of The Intellectual Worker
was the most difficult experience Machajski's adherents had to undergo.
That can be believed, for in places it is almost impenetrable. Machajski
himself, in his introductory note to the Geneva edition of the work,
expressed regret that he had been unable to revise it instead of
reprinting it as originally written in Siberia, for, as he acknowledged
in a rare understatement, it was 'insufficiently comprehensible and
popularized."Though the argument itself is complex and far from clear,
the conclusion to which it led is perfectly plain: the Marxist goal of
socialisation of the means of production would produce not economic
equality for the proletariat but a system of state socialism
administered by, and for the benefit of, the intellectual workers.
Toward the end of volume 2 of Capital, Marx set out to investigate the
economic process by which "social constant capital," i.e., the means of
production of the capitalist system as a whole, is accumulated and
replenished. According to Marx, a large part of the yearly product is
not new value produced in the current year but represents the value of
means of production handed down from the previous year and embodied in
the current year's production. In the numerical example which Marx used,
9,000 units represents the total annual product, of which only 3,000
constitutes the new value of the year's production.
The sum of the product in values of this year is . .3,000. All other
portions of value in the products of this year are merely transferred
values, derived from the value of means of production previously
produced and consumed in the annual production. Aside from the value of
3,000, the current annual labour has not produced anything in the way of
values. That 3,000 represents its entire annual production in values.
These 3,000 units are the "social revenue" from the year's production,
and they alone form the consumable income of society, to be divided
between the capitalists and the workers.(In Marx's example, the workers
receive 1,500 units as wages and the capitalists appropriate 1,500 units
of surplus value as profits.) Marx recognised that an additional 6,000
units, which he called "constant capital-value," are produced in the
current year in the form of replacements for the used-up means of
production. Means of production, obviously, are not only handed down
from the previous year and embodied in the current year's production,
but, since they are used up, they must be created anew and passed on to
provide for next year's production. They do not, however, constitute
part of the "social revenue." Only one-third of the annual product, or
3,000 units, is the consumable income of society, while two-thirds, or
6,000, is in the form of means of production which cannot be consumed.
Machajski refused to accept the category of "social constant capital,"
because he rejected the idea of a strict separation between means of
production and articles of consumption in the economy as a whole. He
maintained that Marx had illegitimately projected the economy of a
single enterprise - the subject of the first volume of Capital - onto
the capitalist economy as a whole. Only for an individual factory was
there such a thing as "constant capital," means of production used up by
the factory's workers to create "only" 3,000 new units of value. In the
economy at large, these distinctions were erased. Factory owners
producing means of production for other factories make a profit from
them (by exploiting their workers) just as the producers of consumer
goods do; that profit takes the form of money, which can be used to buy
articles of consumption. The means of production, sold to other
factories, are then worked on by exploited labour to produce monetary
profits for their owners. "Thus, labour power, operating in the area of
preparation of means of production, creates, nonetheless, means of
consumption. . . . The whole value of the yearly product produced by the
working class over and above the share allotted to it for the
preservation of its labour power is handed over to ruling educated
society in the form of articles of personal consumption."Each year,
therefore, the labour of the working class created a full 9,000 units of
new value. Marxism claimed for the workers only that part of it (in
Marx's model, one-sixth) pocketed by the capitalists as profit.
Machajski maintained that the much larger portion which Marx tried to
set aside as "constant capital" was also available to the rulers of
society for consumption - whether those rulers be capitalists or
intellectual workers. As the ideology of the latter, Marxism was neither
able nor willing to reveal this fundamental economic truth.
What was at stake, then, was much more than capitalist profit as Marx
had defined it. The much larger portion of social wealth that Marxism
tried to withhold as non consumable capital goods had been produced by
the labour of the workers, and they were entitled to all of it. Just how
that was to be accomplished without destroying the productive capacity
of the economy remained unclear. Evgenii Lozinskii suggested a
clarification of Machajski's position: what was being demanded for the
workers, he claimed, was not the right to divide up or "eat" the
factories and machines, but an equivalent for the labour they had
expended to produce them in the form of equal access to all articles of
consumption. This makes a fair amount of sense, and it may well have
been what Machajski meant-but it is not exactly what he himself wrote.
Marx as an economist had little to fear from Machajski, because
Machajski rejected the very enterprise of objective economic analysis.
Marx recognised that the industrial system itself, and not just the way
it was run by the capitalists, required that a large share of the annual
product be used for investment purposes in order to keep the system
running. He acknowledged, without regret, that this would be the case
even when the means of production were socialized.Machajski refused to
view capitalism as a "system" at all. Adopting the perspective of the
average worker, he reasoned that if all social wealth was the product of
the proletariat's labour, as the Marxists themselves affirmed, then it
should be placed at the immediate disposal of the workers. To provide
support for this demand, and to demonstrate how the Marxists sought to
deflect it, was the primary purpose of his digression into economic
theory.
Marxism's economic analysis, like its philosophical and historical
outlook, testified to its attachment to the existing order. Viewing
society as an economic organism, concentrating on the forces and
relationships of economic production, the Marxists did not wish to
destroy the capitalist system but to take it over intact in order to
ensure its further development. The Marxists, Machajski charged,
declared war on the capitalist system not because it plundered the
workers but because the rule of the "plutocrats" had led to its
degeneration. in the Marxist view of history the successive ruling
classes - nobility, capitalists, even ancient slave-owners - had been
progressive forces when they first appeared. Only toward the end of
their era of domination did they degenerate and become superfluous. The
socialist revolution would ensue from the crisis of capitalism, the
inability of the capitalists to continue running the economy and ruling
society. They had to be swept away not because they were exploitative
but because they had lost their vitality and usefulness. Marxism was
determined not to overthrow the existing order but to cure it of its
crises.
"More than once in history," Machajski warned, "have 'senile' ruling
classes been overthrown by revolutions in order to make way for new
ones. But where is the guarantee that ruling classes will cease to exist
altogether?"The Marxists would consider their mission fulfilled once
they had chased out the capitalists, once they had replaced the present
"obsolete" rulers with new and more competent ones.
Anyone who rebels, like the socialists, only because the degenerate,
idle masters are no longer capable of governing, demands only new, more
capable masters; he breaks the trail for these new masters and thus does
not weaken but strengthens oppression. This is what results from all the
activity of the socialists. They force the crude, ignorant kulaks, the
puffed-up magnates, and the untalented governors to call on the whole
learned world of masters for help, to admit the intelligentsia, educated
society, to power.
That day would come with the realisation of Marxism's ultimate goal, the
"socialisation of the means of production."
To help demonstrate that Marxism's objective was not to regain for the
workers the full value of their labour, Machajski interlaced his
analysis of Marx's economic theory with a comparison between Marx and
Johann Karl Rodbertus - thereby making life even more difficult for the
hard-pressed readers of his second essay. Rodbertus (also known as
Rodbertus-Jagetzow, 1805-1875), a lawyer, landowner, and, for a brief
time in 1848, Prussian minister of education, was one of the creators of
the concept of state socialism. Almost forgotten today, Rodbertus's
economic ideas had stirred a flurry of interest in German socialist
circles in the 1880s. The subject was therefore of greater immediacy and
familiarity to Machajski's intended readers than it would seem today.
Rodbertus was a critic of capitalism and, like Marx, an adherent of the
labour theory of value, as well as a devoted monarchist and
conservative. He therefore proposed a system that amounted to state
regulation of the economy by a socially enlightened monarchy. In the
early 1880s, Rodbertus's "conservative socialism" was rediscovered by
German intellectuals who saw in it a non revolutionary alternative to
Social Democracy as well as a justification for acceptance of the
Bismarckian state and its social legislation. The new interest in
Rodbertus and the publication of some of his works (which Machajski had
at his disposal in Siberia) revived earlier charges that Marx had
borrowed his fundamental ideas from Rodbertus, whose first work dated to
1842. This prompted a spirited defense of Marx, and critique of
Rodbertus, by both Kautsky and Engels, a task which they considered
important enough to devote much of 1884 and 1885 to fulfilling.
Machajski did not charge Marx with plagiarising from Rodbertus, but the
accusation he did level against him was no less damaging: that Marx's
economic theory would lead to a form of state socialism little different
from the one Rodbertus had proposed. Like Marx, Rodbertus had wished to
eliminate private ownership of land and capital while preserving
"national capital," the economy's means of production which cannot be
distributed to the workers; this, however, is precisely the source of
profit.
Rodbertus recommends eliminating private capital in order to guarantee
the perpetual existence of national capital. This means that he prefers
to transform the process of the collection of profit by private
entrepreneurs, the representatives of bourgeois society, into one
perpetual national enterprise, run directly by the state, which
distributes national profit to all its constituent parts, i.e., to the
whole of ruling and governing educated society.
The task of volume 2 of Capital had been to lend the weight of pure
science' to Rodbertus's basic position.
Essentially, Machajski was using Rodbertus to establish Marx's guilt by
association: as far as the workers were concerned, the theories of
Rodbertus, the conservative monarchist, and Marx, the defender of the
proletariat, would amount to much the same thing. The major difference
between them concerned the exploiters of the workers. A system of state
socialism in an undemocratic state, such as Rodbertus had proposed,
would mean the distribution of national profit only to the highest ranks
of the ruling class. The objective of Marxism was to broaden that
distribution to all the intellectual workers. Therefore, "the socialism
of Social Democracy is state socialism implemented in a democracy," a
"'socialist' distribution of national profit to the whole of educated
society, the army of intellectual workers."
The rights of ownership of the means of production pass into the hands
of the state. The latter, in the guise of "replacing" the ever-growing
"social constant capital," takes from the working class all the fruits
of the increasing productivity of labour and hands them over to all the
ranks of the army of "intellectual workers" as a reward for their
"special talents and abilities."
Machajski found in the writings of the Social Democrats no indication
that the coming of socialism would result in equality of incomes. All
the socialists' indictments of the capitalist order would lose their
force as soon as the parasitical capitalist was replaced by an
individual "with a diploma from a higher educational institution"
certifying that he was versed in some speciality. A high income would be
regarded purely as the reward for intellectual labour, and only if it
reached scandalous proportions would there be any thought of limiting
it.
Thus the rewards of socialisation of the means of production would go
entirely to the intellectual workers, who would be able to pass on their
monopoly of education to their children. As long as the technical
knowledge necessary to run the economy and the government remained
unattainable for the ordinary workers, then "regardless of the formal
ownership of all material wealth, their bondage will remain unshaken.
Machajskis critique of Marxism as an outlook on the world,whatever it
may tell us about Marxism itself, reveals a great deal about Makhaevism.
The refusal to accept the possibility of evolution, development,
peaceful accommodation in human affairs; the adherence to an unchanging
truth which needs only to be repeated and instilled; the accusatory
rhetoric, with its litany of formulaic epithets - all this gave
Makhaevism a distinctly sectarian cast. Machajski's old friend, Stefan
Zeromski, hit the mark when he wrote that if Machajski had lived in the
Middle Ages he would have founded a religious sect; living in modern
times, he founded a social sect.The analytical, "scientific" side of
Marxism was suspect to Machajski (though he himself was enough of an
intellectual to comprehend it and even to emulate it when he chose); too
great an interest in understanding the world diminished the passions
required for changing it. This attitude imposed a certain intellectual
rigidity and narrowness on Makhaevism and helped to limit its
effectiveness as a revolutionary movement.
For all that, however, Makhaevism was not devoid of insight into the
limitations of Marxism and its economic program. Machajski perceived-and
with prophetic clarity, as Stalin's Russia was to demonstrate only too
well - that socialisation of the means of production would not
necessarily alter the living standards of the workers. This may seem a
commonplace today, but it was a perception rarely encountered among
early twentieth-century revolutionaries. Social ownership of the means
of production promised the end of private capitalism; it would not
immediately signify the end of a hierarchical division of labour, wide
inequality of incomes, and low rewards for the workers' labour - the
primary sources of the workers' discontent. whatever the moral and
psychological satisfactions of liberation from the constraints of the
old order, it might prove to be of little economic significance to the
individual worker that the means of production were now in the hands of
the state rather than of private entrepreneurs: he could still find
himself in the position of reproducing and even expanding them without
adequate compensation for his labour. As Adam Ulam has put it, "The
chains felt by the proletariat are the chains of the industrial system.
The chains Marx urges them to throw off are those of capitalism. Will
the workers understand the difference?"Machajski perceived a very great
difference, and this perception underlay the revolutionary theory he
formulated as an alternative to socialism.
As we have seen, the intellectual and ideological sources of Makhaevism
were Marxism and anarchism, the latter specifically of the Bakuninist
variety. Viewed more broadly, however, Makhaevism was part of that
sea-change in European social thought at the end of the nineteenth
century which has been called the "revolt against positivism." The term
positivism here refers to the general tendency of late
nineteenth-century thought to apply natural-science concepts to social
behaviour. Marxism became a major target of this critique, for, in the
words of H. Stuart Hughes, Marxism was considered "an aberrant, and
peculiarly insidious, form of the reigning cult of positivism . . . the
last and most ambitious of the abstract and pseudoscientific ideologies
that had bewitched European intellectuals since the early eighteenth
century "
Different conclusions could be drawn from a critique of the "scientific"
character of Marxism. Those interested in the formulation of a more
solidly grounded social theory sought to distinguish what seemed of
general validity in Marxist theory from its political commitments, thus
using the critique of Marxism to construct a modern social science.
Others, like Machajski, moved in the opposite direction, their insight
into the subjective character of Marxism leading them to a rejection of
the validity of social thought itself. Hence the elements of
anti-intellectualism and irrationalism which came to mark many of the
new currents of thought arising at this time: on the one hand, a
disenchantment with prevailing democratic and socialist political
ideals, including Marxism, accompanied by a growing suspicion of the
motivations of their spokesmen; and, on the other, a tendency to
emphasise will, instinct, and intuition rather than reason as the true
wellsprings of social action.
In this context, of direct relevance to Makhaevism are the ideas of
three figures who have been dubbed the "modern Machiavellians": Gaetano
Mosca,Wilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels.Mosca, Pareto, and Michels are
appreciated today for their contributions to the modern theory of social
and political elite's. They were "Machiavellians" in the sense that all
three believed that men were moved by their needs and interests,
especially the desire for power, and not by ideals or a sense of
justice. This led them to probe beneath the formal rhetoric and explicit
principles of contemporary political doctrines, where they found an
ineluctable tendency to perpetuate the division of society into a
dominant elite and a subordinate mass. whether expressed as Mosca's
"theory of the ruling class," Pareto's "circulation of elites," or
Michels's iron law of oligarchy," it was a constant and universal law of
political, social, and economic organisation, and neither parliamentary
democracy nor Marxism was exempt from it. while generally sympathetic to
Marx's critique of capitalism they asserted that even its replacement by
some form of socialism would merely introduce a new variety of economic
inequality and class division. They phrased this conclusion in pithy
statements with which Machajski could readily have agreed. Mosca, for
example, de-dared that even if capitalism were abolished "there would
still be those who would manage the public wealth and then the great
mass of those who are managed."According to Pareto, even if the conflict
between capital and labour were abolished, "conflicts would arise
between the different kinds of workers of the socialist state, between
the 'intellectuals' and the 'non intellectuals,' between different kinds
of politicians, between the latter and those they administer, between
innovators and conservatives. Michels pointed out the oligarchical
tendencies of the workers themselves, claiming that working-class
leaders of proletarian origin were simply "lifted out of the working
class into a new class" of salaried party employees.
However similar some of their criticisms of Marxism were to those voiced
by Makhaevism, these social theorists had no fundamental affinity with
Machajski. As a revolutionary activist rather than a sociologist,
Machajski had little interest in social theory in and for itself.
Indeed, with its claim to scientific objectivity and its sense of
society as an organic structure or unity, social theory seemed to him
merely a device of the ruling elite to deflect the demands of the
labouring classes. Furthermore, Machajski's identification of socialism
as the ideology of the intellectual workers, and the latter as the new
ruling class that would succeed the capitalists, was more specific -
and, whatever its validity, perhaps more original - than anything to be
found in the general theories of elite circulation of Mosca, Pareto, and
Michels.
Another turn-of-the-century figure, Georges Sorel, at first glance seems
to stand even closer to Machajski. Inspired by syndicalism, Sorel too
attacked parliamentarism and the political practices of contemporary
socialism as serving merely the interests and ambitions of a new elite,
the socialist party leaders. In his best-known work, Reflections on
Violence, he warned, much as Machajski did, that a political general
strike of the kind the socialists advocated would result in the
transferral of power "from one privileged class to another," while "the
mass of the producers would merely change masters." Again like
Machajski, what he appreciated in Marxism was its most militant element,
its articulation of irreconcilable class war and of the proletariat's
"stubborn, increasing, and passionate resistance to the present order of
things."Beyond that, however, Sorel's mystical conception of the
economic general strike as a "social myth" and of proletarian violence
as a way of reviving the flagging energies of a decadent civilisation,
reflecting the strong overtones of Bergson and Nietzsche in his
thinking, sharply demarcate him from Machajski. For the latter, there
was nothing mystical about the general strike. He perceived it as the
most effective device for rallying the labouring classes and wresting
economic concessions from the existing order. His image of working-class
militancy derived not from fin de siecle philosophy but from his Polish
experience and the impact on him of the 1892 Lodz strike.
Although Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and Sorel knew each other's work and
drew upon it in various ways, there is no indication that any of them
had ever heard of Machajski. Nor does Machajski appear to have been
familiar with their writings, with the possible exception of Sorel. What
is more significant than the possibility of any mutual influence,
however, is the extent to which the anarchist critique of Marxism
reverberated in the ideas of all these individuals. Sorel obviously drew
part of his inspiration from syndicalism and anarchism, but even
Michels, himself a socialist, refers frequently to Bakunin in Political
Parties and quotes with approval Bakunin's warning about "bourgeois
intellectuals" in L’empire Knouto-Germanique.If disillusionment with the
scientific" claims of Marxism and the disinterested objectivity of its
practitioners contributed to the reorientation of European thought at
the turn of the century, this development owed a certain intellectual
debt to premises anarchism had been advancing since the time of Bakunin
(though none of the figures discussed, any more than Machajski himself,
believed the anarchists were immune to their own criticism). Those
premises would be reformulated yet again in the next stage of the
history of the "new class" theory, the post-1917 critique of the new
Bolshevik rulers of Soviet Russia.
In the course of his analysis of Marxism, Machajski worked out his own
revolutionary program, and it was essentially complete by the time of
the 1905 revolution.It breathed the spirit of implacable hostility to
the existing order which had characterised him since his student days
and which he found so sorely lacking in other revolutionary parties and
currents. His image of the workers' revolution was a "slave revolt," a
term he used repeatedly in his writings, an explosive mutiny against the
existing order by those who had no share in its rewards and privileges
and therefore no vested interest in its preservation. The driving force
of this revolt was to be not "class consciousness," social ideals, or
awareness of historical forces, but the resentment of the "have-nots"
and their demand for immediate economic improvement. Of particular
interest is his effort to identify and mobilise the social elements that
seemed to harbour that resentment to the greatest degree.
As his criticism of Social Democracy indicated, Machajski believed that
not only parliamentary institutions but even civil freedoms were
irrelevant to the worker as long as his economic disabilities endured.
It was only the intelligentsia that could profit from freedom of speech,
assembly, and association, freedom of the press, and freedom to elect
the rulers of the country. The only personal autonomy the worker could
exercise in the bourgeois order was the freedom to sell his labour to
the capitalists, and the only objective that could possibly be of
benefit to him was immediate economic improvement.
Nor was trade-union activity any more useful. Machajski's rejection of
trade unions distinguishes Makhaevism from syndicalism, even though he
advocated the syndicalist tactic of the general strike. Revolutionary
syndicalism in France "stood for revolutionary action by unions to
establish a society based upon unions." Unions were seen as the nuclei
of the new society and as the essential mechanism for achieving it. To
Machajski, however, trade unions, like parliaments, represented a
dangerous compromise with the existing order, for they tended to reduce
the rebelliousness of at least a part of the working class by satisfying
its better-paid and better-trained elements. Although he clung to the
assertion that within the existing order the manual workers could expect
nothing more than the status of industrial helots, Machajski
occasionally gave way in his writings to criticism of the workers'
tendency to accept those improvements that did come their way. In one
place he hinted that the workers might in fact be susceptible to the
temptation of rising within the existing order: "the socialists have
begun in the most brazen fashion to instil in people's souls all those
robbers' plans and calculations which give rise to the hope that this
slave or that one will leap into 'society,' the starving peasant will
become a well-to-do muzhik, the skilled worker a white-handed
parasitical boss." He referred scornfully to those workers who belonged
to trade unions and to socialist organisations as the "pacified" strata
of the working class willing to settle for trifling concessions from the
capitalists or hoping to receive them by renouncing uprisings and
conspiracies. Such workers, he complained, had been corrupted by the
bourgeois world and then further demoralised by the socialists, who
encouraged them to look down on their unorganised, badly paid comrades
as a "half-criminal Lumpenproletariat" too benighted to fight for
socialism.The main effect of trade unions, therefore, was to create "a
deep breach between the better-paid workers and those who live in
poverty".
Makhaevism swore implacable hostility to the existing order on the
grounds of the workers' desperate economic plight. Consequently, it
faced the threat (which Lenin recognised in What Is to Be Done?) of a
fatal slackening of revolutionary incentive if the workers improved
their living standard before the definitive overthrow of the existing
order could be accomplished. Machajski's solution was to turn to those
elements of Russian society who seemed least likely to be exposed to
such "corruption." The agents of the Makhaevist revolution were to be
the most alienated and disinherited offspring of the industrial
revolution in Russia: the unemployed, the worker-peasant, even the
outcasts of urban life.
Machajski accused the Social Democrats of revising Marx's attitude
toward unemployment in their eagerness to avoid a proletarian
revolution. Marx had maintained that the "growing army of the
unemployed," an inevitable product of capitalist development, would make
the further existence of the capitalist order impossible. Now the
followers of Marx had come to regard the unemployed "dregs" of the
population not as part of the "working proletariat" but as a
Lumpenproletariat composed mainly of lazy-bones and semicriminals.A
doctrine which defined the proletarian not as "one who has no means of
subsistence" but as "one who owns no means of production" could not
truly be revolutionary. Its adherents could not even consider touching
off "an explosion of that volcano on which the class structure of Russia
rests."
The resentment and anger that could lead to such an eruption were
effectively brought to a boil among the unemployed. "The unemployed man
feels what he has sometimes forgotten while working. Amidst the torments
of hunger he feels that he was born a slave, born without any right to
even the smallest share in the riches which surround him, which have
been created by generations of labour through the centuries and which he
has increased by the labour of his own life."These, Machajski declared,
were the only feelings harboured by the unemployed worker, and to talk
to him of "freedom of personality" 'and the "inviolable rights of the
citizen" was nothing but the cruellest mockery.Here was a revolutionary
force neglected by even the most radical socialists, for only a true
revolutionary would go among the unemployed, "where the strongest
dissatisfaction and despair exist," where "only one spark" would be
enough to touch off an uprising.
The unemployed were not the only dry social tinder Machajski saw waiting
to be ignited. He devoted some attention to the "dark" elements of the
Russian towns, those subterranean strata of the urban population whom a
Marxist might have termed the "Lumpenproletariat" and an ordinary
citizen might have regarded simply as hoodlums. For example, he chose to
regard the Black Hundreds, the protofascist street gangs which appeared
during the 1905 revolution, as representatives of the "hungry masses,"
protesting against a revolution which promised them meaningless
political rights instead of relief from their economic distress. "Thus a
political revolution inevitably, by its own hand, paved the way for the
Black Hundreds from the starving Russian masses to arise against it. A
bourgeois revolution could give these people nothing; at least in the
Black Hundreds they sometimes had rich aliens' [Jewish? Machajski used
the term inorodcheskie] shops at their disposal." For the same reason
the "well-dressed preachers of the socialist ideal" were set upon by
"people in rags," as Machajski chose to characterise the perpetrators of
pogroms against intelligenty.
He drew a curious analogy between the Black Hundreds and the Galician
peasant uprising of 1846. A half century earlier, he wrote, the Polish
nobility of Galicia had demanded political rights from the Austrian
government, and the Austrians in response instigated an uprising of the
Galician peasants against their "freedom-loving masters." That the
Galician peasants were incited by a reactionary government did not
change the fact that "the peasants were fiercely venting their anger on
their own predators." Similarly, the Russian intelligentsia was
struggling for political freedom while the Black Hundreds were set upon
it by the tsarist authorities, but this did not alter the fact that "the
Black Hundreds are killing their masters, who, not satisfied that they
live by robbing the workers, use the struggle of the workers to
intensify their parasitism."
In light of such statements it is hardly surprising that Machajski was
accused of sympathising" with the Black Hundreds,but this charge
requires considerable qualification. He probably had few qualms about
their methods, and he could shed no tears at the thought of intelligenty
and shopkeepers being victimised. Machajski was a revolutionary,
however, and his aims could have little in common with those of the
monarchist Black Hundreds. Nor is there any evidence in his writings of
the anti-Semitism that inspired the Black Hundreds. Machaiski's wife was
a Russian Jew, and some of his followers were Jewish. Furthermore,
recognising that anti-Jewish pogroms were sometimes instigated by
provocateurs, he claimed that the kind of general strike he people of
all races and nationalities in an act of working-class solidarity
.There was some foundation, therefore, to Machajski's complaint in a
letter to Zeromski that "it was enough to say that hooliganism is a
crude, elemental protest against the fraudulent intention of the
socialists to feed the hungry millions with political freedom, to be
proclaimed an apostle of hooliganism."Machajski did not address the
larger issue, however: that his treatment of the Black Hundreds
reflected the broad streak of violence that ran throughout Makhaevism,
finding expression not only in his revolutionary tactics but even in his
incendiary prose style.
In passages such as those dealing with the Black Hundreds, Machajski did
in fact sometimes refer approvingly to the "hooligan,"but this was a
theme elaborated by Evgenii Lozinskii rather than by Machaj ski himself.
As Lozinskii depicted him, the hooligan was an unemployed vagrant whose
home was the street and whose way of life, if not directly criminal, was
generally shady. what most interested Lozinskii about him was his status
as a social outcast, the outsider par excellence: he owed nothing to
society and therefore was neither bound by its prejudices nor had any
vested interest in its existing structure. Here was a fresh, vigorous
force that might cleanse the Russian scene of its accumulated social
litter:
Onto the historical stage has come the frenzied, dirty, outcast figure
of the fighting "hooligan." Amid an ever growing chorus of timid or
indignant "oh's" and "ah's" from all of educated society (including even
the most revolutionary socialists), this “hooligan" is beginning little
by little to occupy the main arena of the historical struggle, not - oh,
horrors! -as an enemy or rival of his "employed," i.e., labouring
comrades, but as an independent fighter against the whole exploiting
world, who has decided to repay the latter savagely for his unnatural,
wasted life.
His appearance, Lozinskii wistfully suggested, "may be the beginning of
the end of all our barbaric culture and civilisation, all our
hypocritical, cannibalistic progress." The vagrant, with his unbridled
energies, might stiffen the backbone of the workers' movement.
Lozinskii's romanticized vision of the criminal, or tramp, as social
rebel, was in fact a recurrent theme in Russian letters of the early
twentieth century. With the growth of urbanisation, Russian literature
had begun to turn its attention from the countryside to the town. Among
others, Maxim Gorky, in his stories and in plays such as The Lower
Depths (Na dne), had popularised the image of the urban derelict and
vagrant. At the same time, mystical and apocalyptic images came into
vogue, especially in the wake of the 1905 revolution. Leonid Andreev's
play Tsar Hunger (Tsar' golod), for example, written in 1907 - and cited
approvingly by Lozinskii - was a vision of an urban apocalypse, a
frenzied revolt by the "hungry" against the privileged classes and their
oppressive civilisation. Meanwhile, Alexander Blok, in a celebrated
metaphor, visualised "the people" as Gogol's troika, trampling under its
hooves the intelligentsia and the culture it represented, and other
Symbolist poets were giving voice to similar images.Hatred of
meshchanstvo, or "bourgeois" life and values, accompanied by apocalyptic
visions of its destruction, was a prominent feature of Russian culture
as well as Russian political radicalism in this period, and to some
degree the two elements rubbed off on each other.
In his celebration of the "hooligan," therefore, Lozinskii linked
Makhaevism to broader currents of Russian thought and culture. Machajski
himself, it must be said, was alien to such interests. Lozinskii
participated much more fully in the intellectual life of the Russian
intelligentsia; Machajski remained a single-minded revolutionary,
searching for real-life agents of social upheaval rather than literary
images of apocalypse. Nevertheless, the fact that Makhaevism did echo
some of the preoccupations of contemporary culture is a useful reminder
that it must be interpreted and assessed in terms of its own historical
context. The apocalyptic tone of Makhaevism, the sense of a new world to
be gained by a mass act of galvanised will, arose, undoubtedly, from
that sectarian cast of mind characteristic of Makhaevism in general. At
the same time, however, it accorded with a larger cultural trend in
early twentieth-century Russia, and, as a result, may have sounded less
outlandish, and more persuasive, in its own time than it might today.
Like so many other features of Makhaevism, the primary inspiration for
Machajski's revolutionary program seems to derive from Michael Bakunin.
In Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin declared that in order to overthrow a
social system which oppressed it, a people must reject it so thoroughly
that all its values and institutional appurtenances seem to belong to
another world. In search of an element of the population that displayed
such a mentality in Russia, he turned to the peasants. Unlike most
populists, he rejected the village commune (mir) on the grounds that it
had become a conservative institution, its patriarchal structure and its
submission to external authority drawing it into the established order.
Instead, he singled out the razboinik, the bandit of the Russian
countryside, who was an outsider even to the mir and therefore not
constrained by its traditions: "there is one individual among the
Russian people who dares to go against the mir: it is the bandit. That
is why banditry is an important historical phenomenon in Russia - the
first rebels, the first revolutionaries, Pugachev and Stenka Razin, were
bandits." As the commune had been turned into an instrument of the
government and the rich peasants, 'banditry remained the sole recourse
for the individual, and for the people as a whole a universal
insurrection, a revolution."
Sharing Bakunin's image of revolution as a "universal insurrection,"
Machajski, too, sought a mass force utterly alienated from the
established order and its institutions. Makhaevism, however, was a
thoroughly urban ideology, its attention focused on the industrial towns
of Russia, not the countryside. What Machajski found was a social
element that seemed to be bringing into the towns precisely the kind of
rnentality that Bakunin had ascribed to his romanticised rural bandit.
New industrial workers, freshly arrived from the countryside, were
providing Russian industry with raw and potentially volatile recruits to
the labour force. These were the people whose outlook Machajski
considered the most promising for carrying out a Makhaevist revolution.
He had first expressed interest in these new proletarians in The
Intellectual Worker, where he berated the populists of the seventies for
insisting that there was no proletariat in Russia. Even at that time, he
wrote, there existed not only hired workers but millions of "migrant
proletarians"who set out from the Russian villages to search for work
all over the country. It was this social link between countryside and
town that he subsequently focused on in greater detail. Machajski had no
sympathy for the peasants as long as they remained tillers of the soil,
and he refused to support their efforts to acquire more land, but he
very much appreciated their presence in the towns.
The rural poor will begin to struggle for themselves and for all the
hungry only when they abandon once and for all their hopes for a "black
repartition," when they separate themselves from those peasants who want
to strengthen and extend peasant landholding. . . . They will flock into
the rich towns and together with the urban unemployed will demand
security from famines, from unemployment. They will raise a revolt of
the slaves like the one the workers of Paris raised a half-century ago.
Makhaevism's insistence on immediate economic gains as the sole
objective of the workers' movement was expected to appeal particularly
to this group.
All strata of the working population rally in a moment to a mass
economic strike, even the most benighted, the most uneducated. The cause
is understandable to each one, even to the illiterate fellow who arrived
just yesterday from the backwoods village, who has heard no agitator and
known no socialist ideas. Even such unorganised workers as domestic
servants, it turns out, unite at such a moment.
That "illiterate fellow" fresh from the village, undergoing the
psychological stress and economic hardship of his new status and
unspoiled by socialist ideas, appeared to be the ideal agent of the
Makhaevist revolution. Arriving from the countryside ignorant and
unskilled, the new worker had few defences against the insecurities of
early industrialisation, and he was the most ready victim of low wages
and frequent unemployment. Trade unions were usually of little
assistance to him, for, as Machajski pointed out, they were primarily
organisations of the skilled and steadily employed. It was not only the
frustration engendered in such individuals that made them potential
recruits to political extremism, but the means they might be expected to
adopt in coping with it. The Russian peasant in large part stood outside
the legal and institutional framework of Russian society. For
generations the helpless object of constituted authority vested in the
nobility and the bureaucracy, his traditional recourse had been to burn
and pillage the manor. Cut off from his land, the proletarianized
peasant lost even that shred of conservatism which attachment to his
property had given him. The new industrial worker, therefore, brought
with him to the town an essentially anarchistic approach to social and
economic grievances.Machajski's proletarian saw his enemies in a highly
personal and immediate way: the cultured and the well-to-do were the
visible possessors of wealth and comfort, and their expropriation was a
matter not of long-term economic processes and institutional procedures
but of direct seizure. Wearing overalls instead of a peasant blouse,
Machajski's new industrial worker was Bakunin's rural bandit in modern
dress.
For the tactical part of his revolutionary program - how to harness
popular resentments and direct them against the existing order-
Machajski adopted the revolutionary syndicalist, or anarchosyndicalist,
device of the mass general strike. He first outlined his plan in a May
Day manifesto to the workers of Irkutsk in 1902 (later republished as an
appendix to the Geneva edition of The Intellectual Worker) The manifesto
called for "a universal conspiracy of workers," a strike by the entire
working class. Rebelling against their "slave status," the workers' sole
demand would be immediate improvement in the conditions of labour.
Stopping work in one factory they would proceed en masse to the next,
until finally entire cities would arise and the movement would spread
throughout the state. Machajski warned that the intelligentsia would
condemn such an uprising as "the wild outbursts of the rabble" and hope
that the tsar's guns would put it down. He urged the workers to
repudiate the socialists and their political objectives, to refuse to
serve as "cannon fodder" for a bourgeois revolution that would benefit
only the intelligentsia, and to battle solely for their own cause.
A year after Machajski composed his proclamation to the Irkutsk workers,
a general strike broke out in the south of Russia. To Machajski, the
South Russian strike of 1903 provided vivid proof of the gulf between
the intelligentsia's interests and those of the workers. He viewed the
strike movement in Baku and Odessa as an attempt by the workers to turn
a general strike into a workers' insurrection - an attempt which
encountered the adamant opposition of the socialists. The spontaneous
development of the strike and its presentation of purely economic
demands violated the socialists' principle that the aim of the
revolution must be a constitution: "The great outburst of worker
resentment . caught the Social Democrats completely unprepared. The
working masses mounted the strike in defiance of everything the Russian
socialists were telling them and were writing in their pamphlets and
newspapers." Thereafter, the South Russian strike served Machajski as a
model for the initial phase of a workers' insurrection designed to
complete the business left unfinished in 1903.
Essentially, the Makhaevist revolution was to begin as a resurrection of
the 1903 general strike and end as a new Russian edition of the June
Days of Paris. Machajski maintained that the 1903 strike, because of its
economic nature, had begun to attract "all segments of the urban working
population, even the most uneducated." Had it continued along its
original path, it would surely have drawn in "the starving millions of
the countryside." To accomplish this, a new general strike must begin,
its principal demand being the creation of public works for the
unemployed, along the lines of the National Workshops established in
Paris in 1848. As we have seen, the June Days played a prominent role in
Machajski's reconstruction of the origins of socialism. It was the
archetypal confrontation that revealed to the workers once and for all
that their enemy was not just the big property owners but the whole of
"educated society." The unadorned economic demands of the Paris workers
had frightened the intelligentsia into adopting Marxism to deflect the
workers into political struggle. Therefore a new version of the June
Days seemed to Machajski the best way for the workers to sabotage the
political plans of the socialist movement as well as to attack the
economic position of the intelligentsia.
The demand for public works for the unemployed would tap a revolutionary
force which the socialist parties habitually neglected. "Neither the
June insurgents of '48 in Paris, who raised a revolt against the
republic which condemned them to starvation, nor unemployed workers who
rebelled later were lucky enough to have even one learned socialist or
revolutionary in their midst."The establishment of public works in the
towns, like the National Workshops of 1848, would reinforce the ranks of
the urban unemployed with hordes of distressed labourers from the
surrounding countryside. Machajski gave this description of the course
the 1903 strike would have taken had it followed his program:
[It]would have attracted all the unemployed, all the vagrants whom the
socialists repulse, for in order to confirm and support the conquests of
the employed workers it would have demanded bread for the hungry,
security for them from unemployment. But as soon as such an uprising of
the workers had succeeded in forcing the authorities of the provinces
and the capital to establish public works for the unemployed, then the
workers' uprising would have found on its side all the hungry millions
of the countryside, who now would have seen at last the possibility of
living, instead of dying in dreams of a "black repartition."
In this way a general strike was to be transformed into a massive
popular insurrection.
The ultimate objective of the workers' efforts was to be what Machajski
called the "socialisation of knowledge," one of the most distinctive,
and remarkable, elements of Makhaevism. The fundamental reason for the
proletariat's inferior status, Machajski maintained, was its ignorance.
The workers could be truly emancipated only when they achieved equal
educational opportunity through economic equality.
Before taking production into their own hands, the workers must obtain
for themselves and for their children the right to acquire knowledge in
the way Messrs. white-hands acquire it. The workers will obtain this
right when they raise the price of their labour to the same level as
that of the white-hands, a level which enables them to support their
children during their long years of study. Until the workers in this way
tear knowledge from the hands of the learned world, they will remain as
they are now, knowing only manual labour, brought up to be slaves, and
they will always be under the command of their masters - intelligenty,
white-hands - even in a Social-Democratic state, even in an anarchist
commune.
The workers could not prepare themselves to run the economy merely by
studying in their spare time, as some socialists urged. It was nonsense,
Machajski declared, to expect a worker to achieve the same level of
education after a hard day's labour that the intelligent attained in
years of full-time study. Education, like wealth, was the product of
robbery, not of concentrated effort or superior talent, and the
intelligenty had a monopoly on knowledge only because the exploited
workers were compelled to furnish them with food, clothing, and shelter
while they studied. Economic inequality, not intellectual superiority,
was the source of the intelligentsia's advantages.
The workers would strike for higher and higher pay, until at last
the wages of the worker will equal the income of the intelligent. But
then the children of the manual workers will have the same opportunity
for education as the children of the white-hands. Equality of education
will perforce be established, and the school will cease to educate some
to be slaves and others to be masters, as it does now. All will become
educated people on an equal basis; there will be no one to condemn to
the latter-day penal servitude of lifelong manual work, there will be no
one to rob.
Once equality of incomes had been achieved, the manual workers, or at
least their children, could become intellectual workers. At last, what
Machajski held to be the true source of class division and exploitation
in modern society would be erased.
Machajski did not develop the idea of the "socialisation of knowledge"
any further, and he left his image of utopia quite vague. Nevertheless,
it gave Makhaevism a unique character among the revolutionary ideologies
competing for attention in Russia. Makhaevism was not an anti-industrial
theory. It did not embody any nostalgic remembrance of the harmonious
rural community, of the sort that found expression in the glorification
of the peasant commune by the anarchist-communists and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. Machajski fully shared Marx's opinion of the
"idiocy of rural life," and he dismissed any idealisation of the
peasants. He condemned the fruits of modern technology only to the
extent that they could not be enjoyed by the workers. His stated purpose
was to distribute the rewards of modern life more equitably; he did not
disdain them.
Unlike Marxism, however, Makhaevism did not seek to rehabilitate
physical labour, the honest joys of which were celebrated by so many
nineteenth-century intellectuals who had never been forced to experience
them. Machajski rejected the Marxist ideal of humanising factory labour
by ending the worker's "alienation" from the means of production and
restoring his pride and satisfaction in his work. The worker's bondage
consisted not in the fact that he was forced to sell his labour, but in
the type of labour he was forced to perform. "The essence of the
workers' bondage is the fact that they are forced to hire themselves out
to slave labour, that they are condemned for life to executing the
mechanical, manual labour of slaves. . . . It is not the hiring that is
terrible-it is all a matter of the kind of work and the kind of pay." To
be hired in the way that an engineer or manager was hired, he added, was
for most workers an unrealisable dream.
Throughout his writings, Machajski insisted that manual labour was
degrading; his favourite term for it was "penal servitude." Assiduously
shunning all "ideals," he usually dealt with education and acquisition
of knowledge on a purely material level, as the means to social and
economic advantage. In one or two places, however, he voiced the idea
that intellectual activity was the defining attribute of man: the
workers' coarse physical labour not only degraded them socially and
economically but robbed them of their essential humanity. 'The
productivity of labour," he wrote, grows to the degree that the secrets
of nature reveal themselves to mankind and its mastery of nature grows.
He [sic) owes this mastery to his human organism, to intellectual
activity." But under the present organisation of society, only a small
minority were able to use their minds, the organ of man, while the rest
were allowed only the exercise of their animal organs in physical
labour.
This element of Makhaevism, to be sure, seems to contradict the streak
of anti-intellectualism it contained. (Machajski might have replied that
it was only "science" in its historical role as an instrument of class
rule that he rejected.) And Marxism, too, had always proclaimed the goal
of erasing the distinction between mental and manual labour. It may be
suggested, however, that in stressing the importance of education for
the workers, Machajski proposed a more effective way of humanising
labour than social ownership of the means of production by itself
offered, and at the same time foresaw very accurately what would become
the main road to social mobility in modern industrial and postindustrial
society.
Even apart from the practical problem of creating a movement capable of
implementing it, Machajski's program contained a number of internal
contradictions and inconsistencies. Some were unique to Makhaevism, but
some were shared by other currents in the Russian revolutionary
movement. First, while based on implacable hatred of the existing order,
Makhaevism could attain its ends only by preserving that order and even
opposing any efforts to overthrow it. The equalisation of incomes
through the withholding of labour, and the subsequent educational
revolution, could not occur overnight; they assumed the retention of the
present economic and political structure for an indeterminate length of
time. On the surface, at least, Makhaevism proposed not the seizure of
power by the proletariat but merely the exertion of irresistible
pressure on the established authorities.
It would appear from Machajski's writings that when he abandoned Social
Democracy, that is, after writing part 1 of The Intellectual Worker, he
also abandoned the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In
part 1, he defined as the proletariat's objective the establishment of a
"revolutionary dictatorship, the organisation of the seizure of
political power." Later, however, when he composed the preface to the
printed edition of part 1, he spoke only of "worldwide workers'
conspiracies, dictating, by means of worldwide workers' strikes, the
laws of state power." Instead of taking political power into its own
hands, the proletariat would present the state with "concrete demands
capable of immediate realization."This now became the declared objective
of Makhaevism. Only once more in his writings, in part 2 of The
Intellectual Worker (written, it will be remembered, in Siberia, the
first statement of his mature views), did Machajski refer to a
dictatorship.
By means of its worldwide conspiracy and dictatorship, the proletariat
will attain domination over the state machine, but not in order to
extricate from difficulty, anarchy, and bankruptcy an economic order
unable to cope with productive forces which have outgrown its narrow
property limits. It will strive for domination over the government in
order to seize the property of ruling, educated society, the property of
the learned world. . . . And, destroying hereditary family property and
all private funds and means of education, it will force the use of
confiscated property for the organisation of social education, for the
"socialisation of knowledge."
Here, the significance of the word "dictatorship" is unclear, for the
remainder of the passage refers only to forcing radical economic reforms
out of the existing government. The intention of mobilising the
unemployed in fact precluded any attempt to overthrow the government.
Unlike the employed workers, the unemployed could not wrest concessions
from the individual owners of their factories. As Machajski pointed out,
they would have to turn to the government to demand the establishment of
public works, as the unemployed of Paris had done in 1848.
The difficulties in Machajski's program were not lost on contemporary
critics. It was pointed out that the Makhaevists assumed extraordinary
forbearance on the part of the upper classes, who were apparently
expected to yield more and more of their income to the workers while
placidly continuing to fulfil their duty of running the economy and the
state. One critic acutely observed that if the bourgeoisie decided to
resist, the workers would be saved only in the event of their own
defeat. For if they won, they would either have to renounce the fruits
of their victory and restore the old state of affairs, or socialise the
means of production - a step which Machajski maintained would leave them
at the mercy of the intellectual workers.
A second set of problems was related to the nature of the social forces
Makhaevism relied on to implement its program. Machajski sought to
recruit those groups and individuals whose frustration and capacity for
violence might be expected to generate the most implacable attack on the
existing order. The simple and single-minded objective of seizing the
property of the rich might well tempt such elements of the population,
but it was questionable whether the objective of the "socialisation of
knowledge" could have much appeal to them. To the unskilled, illiterate
semi-peasant, the prospect of educating his child to be a doctor or an
engineer was about as meaningful as the idea of turning him into a
nobleman; he had more imrnediate needs and narrower horizons. The hope
of improving one's socio-economic position through education and finding
greater personal fulfilment as an intelligent was more likely to reside
in those individuals whom Machajski rejected as insufficiently
revolutionary: the more skilled and relatively well-off workers. To
educate one's children to be white-collar workers, to rise into the
middle class, is the ambition not of the bewildered and angry
"illiterate fellow from the backwoods village" but of the more secure
worker whose social expectations have risen and bear some possibility of
fulfilment.
Where was the guarantee, furthermore, that the "hungry masses" would go
on struggling for full equality of incomes once their most pressing
needs had been appeased? The Paris insurrection of 1848 was not as
promising an historical precedent as Machajski thought. One careful
study of the National Workshops concludes that at most only one-sixth of
those in the pay of the workshops participated in the insurrection. The
government's decision to continue paying the workshop employees when the
insurrection began was apparently a major factor in neutralising the
great majority of them. The unemployed among the insurrectionists were
largely workers who had been denied places in the workshops: the
continued assurance of their daily wages was sufficient to pacify most
of the actual members.
Nor was it certain that the elements of the population Machajski sought
to mobilise would prove as readily explosive a force as he assumed.
Recent research in the social history of pre-Revolutionary Russian
workers has begun to question the long-held view that peasant migrants
from the countryside were necessarily alienated and disoriented, dry
social tinder available to the most incendiary currents within the
revolutionary movement. In at least some significant industrial centres,
such as Moscow, peasant-workers brought much of their peasant culture
with them. They retained strong family and economic ties to their
villages, as well as local networks of organisation and information that
persisted over generations. As a result, their lives contained a good
deal more structure and stability than has previously been thought.This
did not necessarily render them passive, for the solidarity and
organisation they derived from their peasant culture could at times be
translated into collective action. It would appear, however, that the
image of a reservoir of anarchic peasant-workers crowded into the
industrial towns and hovering on the brink of insurrection may have been
as romantic as the populists' image of a revolutionary peasantry back in
the 1860s and 1870s. In any event, the social fuel for the Makhaevist
revolution was more complex, and less easily kindled, than Machajski
believed.
There was a serious discrepancy between means and ends in Machajski's
revolutionary program. The forces on which he pinned his hopes were
suited, at best, to outbursts of violence against the existing regime,
not to the kind of sustained but limited pressure on it that the
realisation of Makhaevism's objectives required. To resolve the dilemma,
Machajski resorted to the familiar device of a conscious revolutionary
elite that would help to guide the workers' movement in the proper
direction. Although he repudiated all existing forms of working-class
organisation, he urged the establishment of an underground party, a
"workers' conspiracy" (rabochii zagovor). Its purpose would be to
coordinate the proletariat's separate outbursts into a regular, planned
mass movement to present the workers' ever-growing demands. "The party
of the workers' revolution, the party of the workers' insurrections,
will not demand political liberty - it will live underground, both under
absolutism and in a democracy. Its sole demands will be economic demands
concerning manual labour. Its sole task will be a conspiracy with the
goal of uniting mass workers' strikes into one general
insurrection."These underground conspirators would presumably be
Machajski and his associates. As Ivanov-Razumnik pointed out, however,
there was no provision in the logic of Makhaevism for leadership of the
workers by such a group. Machajski himself never raised the point that
he was in fact an intelligent, not a worker, and that his oversight of
the workers' movement might be open to the same suspicions and
accusations he was levelling against the socialists.
Max Nomad, for one, ultimately concluded that Machajski's renunciation
of the seizure of power was only a facade, behind which lurked familiar
political ambitions. Nomad suggested that perhaps Machajski stopped
referring to a revolutionary dictatorship in order to attract former
anarchists and syndicalists. Given the close affinities between
Makhaevism and anarchism, this is possible; on the other hand, anarchist
groups and organisations themselves faced much the same dilemma as the
Makhaevists, and their solutions were often no more rigorously
consistent than Machajski's. The contradictions in Machajski's
revolutionary program were inherent in his very concept of a mass
revolution and need not have stemmed from a conscious attempt at
deception. As Nomad points out, however, a movement strong enough to
"dictate the laws of state power" would presumably be capable of taking
power into its own hands. In any event, Machajski never had the
opportunity to demonstrate what his ultimate ambitions really were. The
immediate question he faced was whether Makhaevism could organise enough
revolutionary activists, and attract enough of a following among the
workers, to become a viable competitor to the existing Russian
revolutionary parties and groups. By 1905 Machajski had completed the
theoretical foundations of Makhaevism, and the outbreak of revolution
gave him the opportunity to carry his message back to Russia and try to
create a revolutionary movement.
Movement
At the beginning of 1906, Machajski arrived in St. Petersburg and
proceeded to organise a small band of his followers in the capital.
Their primary objective was to persuade the workers to repudiate the
political program of the socialist parties - a "bourgeois revolution" to
replace autocracy with a parliamentary democracy - and instead to insist
on the immediate satisfaction of their economic demands. Briefly, at
least, Makhaevism achieved a measure of visibility as an organised
movement, although in fact a variety of groups and individuals
professing Makhaevist ideas had been appearing on the Russian scene for
several years before this.
Before tracing the activities of the Makhaevists themselves, we have to
turn our attention to that aspect of Russian life with which they were
primarily concerned: the relations between workers and intelligentsia in
the labour and revolutionary movements. In the two decades or so before
the 1905 revolution, both of these movements were preoccupied with this
crucial issue. The workers, striving to organise so as to press their
demands for improved wages and working conditions, often had to avail
themselves of the organisational skills and communications resources the
intelligentsia alone could provide, especially at a time when most forms
of labour association were illegal and had to be conducted underground.
The revolutionary intelligentsia needed a mass base to use as a lever
for prying loose the tsarist autocracy. The populists having been
rebuffed by the peasantry in the 1860s and 1870s, a sizeable part of the
intelligentsia adopted Marxism in the 1880s and 1890s and sought to
rally the industrial workers under the banner of Social Democracy. The
two social elements were drawn to each other by mutual need and, so it
seemed, mutual interest.
As their contacts grew, however, the social and cultural barrier that
separated the Western-educated stratum from the mass of the population
in the society at large replicated itself in the relations between
intelligenty and workers in the underground organisations. This is not
to say that reciprocal trust and co-operation were unattainable;
representatives of the two groups did work together productively and
harmoniously. Even at the best of times, however, relations between them
were fraught with a considerable degree of underlying tension which
could erupt in outbursts of anti-intelligentsia hostility. So
insistently does anti-intelligentsia sentiment recur throughout this
period, in fact, that any attempt to treat it exhaustively would not
only go well beyond the scope of the present work but would amount to a
virtual recapitulation of the history of the Russian labour movement and
of the Russian Social-Democratic party. My purpose here will be to
examine some of its principal manifestations and their relationship to
Makhaevism. The Makhaevists were unique in placing anti-intelligentsia
sentiment at the very centre of their doctrines and agitation, but they
were by no means alone in giving voice to it. Machajski's attack on the
intelligentsia drew attention precisely because it probed at one of the
most painful spots in the development of Russian socialism. Here, as in
so many areas, Makhaevism focused on an issue of great importance, even
if it could not itself provide an adequate resolution of it.
Anti-intelligentsia sentiment appeared at the very dawn of the Russian
labour movement, even before Social Democracy arose. Beginning with the
Chaikovskii Circle in 1872, populist students during the 1870s were
organising propaganda circles among the metalworkers and textile workers
of St. Petersburg. Almost immediately, a series of frictions arose
between the workers and their mentors. When the students, disappointed
with the response of the workers to their revolutionary aspirations,
went off to the countryside to propagandise the peasants, the workers
felt that their immediate interests were being sacrificed to the larger
social and political objectives of the intelligenty; they were repelled
by the ideological bickering of the different intelligent factions; and,
increasingly, they resented manipulation by domineering "generals," as
they termed them, leading some workers to demand the exclusion of
intelligenty from their organisations.' These same complaints and
accusations, along with new ones, would be repeated again and again in
subsequent decades.
The first conscious and systematic questioning of the intelligentsia's
motivations and sense of commitment to the workers found expression in
the Tochiskii Circle of St. Petersburg in the mid-1880s. Pavel
Varfolomeevich Tochiskii was born in 1864 (given in some sources as
i865) in Ekaterinburg. His father, a Russian Pole of noble origin, was
an officer in the Russian army, and his mother was of French origin.
Tochiskii attended a gymnasium in Ekaterinburg but dropped out and made
his way to St. Petersburg in 1884. There he became a metalworker, both
to make contact with other workers and to earn a living, having broken
with his father. In late 1885 he began to form an underground circle
based on an amalgam of socialist ideas, including, but not limited to,
Marxism. Called at first the Society to Help Raise the Material, Moral,
and Intellectual Level of the Working Class in Russia - an unwieldy but
accurate reflection of Tochiskii's aims - it subsequently adopted the
name Tovarishchestvo peterburgskikh masterovykh (Association of
Petersburg Artisans), and, all told, operated for something over two
years.
Tochiskii himself left no writings from this period of his life, but to
judge from the account by his close associate Andrei Breitfus, his views
foreshadowed Machajski's in a number of respects. Breitfus, at the time
attracted to populism, made Tochiskii's acquaintance in i88~ and found
him highly critical of the Narodnaia Volia organisation's use of terror,
which, he believed, "in the last analysis was only a means of gaining
power for the growing class of bourgeoisie." The people were too
backward to take advantage of the intelligentsia's efforts: "the latter,
supposedly struggling in the name of the people, could only help new
enemies of the people take power." Real change was possible only as a
result of a social movement by the one truly revolutionary class -
neither the peasantry nor the intelligentsia, but the
proletariat.According to Tochiskii's sister, who was a member of the
circle, Tochiskii rejected political struggle entirely and sought to
organise the workers solely on the basis of their economic interests.
Given these principles, Tochiskii's attitude toward the intelligentsia
was, at best, ambivalent. On the one hand, he felt that the
intelligentsia's assistance was essential for organising the proletariat
and developing its class consciousness, but on the other "he considered
the revolutionary intelligentsia in general to be ideologists of the
bourgeoisie." Therefore the intelligentsia must be regarded as a "casual
guest in the revolution," to be tolerated only as long as the
proletariat needed it. "He often said: 'You are with us until the first
turning point, the first constitution which you will obtain from the
government and which you need, and then our paths will diverge
sharply."'To protect the workers from being drawn into political
struggle, which at this time meant terrorist activities, he tried his
best to minimise direct contact between workers and intelligenty within
the circle, considering it "superfluous," as his sister put it, "to let
the intelligentsia get close to the workers" and even trying to avoid
those workers who had already been exposed to revolutionary propaganda
and thus "corrupted by revolutionary adventurism."With the
intelligentsia supplying funds, literature, and other practical
assistance, the circle concentrated on worker education and
consciousness-raising, building an impressive library of legal
publications as well as a much smaller stock of illegal literature. When
some intelligent members undertook a more vigorous distribution of
illegal literature to the workers, Tochiskii objected, fearing that it
would merely excite them and increase their chances of arrest. (Thanks
to Tochiskii's precautions, in fact, the worker members of his
organisation were not discovered by the police, and only the
intelligentsia leaders were eventually arrested.) He now attempted, in
effect, to exclude the intelligentsia members from active participation
in the work of the circle and to reduce them to "passive" or auxiliary
members. He was opposed by other members of the organisation who agreed,
over his objections, to widen the intelligentsia's role, but the issue
became moot when the police broke up the association in 1888.
Conflicts between workers and intelligenty punctuated the history of the
Jewish labour movement within the western Pale of Settlement. In the
early 1890s, a vehement wave of protest arose over the decision of the
movement's leaders to shift from "propaganda," that is, worker education
conducted in small study circles, to "agitation," a program aimed at
reaching a broader mass of workers by concentrating on their practical
economic needs, through strikes, demonstrations, and factory
organisation. The protest first surfaced in Vilna in 1893, led by Avram
Gordon, an engraver and a member of a study circle. Gordon believed that
the dissemination of knowledge to the people was the true source of
historical progress, and such educational work was the proper function
of the intelligentsia. The latter's abandonment of cultural work was a
deliberate act of treason to the labour movement. Historical events such
as the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 had demonstrated
that the intelligentsia wanted to delude the people and use them for its
own selfish interests.Keeping the workers ignorant and dependent was an
important part of this effort. The agitation campaign, Cordon declared
in terms that strikingly anticipate Machajski, was the intelligentsia's
way of preserving its monopoly on the precious commodity of
knowledge.Similar views were expressed in cities across the Pale. One of
the opposition groups generated by this wave of protest, the Group of
Worker Revolutionaries, active in Belostok in 1897, was headed by
another engraver named Moisei Lur'e, who, as we shall see, subsequently
espoused Makhaevism. The antagonism between workers and intelligentsia
that erupted in the nineties never entirely disappeared from the Russian
Jewish labour movement.
A second wave of anti-intelligentsia sentiment broke over the movement
after the organisation in 1897 of the Bund, the Marxist socialist party
that spoke for the interests of the Jewish work-mg class in Russia. The
Bund soon began to place a greater emphasis on political action than on
economic activity, and it sought to impose a more centralised
organisational structure on the labour movement. Both endeavours
generated new worker-intelligent fractions. By the early years of the
twentieth century, workers were accusing intelligenty of behaving in a
dictatorial, undemocratic manner, and were attacking the "despotism of
the intellectuals." Hostility to political action, which to many workers
seemed both overly abstract and overly dangerous, and hostility to those
who advocated it, also began to be voiced. Demands arose that the
movement be led solely by workers, and in some cities the latter
excluded the intelligentsia from the local committees. ii Under these
circumstances, it is not surprising that the Zubatov experiment
(discussed below) received its first application in the Jewish labour
movement of the Pale. In its effort to separate the workers from the
revolutionary propagandists who sought to lead them, Zubatovism
exploited precisely the kinds of tensions that existed in this region,
and it found a fertile field for its activity within the jurisdiction of
the Bund.
The question of the intelligentsia's relationship to the labour movement
was a major theme in the first great "heresy" within the Russian
Social-Democratic movement, the current that arose at the end of the
1890s and came to be known as Economism. This label was applied to
several groups and shades of thought which were in fact quite distinct
and not necessarily in agreement. In general terms, however, and with
varying degrees of emphasis, those of the Economist persuasion held two
basic positions: the priority of economic improvement for the workers
over large-scale political change (although the necessity of political
change was generally recognised), and the need for vigorous
organisational development of the labour movement. The most "radical"
expression of Economism was the clandestine newspaper Rabochaia mysl'
(Workers' Thought), issued from 1897 to 1902. The newspaper itself was
the product of a conflict between workers and intelligentsia within the
St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working
Class, the Social-Democratic organisation formed in 1895. The workers of
the city, aroused by the great textile strikes of 1896 and 1897, had
demanded a greater voice in the affairs of the union. They were
supported by such labour-oriented intelligenty as Konstantin Takhtarev,
who became one of the editors of Rabochaia mysl but were opposed by most
of the other intelligenty in the Union of Struggle. The latter wanted to
maintain the union's tightly knit conspiratorial character and felt that
this precluded admission of workers into its inner circles, because the
workers were not well versed in the ways of the underground.From the
thinking of the Takhtarev group came Rabochaia mysl. Unlike most
Social-Democratic publications, it was specifically intended to give
expression to the workers' own views, and it devoted a large portion of
its space to reports by workers on conditions in their factories.It also
gave voice to a broad streak of anti-intelligentsia sentiment, which,
given the nature of the newspaper, must have reflected feelings widely
held among the workers and not just by the editors.
In its first issue the newspaper proclaimed the independence of the
labour movement from the intelligenty who had hitherto guided it, and
the primacy of economic over political goals. The editorial asserted
that the Russian labour movement owed its new vitality "to the fact that
the worker himself is taking over the struggle, having wrested it from
the hands of the leaders. . . . As long as the movement was merely a
means of calming the suffer-mg conscience of the repentant intellectual,
it was alien to the worker himself. "The labour movement would now
concentrate on the struggle to improve the workers' economic status,
using strikes as its principal weapon, and political change would
ultimately occur as a by-product of the economic struggle.
The paper was soon charged with harbouring a distinctly unfriendly
attitude toward the intelligentsia, and in a later issue the editors
responded to this accusation. They declared that the primary task of
Rabochaia mysl was to give the worker a forum of his own. Since he could
more easily understand the words of his fellow worker than "the abstract
writings of the intelligenty," the paper gave preference to articles
written by workers themselves. The editors, however, did admit to the
charge that the paper was "against the intelligentsia," and described in
highly unflattering terms those categories of intelligenty whose
participation in the labour movement the paper opposed. They rejected as
completely unreliable the members of the professions, such as lawyers,
artists, writers, and priests. They were only slightly more favourably
disposed to students. Like Tochiskii, they valued the services the
students could provide, such as collecting funds and distributing
literature, but considered them irrevocably part of the ruling classes
by virtue of their education and social origins. "It must never be
forgotten that while they are revolutionaries today, tomorrow they will
be procurators, judges, engineers, factory inspectors, in short,
officials of the Russian government."Therefore, while their
contributions to the labour movement might be useful, they must not be
allowed any significant influence in the workers' affairs. The only
intelligenty who would be warmly welcomed were those few "ideologists,"
or "white crows," who selflessly devoted themselves to the struggle for
liberty and equality.
Rabochaia mysl' expressed the hope that the labour movement by itself,
without the mediation of the revolutionary intelligentsia, could
persuade the authorities through pressure and persuasion to improve the
conditions of industrial work. At least some of the editors were clearly
thinking in terms of the legalisation of the labour movement. The
editors announced that they had been sending copies of the newspaper to
the ministers of finance and internal affairs, the over-procurator of
the Holy Synod, and all the factory inspectors of Petersburg, in order
to acquaint them with the workers' views. Had they been sure it would
reach him, they added, they would even have sent a copy to the tsar, for
"it would be very useful for him, too, to acquaint himself with the life
and thought of the workers."
Machajski had the opportunity to learn about Economism from some of the
exiles in Viliuisk, and he was familiar with Rabochaia mysl At one point
in The Intellectual Worker he even seems to have borrowed its
characterisation of the students as future rulers of the proletariat.
His few references to the newspaper and to Economism in general,
however, were ambivalent. On the one hand, he could not but approve of
the emphasis the Economists placed on economic improvement over
political objectives; on the other, Machajski could conceive of the
labour movement only as an underground, revolutionary struggle, whereas
the strand of Economism represented by Rabochaia mysl though critical of
the intelligentsia, led toward legalisation of the labour movement.
Therefore he could not regard Economism as a significant exception to
the efforts of the socialist intelligentsia as a whole to curb the true
revolutionary spirit of the working class. In the early years of the new
century, what remained of the Economist tendency within the
Social-Democratic party gave way before the forces grouped around the
émigré' newspaper Iskra (The Spark), with Lenin in the forefront. The
adherents of Iskra reasserted the primacy of political goals,
maintaining that the first task on Russia's historical agenda must be
the overthrow of tsarist absolutism. At the same time, they placed
renewed emphasis on the party as an underground, conspiratorial
organisation, requiring a centralised, hierarchical structure which
would serve both to safeguard the party's doctrinal purity and to ensure
the fulfilment of its revolutionary tasks. The imposition of these views
was achieved only at the high cost of intensified discord between the
intelligenty who staffed the party's local committees in the Russian
towns and the workers among whom they operated. The frequently
autocratic ways of the self-appointed committeemen provoked increasingly
bitter resentment, and the "Iskra period" of the Social-Democratic party
saw the rise of numerous "worker opposition" groups within its local
organisations.
The most frequent demand of the workers was for a more democratic form
of organisation, one in which the workers themselves would elect their
own leaders and have a voice in the determination of policy. In 1902,
for example, the workers in Kremenchug rebelled against the attempt to
reconstitute their party organisation along the centralised lines
advocated by Iskra. "The members of the committee were all newcomers
whom the workers did not know personally. They declared themselves the
committee without any sanction on the part of the workers, and in the
latter's eyes they were like uninvited 'Varangians' who had come to
'rule and reign' over them."
Similar discords arose in Ekaterinoslav and Odessa - two cities,
significantly, where Makhaevist organisations made their appearance. The
Ekaterinoslav committee had a long history of worker independence and
worker control of the organisation. The efforts of newly arrived
intelligenty to assert control over the committee's activities nearly
provoked an open breach with the workers, who insisted on maintaining
their influence. A compromise was worked out under which the two groups
maintained separate but co-operating committees, but at the beginning of
1903 the issue of centralisation produced a new schism in the
Ekaterinoslav organization.The Odessa workers had also begun to express
the opinion that "in a workers' movement, workers ought to be the
leaders." In 1901, a workers' opposition group formed, demanding that
the members of all party organs be elected. Attempts by the intelligenty
on the Odessa committee to justify the existing system of cooptation on
the grounds of conspiratorial necessity were received as evidence that
they distrusted the workers. Finally, in 1902, the workers' opposition
withdrew from the Social-Democratic organisation and formed an
independent group called the Workers' Will (Rabochaia volia), which
lasted until 1903 25 Descriptions of similar frictions in other cities,
such as St. Petersburg and Tula, appear in the reports submitted by
local committees to the Second Party Congress in 1903.26 Worker
dissidence and opposition cropped up also in Kharkov, Kiev, Tiflis, and
Ivanovo-Voznesensk.As previously mentioned, the Bund was experiencing a
similar wave of worker opposition in its local organisations.
Nor was it only intelligentsia high-handedness and worker independence
that generated frictions between the two elements. The intelligentsia's
preoccupation with doctrinal orthodoxy, which the workers often found
incomprehensible, also created antagonism -a problem which the
Bolshevik-Menshevik disputes would later exacerbate even further. On one
occasion in Kharkov, for example, when a group of factory workers got
together on their own initiative and asked the local Social-Democratic
committee for propaganda literature and speakers, they were rebuffed on
the grounds that they were "trade unionists." When asked if this was
true, one worker replied: "We haven't gone into these questions; the
devil only knows what we are."
Into the breach between workers and intelligentsia stepped Sergei
Zubatov, the creator of the experiment in so-called police socialism.
(Like Makhaevism, Zubatov's effort was dubbed zu-batovshchina by its
critics and is frequently referred to by that pejorative term in the
literature.) Zubatov became the chief of the Moscow Okhrana, the tsarist
political police, in 1896, then served in St. Petersburg from 1902 until
his dismissal from the government in 1903. A devoted monarchist, Zubatov
was well aware of the gulf that existed between the industrial workers
and the intelligentsia, and he set out to capitalise on it by persuading
the workers that the autocracy, not the revolutionaries, understood
their true interests. The themes sounded by Zubatov and his
representatives are so close to those of Makhaevism that it is worth
examining the rhetoric and aims of the Zubatov experiment in some
detail.
The basic premises of Zubatovism were set forth in 1898 in a memorandum
sent by General D. F. Trepov, then police chief of Moscow, to Grand Duke
Sergei, the Moscow governor-general. This memorandum was actually the
work of Zubatov himself,and it asserted that the intelligentsia regarded
the labour movement primarily as an instrument for furthering its own
political purposes.
The history of the revolutionary movement has shown that the
intelligentsia alone does not have the forces to struggle with the
government, even when armed with explosives. With this in mind, all the
opposition groups are now applauding the Social-Democratic movement, in
the calculation that by drawing the workers into anti-govemmental
undertakings they will have at their disposal a mass force which the
government will have to take into serious consideration.
The German Social Democrats, the document contended, had originated the
method of joining "their own ideal aspirations with the everyday, more
vital demands of the workers," and their Russian counterparts were now
adopting it by engaging in economic agitation and supporting strikes.
"If the petty needs and demands of the workers are being exploited by
the revolutionaries for such deeply anti-govemment purposes, shouldn't
the government as quickly as possible tear this . . . weapon from their
hands?" In order to thwart the spread of revolutionary activities among
the workers, the government must take the initiative in satisfying their
economic grievances through legal channels, "keeping in mind that only
the most youthful and energetic part of the crowd will follow an
agitator, while the average worker always prefers a less glittering but
more peaceful and legal solution." Problems arose not just from the
unruliness of the workers but from the failure of the factory owners
themselves to observe the laws and respect the workers' rights. The
solution was for the police to supervise relations between workers and
employers and to demonstrate to the worker that there was a better way
out of his difficulties than that offered by the revolutionaries: "What
occupies the revolutionary must necessarily interest the police."The
ideas set forth in the report won the firm support of both Trepov and
Grand Duke Sergei, and Zubatov was able to proceed with their practical
application.
Zubatov had been a radical in his student days, and he brought a
firsthand knowledge of the revolutionary movement and the psychology of
its participants to his work in the political police. The first object
of his attention was the Bund. In the summer of 1898 a number of Bund
leaders were arrested and brought to Moscow for questioning. In the
course of the interrogations, Zubatov concluded that the situation among
the Jewish workers of the Pale was favourable for his plans. When
another group of arrested Bundists was brought to Moscow in 1900,
Zubatov made a concerted effort to persuade them of his views. He
treated them benevolently, engaged them in long discussions of the
labour movement, and gave them books by judiciously selected authors,
including Eduard Bernstein. (He referred to Bernstein as "our ally
against the outrageous Russian Social Democracy. ") He described in the
following terms the form his gentle brainwashing took when political
prisoners came before him:
In the interrogations I am separating the anti-govemment element from
the mass with brilliant success, I can honestly say. In the Russian
movement, and perhaps also in the Jewish movement, I am successfully
persuading my public that the workers' movement is one thing while the
Social Democratic movement is another. In the former the goal is a
kopeck, in the latter it is an ideological theory. . . the Social
Democrats, ignoring [the worker's immediate interests, call upon him to
help the "privileged" classes achieve their interests (to carry out a
revolution), promising him all kinds of benefits afterwards.
Zubatov succeeded in winning some of the Bundists over to his ideas,
perhaps aided by the fact that several members of his captive audience
were quite young and impressionable. Mania (Mania) Viltushevich, for
instance, who became Zubatov's chief organiser in Minsk, was only
nineteen or twenty at the time of her arrest, and some of the other
activists were not much older.
Zubatov's converts returned to Minsk and in 1901, having broken
definitively with the Bund, formed their own organisation, called the
Jewish Independent Workers' party. The principal point of the manifesto
the new party issued was the rejection of politics. It was criminal, the
Independents declared, to sacrifice "the material interests of the
working class for political goals which at present are alien to it," and
they denounced the Bund for regarding economic demands primarily as an
instrument for revolutionising the workers. Their own objectives would
be limited to material and cultural improvement of the Jewish
workers,or, as they phrased it, to the attainment of "bread and
knowledge." Their program called for the establishment of a variety of
non-political economic and cultural organisations open to workers of any
political persuasion (or none at all), and promised that the party would
be democratically organised and governed by the rank and file.
The Zubatov organisation in Minsk was perfectly calculated to appeal to
both currents of opposition that had arisen previously in the
development of the Jewish labour movement. On the one hand, it promised
peaceful educational and cultural development, and on the other it
championed legal economic activity over political action. At the same
time, it offered a democratic form of organisation responsive to the
needs and wishes of the workers themselves. Not surprisingly, it became
immensely popular among the Jewish artisans of the city, especially when
the Independents proved effective in promoting strikes. The factory
owners, aware of the Independents' connection with the police, were
often quick to grant concessions. In some cases the Minsk police acted
as mediators in labour disputes or even actively sided with the
workers.In a report at the end of 1901, Zubatov claimed a membership of
more than fifteen hundred in the organisation.
By the summer of 1903, however, the Independent Workers' party in Minsk
had collapsed, undermined by the acute contradictions in the tsarist
government 5 policies. The Zubatov organisation existed in a kind of
legal limbo; it operated with the sanction of the police but did not
have full legal status. It was therefore subject to all the whims of the
Petersburg bureaucracy and the opposition of some of the local
authorities. When the gains which the workers had initially wrested from
their employers proved ephemeral, they began to withdraw their support
from the Independents.At the same time, events occurred which made it
increasingly difficult to represent the autocracy as the protector of
the Jewish proletariat. The Kishinev pogrom in April 1903 was widely
considered to have occurred with government complicity; and in June of
that year Interior Minister Plehve, who was regarded as anti-Semitic to
begin with, banned the further activity of Zionism in Russia, a movement
with which a number of the Zubatovites in the Pale were closely
identified.Even before the general strike of 1903, which brought an
abrupt end to the Zubatov experiment as a whole, the Minsk Independents
had disbanded.
The same themes, with some variations, were repeated in Moscow and
Odessa, the other two cities where Zubatov's agents succeeded in
creating mass organisations. In Moscow, the organisers were mainly
factory workers, members of the "worker-intelligentsia," rather than
intelligenty, as in Minsk.Their rhetoric, however, was similarly filled
with anti-intelligentsia sentiment. They urged the workers to separate
themselves from the "petty intelligenty," as they termed the
revolutionary socialists. (They did, however, welcome the services of
liberal intellectuals such as the Moscow academics who participated for
a time in the Zubatovites' educational program, giving lectures which
proved quite popular with the workers.) The revolutionaries, they
maintained, were interested only in using the workers for their own
political ends, deflecting them from their economic demands and bringing
them only suffering and prison terms. In 1901, they formed a Society of
Machine Workers, the first of several associations devoted to mutual
aid, education, and peaceful organisational activity in allegiance to
the autocracy.
The high point of the Zubatov experiment in Moscow came on February 19,
1902, when Zubatov's agents demonstrated their influence over the
workers by ushering a peaceful crowd estimated at some fifty thousand to
Alexander II's monument in the Kremlin, to commemorate the anniversary
of the emancipation of the serfs. Soon, however, thanks to pressure from
the factory owners as well as apprehension on the part of some
government authorities over the Zubatovites' involvement in strike
actions, the character of the movement changed. It took on a more
conservative cast, overtly religious and monarchist, thereby
anticipating the Gapon organisation that was to arise in St. Petersburg
in 1904. The activities of the Zubatovites were curtailed and the
organisation lost most of its effectiveness, although remnants of it
survived into 1905.
The site of Zubatovism's greatest success - and spectacular collapse -
was the city of Odessa. The chief Zubatov organiser in Odessa was
Genrikh (Khunia) Shaevich, a young Zionist who claimed to hold a
doctoral degree from the University of Berlin. He had met Mania
Viltushevich at a Zionist congress in Minsk and then returned to Odessa
to form a branch of the Independents.In August 1902 the Independent
Workers' Group of Odessa (soon renamed the Independent Workers' party)
issued a manifesto to the Odessa workers.
Various parties have long been trying to organise us, but until now we
have not had one purely workers' organisation. Those parties which work
among us set themselves very large but very distant goals. They are
striving for a world-wide overturn, i.e., they want to change all of
human life. Setting themselves such enormous goals, which embrace all
social life, those parties have neither the time nor the opportunity to
pursue our particular workers' interests with sufficient attention, or
to satisfy them.
What labour really needed, the manifesto continued, was not lofty
abstractions but trade unions. Although these were forbidden in Russia,
the reason for the ban was the association between the labour movement
and the revolutionary parties. If purely economic unions were organised,
independent of any political parties, there was no doubt that the
government would be persuaded to allow them. The rejection of politics
as the preoccupation of the intelligentsia pervaded the rhetoric of the
Odessa Zubatovites. The manifesto of the Union of Odessa House-Painters,
one of the constituent unions of the Independent Workers' party,
contained the following statement:
The purely economic union of house-painters should be distinguished from
the various political workers' parties. The union is completely
independent of political parties. We do not yet know how the government
will regard our union, but we can be sure that its members will not be
exiled to Siberia as political criminals.
Going somewhat beyond the bounds of strict loyalty to the throne, the
independents declared, in response to criticism from the
Socialist-Revolutionary party, that it was irrelevant to the workers'
needs whether they had a monarchy, a republic, or a constitutional
state. Instead of inciting the workers against the autocracy, the
socialists might inform them that "even in republics, socialist
ministers deport strikers (Millerand)." The workers' welfare depended
not on the system of government but on the strength of their
organisations. As they had elsewhere, the workers of Odessa responded
enthusiastically to the formation of non-political labour organisations,
an official report putting the membership of the Independent Workers'
Party in April 1903 at 2,000.50 Remarkably, the Independents were able
to transcend the national and religious cleavages of this polyglot city,
bringing together Russian and Ukrainian as well as Jewish workers.
Zubatov's agents in Odessa carried out their mission only too well, for
their efforts generated a well organised and increasingly independent
labour movement in Odessa. In the summer of 1903, this movement slipped
from the grasp of its creators and produced Russia's first general
strike - the South Russian strike of 1903, which so impressed Machajski.
The strike began in Odessa in early July and lasted for several weeks;
order was restored in Odessa with a minimum of violence, but the strike
spread to other cities throughout the southern part of the empire. It
was a spontaneous phenomenon, but there can be little doubt that the
agitation of the Independents played a major role in provoking it.In any
case, it was too much for the authorities. Shaevich was arrested and
sentenced to five years in Siberia, although his sentence was commuted
the following year. Zubatov himself was dismissed from government
service, and with the end of his career came the end of the experiment
in "police socialism."
The enthusiastic response of the workers to the Zubatovites' message in
three such disparate cities as Minsk, Moscow, and Odessa, indicates how
shrewdly Zubatov had perceived the tensions between the workers and the
intelligentsia. His enterprise failed to sustain itself for a number of
reasons, not the least of which was the fact that most of his agents
were sincerely devoted to the interests of the workers and were not mere
tools of the police.Therefore Zubatov could not always control the
mechanism he had constructed or keep it on the course he had set for it.
The major share of blame for Zubatovism's downfall, however, appears to
lie with the tsarist government, which treated the Zubatov experiment
with the utmost ambivalence and inconsistency. The ministry of the
interior was opposed on the issue by Count Witte's ministry of finance,
and the interior ministry itself was deeply divided at every level. The
bureaucratic infighting that resulted was problem enough, but it was
symptomatic of an even deeper flaw in the government's approach. Zubatov
himself put his finger on it when he complained of the confusion
displayed by some of the provincial authorities, a confusion stemming
from "their inability to distinguish a revolutionary labour movement
from a peaceful one."It was a handicap that pervaded the entire
autocracy. The intrinsic contradictions of Zubatovism could have been
resolved only by some form of legalisation of trade unions - a step
which many of the participants, including Zubatov himself, anticipated
as its logical outcome. But if the autocracy was deeply suspicious of
"self-activity" even among the educated and property-owning segments of
society, still less could it countenance organisation by the working
class - one which, despite impressive displays of self-discipline, was
still raw and volatile and had to be dealt with very carefully. With the
Zubatov episode the government in a sense did what some scholars believe
Social Democracy had done: it helped to foster a labour movement which
it was then unable to handle. As a result, the Zubatov organisations
served to increase the sense of frustration with the government which
they were intended to overcome.
As far as Makhaevism is concerned, it seems to have had no points of
contact, either personal or ideological, with Zubatovism.If Machajski
could not approve of Economism because it led toward trade unionism
rather than revolution, he could hardly have had any sympathy for a
tendency that led in the same direction under the sponsorship of the
tsarist police. He kept silent about the Zubatov phenomenon, however,
and his writings contain only a few ironic but fleeting references to
it.Makhaevism and Zubatovism arose independently of each other and
developed separately, but their attacks on the revolutionary
intelligentsia, coming as they did from opposite ends of the Russian
ideological spectrum, showed a remarkable similarity. This is additional
evidence, if such be needed, of just how widespread and acute the
"question of the intelligentsia" in its relationship to the working
class had become.
The socialist parties had for the most part been powerless to counter
the rise of the Zubatov organizations (although the Bund had some
success on this score in Vilna), and they were in no position to
capitalise on their collapse. The Social-Democratic leadership, after
the party's second congress in 1903, became almost totally immersed in
the factional dispute between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks which had rent
the party. To many workers, the party schism was both incomprehensible
and inexcusable. It seemed to them that the intelligenty were indulging
in doctrinal hair-splitting at the expense of the workers' interests,
and the squabbling reinforced anti-intelligentsia feelings. In a letter
to the Bolshevik newspaper Vpered (Forward), for example, a group of St.
Petersburg metalworkers declared that the working class was impatiently
awaiting the restoration of unity among the party leaders. "If it is not
forthcoming, then we will know that we have no intelligentsia
proletariat [intelligentskii proletariat], and if we did have one, then
it no longer exists: they have sold the labour movement to the
capitalists. Long live the worker proletariat!"The breach between
workers and intelligenty within the party remained unhealed, and the
approach of the 1905 revolution caught the Social Democrats unprepared
and unable to mobilise the working class under its banner.
The domination of the party by the intelligentsia generated worker
apathy as well as worker hostility. Excluded from the inner councils of
the local committees and unable to influence their decisions, the
workers tended to lose interest in their operation. The lack of
communication that had developed between the two elements became
forcefully apparent in the events of 1905. Several witnesses testify to
the shock the party experienced when the Petersburg workers failed to
respond to the Social Democrats' call for a May Day demonstration.
Despite the carefully laid plans of the local party organisation, an
embarrassingly insignificant number of workers actually appeared for the
march.According to S. I. Somov, a Menshevik active in the Petersburg
organisation, this episode dramatised the extent to which Russian Social
Democracy had remained a party of revolutionary intelligenty rather than
a party of workers. The latter had come to regard the party "not as
their own business but someone else's, the intelligentsia's," and they
felt little sense of personal responsibility for it. As a result, they
left it to the party leaders to organise the May Day demonstration
without deeming it necessary to take an active part in it themselves.
Although the party proclaimed itself a proletarian party, it was run by
intelligenty at every level. As one worker complained, whenever workers
succeeded in forming a district organisation, an "intelligent-tsar"
would inevitably arrive to supervise it. Some were benevolent tsars,
perhaps, "but we need neither good nor evil tsars, we ourselves want to
rule in our own party, and we must set up our own procedures in it."Even
in the heat of revolution the gulf between the two forces was not easily
bridged, as in the case of a leader of the precious-metalworkers' union
in Petersburg who attempted to address a meeting on November 13, 1905:
the workmen allowed him to proceed only after they were assured that he
was "neither an intellectual nor a student."It was only under the impact
of the 1905 revolution that the Social Democrats, and particularly the
Mensheviks, began to address themselves seriously to the task of
creating a party of the workers and not just for the workers.
The prolonged effort by Russia's revolutionaries to bring together their
own grievances against the tsarist autocracy and those of the industrial
workers had not been crowned with success by the time the 1905
revolution erupted. Russian Marxists, for all their dedication to the
"working class," all too often found themselves rebuked and rebuffed
when it came to organising actual workers. The sources of the tension
that arose between them were numerous and complex: issues of leadership
and subordination, exacerbated by underground conditions; the divergence
between the political objectives of most intelligenty and the economic
pre-occupations of most of the workers; educational, cultural, and
social differences. Some of these antagonisms were specific to the
Social-Democratic movement, but others were more deeply rooted in the
nature of the Russian intelligentsia and its relationship to the
uneducated masses. All this provided fertile soil for Makhaevism, and as
its doctrines circulated and became known, individuals and groups of
various sorts found in it a persuasive explanation of their
dissatisfaction with the intelligentsia.
The history of the Makhaevists twined in and around the
anti-intelligentsia currents discussed above, intersecting with some,
closely paralleling others.A wide variety of individuals were drawn to
Machajski's doctrines, whether they actually joined Makhaevist groups or
merely expressed approval of his views. For some, Machajski's criticism
of the intelligentsia provided sanction for a crude social resentment of
the privileged classes. One example is the testimony of a Jewish worker
named B. A. Breslav, whose brief memoir, published in 1928, begins as a
tribute to Gorky and ends as a tribute to Machajski. When he was
arrested for labour activity in 1901 Breslav was illiterate, and he
learned to read only in prison and exile. Discovering Gorky's works, he
was greatly impressed by their descriptions of life among the lower
classes. He was particularly struck by a line in The Lower Depths, where
one of the characters says of a nobleman he encounters that lordliness
(barstvo) is like the smallpox -the disease may go away, but it leaves
traces on the face.This remark "on the impossibility of a complete
regeneration and merger with the proletariat on the part of those who
came from a class milieu alien to us" fell on fertile soil, for Breslav
was already becoming disillusioned with the intelligentsia. At first he
had idealised those intelligenty he had encountered in underground
circles for their apparent selflessness and dedication, but "when I came
into close contact with the intelligentsia in prison and exile, my
initial idealization fast disappeared, and a strong reaction even set in
against my original enthusiasm."
These sentiments found confirmation when, in exile in eastern Siberia in
1902, he came across Machajski's two essays, "which literally called for
a pogrom against the intelligentsia."The essays showed him how the
intelligentsia used the struggle of the workers for its own class
interests - and, remembering the remark in Gorky about "lordliness," he
felt that it underscored Machajski's views.
A more sophisticated example of the kind of social envy to which
Makhaevism could appeal appears in the reminiscences of M. Vetoshkin, a
village schoolteacher who had been expelled from his post in 1903 for
propagandising his pupils. Having come across Machajski's Intellectual
Worker, he arrived at the beginning of 1904 in Irkutsk - the city where
Machajski had organised his first group, in 1902-hoping to support
himself by giving lessons and to pursue the interest in Marx which his
reading of Machajski had aroused. "I was full of Makhaevist attitudes,"
he recalled. "The Intellectual Worker had made such a strong impression
on me that I knew this book, which at the time passed from hand to hand
in an illegal lithographed edition, almost by heart. The intelligentsia
seemed to me almost the main enemy of the working class."He hoped also
to organise a Makhaevist circle in opposition to the local
Social-Democratic committee, but this plan was cut short by his arrest.
In prison he encountered Social Democrats who succeeded in re-educating
him, and he renounced Makhaevism in favour of Marxism.
In the second instalment of his memoirs, however, he admits that he had
not fully overcome his Makhaevist sentiments. While engaged in party
work in Tomsk in 1905, he found himself envying the articulateness of
the university-educated intelligenty in the party, especially their
ability to use Latin and German words. "It must be said that along with
some envy of the oratorical skills of the Tomsk intelligenty, I also
harboured a certain degree of alienation in regard to them, which I had
underscored from Machajski's book and of which, evidently, I had not
been completely cured in prison, although it seemed to me that I had
broken decisively with Makhaevism."After a meeting, for example, he had
thought to himself: "There they are, with a good education, while our
brother, coming out of a worker's poverty, feeds on crumbs from the
table of the educated gentlemen."He himself had had only the meagre
education a teachers' seminary could offer, and his father, a labourer
in a saltworks, had always scorned those who lived by "light work,"
including the intelligentsia. His father's influence had no doubt
predisposed him to Makhaevism, he concluded, and although intellectually
he had overcome it, some of it had remained within him.
As Vetoshkin's memoir indicates, Makhaevism left a lasting legacy in
Irkutsk even after the arrest of Machajski's group. As late as 1908,
when an attempt was made to reconstitute the previously arrested
Social-Democratic committee there, the workers insisted that no
intelligenty be allowed as members. The Social-Democratic organiser, M.
M. Konstantinov, later professed not 'to have been surprised at the
mistrustful and even hostile attitude of the workers. Even before this
time he had encountered among the workers "a distrust for [the
intelligentsia's] commitment and sincerity" and a desire to run their
own organisations: "'They can help us with advice and carry out the
organisation's decisions, but not direct us."'He hastens to add,
however, that this attitude was not "what at this time was still fresh
in the memory of many of us under the name of 'Makhaevism."' He knew
that Machajski had propagated his views in Irkutsk before the revolution
but asserts, not convincingly, that they had enjoyed popularity not with
the workers but with other intelligenty.
Makhaevism's advocacy of worker independence of the intelligentsia was
the main source of its appeal to individuals who were active in the
labour movement. One example was the Jewish printer Moisei Lur'e,
mentioned above. Born in Kovno gubernia in 1871 or 1372, he became a
highly individualistic Social Democrat, retaining his early connections
with the Polish Socialist party and sometimes collaborating with
populist revolutionaries.In the mid-1890's, he and his brother Mikhail
organised the Group of Worker Revolutionaries, which operated in several
cities of south Russia from a base in Belostok. By 1898, it had evolved
into the Workers' Banner (Rabochee znamia), which issued an underground
journal by that name. One of the continuities of Lur'e's political
outlook was his hostility to the intelligentsia. He accused it of
wanting to withhold "real knowledge" from the masses in order to be able
to use them as a "blind tool," and in Kiev he and his followers made
common cause with some narodovol'tsy in opposition to the Social
Democrats' turn from propaganda to agitation. According to one of his
close associates in the Group of Worker Revolutionaries, he was deeply
suspicious of what he regarded as the intelligentsia's "rightist
tendency." In his opinion, "the intelligentsia in its majority latches
onto the workers' movement to try to use the hands of the workers to
pull the bourgeoisie's chestnuts out of the fire for it, or with its own
group interests in mind."
Given this attitude, it is not surprising that Lur'e was drawn to
Makhaevism. Arrested in 1901, after twenty months in prison he was sent
to Iakutsk to serve a term of exile. In Siberia, he encountered
Machajski's doctrines and found himself very much impressed with
them.Even after his return to St. Petersburg in 1906, where he organised
armed detachments for the Bolsheviks, he was still "raving over
Machajski."Lur'e himself never joined a Makhaevist group, but, according
to one source, a worker who had belonged to his early group in Kiev
turned up in the ranks of Machajski's adherents in 1905.
Vera Davidovna Gurari, a revolutionary and labour organiser, did
formally join the Makhaevists. A Jew converted to Orthodoxy, Gurari was
born in Poltava in 1865 and had attended gymnasium. She had a long and
rather eclectic revolutionary career. We first hear of her in the 1880s
as the organiser of several underground circles in St. Petersburg. In
this period when the demarcation between populists and Marxists was
still hazy, she is described as "a social democrat, terrorist, and
narodovolka."In 1897, upon returning to Petersburg from a term of
administrative exile, she was drawn into Social-Democratic activities in
the capital. From the fall of 1898 to her arrest in April 1899 she led a
workers' circle called the Group for the Self-Emancipation of the
Working Class. As its name suggests, the organisation was critical of
intelligentsia domination of the labour movement. Its manifesto
complained of the intelligenty's tendency to form an exclusive
"areopagus," a "touching union of intelligenty" to which they refused to
admit workers, and declared that the workers must take their cause into
their own hands. It also asserted that political goals must be
subordinated to, and grow out of, the economic struggle.This position
was very close to that of the Economists, and, in fact, one of the
group's activities was to distribute the newspaper Rabochaia mysl' to
its members. It also succeeded in issuing May Day proclamations to
several of the factories of St. Petersburg, listing economic demands for
which the workers should strive.
With the arrest of her Petersburg group, Gurari was exiled to Siberia.
There she became a convert to Makhaevism and was a member of Machajski's
Irkutsk group.She surfaces again in Ekaterinoslav in 1903.
Ekaterinoslav, it will be remembered, was one of the towns where
relations between workers and intelligenty in the Social-Democratic
committee were most antagonistic. Apparently taking advantage of this
friction, Gurari organised a Makhaevist group consisting of several
dozen Jewish workers who had previously belonged to the
Social-Democratic organisation. She soon found herself back in Siberia
but retained her ties with Machajski: she reappears one last time as a
Makhaevist in the Workers' Conspiracy in St. Petersburg.
It was in Odessa that Makhaevism as an organised movement showed the
greatest staying power. Odessa was particularly susceptible to the
penetration of Machajski's doctrines. The "worker opposition" within the
local Social-Democratic organisation was so vehement that it generated
an actual schism, and it was in Odessa that Zubatovism had proved
particularly popular. By 1902, a mimeographed copy of The Intellectual
Worker was circulating in Odessa, and Machajski's views were beginning
to make headway among both unemployed artisans and workers antagonised
by the Social-Democratic committeemen.
In 1903 or 1904, a group calling itself the Implacables (Ne-primirimye),
consisting of both Makhaevists and anarchists, arose in Odessa. Two of
its members, Mitkevich and Chuprina, were alumni of Machajski's group in
Irkutsk. The Makhaevist influence manifested itself in the group's
rejection of utopian ideals, its emphasis on the economic goals of the
labour movement, and its denunciation of the intelligentsia as a
parasitical class. In addition, the Implacables circulated copies of The
Intellectual Worker. The police soon put an end to their activities and
seized the printing press they had established.Before their dispersal,
however, they had made their presence felt sufficiently for kindred
groups to turn to them for support. At the beginning of 1904, a group of
anarchists in Belostok, having heard that the Implacables were supplied
both with funds and with literature, sent an emissary in quest of
financial assistance, and he did not come back empty-handed.
After another attempt at joint activity with the anarchists, the
Makhaevists formed a group of their own, calling it The Workers'
Conspiracy (Rabochii zagovor). It succeeded in issuing a hecto-graphed
pamphlet setting forth its views but then disappeared. The Odessa
anarchists belonged to a third category of individuals to whom
Makhaevism proved attractive: revolutionary militants. Rejecting the
main socialist parties' program of achieving a "bourgeois revolution" as
a stepping-stone to a classless society, such revolutionaries could find
in Makhaevism a persuasive explanation of what they regarded as
foot-dragging on the part of the socialists. One example is N. M.
Erdelovskii, originally a Social Democrat, who became a Makhaevist
briefly and ended up as an anarchist terrorist. Erdelovskii was a
participant in the bombing of the Libman Cafe' in Odessa in December
1905. This was one of the more notorious instances of what anarchists of
a certain stripe called "unmotivated terror,"that is, indiscriminate
acts of terror directed not against specific individuals but against
members of the ruling classes in general.
Another revolutionary activist who stopped briefly at Makhaevism on his
way to terrorism was Vladimir Lapidus, known as "Striga." Born into a
comfortable Jewish family, Striga became a revolutionary animated by a
burning hatred of the "bourgeois order' and a passionate desire to bring
it down. Unable to accept the slow-moving strategy of the Social
Democrats, he was attracted to Machajski's doctrine that the
intelligentsia was pursuing its own class interest, and in Odessa he
joined the Implacables. Subsequently, however, he became an anarchist
terrorist, for the anarchist vision of the future society provided him
with positive ideals to which he could commit himself. Ultimately he met
a more dramatic end than Makhaevism could offer him: after engaging in
terrorist activities in Belostok and Warsaw, he accidentally blew
himself up in Paris with one of his own bombs.
Thus, Makhaevism's field of operation was not only the labour movement,
where it sought to challenge the Social Democrats for the loyalty of the
industrial workers, but also the extremist fringe of the Russian
revolutionary movement, where it interacted with both anarchist and
Socialist-Revolutionary elements. As might be expected, given the
similarity of many of their positions and especially their shared
Bakuninist heritage, Makhaevism and anarchism had a particularly close
relationship. Even when they did not explicitly voice approval of
Makhaevism, anarchists often expressed views similar to Machajski's, for
anti-intelligentsia attitudes were deeply rooted in Russian anarchism.
Danul Novomirskii, for example, who headed a group of
anarcho-syndicalists in Odessa from 1905 to 1907, like Machajski branded
Social Democracy the ideology of "a new middle class" consisting of the
"bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia." He accused the Social
Democrats of wanting to maintain the state for the benefit of the
managerial and technical elite, which would direct the socialist economy
and govern the working class through its control of parliamentary
institutions. In distinction to Machajski, however, Novomirskii adhered
to the anarcho-syndicalist program of replacing the state with a system
of federated workers' associations to administer the economy.
Even if they did not always go as far as Novomirskii in their charges
against the intelligentsia, anarchists were receptive to criticism of
it. As one anarchist critic of Makhaevism put it, the anarchists
believed that the relationship between proletariat and intelligentsia
should be "not sharply hostile, as Mr. Lozinskii preaches, but not
overly intimate either, as Social Democracy would have it. "Given the
many points in common between the Makhaevists and the anarchists, a
considerable degree of interchange, both personal and ideological, took
place between them, although Makhaevism always maintained its distinct
identity.
Besides its close relations with anarchism, Makhaevism may also have
played a role in the emergence of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalism.
One of the forerunners of Maximalism was a dissident group called the
agrarniki, or "agrarians," which arose in 1904 among the younger
Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés in Geneva. These were proponents of
agrarian terror, acts of terrorism directed against landowners. Their
leading practitioner was M. I. Sokolov, but the group's theorist, who at
the time called himself E. Ustinov, was none other than Evgenii
tozinskii. As a pamphleteer and journalist, Lozinskii was serving on the
editorial board of the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper
Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (Revolutionary Russia). It was Lozinskii who
drafted a resolution embodying the young insurgents' position that was
adopted at a Socialist-Revolutionary conference in Geneva in October
1904. As a result, these dissidents were sometimes known as
Ustinovites.In the spring and summer of 1905, the group published three
issues of a newspaper called Vol'nyi diskussionnyi listok (The Free
Discussion Page), which sharply criticised the official party program.
In particular, the paper rejected parliamentary forms of struggle and
political activity in general, and it opposed the party's distinction
between "minimum" and "maximum" objectives. Instead of aiming merely for
a "bourgeois" revolution which would establish a parliamentary order and
socialise agricultural land but not industrial enterprises, the group
called for the immediate establishment of a full-scale socialist order
in both town and countryside through mass social action.Most notably for
a Socialist-Revolutionary group, the dissidents assigned a prominent
role in the forthcoming revolution to the urban workers, taking the
Paris Commune as their model in much the same way that Machajski had
drawn inspiration from the June Days of 1848.
The agitation of the Ustinov group was not well received by the party
leadership; by the end of 1905, the party had not only officially
repudiated the dissidents' positions but had forced them out of the
party itself. The second issue of VoI'nyi diskussionnyi listok quoted a
declaration in Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia that "the editorial group of
Vol'nyi diskussionnyi listok, as such, stands outside the party of
Socialist-Revolutionaries."In December 1905 the group published one
issue of a newspaper called Kommuna (The Commune), in which it announced
that it had withdrawn from the Socialist-Revolutionary party and joined
the newly formed Union of Revolutionary Socialists, under whose imprint
Kommuna appeared.Even more than its predecessor, this publication looked
to the urban workers as the revolutionary vanguard and even detailed a
program for organising a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the
towns.'
The Ustinov group was one of several left-wing currents within the
Socialist-Revolutionary party which, under Sokolov's leadership, in 1906
came together to form a new Maximalist party. Lozinskii himself,
however, seems to have played no further role in this development,
having by now broken with the Socialist-Revolutionaries entirely and
turned to Makhaevism. Between February and May 1907, three issues of a
newspaper entitled Protiv techeniia (Against the Current) appeared in
St. Petersburg under his guidance. It called itself a "journal of social
satire and literary criticism," and it consisted of commentary on social
and political issues of the day from the point of view of familiar
Makhaevist positions on the intelligentsia and socialism. It was
published legally, with Lozinskii as editor, and in it he explicitly
repudiated Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalism.It is uncertain who,
besides Lozinskii himself, may have contributed to this little
publication if, indeed, there were any other contributors: all of the
signed articles in the three issues bore either Lozinskii's name, his
initials, or one of his pseudonyms. To the uninitiated reader, Lozinskii
had transformed himself into an entire group.
Whether, and to what degree, Machajski's ideas actually contributed to
the emergence of the Ustinovites, and ultimately of Maximalism, is
unclear, for it is unclear whether Lozinskii or any of his fellow
Socialist-Revolutionary militants adopted Makhaev-ism prior to 1907.
Certainly, party dissidents had the opportunity to familiarise
themselves with Machajski's doctrines much earlier. The main centre of
their émigré activity was Geneva, and this was where Machajski had
settled in 1903 and where his writings were published in 1904-1905.There
is no mention of Machajski in Vol"iyi diskussionnyi listok or Kommuna,
however, and neither publication displays the attitude toward the
intelligentsia that was the hallmark of Makhaevism. It is more likely
that the immediate influence on the Ustinovites was anarchism, as
suggested not only by their anti political and anti-parliamen-tary
stance but also by the pains they took to distinguish themselves from
the anarchists.'Lozinskii's ideological evolution, however, provides
further evidence of the extent to which Ma-khaevism interacted with, and
helped to fertilise, those currents that stood on the militant left-wing
fringe of the Russian revolutionary spectrum.
The organised activities of the Makhaevists culminated with Machajski's
St. Petersburg group in 1906 and 1907. The group called itself the party
of the Workers' Conspiracy (Rabochii za-govor) and established an
underground printing press in Finland.The Makhaevists were also able to
finance legal editions of The Intellectual Worker, parts 1 and 2, and
The Bourgeois Revolution and the Workers' Cause, both of which appeared
in 1906. They began issuing proclamations and agitating in the factories
as well as among the unemployed. They also appeared at workers' meetings
to criticise the representatives of the socialist parties and urge the
workers to expel intelligenty from the labour movement. The socialists
responded by accusing the Makhaevists of "provocation" and by sponsoring
condemnations of them whenever possible. From the latter, some idea of
the message the Makhaevists were trying to convey to the workers can be
gleaned. In February 1907, for example, a meeting of the unemployed in
one of the city's districts adopted the following resolution:
After listening to the representatives of the Workers' Conspiracy with
indignation, the meeting rejects their proposals directed against a
democratic republic, against the organisations of the working class, and
against the socialists, and expresses its confidence that only by
rallying around the socialist banner can the workers overthrow
capitalism and thereby rid themselves of capitalism's inseparable
companion, unemployment .
This did not stop the Makhaevists, however. On April 18, the Marxist
newspaper Tovarishch (Comrade) reported the appearance of
representatives of the Workers' Conspiracy party at another meeting of
the unemployed. Debates with the Social Democrats and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries ensued, and the meeting adopted a resolution
rejecting the Workers' Conspiracy's demands and tactics.
A month later, Tovarishch reprinted an item from Rech' (Speech), the
newspaper of the liberal Constitutional-Democratic, or Kadet, party. It
described the participation of Makhaevists in a workers' meeting called
to hear a report on the recent Fifth Congress of the Social-Democratic
party in London.
After the reading of the report, orators of the Workers' Conspiracy
group ("Makhaevists") came forward and subjected the report on the
congress to severe criticism. They tried to show that the congress had
ignored the most burning issues of worker life, such as lockouts, the
trade-union movement, etc. The orators attributed this to the influence
of the intelligentsia on the congress. The Makhaevists called on the
workers to form a new party. The meeting, however, adopted a resolution
expressing confidence in the Social-Democratic Party.
In August, Tovarishch reported the reappearance of Makhaevist agitators
among the workers of Vasilevskii Island and the Petersburg Side,
commenting that "their influence is especially strong on the unemployed
of these districts." To halt the spread of that influence, a workers'
meeting had been held on August 24 at which the Socialist-Revolutionary
speaker "pointed out that the Makhaevists say nothing about the ideal of
the future, while the socialist parties advocate perfectly clear goals."
The Social-Democratic representative concurred, and, the response of the
Makhaevists having met with little sympathy, the meeting adopted the
following resolution:
Taking into account the fact that the organisation under the name of the
Workers' Conspiracy propagates slogans among the workers which are
fundamentally harmful and hinder the proper conduct of the class
struggle; that the Workers' Conspiracy, in calling the workers to an
armed uprising and a general political strike consciously engages in
provocation of [provotsiruetl the worker masses; and that, finally, the
Workers' Conspiracy, which does not acknowledge socialist doctrine,
hampers the triumph of socialism, the meeting does not recognise the
Workers' Conspiracy as a party of the working class and calls on all
those who have fallen under its influence to return to the bosom of the
socialist parties.
The Makhaevists remained undaunted. At a meeting in the Vyborg district
in September a representative of the Workers' Conspiracy declared that
the political parties which claimed to represent the proletariat had led
the labour movement onto a false path. He attributed this to the social
composition of the parties, "more than three-quarters of which consist
of half-proletarianised intelligenty." Only labour organisations which
excluded "the party intelligentsia element" could properly represent the
workers.
The socialists, in turn, kept up their attacks on the Makhaevists. At a
meeting of factory workers in the Narva Gate district several weeks
later, the Social-Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary
representatives, after a spirited debate with the Makhaevists, succeeded
in passing a resolution branding their activity "extremely harmful and
provocational," and recommending that their meetings be boycotted. Such
condemnations evidently did not prevent the Workers' Conspiracy from
calling a "crowded meeting" of workers of the Vyborg Side on October 17.
According to the report in Tovarishch, however, the speeches of the
Makhaevists were met with a total lack of sympathy on the part of the
workers, who dispersed shouting "provocateurs," 'hooligans," and other
epithets.
Exactly what course of action the Makhaevists urged upon the workers of
St. Petersburg remains unclear. Since the Makhaevists concentrated
particularly on agitation among the unemployed, Vladimir Voitinskii, at
the time a Bolshevik, encountered them frequently in his capacity as
chairman of the Petersburg Council of the Unemployed. "They summoned the
workers to 'direct action,"' he states in his memoirs, "understanding by
this the forcible seizure of all of life's necessities and revenge on
the enemies of the toilers. In practical terms it came down to
expropriations and individual terror."'At one rally, Voitinskii claims,
an offended Makhaevist drew a gun on him but backed down when Voitinskii
produced a pistol of his own.'
Machajski himself, on the other hand, presented the activities of the
Makhaevists in a very different light. In a letter to Zeromski in
January of 1911, he stoutly denied that they had engaged in either
terrorism or banditry. There was only one place in the whole of Russia,
he maintained, evidently referring to St. Petersburg, where the
Makhaevists for an extended period of time had been able to disseminate
their literature, print a series of proclamations, and conduct
agitation. To do so, they had had to concentrate all their forces on
this organisation during its two-year existence.Even here, however, they
had fielded no armed detachments, and, in fact, "no Makhaevist even
carried a Browning, either his own or a borrowed one." As evidence of
their non violent behaviour he claimed that no Makhaevist had been
brought before a military court (which tried terrorists), or had even
been sentenced to hard labour, only to administrative exile. Charges and
insinuations of banditry and expropriations had been the work of the
socialist and liberal press. The sole objective of the Makhaevist
organisation had been "a mass strike with economic demands and the
demand for the most comprehensive public works for the unemployed."
Neither account can be accepted at face value. The Makhaevists, like the
anarchists, did tend to attract a motley assortment of characters to
their organizations, and it is possible that some of them engaged in
unsavoury activities. But Makhaevist propaganda caused the socialists a
good deal of embarrassment, and it was convenient to try to dismiss the
Makhaevists themselves as mere hoodlums. Even Voitinskii concedes that
Makhaevism found a decided response among the workers. At times the
Makhaevists succeeded in introducing resolutions expressing "distrust of
the socialists," and even when the workers, after heated debate between
the Makhaevists and Social Democrats, declared their continued faith in
socialism, "even then the appeals of the Workers' Conspiracy left a
certain trace."Nor were the socialists above the use of smear tactics to
discredit their opponents. According to Max Nomad, "the Socialists of
the various schools spread leaflets among the workers and the unemployed
warning them that the 'Makhayevtzy' . . . were agents of the tsarist
police. (I myself saw one of these leaflets in the Museum of the
Revolution in Moscow during my visit in 1930). "
On the other hand, as we shall see in the next chapter, Machajski wrote
his letter to Zeromski from a Galician prison at a time when he was
trying to fend off rumours that he had engaged in banditry and possibly
in terrorist activity as well. He therefore had every incentive to
emphasise the peaceable nature of the organisation he had headed in the
Russian capital. There is no evidence that Machajski himself ever
participated in terrorist acts or armed expropriations, or that he
advocated them. Nevertheless, the highly militant tone of his writings,
as well as the company the Makhaevists kept on the extremist fringe of
the revolutionary movement, could not help but leave him and his
followers open to such charges.
Outside of St. Petersburg, the only other site of Makhaevist activity
during the period of the 1905 revolution was Warsaw. Upon his arrival in
Petersburg, Machajski had despatched his Viliuisk disciple Porebski to
the Polish capital in the hopes of creating a Makhaevist organisation
there.The results, according to his 1911 letter to Zeromski, were very
meagre. There was one Warsaw worker," he wrote without naming him, who,
as an old acquaintance," had some knowledge of Makhaevism and during the
time of the revolution may have disseminated that knowledge. "He was the
sole Warsaw Makhaevist." Lacking any literature to distribute, and
unable to compose any himself, he was unable to create a movement or an
organisation. Therefore the Warsaw Makhaevists, Machajski claimed, were
limited to a circle of a few sympathizers.He acknowledged that a group
calling itself the Workers' Conspiracy (Zmowa Robotnicza) had appeared
in Warsaw and engaged in armed robbery in 1906-1907. He vehemently
denied any connection with it, however: "the one authentic Warsaw
Makhaevist and his closest associates of course had nothing to do with
any assault" and were never accused of such a connection by the police.
He himself, he maintained, had heard of the "Conspirators" only in the
middle of 1907, half a year or so after their appearance. They only used
the name of the Ma-khaevists, he insisted, and if the Makhaevists had
not existed they would have carried out their attacks under some other
label, perhaps that of anarchism.'
As already mentioned, the circumstances under which Machajski wrote this
letter gave him every reason to dissociate himself from terrorist
activities of any sort. Max Nomad's account of the Warsaw Workers'
Conspiracy suggests the possibility of a somewhat closer connection
between this group and the Makhaevists - though just how close cannot be
determined.In any event, the Warsaw Makhaevists accomplished little,
and, aside from those groups which have already been discussed, there is
no firm evidence that Makhaevist organisations operated anywhere
else.'By the time the Petersburg Makhaevists established their presence,
the revolutionary wave was already ebbing, and they soon had to carry on
their efforts without their leader. At the end of 1906, some members of
the Workers' Conspiracy were arrested, and Machajski himself fled to
Finland and thence to Ger-many. By the spring of 1907 he was in
Cracow.By the end of 1907, Makhaevism as an organised movement, at least
on the territory of the Russian Empire, had come to an end.
Two general themes stand out in the troubled history of
intelligentsia-worker relations and Makhaevism's place in it. One is the
depth and pervasiveness of anti-intelligentsia sentiment among Russia's
workers, dating from the very beginnings of the labour movement. Such
sentiment emanated from virtually every segment of the highly variegated
industrial working class: from non-political workers as well as active
members of Social-Democratic organisations, from barely educated
individuals and "conscious" members of the worker elite. At some point
the intelligeny's education, values, and way of life - what made him an
intelligent - made him alien to the world of the worker and his outlook,
and the workers themselves were acutely aware of the existence of a
sharp dividing line. Depending on individual circumstances and
personalities, the two worlds could be, and often were, effectively
bridged. But hostility to the intelligentsia was never far beneath the
surface, and even when clashes occurred over specific, practical
matters, they were frequently nourished by a deeper resentment. The
Menshevik B. I. Gorev put his finger on this emotional undercurrent when
he attributed the workers' receptivity to Makhaevism to "animosity
toward the 'committee-men on the one hand, and "the instinctive distrust
of many workers for 'gentlemen' [gospodam]" on the other.The deep social
and cultural gulf that separated the Western-educated elite from the
traditionalistic mass of the population found reflection in the labour
and Social-Democratic movements as it did in other spheres of Russian
life.
The second theme that permeates this history is the degree to which the
intelligentsia itself endorsed this hostility. Intelligenty of various
stripes voiced suspicion of the intelligentsia's motivations and doubts
as to its selfless commitment to the workers' interests. Makhaevism was
merely the most extreme and consistent expression of a deep ambivalence
about itself which the intelligentsia harboured. Therefore ideas closely
similar to Machajski's could emanate from intelligenty who had nothing
to do with Makhaevism. Even while claiming, as the country's "critically
thinking individuals," ideological and organisational leadership in the
battle against the existing order, many intelligenty, afflicted by the
intelligentsia's guilt-ridden sense of its own privileged place in the
world of consciousness, undermined the intelligentsia's moral claim to
such leadership. They were, in effect, "Makhaevists from above," as a
journalistic wit termed the critics of the intelligentsia who
contributed to the Signposts collection of 1909.As such, they
articulated the spontaneous anti-intelligentsia impulses that welled up
from below, reinforcing them and lending them a degree of legitimacy.
Some such sentiment was probably inevitable, given the fissures within
the country's culture and social structure, but it was intelligenty
themselves who gave it an ideology, nurturing the image of the
intelligentsia as a parasitic and self-interested class.
If hostility to the intelligentsia was so significant among both workers
and intelligenty, and Makhaevism was the sharpest and clearest
expression of it, why did the Makhaevists have so little success as an
organised revolutionary force? Aside from embarrassing the socialist
parties and provoking the bitter attacks which the latter felt
constrained to level against them, the Makhaevists were able to put
forth only a few ephemeral groups in a few towns. Purely practical
obstacles such as lack of resources and Machajski's forced emigration
obviously had their effect, but inherent ideological limitations seem to
have been the principal factor in Makhaevism's failure as a
revolutionary current. Makhaevism was both too broad and too narrow to
serve as an effective revolutionary ideology. Its criticism of the
intelligentsia appealed to people of such divergent viewpoints and
interests that it could not weld them together as a cohesive force; it
might provide them with a gratifying explanation and justification of
their frustrations, but those frustrations were so diverse that they had
little in common besides a shared interest in Machajski's doctrines. At
the same time, Makhaevism was too narrow in that it was an essentially
negative standpoint. While criticising and rejecting the ideals and
programs of the other revolutionary movements, it offered in their place
only the haziest vision of a new and better world and no prospect of
achieving it in the near future. This was not enough to galvanise the
energies or justify the commitment of those who were taking great risks
to overthrow the existing order. As a result, Makhaevist groups could at
best serve as temporary way stations on the road to some more positive
and satisfying ideology; they could not compete with the other
revolutionary parties. The Workers' Conspiracy petered out as the
revolution of 1905 subsided, and it was to play very little role in the
revolution of 1917. That revolution, however, while settling the fate of
the autocracy and capitalism in Russia, did not resolve the question of
the intelligentsia's role in the new order. Therefore the history of
Makhaevism as an expression of anti-intelligentsia sentiment by no means
came to an end in 1917.
Once again an émigré' in Western Europe, Machajski had not yet given up
his quest to create a movement based on his doctrines. He published a
detailed exposition of his revolutionary program in the form of a
journal, Rabochii zagovor (The Workers' Conspiracy), a single issue of
which appeared in Geneva at the beginning of 1908, and settled in
Cracow, part of the Austrian province of Galicia. As he had been
expelled from the Austrian Empire in 1891, after his arrest for trying
to smuggle illegal literature into Russian Poland, his residence in
Cracow was illegal, and he assumed the name Jan Kizlo. In a letter to
Zeromski in 1910, he claimed that he spent his two years in Cracow
toiling as a lowly copyist "at a very respectable establishment,"
earning the meagre sum of forty Austrian florins a month. Only with the
financial assistance he received from a brother was he able to support
himself and his wife.The reality of his life in Cracow, however, was
more complex.
Machajski's closest associate in Cracow was Max Nomad (who operated
under the name of Czarny), and Nomads account sheds a very different
light on Machajski's activities at this time. According to Nomad, one of
Machajski's adherents, whom he identifies only as "Kolya," worked in the
imperial mint in St. Petersburg. Having "appropriated" the sum of 25,000
rubles, he forwarded it to Machajski to support the efforts of the
Workers' Conspiracy. With these funds, Machajski was able to finance the
printing of Rabochii zagovor as well as some Polish translations of his
writings, and to establish a rudimentary propaganda apparatus.(Whether
he also held the job he described to Zeromski remains unclear.)
Machajski supervised the activities of the Cracow organisation, which
consisted mainly of the young and energetic Nomad. The latter agitated
among the unemployed and the unskilled, as well as among disgruntled
intelligenty. Of the émigrés who had come from the Congress Kingdom in
the wake of the 1905 revolution, members of the Polish Socialist party
(PPS) must have seemed a particularly ripe target. The revolution had
brought an influx of new members into the party, many of whom felt a
strong sense of solidarity with the Russian revolutionary movement and
were willing to subordinate the cause of Polish independence to the goal
of social revolution. This brought them into increasing conflict with
the "old guard" of the PPS, led by Pilsudski, which distrusted the
Russian movement and gave national liberation priority over the class
struggle. In November 1906, the party split. Pilsudski and the right
wing broke away from what was now the majority of the party and formed
the PPS "Revolutionary Fraction," while the left wing, which abandoned
the slogan of independence, formed the Left PPS, now similar in
orientation to the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and
Lithuania (SDKPiL) with which it would eventually merge. The Polish
Social Democrats of Galicia (PPSD), led by Ignacy Daszynski, supported
the position of the PPS "old guard" and therefore were also the object
of the Makhaevists' attentions.
In these circumstances, the Makhaevists managed to win over some former
members of the PPS as well as the PPSD and tried to disseminate
Makhaevist literature in Warsaw .The established parties became
sufficiently alarmed at the inroads of the Makhaevists to begin
attacking them and spreading unsavoury rumours about them. According to
Nomad, 'We were called provocateurs, tsarist spies, and bandits."Nomad's
colourful account describes socialist meetings convened specifically to
refute the Makhaevists and featuring Daszynski himself; one such meeting
nearly turned into a riot.Within two years, however, the Makhaevists'
activities had come to an end: Nomad left Cracow at the end of 1909, and
shortly thereafter Machajski, apparently fearful of growing attention
from the police, resettled in the Tatra Mountain resort of Zakopane. A
number of factors probably contributed to Machajski's withdrawal from
active political combat: the slanders of his opponents, the exhaustion
of his financial resources, perhaps his own exhaustion after so many
years of crying in the wilderness. Most important, however, is the
likelihood that Machajski's ideas simply had little appeal to Polish
socialists. For those who placed Polish national independence in the
forefront, Machajski's consistent rejection of nationalism had nothing
to offer. For those who found in the international socialist movement a
substitute homeland worthy of their loyalties and total devotion,
Machajski's anti socialist version of class struggle could not provide
an attractive alternative. Makhaevism, therefore, found it impossible to
make any real headway on Polish soil.
Unable to find work in Zakopane, Machajski again turned to Stefan
Zeromski, with whom he had resumed his friendship in Cracow in 1907. On
May 5, 1910, he wrote to Zeromski in Paris, asking him to recommend
Machajski's wife for a job at a sanatorium in Zakopane run by Dr.
Kazimierz Dluski. Dtuski, a socialist of long standing, had been a
prominent member of the Great Proletariat party and later was a
supporter of the PPS. He was also a close acquaintance off Zeromski's.
The faithful Zeromski sent the recommendation and also made other
representations on Machajski's behalf, but none of his efforts bore
fruit. Machajski even devised a scheme to translate Zeromski's latest
work into Russian and have it published in Russia, but nothing came of
it.
Instead,Zeromski's good offices had unintended consequences of a very
different sort. Waclaw Sieroszewski, also a friend of Dluski and in
Paris at the time, heard of Zeromski's advocacy of Machajski. A poet and
novelist, Sieroszewski had been active in the early Polish socialist
circles of the 1870s and had spent many years in Siberian banishment. On
the basis of what he had heard about Machajski during his exile in
Russia, and about the bandit activities of the supposed "Makhaevists" in
Warsaw, Sieroszewski wrote to Dluski urging him to exercise caution in
his dealings with Machajski - who was still using the name Kuto - lest
he find himself the victim of some kind of "expropriation." The police
in Zakopane learned of Sieroszewski's letter and arrested Machajski.
They found no evidence that an assault of any sort was being planned,
but Machajski's real identity came to light, and he was threatened with
expulsion from Galicia. Even worse, the investigation unearthed a
totally unfounded rumour that at the time of his arrest at the Russian
border on his way to Lodz in 1892, Machajski had attacked or even shot a
Russian border guard. Now he faced not merely expulsion from Austrian
territory but the possibility of being handed over to the Russian
authorities for a capital offence!
It was at this point that Machajski wrote the long letter to Zeromski
referred to in the previous chapter, in which he denied that he or any
of his authentic followers had ever engaged in acts of terror or
banditry, in Russia or in Poland. Machajski's wife had already written
to Zeromski asking him to speak out in Machajski's defence, and
Machajski's own letter, smuggled out of prison, naturally presented his
political activities of previous years in the most defensible terms. In
Zakopane, he wrote, he had done nothing but give lessons as a private
tutor and try to make ends meet. All those acquainted with him there
knew that "Kizto, occupied exclusively with trying to assure his
existence in Zakopane, in the entire year of his stay here has not
opened his mouth to propagandise anyone, nor has anyone heard of any
pamphlet of Machajski's whatsoever arriving in Zakopane."As for his
activities elsewhere in Poland, "No Makhaevist literature existed in the
Polish language before 1909. Only then did two tiny pamphlets appear,
and, so far as I have heard, scarcely a few score copies made their way
to Warsaw, where, moreover, in view of the general present-day reaction,
no one knows anything about them." Nor had any references to those
pamphlets or to the Makhaevists in Cracow been made in the present case
against him.Thus did Machajski gloss over his two years of activity in
Cracow, finding himself in the peculiar position, for a revolutionary,
of seeking to minimise the impact his ideas and conspiratorial efforts
had had.
On this occasion, Machajski did not have to rely on Zeromski alone for
assistance. His troubles had come to public notice, and reports of his
arrest appeared in a number of Polish newspapers in both Russia and
Austria.Machajski, who had always complained bitterly of slander and
persecution at the hands of his political opponents, found a surprising
number of defenders willing to take a public stand in his behalf. Roman
Dmowski, for example, had been a leader of Zet, the Union of Polish
Youth, to which Machajski had belonged at Warsaw University. Now head of
the National Democratic party (Stronnictwo Demokratyczno-Narodowa, the
successor to the Liga Narodowa), he espoused a brand of right-wing
nationalism which was far removed from Machaiski's views. Nonetheless,
Dmowski published an article in a Warsaw newspaper praising Machajski's
"noble character."Even Sieroszewski, in a letter to the editor of a
paper in Lwow, expressed regrets at the turn events had taken.
Zeromski's contribution to Machajski's defenso was an eloquent article
entitled ~n the Matter of Machajski." It appeared in the Cracow
newspaper Nowa Reforma (New Reform) and contained Zeromski's
reminiscences of Machajski from their student days in Kielce and
War-saw. Describing him as someone who throughout his life had been an
anchorite, an exile, subject to continual persecution," Zerom-ski wrote
in his concluding remarks: "However one may assess his social theories,
it is beyond doubt that he himself is a man of high worth, Mickiewicz's
'suffering man, struggling man, a man free in spirit."'
These efforts proved successful. Machajski was sentenced to two weeks'
imprisonment for illegal residence and registration under a false name,
and then was allowed to leave Austria. In the spring of 1911, he and his
wife settled in Paris.
For the next six years, he lived a modest and totally non-political
existence in the French capital. His French was none too good, and his
personal contacts were confined mostly to the local Polish colony. With
Zeromski's help, he secured a modest job at the Bibliotheque Polonaise.
He tried once again to supplement his income by translating some of
Zeromski's works into Russian, but he was unable to find a publisher for
his translations. He had to resort to giving lessons to the children of
Polish and Russian émigrés - having thus come full circle back to his
student days.On the eve of the Russian Revolution, in addition to
tutoring, he was working as an archivist in a bank; his wife was living
in Moscow.
As it did for so many of Russia's political émigrés, the outbreak of the
revolution rescued him from his humdrum existence and held out the
prospect of a new lease on political life. At the end of June 1917 he
wrote to Max Nomad that he would long since have left for Russia, but
ill health had delayed him. He had quit his bank job, however, and was
now waiting to board a ship provided by the Provisional Government to
take émigré's back to Russia.It is not yet my revolution," he told
friends in Paris, "but it is a revolution, so I'm going to it"
When he arrived in Petrograd, he found his old comrade Bronislav
Mitkevich, who had been a member of his group in Irkutsk and had escaped
from prison with him. Other former associates as well as new recruits
joined them and formed a Makhaevist organisation. The Makhaevists began
to appear at public meetings, and Mitkevich achieved some success as a
spokesman for the group's ideas. Material resources to support an
organised group were lacking, however, and the Makhaevists had some
difficulty orienting themselves in the midst of a revolution whose
speedy radicalisation tended to outflank even the most militant programs
and positions. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, the
Makhaevists dwindled away.
The last concrete manifestation of Makhaevism was the appearance of a
single issue of a journal entitled Rabochaia revoliutsiia (The Workers'
Revolution). It came out in Moscow, dated June-July 1918, although parts
of it were written earlier; none of the articles were signed, but the
editor was listed as "A. Vol'skii." The journal gave Machajski the
opportunity for a final restatement of the basic tenets of Makhaevism in
the light of the Russian Revolution, and it reflected his fundamentally
ambivalent attitude toward the Bolsheviks.
In attempting to account for the Bolshevik seizure of power in
Makhaevist terms, Machajski faced an acute theoretical dilemma. The new
Bolshevik regime, established in the name of socialism by avowed
socialists, was clearly much more radical than the "bourgeois
revolution," with its parliamentary system and unfettered capitalism,
which Machajski had always anticipated as the immediate outcome of
socialist politics and the first step on the intelligentsia's road to
power. Yet, it by no means measured up to Machajski's definition of a
true "workers' revolution." In Rabochaia revoliutsiia, Machajski
resolved the dilemma by arguing that the Bolsheviks were no more radical
than the Jacobins of the French Revolution. At most, they were effecting
a democratisation of the bourgeois system that would extend the fruits
of the revolution to the lower strata of the intelligentsia but would
continue to withhold them from the workers.
Machajski's evidence for this position was Lenin's new program of
economic moderation, to which Rabochaia revoliutsiia was a direct
response. By the spring of 1918, Lenin was backing away from the initial
Bolshevik policy of "workers' control" in industry in an effort to
restore order in the factories and regularise production. A sweeping
revision of Bolshevik industrial policy was announced, including the
restoration of managerial authority, the tightening of labour
discipline, and measures to retain and reward the so-called bourgeois
specialists, the former managers and technical experts. (The grudging
manner in which the specialists were to be rewarded for their services
is reflected in Lenin's remark that the high salaries they would require
constituted a "tribute" that had to be paid for Russia's backwardness.
)21 Lenin's term for the economic system these policies would create, a
hybrid of capitalist and socialist elements, was state capitalism -a
rather tactless choice of words which horrified revolutionary purists of
every stripe. To Machajski, such backtracking on the part of the
Bolsheviks served as confirmation of what he had been predicting for two
decades: a socialist revolution, far from destroying the capitalist
system, would merely set the stage for the intelligentsia to replace the
capitalists as its new rulers.
The definitive overthrow of capitalism, Machajski insisted, could be
achieved only through an immediate, universal expropriation of the
bourgeoisie. This would entail not only the confiscation of all means of
production, but also of all accumulated wealth - requiring the strict
limitation of intelligentsia salaries.The Bolsheviks, however, for all
their initial hostility to capitalism and declared intention of
dismantling it, were now willing to settle for a much more modest
program; despite the nationalisation of some enterprises, the managers
and technical experts were still in charge and receiving high salaries,
while the workers were being subjected to strict labour discipline. The
Bolsheviks were once again referring to the construction of socialism as
a gradual, long-term process, and Lenin's state capitalism offered
little prospect of radical change in the position of the workers.
Why had the Bolsheviks so disappointed the hopes the workers had placed
in them? In part, Machajski attributed the Bolsheviks' retreat from
their initial promises to what he called the "intelligentsia
counterrevolution," strikes and sabotage by the intelligenty in protest
against the equalisation of wages and other measures that would have
undermined the existing order.
Bolshevism represented a mortal threat to the bourgeoisie, but it was
neither able nor willing to carry it out. It retreated before the will
of the intelligentsia. The Russian intelligentsia, famous for its
rebelliousness, almost entirely socialist, led by recent revolutionaries
with martyrs' haloes - the noble Russian intelligentsia saved the
bourgeoisie from ruin, saved it from a workers' revolution.
The Bolsheviks readily acceded to the intelligentsia's demands, however,
because, like all socialist parties, they regarded the capitalists as
the sole exploiters of the working class and had no desire to attack the
privileges of the intelligentsia. Far from being enemies of the
intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks were exponents of its interests.They are
not fighters for the emancipation of the working class, but defenders of
the lower strata of existing bourgeois society, and of the
intelligentsia above all. As such, they simply do not want a universal
expropriation of the bourgeoisie," one that would expropriate the
intelligentsia along with the capitalists. Once in power, therefore,
they had quickly reverted to the program socialists had always
preferred, a program of gradual nationalisation of the means of
production, which preserved the high salaries of the intelligentsia.
Like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks were
effecting only an extreme democratic version of the "bourgeois
revolution." They had destroyed the old political order but had not
established economic equality, and without control over all social
wealth the working class could not become the ruling class.To whom,
then, had power passed under the Bolsheviks?
Power, slipping out of the hands of the capitalists and landowners, can
be seized only by the lower strata of bourgeois society, the petty
bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia which, as the possessor of the
knowledge needed for the organisation and administration of the entire
life of the country, acquired and firmly secured for itself the right to
lordly incomes, the right to a share of plundered wealth, to a share of
national profit.
Much as Bakunin had predicted, some of these new rulers were former
workers.
In the Bolshevik dictatorship, "advanced" workers ["rabochie
"peredoviki"], from revolutionaries expressing the will of the masses
turn into state functionaries. . . . They become the usual rulers,
commanders, and supervisors, stepping out of the worker mass and joining
the lower strata of bourgeois educated society.
These individuals, Machajski claimed, were especially zealous in
imposing the new measures of worker discipline. The masses now found
themselves ruled by "a new bureaucracy," a "people's [narodnaia]"
bureaucracy consisting of "intelligenty and of semi-intelligenty from
among the workers," who "previously were revolutionaries but after the
October revolution became state officials."
For all his professed disappointment with the Bolshevik regime, however,
Machajski did not advocate its overthrow. Despite their failings, the
Bolsheviks were preferable to the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries, and Bolshevik rule was a far better
alternative than counter-revolution.Instead, he reiterated his earlier
strategy of the workers "dictating the laws of state power," exerting
pressure on the government to carry out their economic demands.The end
result of this pressure would be, in effect, a second revolution, a real
"workers' revolution." First of all, private property must be
confiscated, and then the wages of the manual workers must be raised to
the same level as the salaries of the intelligentsia. One last time,
Machajski limned the Makhaevist utopia, where all would have equal
access to education: "Full emancipation of the workers will ensue only
with the appearance of a new generation of equally educated people,
which will inevitably arise once equal payment for manual and
intellectual labour has been won, once the intelligent and the worker
possess identical means for the education of their children."
Machajski was not alone in viewing the Bolsheviks as he did. At the time
Rabochaia revoliutsiia appeared, a radical critique of Lenin's policies
in terms very similar to Machajski's was being voiced by the anarchists,
on the one hand, and by the left wing of the Communist party itself, on
the other. (In his usual fashion, Machajski dismissed both sources of
criticism as lacking in seriousness.) By 1918, anarchist writers were
already criticising the Bolsheviks in terms reminiscent of Bakunin's
critique of Marxism. One accused the Social Democrats of deeming it
necessary to retain the state "so that, in a socialist society,
so-called organisers of production can take the place of present-day
entrepreneurs. These organisers will not receive profits, but they will
be allotted special subsidies by their fellow administrators ."Another
cast the rule of the Bolsheviks in more specifically Makhaevist terms,
warning of the emergence of a "new class" of rulers from the
intelligentsia:
The proletariat is gradually being enserfed by the state. The people are
being transformed into servants over whom there has risen a new class of
administrators - a new class born mainly from the womb of the so-called
intelligentsia. Isn't this merely a new class system looming on the
revolutionary horizon? Hasn't there occurred merely a regrouping of
classes, a regrouping as in previous revolutions when, after the
oppressed had evicted the landlords from power, the emergent middle
class was able to direct the revolution toward a new class system in
which power fell into its own hands?
Such accusations did not remain confined to the Bolsheviks' political
opponents, who were rapidly being stifled in any case. More ominously,
they began to surface within the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves. The
Left Communists, who formed the ultra radical wing of the Bolshevik
party, originated in opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; they
advocated revolutionary war against the Germans rather than Lenin's
pragmatic peace settlement. They applied their revolutionary fervour to
domestic policies as well, criticising particularly what they considered
to be the reimposition of bureaucratic hierarchy as the new regime
consolidated itself. They were especially vociferous in their opposition
to Lenin's policy of state capitalism, warning that it would lead to
"bureaucratic centralisation" and "the rule of various commissars."As
Stephen Cohen has written in his biography of Nikolai Bukharin, who at
the time was one of the leaders of the Left Communists, underlying the
controversy were "two enduring fears of idealistic Bolsheviks: the
potential emergence of a new ruling class, and the 'bureaucratic
degeneration' of the Soviet sys-tem."The start of the civil war and the
introduction of war communism soon rendered the issue of state
capitalism moot (although some of its features would reappear in the New
Economic Policy of 1921), but with the end of the civil war the
apprehensions that had fuelled the controversy of 1918 would come to the
surface once again.
Machajski himself, however, now left such disputes to others. When it
became apparent that the Workers' Conspiracy could not be resurrected,
he made his peace with the Bolshevik order. In 1918, he took a job in
Moscow as a copy editor for Narodnoe khoziaistvo (National Economy,
subsequently renamed Sotsialisticheskoe khozraistvo, Socialist Economy),
the journal of the Supreme Council of National Economy.As far as can be
determined, he no longer played an active role in the political life of
the new Soviet state. Makhaevism itself, however, lingered on, for the
anti-intelligentsia sentiment it represented continued to fester within
the Russian working class and continued to find articulate expression
within the left wing of the Communist party.
At the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, two ultra-left opposition
currents that had crystallised within the Communist party made
themselves heard. One was the Workers' Opposition, which advocated a
greater role for the trade unions in the management of industry. The
other was the Democratic Centralists, who drew their leadership from the
ranks of the former Left Communists and urged a greater degree of
democratisation within the party. What the two currents had in common
was concern over the growing centralisation of power in the hands of the
party's top leaders, at the expense of other organisations such as the
trade unions and the Soviets, and of the rank-and-file party members.
They expressed this concern in their repeated attacks on
bureaucratisation" - attacks which included warnings of the rise of a
new, non proletarian ruling elite. The Workers' Opposition, for
instance, proposed as one measure to combat bureaucratisation a
requirement that every party member spend three months annually doing
physical labour and sharing the living conditions of the workers.
Though three years had elapsed since Makhaevism had last found
expression in print, it had not been forgotten, and the term, which had
now become a synonym for hostility to the intelligentsia, figured in the
debates of the congress. On the one hand, it was used to stigmatise the
opposition forces. In a brief document written at the beginning of
March, Lenin called for the congress to condemn "the syndicalist,
anarchist, Makhaevist inclination of the Workers' Opposition."Proposals
to ensure the authentic proletarian character of party workers led
Emel'ian Iaroslavskii, a former Left Communist but now a spokesman for
the party leadership, to accuse the Workers' Opposition of "playing at
Makhaevism." Makhaevism was also employed by the opposition as a warning
to the leadership to mend its ways. Calling for structural reforms
within the party, the Democratic Centralists warned that popular
discontent had affected even "advanced strata of the proletariat,"
where, among other disturbing signs, "an intensification of Makhaevist
sentiments" could be detected.
Such sentiments soon manifested themselves. The Tenth Party Congress
duly condemned the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralists.
Left-wing discontent among party stalwarts persisted, however, and
generated two small underground groups (the Tenth Congress having banned
the organisation of "factions" within the party), the Workers' Group
(Rabochaia gruppa) and the Workers' Truth (Rabochaia pravda). In the
pronouncements issued by these groups, anti-intelligentsia feelings
received even more overt expression than previously, and in terms almost
identical to Makhaevism.
The Workers' Group, an outgrowth of the Workers' Opposition, was led by
Gavriil Miasnikov, a long-time Bolshevik of genuine proletarian origin:
a metalworker from the Urals, he had joined the Bolsheviks in 1906.His
group's manifesto, issued in 1923, voiced a crude enmity to middle-class
intelligenty in general: the best policy in regard to Kadets,
professors, and lawyers, it declared, was to "bash their faces in."More
unusual was the extension of this enmity to the Bolsheviks. The
manifesto characterised the Soviet government as "a high-handed bunch of
intelligenty," "a bureaucratic fraternity which holds the country's
wealth and the government in its hands." The right to speak in the
proletariat's name had been usurped by "a little handful of
intelligenty."It is not surprising that the official Soviet account of
the Workers' Group characterised it as a hotbed of Makhaevism.
The Workers' Truth was more intellectual in its origins and appears to
have drawn some of its inspiration from the ideas of the former
Bolshevik theorist Aleksandr Bogdanov, who had stressed the technical
and organisational side of economic power and class differentiation,
rather than ownership.The real source of class division and
exploitation, the Workers' Truth argued, was not ownership of the means
of production but "the contradiction between organisers and organised."
In the present period, the bourgeoisie had given way not to the
proletariat but to "the technical intelligentsia under state
capitalism."According to the manifesto of the Workers' Truth, this
technical intelligentsia formed the nucleus of a rising new bourgeoisie.
"The working class drags out its miserable existence while a new
bourgeoisie (i.e., workers in positions of responsibility, directors of
factories, heads of trusts, chairmen of Soviet Executive Committees,
etc.) and the NEPmen wallow in luxury and call to our minds the picture
of the life of the bourgeoisie of all eras." Only the technical
intelligentsia was capable of running industry, but "in its methods of
work and its ideology this intelligentsia is bourgeois to the core, and
it can build only a capitalist economy. A new bourgeoisie is being
created from the fusion of the energetic elements of the old bourgeoisie
and the increasingly prominent organising intelligentsia." These
technicians, managers, and bureaucrats constituted the new exploiters of
the proletariat, and the Communist party had become "the party of the
organising intelligentsia."The solution, in addition to a resurgence of
proletarian consciousness and proletarian culture, was to end "the
contradiction between organisers and organized by making technical
knowledge available to the whole proletariat.
The existence of these two groups was brief. Miasnikov, who had
previously drawn Lenin's ire, was arrested in May 1923 but was allowed
to leave the country for Germany. The Workers' Group continued to
operate, but when it began to step up its agitation in connection with a
wave of strikes that broke out in Moscow and other cities in August and
September 1923, the party authorities grew alarmed and ordered the GPU
to suppress it. The Workers' Truth quietly withered away.
The denunciation and repression of the ultra-left critics within the
party, however, did not necessarily signify official repudiation of
their anti-intelligentsia sentiment. Even while he was denouncing
"Makhaevist attitudes" and authorising police measures against those who
allegedly propagated them, Lenin was sending out signals of a very
different sort in regard to the intelligentsia. Throughout his political
career, Lenin displayed the same ambivalence toward the intelligentsia
that was shared by so many of its own members; in some respects Lenin
manifested this ambivalence more sharply than most, and his attitudes as
well as his rhetoric fluctuated violently. In What is to Be Done? he had
expressed the conviction that only the intelligentsia could be trusted
to carry the socialist revolution to a successful conclusion. On other
occasions, however, his hostility and contempt erupted in such phrases
as "the intelligentsia scum," "the scoundrelly intellectuals," "that
riffraff," which pepper his writings.After 1917, he firmly maintained
the position, unpopular with many other Bolsheviks, that Russia's
economic development required the continued services of the "bourgeois
specialists," and he insisted that they be retained and well paid, at
least for the time being. But it was also Lenin who, in a letter to
Maxim Gorky in 1919, referred to intelligenty as "lackeys of capital,
who fancy themselves the nation's brain. In fact, they are not the brain
but the shit."And it was Lenin who, in 1922, formulated the policy that
led to the expulsion from Russia of scores of the country's most
prominent scholars and men of letters. On May 19 of that year he wrote
to Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the head of the GPU, "concerning the exile
abroad of writers and professors who are assisting the
counter-revolution."On August 31, the front page of Pravda announced the
expulsion of "the most active counterrevolutionary elements among the
professors, doctors, agronomists, and men of letters."Those expelled
included a number of prominent mathematicians, economists, historians,
and philosophers; no specific charges were brought against them, and
their only crime seems to have been a certain measure of intellectual
independence. While Lenin himself would no doubt have been repelled by
Stalin's later treatment of the intelligentsia, here, as in many other
areas of state and party policy, he set a dangerous precedent for his
successors and established few safeguards - legal, institutional, or
even moral - to prevent it from being invoked. As Pravda ominously
concluded the article that announced the expulsion, it was merely a
"first warning" to counterrevolutionary elements of the bourgeois
intelligentsia.
At the very least, such currents as the Workers' Group and the Workers'
Truth indicate that as stalwart Bolsheviks became increasingly
apprehensive over the rise of stifling bureaucratism and a new
privileged elite within the party, they began to employ terms and
accusations strikingly reminiscent of Makhaevism. Whether they drew
specifically on Machajski's ideas cannot be determined. According to Max
Nomad, sometime after 1918 "a new edition of the first part of his
Intellectual Worker, authorised by the somewhat tolerant censorship
office, was seized and destroyed by the secret police as dangerous to
the regime,"but Nomad supplies no date as to when this occurred.
Intriguingly, at the end of 1922 Machajski wrote to Nomad with an urgent
request for a copy of his pamphlet The Bankruptcy of Nineteenth-Century
Socialism. So anxious was he to receive it that he asked Nomad to have a
typewritten copy made if a printed text could not be found. Regrettably,
he did not explain what purpose he intended to make of ~ Certainly, none
of the Bolshevik dissidents claimed to have derived any inspiration from
Machajski, and, if there was any, it was most probably indirect. It is
more likely that they drew on that much larger and long-standing
reservoir of anti-intelligentsia feelings and ideas to which Makhaevism
contributed and of which it was the most systematic expression.
In any case, Machajski was by now approaching sixty and in poor health,
and he professed contentment with the non-political nature of his
editorial job. "My work earns me a decent living," one of his letters
read. "I am satisfied with its 'neutrality,' for from the very start I
have avoided all ideological guidance of the writing, and my editing is
purely technical, purely literary (stylistic corrections, etc.)."He died
in Moscow on February 19, 1926, just three months after the death of his
old friend Stefan Zeromski. Ironically, he ended his days as one of
those very "intellectual workers" against whom his entire political
thought had been directed.
Machajski's passing received a surprising amount of attention in the
Soviet press. Izvestiia's obituary notice, which even included a
photograph, consisted of a biographical sketch written by A. Shetlikh,
who had been a fellow exile of Machajski's in Viliuisk and, for a time
at least, an adherent of his views.Two weeks after Machajski's death,
Pravda ran a four-column-wide "obituary" - not of Machajski himself but
of Makhaevism.
Written by N. Baturin, it was filled with contradictions but at the same
time was quite informative. Baturin began by identifying Makhaevism as
one of the varieties of anarchism, original only by virtue of its
"particular absurdity and incoherence" - but then proceeded to give a
fairly detailed and not inaccurate summary of its doctrines. He lumped
Makhaevism together with the Economism of Rahochaia mysl with
Zubatovism, and even with the Black Hundreds, claiming that it relied on
the most backward, semi-peasant strata of the working class and was
confined mainly to such backwaters as Siberia. At the same time,
however, as the more honest Social Democrats had conceded in the past,
he admitted that even among the workers in industrial centres Makhaevism
had "enjoyed great notoriety and sometimes even fleeting success," for
it probed at the sore spot of the Social Democrats' underground
organisations, the "abnormal relations" between the fiercely
conspiratorial intelligenty and the workers.
Machajski was buried in the Novodevichii Cemetery in Mos-cow, his grave
topped by a monument that was the work of his associate of many years
earlier, the French-born sculptor known as Pontiez. Stark and unadorned,
the gravestone bore nothing but the name of the deceased, in Russian -
and, at last, rendered correctly: Ian Vatslav Makhaiskii.The brevity of
the inscription proved more appropriate than anyone at the time of
Machajski's demise could have known. Though Machajski himself was gone,
Pravda's report of Makhaevism's death was somewhat exaggerated and its
epitaph was yet to be written. Very shortly the last, but by no means
the least interesting chapter of the his-tory of Makhaevism began to be
played out.
What might be termed the posthumous history of Makhaevism unfolded on
two distinct though related levels. One was the development of the
theory of the "new class," the concept that arose in certain Marxist, or
ex-Marxist circles to explain the tumultuous changes occurring within
the Soviet Union in the 1930's. Although it had no direct connection
with Machajski's doctrines, the "new class" theory as applied to
Stalin's Russia in many ways represented an extension of Makhaevism. The
other level was the transformation of the Soviet social and political
elite that took place from the First Five-year Plan to the Great Purge.
While the "new class" theory failed to provide an adequate explanation
of this phenomenon, other elements of Makhaevism shed some unexpected
light on it - and may even, in fact, have made a modest contribution to
its occurrence.
The contention that under Stalin a "new class" had usurped power in the
Soviet Union had two basic sources. On the one hand, it expressed the
apprehension that the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order,
instead of abolishing hierarchical authority for good and all, would
create a new ruling elite emanating from the revolutionaries themselves.
This apprehension tended to be felt most keenly by ultraradicals, those
revolutionary purists who believed that a whole new order of human
relations was possible on the very morrow of the revolution. Its first
major expression was Michael Bakunin's critique of the Marxists: as an
ultra-revolutionary, Bakunin deeply distrusted the Marxist view that a
new order of things required a more or less gradual unfolding of an
historical process. Through Bakunin, this critique, and the underlying
outlook which had generated it, became an integral part of the anarchist
tradition. The second source was, of course, Marxism itself. While
Bakunin was content to use the term new class in the general sense of a
new ruling elite of former revolutionaries, it was Machajski who gave it
a more precise Marxist formulation, even while disavowing both anarchism
and Marxism. Defining the "new class" as the "intellectual workers," he
specified its relationship to the productive process, its ideology,
namely, socialism, and its place in the Marxist scheme of history as the
would-be successor to the capitalists. In doing so, he stretched Marxist
categories to the breaking point, as subsequent applications of the "new
class" theory to the Soviet Union were to demonstrate.
After 1917, the developments described above replicated themselves in
microcosm within the Soviet Communist party. The ultra-left wing
elements of the party, with their abhorrence of hierarchy and privilege,
harboured a vision of revolution and its possibilities similar to that
of the anarchists; and when that vision clashed with reality, they
naturally tended to cast their criticism of those they held to blame in
Marxist terms. By the time the "new class" theory came to be applied to
Stalin's men, however, it had taken on a life of its own, and its
exponents were for the most part unaware of how much it owed to
Machajski.
The suppression of opposition groups within the party after the Tenth
Congress of 1921 did not put an end to the various warnings that a new
ruling elite might be in the making. One of the most notable expressions
of such a viewpoint in the twenties emanated not from a dissident but
from one of the top leaders of the Communist party, Nikolai Bukharin.
Bukharin had at one time been a Left Communist, and even after his
embrace of the NEP and the official policies of the party he continued
to voice some of the concerns of the party's left wing. On several
occasions he warned of the possible "internal degeneration" of the
revolution and the rise of a "new class" of exploiters of the workers.
The threat stemmed from the low level of the proletariat's cultural
development under capitalism. Because of the bourgeoisie's monopoly of
education, the working class was unable to develop ideological,
administrative, or technical leadership from its own ranks. Therefore,
during its struggle against capitalism it had had to rely on members of
the bourgeois intelligentsia, and even after becoming the ruling class
it must make use, during a transitional period, of bourgeois technical
specialists.From the necessity of depending on forces culturally more
advanced than itself but socially hostile to it, the proletariat faced
the possibility that the technical intelligentsia, the "new bourgeoisie"
which had arisen under capitalism, along with a segment of the workers'
own party, might turn into "some new class, . . . a new social
formation."
The danger, as Bukharin described it, came from two directions. On the
one hand, "a new class may arise, standing at the top of the heap, while
the working class is transformed into an exploited class; a new
bourgeoisie will arise, in part from the NEPmen, to use the Russian
expression, and in part from the intelligentsia whom we are
utilizing."On the other hand, even individuals of proletarian origin and
with calloused hands, when separated from the mass of the workers by
their position in organisational and administrative posts, might be
assimilated by their more cultured colleagues and become part of "the
embryo of a new ruling class."These were essentially the two components
of the "new bureaucracy whose formation Machajski had warned of in 1918
and the dissident Bolsheviks had subsequently criticised. To ward off
the first danger, Bukharin wrote, the workers must be educated in order
to replace the old intelligentsia as quickly as possible. To prevent the
second from materialising, this new workers' intelligentsia must be
prevented from turning into a closed caste passing on its educational
monopoly to its sons and grandsons. As Bukharin defined it, the problem
was cultural and educational as much as economic: to preclude the rise
of a "new class" it was necessary to erase "the contradiction between
those who know and those who do not know "
As Stalin consolidated his power in the late twenties, critics outside
the party began to express the growing conviction that the party had
failed to resolve the problem Bukharin had identified and that a new
class had in fact taken power in the Soviet Union. Gavriil Miasnikov,
now in Western European emigration, continued the criticism of the party
leadership that he had begun earlier in the twenties. In contrast to his
previous attacks on the intelligentsia, he now directed his anger
specifically against the party bosses, demanding a multiparty system and
freedom of expression and political organisation for workers, peasants,
and intelligentsia. In 1931, he published in Paris a booklet in which he
contended that the Soviet Union represented a "state capitalist" order.
By this, he meant something quite different from a socialist economy
with capitalist elements, as Lenin had used the term in 1918. State
capitalism signified "the bureaucracy organised into a ruling class, the
bureaucracy standing at the head of production and the state." This
bureaucracy disposed of all the resources of industry and, like the
bourgeoisie before it, exploited the working class, which remained
economically and politically enslaved. "The rule of the bourgeoisie has
been replaced by the rule of the bureaucracy."
Ironically, the individual most responsible for fostering the idea that
the Stalinists represented a new ruling class was Leon Trotsky, who
consistently rejected just such a contention. Trotsky, of course, was
quite familiar with Machajski's views and had once even argued about
them with their author. Throughout the thirties, however, he continued
to express disagreement with any new class" theory. In an article
written in late 1933, he referred in passing to Machajski, and to
Miasnikov as well (who had tried unsuccessfully to get Trotsky to write
a preface for his booklet'), in order to dismiss the idea that the
Soviet bureaucracy represented a new class of rulers and exploiters of
the proletariat, comparable to the bourgeoisie before it. The
bureaucracy, Trotsky insisted, lacked an independent position in
economic production and distribution, and therefore could not constitute
a class. Given the socialised nature of the Soviet economy, the
proletariat remained the ruling class, as it had been since 1917,
regardless of the political power and economic privileges enjoyed by the
bureaucracy-privilege did not signify the existence of a class.
Trotsky elaborated on this position in his book The Revolution Betrayed,
which was published in 1936. He rejected the notion that the Soviet
economy constituted a form of "state capitalism." Since the means of
production remained socialised, and there had been no reversion to
private capitalism, the Soviet state remained a workers' state, albeit a
"degenerated" one, in which the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
prevailed.'Hence, the bureaucracy which had usurped political control
from the proletariat, primarily as a consequence of Russia's
backwardness, did not constitute a class. It was merely a ruling stratum
or caste, of which Stalin was the creature and the tool.
The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of "state
capitalists" will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has
neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in
the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special
property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit
to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The
bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. .
. . Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the
character of social parasitism.
Trotsky was very vague about where this bureaucracy came from, or what
its social origins might be, merely hinting at its bourgeois or
petty-bourgeois roots.It seemed to consist merely of faceless
careerists, and Trotsky could therefore present it as a temporary or
transitional phenomenon, a parasitic growth upon the socialist economy
which a new proletarian revolution would sweep away.
Trotsky found himself on the horns of a cruel dilemma, both ideological
and personal. To have denied that the Soviet Union, even under the aegis
of the hated Stalin, remained a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would
have called into question the validity of the October Revolution and the
construction of the Soviet state, and thereby Trotsky's life work. But
in order to uphold, in Marxist terms, the socialist character of the
Soviet system under Stalin, Trotsky found himself depicting a ruling
class (the proletariat) which did not rule, and a group of rulers (the
"bureaucracy") who did not seem to belong to a class. It is difficult to
refrain from accepting Robert McNeal's conclusion that "in a sense
Trotsky struggled to avoid making a Marxist analysis of Stalinism."'
It was not Trotsky but some of his former adherents who cut this Gordian
knot. Lacking the kind of commitment to the Soviet system that inhibited
Trotsky, they began to argue that its rulers had in fact become a "new
class" standing in the same exploitative relationship to the workers as
the capitalist class it had replaced. The first was Bruno Rizzi, an
Italian ex-Trotskyist whose book La Bureaucratisation du monde was
published in 1939. Rizzi asserted flatly that the October Revolution had
produced not the "dictatorship of the proletariat" but a new ruling
class, the bureaucracy, a combination of state and party functionaries,
technical experts, and intellectuals. According to Rizzi, the
bureaucracy consisted of "officials, technicians, policemen, officers,
journalists, writers, trade-union big-wigs, and the whole of the
Communist party."The Soviet Union was neither a capitalist nor a
socialist, neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian state: it was a local
manifestation of a new and unanticipated phase of world-historical
development, what Rizzi called "bureaucratic collectivism. Private
ownership of the means of production was being eliminated, but only to
be replaced by state control. Hence the capitalists were being ejected
but were giving way to a new ruling class, the bureaucrats who
administered the state. The "new class" differed from the capitalist
class only in that it owned the means of production collectively rather
than individually. Through its monopoly of political power, the
bureaucracy as a class was able to exploit the proletariat, appropriate
surplus value, and enjoy a privileged standard of living. Not socialism
but bureaucratic collectivism was the historical successor to
capitalism, and while it was most fully developed in the Soviet Union
its growth was discernible in the fascist and even the democratic states
of the West.
Max Shachtman and James Buruham, also ex-Trotskyists, were soon echoing
Rizzi in the United States. Shachtman, like Rizzi, came to see the new
Soviet social order as an example of bureaucratic collectivism." The
Stalinist bureaucracy was a new ruling class, inimical both to
capitalism and to socialism. Its appeal, Shachtman felt, was to those
elements of the old middle classes who had felt threatened under
capitalism and were thus attracted to anticapitalist movements:
intellectuals, professionals, government employees, labour bureaucrats.
They had little to lose from the abolition of capitalism and much to
gain from a system that would overturn capitalism without imposing the
egalitarian principles of proletarian socialism.
Burnham's The Managerial Revolution was probably the best-known
formulation of the "new class" theory before the appearance of Milovan
Djilas's The New Class. Burnham's book, written in 1941, differed
somewhat from previous discussions of the "bureaucracy in stressing
technical and organisational control as the source of political power,
rather than vice versa. To Burn-ham it was the managers of modern
industry who were supplanting the capitalists as the new ruling class.
The crucial position of the managers stemmed from their monopoly of
technical expertise, which was replacing private ownership as the source
of economic power, and the intensifying trend toward state take-over of
the means of production would ultimately bring them to political power.
Burnham's theory was similar to Rizzi's in viewing the rise of
"managerial society" as a worldwide phenomenon, an historical stage of
post-capitalist development that Marx had not foreseen. Burnham's
"managerial class," however, bore a considerable similarity to
Machajski's "intellectual Interestingly, in the figure of Burnham
another strand of the long intellectual history of the "new class"
theory joined the element derived from Trotsky. Just two years after the
appearance of The Managerial Revolution, Burnham published a bdok called
The Machiavellians, a summary of the ideas of Michels, Sorel, Mosca, and
Pareto (theorists with whom the Italian Rizzi may also have been
familiar). Thus the sociological analysis of elite formation which these
figures had pioneered at the turn of the century to some degree began to
converge with the more strictly political perceptions of anarchists and
Marxists.
It was Milovan Djilas, a former leader of the Yugoslav Communist party,
who did most to popularise the concept of the "new class" with his book
by that name, published in English in 1957. Apparently unfamiliar with
Machajski's ideas,Djilas, like others before him, took Trotsky's
criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy as his starting point and carried
it far beyond the limits Trotsky himself had set for it.Djilas
maintained that the party bureaucracy in the Communist-ruled states of
Eastern Europe was in fact the core, or base, of a new owning and
exploiting class consisting of those who derived economic privileges
from their administrative positions. In practice, the ownership
privilege of the new class manifests itself as an exclusive right, as a
party monopoly, for the political bureaucracy to distribute the national
income, to set wages, direct economic development, and dispose of
nationalised and other property."The book had a far-reaching impact,and
with its publication the term new class became a commonplace description
of the Soviet ruling elite.
As such, it has come to be used so broadly as to lose its explanatory
value, often serving as little more than a polemical epithet or an
ironical term for the privileged stratum of a professedly classless
society.To the extent that it continues to be used as a serious
analytical concept, it demonstrates how wise Trotsky was in objecting to
the application of the term class to the Soviet leadership. A ruling
elite whose position is derived from political or administrative power,
or even from technical expertise, may exhibit certain analogies to a
property-owning class, but it is by no means the same thing. What
Trotsky could not, or would not, acknowledge was the possibility that
Soviet developments had outstripped the ability of traditional Marxist
concepts to contain them. The categories of "property," "class," and
"ownership" had melted down in the crucible of the Russian Revolution,
and Stalin's Russia represented a new social, economic, and political
alloy whose components required new forms of analysis. Attempts to
comprehend Soviet political and social stratification in terms of the
traditional economic, universalist categories of Marxism have therefore
proved abstract and sterile, while efforts by Marxist analysts to move
away from those traditional categories have led them into distinctly
non-Marxist conceptual realms
This theoretical impasse is hardly surprising, for what was occurring
under Stalin's auspices in the 1930S had little to do with class change
or class conflict in the Marxist sense. It had a great deal to do,
however, with the Russian intelligentsia, a specifically Russian
phenomenon which had eluded Marxist attempts to capture it in the past
and which the theory of the "new class" failed to deal with adequately
now.
The resentments expressed in the criticism of the "bureaucracy" or the
"new class" that marked the decade or so after 1917 were directed
against two overlapping groups who seemed to be entrenching themselves
as a new elite, the "bourgeois specialists" and the new party bosses.
They composed what Machajski in 1918 had termed a "new bureaucracy" of
intelligenty and semi-intelligenty, the latter consisting of former
revolutionaries who had now become state officials. With the
consolidation of Stalin's power and the introduction of the First
Five-Year Plan came a growing assault on this new elite.
Even under Lenin, it had been made clear that the remnants of the old
intelligentsia who worked for the new regime were merely being
tolerated, grudgingly and temporarily, until such time as a new
intelligentsia, politically more reliable and socially less suspect,
could be formed. As a Soviet work puts it, a bit more euphemistically,
"the Communist party and the Soviet state, while making use of the old
intelligentsia, at the same time had to resolve the task of forming a
new, authentically popular intelligentsia from the ranks of the workers
and toiling peasants, for whom the construction of socialism was a
heartfelt and desired cause." There were two avenues open to the regime
in creating "its own" intelligentsia. One was the expansion of
educational opportunities for the children of workers and peasants, a
process which, however, required at least an entire generation to
complete. The other was the adoption of what came to be called
vydvizhenchestvo, a crash program of "promoting" adult workers into
courses of higher education or directly into responsible positions with
on-the-job technical training. The First Five-Year Plan was accompanied
by a massive expansion of this promotion policy. Precise figures are
impossible to determine, but Western and Soviet estimates seem to agree
that a million or so individuals were the beneficiaries of this policy.
The leading proponent of the promotion policy was Stalin, who declared
in a speech of June 23, 1931, that the Soviet Union had entered a phase
of development at which "the working class must create its own
productive-technical intelligentsia, capable of standing up for its own
interests in production as the interests of the working class." "No
ruling class," he added, "has managed without its own intelligentsia."
The beneficiaries of the promotion policy were of a social and cultural
background very different from that of the old intelligentsia. (Whether
the term intelligentsia should be applied to the former raises once
again the historical ambiguities of the word in Russian usage, but
clearly it was applied to them.) They were in most cases authentically
proletarian but, like much of the Russian working class, often had only
recently emerged from the peasantry; they had no educational or cultural
ties to the pre-evolutionary past and its liberal values; they felt
considerable loyalty to a system that was providing them with new
opportunities for upward mobility; and they found Stalin a more
congenial personality than most of the other top Bolshevik leaders. A
prime example of this group was Nikita Khrushchev. Born in a peasant
village, Khrushchev had gone to work as a metal fitter at a coal mine
before the revolution. In 1929, at the age of thirty-five, he was sent
to the Stalin Industrial Academy in Moscow to study metallurgy. In his
background and his career he was typical of the "new men," even though
he used the opportunity to move into the party apparatus rather than a
managerial or technical post. His celebrated memoirs shed important
light on the outlook of these men. On the one hand, they hint at a
strong sense of self-identity by the provincial, poorly educated
newcomers in opposition to the more sophisticated and solidly entrenched
party leaders. In Khrushchev's description of the political line-up at
the Industrial Academy in 1929, cultural cleavages seem to overshadow
ideological divisions.
There was a group of us at the academy who stood for the General Line
[i.e., Stalin] and who opposed the rightists: Rykov, Bukharin, and
Uglanov, the Zinovievites, the Trotskyites, and the right-left bloc of
Syrtsov and Lominadze. I don't even remember exactly what the
differences were between Bukharin and Rykov on the one hand and Syrtsov
and Lominadze on the other. Rightists, oppositionists, right-leftists,
deviationists - these people were all moving in basically the same
political direction, and our group was against them. We all came from
the South - from the Donbass, from Dniepropetrovsk, and from Kharkov.
Furthermore, we had all joined the Party after the Revolution. When
someone's candidacy to a post in the academy organisation was proposed
at a meeting, he had to go to the podium and say where he was from and
when he had joined the Party. This made it easy for the Old Guard in the
Party cell to recognise and vote down anyone who was likely to oppose
them.
On the other hand, when he heard Stalin speak, he heard not the crude
ideological reductionism's scorned by the more polished party members,
but a firm and clear-headed leader, "a man who knows how to direct our
minds and our energies toward the priority goals of industrialising our
country and assuring the impregnability of our Homeland's borders
against the capitalist world."
The campaign to create a new intelligentsia occurred simultaneously with
a wave of hostility against the old one. It was touched off by the
Shakhty affair in the spring of 1928. In March of that year it was
announced that a large group of coal-mining engineers from the town of
Shakhty in the Donbass region were to be tried for sabotage in collusion
with foreign powers. The case was given maximum publicity in the Soviet
media, and it was made clear that the "bourgeois specialists" as a whole
were under fire. Fifty Russians and three Germans were subsequently
brought to trial in a public proceeding that featured confessions by
some of the defendants and foreshadowed the "show trials" of the
thirties. At the same time, the Shakhty trial rekindled
anti-intelligentsia sentiment from below, and a wave of
"specialist-baiting" ensued. According to a Soviet source, worker
suspicion of the old specialists mounted, accompanied by denunciations
and purges. "There were also individual cases of unfounded accusations
of sabotage, with ensuing consequences."
The anti-intelligentsia themes sounded in the Shakhty affair continued
to reverberate. The First Five-Year Plan was accompanied by the
so-called cultural revolution, a radical wave of anti-elitism and
anti-intellectualism amid the glorification of "proletarian" values in
education, literature, and other areas of Soviet culture.Meanwhile, the
pressure on the technical intelligentsia specifically continued with the
trial of the so-called Industrial party in late 1930. This trial
involved eight prominent technologists who were charged with plotting
the overthrow of the Soviet government in collaboration with foreign
agents.The campaign against the old technical intelligentsia is
generally considered to have come to an end with Stalin's speech of June
23, 1931, which announced a new policy of reconciliation with the
"bourgeois specialists" and condemned "specialist-baiting"
(spetseedstvo).This was the same speech in which he reiterated the
necessity for the working class to create its own technical
intelligentsia. Thanks to the promotion policy, the formation of a "red"
intelligentsia was well under way, and the regime, no longer entirely
dependent on the "bourgeois" intelligentsia, could afford a more benign
policy toward it.
The fateful intersection of the dual processes we have been tracing, the
rapid promotion of a new, Soviet-trained intelligentsia and recurrent
outbursts of hostility toward the old intelligentsia, occurred in the
Great Purge of 1936-1938. The Great Purge decimated the old Russian
intelligentsia, while at the same time consolidating the dominant
position of the new Stalin elite. Many aspects of that bleak period
remain shrouded in uncertainty, and at its height the Great Purger or,
as it was called after the secret police chief then in power, the
Ezhovshchina, swept away individuals from top to bottom of the Soviet
social structure. There is little doubt, however, that aside from the
army, which underwent its own separate purge in 1937, the two groups
upon which the Ezhovshchina fell most heavily were the educated elite,
on the one hand, and party officials on the other.A typical example of
the stratum of Soviet society that was the main target of the purge is
Eugenia Ginzburg. A journalist and teacher, with vast amounts of Russian
poetry tucked away in her memory, she was a party member as well as the
wife of an important provincial party official. She was both an
intelligent in the traditional sense of the term and part of the
entrenched post-revolutionary party elite, and her self-identification
with these groups comes through as clearly in her memoirs as
Khrushchev's sense of solidarity with the newcomers:
I had seen no men of this sort, our sort - the intellectuals, the
country's former establishment-since transit camp. . . . The men here
[in a Siberian prison-camp hospital were like us. Here was Nathan
Stein-berger, a German Communist from Berlin. Next to him was Trushnov,
a professor of language and literature from somewhere along the Volga,
and over there by the window lay Arutyunyan, a former civil engineer
from Leningrad. . By some sixth sense they immediately divined that I
was one of them and rewarded me with warm, friendly, interested glances.
They were just as interesting to me. These were the people I used to
know in my former life.
The assault on the country's "establishment," as Ginzburg puts it, was
obviously the product of political decisions taken from above. The
amount of support it received from below, and the degree to which that
support was spontaneous rather than contrived, are impossible to
measure, but it appears that such support was not lacking. Just as the
Shakhty affair and the "cultural revolution" stirred up
anti-intelligentsia sentiment from below, the Great Purge bore a certain
"populist" flavour, drawing on long-standing grassroots grievances not
only against the privileged specialists but against the entrenched party
bosses, that "bureaucracy" which had for so long been an object of
criticism. In J. Arch Getty's formulation, "Spetseedstvo,
anti-bureaucratism, and class hatred re-emerged in strength against the
backdrop of a full-blown spy scare."From the "cultural revolution" to
the Ezhovshchina, the central authorities were able to draw on a
reservoir of popular resentment against what was perceived to be a new
privileged elite At the very least, the apparent willingness of the
Soviet public to accept the most vicious and outlandish charges of
"wreck-mg," treason, and service to foreign powers that were levelled
against the purge victims suggests a considerable social and cultural
distance between that elite and much of the rest of society.
If the Eugenia Ginzburgs were the chief victims of the Great Purge, the
Nikita Khrushchevs were its chief beneficiaries. The Great Purge
provided the opportunity for the new political and technical elite to
move into positions of authority vacated by the purge victims. Although
some members of this new elite themselves fell victim to the
Ezhovshchina, on the whole it survived not only the Great Purge but
Stalin himself, remaining in power at least through the Brezhnev era.
The precise relationship between this social change and the Great Purge
must remain a matter of dispute. The two phenomena coincided, but
whether by design or by accident, we cannot know. To regard it all as a
deliberate plan on Stalin's part which he successfully carried out from
1928 to 1938 seems implausible; if Stalin had the kind of personal
mastery over the country's political and social forces that such a plan
required, he achieved it only at the end of this period, not at the
beginning. It seems more reasonable to assume that the Great Purge,
though it may have had its own political origins, gave Stalin the
opportunity to promote more quickly a new intelligentsia which he had
consistently fostered; with this new intelligentsia waiting in the
wings, he could afford to dispense with the old, and the circumstances
of the Great Purge permitted him to do so on a wholesale basis.
Interestingly enough, Makhaevism figured in the demise of the old
intelligentsia. The introduction of the First Five-Year Plan, the
promotion policy, and the "cultural revolution" coincided with a flurry
of interest in Makhaevism. In 1928, the first volume of an anthology of
non-Bolshevik political views was published in Moscow which reprinted
chapter 5 from part 2 of Machajski's The Intellectual Worker. (It was a
fairly innocuous section dealing mainly with the populists and legal
Marxists.) In the same year, in Kremenchug, the still extant Evgenii
Lozinskii published a little book in which he restated the essential
elements of Makhaevism. Cautiously, he related them explicitly only to
the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International and evaded the
question of whether the Bolshevik regime represented the seizure of
power by the intelligentsia.
Also in 1928 and in 1930 the journal Katorga i ssylka (Hard Labor and
Exile) published two memoir articles by revolutionaries of plebeian
origins who had been attracted to Machajski's ideas, B. A. Breslav and
M. Vetoshkin; their comments seemed to suggest that anti-intelligentsia
sentiment of the sort Machajski had espoused had something to be said
for it.In 1929-1930, a criti-cal but informative history of Makhaevism
by L. Syrkin was published in the journal Krasnaia letopis' (Red Annals)
and then issued in book form in 1931.Finally, Baturin's 1926 Pravda
obituary article on Makhaevism, "Pamiati 'makhaevshchiny'!" was
reprinted in a collection of his writings in 1930.
Why was such attention being paid to Makhaevism at this time? In the
highly charged political atmosphere of the First Five-Year Plan and the
"cultural revolution," it seems unlikely that historical curiosity alone
was at work. The contents of these publications, however, offer no clear
explanation. Some were critical of Makhaevism, dismissing it, together
with anarchism, as a retrograde "petty-bourgeois" ideology, while others
found elements to praise in it. Was the resurrection of Makhaevism part
of the intelligentsia-baiting of the time? Was it a defence against
intelligentsia-baiting, an indirect attempt to condemn such sentiment by
equating it with this discredited current of thought? Was it, perhaps,
some of each, depending on the particular instance?
Much less ambiguous, and highly publicised, was the final reference to
Makhaevism that appeared in this period. On November 15, 1938, as the
Great Purge was drawing to a close, Pravda printed a lengthy Central
Committee statement contain- mg a passage on the intelligentsia. The
statement declared the Soviet intelligentsia that had arisen during the
years of Soviet power "an entirely new intelligentsia," unique in the
world. "It is yesterday's workers and peasants, and sons of workers and
peasants, promoted into commanding positions." Despite the
intelligentsia's importance, however, "a disparaging attitude toward our
intelligentsia has not yet been overcome. This is a highly pernicious
transferral onto our Soviet intelligentsia of those views and attitudes
toward the intelligentsia which were widespread in the pre-Revolutionary
period, when the intelligentsia served the landowners and capitalists."
The Central Committee then condemned such "Makhaevist" attitudes as
"savage, hooliganistic, and dangerous for the Soviet state," and
declared that they must cease.
To drive the point home, three days later Pravda ran an article entitled
"Answers to the Questions of Readers: What Is 'Makhaevism'?" The article
took up three columns - an entire half-page of the newspaper. For the
benefit of "readers" who had expressed puzzlement at the reference to
Makhaevism in the Central Committee declaration, Pravda provided a
fairly detailed account of its history and tenets, concluding, however,
that Makhaevism's central principle could be reduced to the slogan "down
with the intelligentsia." Quoting Stalin's speech of June 23, 1931, on
the need for a more positive attitude toward the "bourgeois
specialists," the paper declared that the party had always fought
against the kind of specialist-baiting that Makhaevism encouraged.
Furthermore, the article reiterated that the new Soviet intelligentsia,
unlike the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia, recruited its members
chiefly from the workers and peasants. Socialist construction was
creating a situation in which "the whole Soviet people will be
thoroughly educated [ves' sovetskii narod budet splosh'
intelligentnym]." Therefore the appearance of a "Makhaevist-hooligan
attitude toward our Soviet intelligentsia" was scandalous and had to be
condemned. This intelligentsia was "the salt of the Soviet earth," and
those who scorned it could only be "aliens, degenerates, and
enemies."The message was clear: whatever justification may have existed
for anti-intelligentsia sentiment in the past, it was no longer to be
tolerated now that the new Soviet intelligentsia was firmly in place.
With the subject of hostility to the intelligentsia now closed, official
interest in Makhaevism came to an end. Subsequent Soviet references to
it tended merely to repeat the terms of abuse Pravda had heaped upon it.
It was fitting that Machajski's views were used for the last time in
order to signal the definitive displacement of the old Russian
intelligentsia by a new Soviet intelligentsia. The change in the
country's elite that was being completed as the Great Purge drew to a
close was actually more intelligible in Makhaevist than in Marxist
terms. As Trotsky had recognised, it could not be explained in
traditional Marxist "class" terms, but it was no less real for that.
What was occurring was something startlingly akin to Machajski's "second
revolution": upward mobility, through education, of men of authentic
worker and peasant background.
In the fateful decade from 1928 to 1938, the awkwardness of the Russian
intelligentsia's situation came back to haunt it. Despite the political
radicalism of so many of its members, the intelligentsia's education had
always set it apart as a privileged elite. Even after the revolution,
the remnants of the old professional intelligentsia in the form of the
"bourgeois specialists," along with the new party bosses - who, though
in many cases they were at best semi-intelligenty, as Machajski termed
them, did, after all, sit behind a desk - to a considerable degree
continued to be seen from below as an extension of the old propertied
and ruling classes. The elite which had entrenched itself after 1917 was
largely of middle-class origin, tied to the old regime and to the West
by virtue of its pre-Revolutionary education and culture, "bourgeois" in
respect to its style of life. The attack on this establishment which
began in 1928 may have been initiated by Stalin for his own purposes,
but he was able to exploit popular sentiments that had their origin long
before 1917. Worker-peasant Russia, having rid itself of the old rulers
and property owners, now turned upon the equally alien and also
privileged intelligentsia, passively accepting, if not actively
participating in, its decimation, while supplying a new intelligentsia
of plebeian origin to replace it.
This is not to suggest that the Makhaevist utopia had been achieved. The
new men who came to power under Stalin used their position not to
abolish privilege and establish equality for all, but to create new
privileges for themselves. These former workers and peasants, unlike
their champions in the old intelligentsia who were wont to project their
own humanistic principles onto them, viewed the promises of the Russian
Revolution in specific, down-to-earth terms. Their ambition was not to
create a new world of abstract perfection but to better their own
standing in the world as it existed. For all its failings and
limitations, however, this new elite was more "democratic" in its
origins and more accessible from below than the old. As such, and to the
bewilderment of so many of the old intelligenty, it doubtless appeared
to the labouring classes as a legitimate fulfilment of at least some of
the promises the revolution had made.
It goes without saying that Stalin did not need Machajski to provide him
with inspiration for any of his ideas or policies. If we take Makhaevism
solely in its negative aspect, however, as an attack on the
intelligentsia as a privileged and "exploiting" class, it is not
entirely fanciful to accord Stalin one additional title among the many
that were bestowed upon him: recognition as the greatest Makhaevist of
them all, albeit an unwitting one. But if we take seriously the more
visionary aspect of Makhaevism, that is, Makhaevism as one version of
the intelligentsia's dream of universal freedom and equality to be
achieved through the flames of popular revolution, then Machajski would
scarcely have regarded Stalinism as the fulfilment of his hopes. He
would have shared that disappointment with much of the rest of the old
intelligentsia. For all his criticism of the intelligentsia, Machajski
remained a member of it from beginning to end, sharing not only its
aspirations and illusions but its deep ambivalence about itself and its
rightful place in Russian life. Had he lived long enough, he would
undoubtedly have shared also the fate that intelligentsia suffered at
Stalin's hands.
The May Day appeal which I have translated below (and annotated) was
circulated by Machajski's group in lrkutsk in 1902. He subsequently
printed it as an appendix to the Geneva edition of part 1 of The
Intellectual Worker. It constitutes a representative sample of
Machajski's writings. Although it was composed shortly after the two
Siberian essays which marked the beginning of Makhaevism, it is a
succinct summary of virtually all the major positions Makhaevism held on
Social Democracy, the intelligentsia, working-class aims and tactics. in
tone and vocabulary, too, it is typical of Machajski's writing style.
April 1902
For several years now, the beginning of May of each year has brought the
Russian government countless concerns. These are the days when the
workers prepare themselves to rebel. Accordingly, the wealth created
over the centuries and plundered by ruling society has to be defended
from attack by the worker masses: the idleness, luxury, and depravity of
the rich have to be safeguarded; the fat salaries of state officials,
the incomes running into the thousands of all the ruling and learned
men, also have to be safeguarded; the parasitism of educated bourgeois
society, so stoutly nourished by the hands of the working class while
hundreds of thousands of people starve to death in the towns and
villages of Russia, has to be defended.
The whole of bourgeois society keeps a close eye on labour unrest, on
the labour movement in general. Not only the police and the prosecutors
but learned professors and writers, too, investigate which of the
worker's thoughts and desires are to be extirpated as "criminal," that
is, harmful to the existence of contemporary society, which is built on
robbery. They painstakingly weigh what may be allowed to the workers
without endangering the bondage of the working masses, which is so sweet
for the exploiters.
Those strata of educated society whom the Russian autocratic order does
not admit to full sway over the country, does not admit to any of the
highest posts in the regime, keep a close eye on the labour movement and
make use of it as a means to their own objectives. Those masses of
unemployed intelligentsia who see how many profitable and cushy jobs,
capable of feeding all the suffering intelligenty like lords, might be
created in the enormous Russian state but are not made available solely
because of the ignorant administration, the policemen and the priests
-those are the ones who are making use of the labour movement. The
intelligentsia observes the labour movement and asks with impatience
when the working people will at last, with their struggle, build for it
the kind of paradise educated society in Western Europe has long since
come to enjoy.
As the First of May approaches, the day when workers all over the world
think about and discuss their situation, they receive all kinds of
advice from educated society.
The First of May, say the respectable socialist scholars, is a holiday
which the workers in their comradely associations should spend in a
solemn mood, thinking about that far-off day when there will be neither
rich nor poor, neither capitalists nor workers. The bourgeoisie is happy
with this socialist doctrine, which advises the workers to pray on their
day of struggle, just as the gentry were happy when the priests preached
that the serfs would be rewarded by God in the afterlife for their
poverty, sufferings, and lashings at the hands of the landowners.
On May Day, says the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, workers
everywhere should organise political demonstrations against the
autocratic government; they should demand that the state be governed by
the will of the entire people freely electing their rulers the way it is
done in the West, where the people themselves rule.
A fine fairy tale! Just half a century ago a French government elected
"by the will of the entire people," with no autocratic tsar or
hereditary monarch, a democratic, republican government, showed that it
knew how to slaughter workers just as well as an autocracy. This
government "freely elected by the people" killed tens of thousands of
workers in the streets of Paris over four days. In that same France,
another republican government repeated the carnage some twenty years
later. And contemporary democratic governments elected by the entire
people, like the French, the English, and the North American, know, of
course, how to shoot down insurgent workers so as to make them remember
that they are slaves.
Some thirty years ago the German workers with the utmost enthusiasm
began to elect their own Social-Democratic deputies to the ruling German
parliament. These deputies at the time promised that they would
immediately and definitively emancipate the working class if only the
workers elected them in large numbers. And now look: after the German
workers have strained every nerve and collected their pennies to elect
several dozen men as their deputies, these Social-Democratic, labour
deputies are beginning to explain that it is impossible to emancipate
the working class at the moment, that the greatest misfortunes would
befall the land if the working class were suddenly victorious and took
power into its own hands.
The French workers not long ago followed the example of the German ones
in their politics. And they have already wound up with "representatives"
such as the ones who produced the most faithful servant of the French
bourgeoisie and the best friend of the Russian police government,
Minister Millerand, who without hesitation approves an order to shoot
down workers.
So, if the workers elect their own Social-Democratic representatives to
governmental institutions, little by little these representatives
develop not into emancipators of the working class but into its new
masters. Why is this so?
Throughout the world, whether a country has an autocratic government or
a "government elected by the people," the law expresses not the will of
the people but the will of ruling society which plunders all earthly
goods. This society, with the ownership of all material wealth, thereby
owns all human knowledge as well, which it turns into a secret
inaccessible to the working people. By the laws of the robbers, the
working class is allowed only popular education, which is ignorance in
comparison with the ruling learned world. By these laws of plunder the
vast majority of mankind is doomed to be born slaves, to begin in
childhood the penal labour of physical work; it is doomed to grow up
from generation to generation as an inferior, uneducated race of people
capable only of physical labour, of mechanically executing the orders of
its masters. The masters, meanwhile, use their plunder to educate all of
their own children - though many of them are utter nitwits - into a
superior race whose business it is to rule.
Under such predatory laws, it hardly matters whether an autocratic tsar
appoints the country's administrators or they are elected by the people.
In either case the government consists of intelligenty who bequeath
their administrative ability only to their own offspring, leaving to the
majority of mankind the slave labour, the penal labour, of physical
work. The elimination of this situation, in which millions even before
they are born are fated to ignorance and slave labour, and the abolition
of a government which expresses this law, a law of robbery and human
bondage, can be accomplished only by a world-wide conspiracy of workers,
a general uprising of the working class in a unanimous strike. This
uprising will tear from the hands of ruling educated society the wealth
created over the centuries and will put it into everyone's hands,
proclaiming every human being an equal heir to all human wealth and
knowledge.
The assurance that all the working class has to do to attain the
possibility of participating in the running of the state is abolish the
autocratic regime and win universal suffrage - that's an old fairy tale,
repeated a thousand times by every conceivable bourgeois
politician-fraud.
The workers, in discussing the question of how to observe the First of
May, cannot put their trust in science, cannot put their trust in the
revolutionary intelligentsia and its innumerable leaflets, which at
present do nothing but loudly and brazenly repeat this old fairy tale.
But, it will be said, the Russian workers have Social-Democratic
committees in all the large towns. Haven't these committees, whose
membership includes conscious workers, shown the true path for the
proletarian struggle to take?
The Social-Democratic committees train worker organisers and agitators.
Each year they prepare the May First holiday, and in numerous leaflets
they call upon the workers to set forth boldly to the struggle on this
day. But when the workers respond to these appeals by suddenly rising en
masse (as they did in Petersburg last year,or in an entire city, as was
the case three years ago in Riga), putting forth their real labour
demands in noisy strikes - then you don't see any Social-Democratic
agitators or organisers at the place of struggle. Not a single committee
has any thought of spreading a strike that flares up, of augmenting the
strength of the aroused masses, of backing up the workers' demands.
In February of last year, when the police in Kazan Square beat up
students and Petersburg intelligentsia,all the Social-Democratic
pamphlets and newspapers cried out with one voice that after such a
disgraceful scandal the workers must immediately come out into the
streets and without arguing expose themselves to bullets and bayonets.
Of course! Have you ever heard of such a thing? On Kazan Square members
of the well-bred public, the polite public, were beaten, not some
rabble, strikers who might engage in unruly conduct, as in Riga.
On the streets of Riga it wasn't just a matter of a thrashing with whips
and rifle butts, such as the students and intelligentsia are getting
now, but of shooting and cutting down more than fifty workers. But since
the people there were dying for the workers' cause and not for the cause
dear to the heart of the intelligentsia, the Social-Democratic
committees did not feel it necessary to raise the kind of ruckus
throughout Russia that they are raising now in behalf of the students.
It did not occur to a single Social-Democratic committee to appeal to
the workers of other cities to revolt against the bestial massacre and
butchering of the workers in Riga, to answer violence with an even
greater general uprising, as they are now preaching.
The Social-Democratic committees patronisingly term stormy strikes like
the one in Riga spontaneous outbursts of the unconscious, ignorant
masses. They consider them unnecessary and useless, and during such mass
disturbances they usually advise their own conscious workers to remain
calm, to stay home.
And so, when they offend educated people, you, the worker, are supposed
to get so indignant that you'll go right out and throw bombs; but when
they shoot down workers in mass strikes-just sit quietly and appeal for
calm . . . that's how the Social-Democratic committees, the
representatives of the working class, reason.
Not too long ago, these "representatives" were beginning their work of
so-called economic struggle, that is, they were organising strikes to
relieve the hardship of factory labour and increase wages (displaying
unusual caution and moderation in this struggle, of course). Now,
without being shy about it, they are explaining to the old Russian
revolutionaries and to the whole intelligentsia that they conducted this
struggle not for its own sake but in order to interest the workers in
politics and to draw them into the struggle, so that the students might
now have the workers for their ardent defenders and the whole of liberal
society, in its quarrel with the tsar, might have the masses of the
people behind it. (That, for example, is how the Russian
Social-Democratic party's founder, Plekhanov, explains its task.)
Since last year, all the Social-Democratic committees have begun to
declare that now is the time not for economic but for political
struggle. None of the newly established committees, such as the ones in
Siberia, even think of starting with economic struggle, but summon the
workers directly to a political demonstration. They assume that without
even having to throw the worker the penny they tossed him earlier, they
can send him under the bayonets and bullets for the intelligentsia's
cause.
Last year's congress of the Jewish Social-Democratic committees
determined that in the economic respect the worker had already received
almost everything that he could be given; therefore a political struggle
should now be conducted to realise all the dreams of the Jewish
intelligentsia, that is, to gain access for it to all the higher posts
in the state,all those positions and fat salaries which it cannot get
because it lacks equal rights.
The Petersburg committee, in regard to the Obukhov strike, informs us
that there is a crisis throughout Russia, that the owners themselves are
in distress, and that therefore those workers who remain out of work
should abandon economic struggle and occupy themselves with politics.
This means that at a time when workers are perishing from hunger and are
seeking bread, they should demand only that the government not oppress
intelligenty but set them all up in the honourable posts that are due
them according to the laws of robbery.
When the workers began to help the students last year, the whole of
Russian educated society rejoiced, for it determined that from now on
the workers would help it absolutely free of charge. The whole
revolutionary intelligentsia suddenly became Social-Democratic, once it
understood that this doctrine is constructed in conformity with its
aspirations. It is a doctrine that has tirelessly affirmed the
impossibility of a proletarian revolution in Russia only so that the
Russian intelligentsia could organise its own bourgeois revolution, with
the workers serving merely as cannon fodder. Now the intelligentsia is
sure that its cause is on the right track. The Social-Democratic
committees have long since issued corresponding instructions. On May Day
the workers should not undertake strikes for the relief of labour, but
should organise demonstrations "of a sharply political character" and
street processions with banners inscribed "down with the autocracy."
When the Petersburg workers nevertheless organised in May a series of
strikes and for weeks on end stubbornly fought with the police and
troops, the Petersburg committee remained highly displeased. It is clear
that the workers will organise the First of May for their own cause, in
defiance of all the committees.
"Conscious" workers! You who participate in the Social-Democratic
committees, cast off the fables with which pharisaical science has
ensnared your minds, fables about the "immaturity" of industry and the
immaturity of the proletariat for socialism, about the "narrow and
unsocialist interests of the worker" and the "elevated ideas" of the
intelligentsia; cast off these fables for just a moment and you will
hear the mighty voice of the worker masses, loudly ringing out in May of
each year. You will understand that science says only what educated
society needs for holding sway over the proletariat, while what the
worker needs the worker masses themselves know better than anyone. Hear
out these masses to the end, for they have spoken more than once, they
have spoken when bayonets and bullets were directed at them.
May Day, they say, is not a day for revolting against the autocracy
because it has not admitted the whole of educated bourgeois society into
the government, The May struggle is a revolt against the bondage which
even before you were born doomed you to hunger-strikes, ignorance, penal
labour, and uncomplaining service to the learned world; a revolt against
the robbery by which only the offspring of the ruling classes are the
heirs of human wealth and knowledge, and any idiot among them can be
your master.
These worker masses unschooled by the Social Democrats, whom you regard
as understanding nothing, are choosing a path of struggle so true that
by comparison with it all the ideas of the learned people about
"emancipating the proletariat" are a patent deception.
The worker masses on May Day do not run to demonstrations to protect the
banner of the intelligent. They present demands for alleviating the
conditions of labour, and they present them for immediate satisfaction.
They do not "demonstrate in favour of" shortening the working day,
something the Social-Democratic intelligentsia devised as a way of
responding to the workers' demands with promises, a way of duping them,
as they have been duped for decades, by promising every year to get an
eight-hour working day through parliament.
The worker masses put forth demands not because their bosses' businesses
are successful or unsuccessful, but because they have felt themselves to
be human beings and are rebelling against their slave status. And
therefore the masses untaught by the intelligentsia understand that
their cause lies not in clever politics, not in legal principles, but in
the strength and numbers of those rebelling; that the broader their
strike, the stronger and higher their demands will be. Therefore the
worker masses use an infallible method in their struggle which
Social-Democratic programs never hit upon. Their first object is to
broaden their strike. Stopping work in their own factory, they go en
masse to the next one to bring it to a halt. In this way whole cities
rise up.
The "revolutionary" intelligentsia understands that spreading such a
struggle to the entire state signifies the start of a proletarian
revolution. And since that would abolish not only the police and the
capitalists but would take away property from the intelligentsia itself,
all it can do is to call such disturbances "wild outbursts of the
rabble' and hope that the tsar's bayonets will be able to quiet the
rabble down.
But the masses expect something else from you "conscious" workers.
Pointing to the dead bodies with which they cover the streets of one
town or another, year in and year out, they have long been appealing to
you to abandon the intelligentsia and its plans for a bourgeois
revolution and to work for labour's cause, for a universal conspiracy of
workers, for the May general strike.