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Title: What is “Makhaevism”?
Author: Paul Avrich
Date: July 1965
Language: en
Topics: Jan Wacław Machajski, Poland, Russia, intellectuals, marxism, critique
Source: Retrieved on August 1, 2012 from http://www.redemmas.org/collective_action_notes/avrich.htm
Notes: From “Soviet Studies”, July 1965. Footnotes were excluded in this Web rendering.

Paul Avrich

What is “Makhaevism”?

When the Short Course history of the Communist party was published in

Pravda in 1938, it was accompanied by a decree which emphasized the role

of the intelligentsia in the construction of Soviet society. The decree

bitterly condemned the ‘Makhaevist’ belief that the intellectuals —

party officials, factory and farm managers, army officers, technical

specialists, scientists — were an alien breed of self-seeking men who

had nothing in common with the worker at the bench or the peasant behind

the plough. This hostile attitude towards the intelligentsia, declared

the decree, was ‘savage, hooligan and dangerous to the Soviet State’.

A number of Pravda readers, puzzled by the strange expression

‘Makhaevism’, wrote to the editors asking them to explain it. (Some

readers, it seems, confused ‘Makhaevism’ with ‘Machism’, the philosophy

of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, which Lenin had severely

criticized thirty years earlier.) In a scathing polemic, Pravda replied

that ‘Makhaevism’ was a crude theory which slandered the intelligentsia

by branding them as the new exploiters of the workers and peasants; its

adherents were ‘aliens, degenerates, and enemies’, whose slogan was

‘Down with the intelligentsia’. Vehemently denying that the

intelligentsia constituted a new class of oppressors, Pravda asserted

that the intellectuals and the toiling masses were ‘of one bone and one

flesh’. Yet Pravda’s barrage of vituperation merely thickened the mist

of confusion surrounding the term ‘Makhaevism’, which, by the 1930s, had

become little more than a convenient epithet for intellectual-baiting.

But what, in fact, was ‘Makhaevism’? Who was its originator, and what

influence did he have during his lifetime?

Jan Wacław Machajski was born in 1866 in Busk, a small town of some two

thousand inhabitants, situated near the city of Kielce in Russian

Poland. He was the son of an indigent clerk, who died when Machajski was

a child, leaving a large and destitute family. Machajski attended the

gimnaziya in Kielce and helped support his brothers and sisters by

tutoring the schoolmates who boarded in his mother’s apartment. He began

his revolutionary career in 1888 in the student circles of Warsaw

University, where he had enrolled in the faculties of natural science

and medicine. Two or three years later, while attending the University

of Zürich, he abandoned his first political philosophy (a blend of

socialism and Polish nationalism) for the revolutionary internationalism

of Marx and Engels. Machajski was arrested in May 1892, for smuggling

revolutionary proclamations from Switzerland into the industrial city of

Łódź, which was then, in the throes of a general strike. In 1903, after

a dozen years in prison and Siberian exile, he escaped to western

Europe, where he remained until the outbreak of the 1905 revolution.

During his long term of banishment in the Siberian settlement of

Vilyuisk (in Yakutsk province), Machajski made an intensive study of

socialist literature and came to the conclusion that the Social

Democrats did not really champion the cause of the manual workers, but

that of a new class of ‘mental workers’ engendered by the rise of

industrialism. Marxism, he maintained in his major work, Umstvenny

rabochi, reflected the interests of this new class, which hoped to ride

to power on the shoulders of the manual workers. In a so-called

‘socialist’ society, he declared, private capitalists would merely be

replaced by a new aristocracy of administrators, technical experts, and

politicians; the manual labourers would be enslaved anew by a ruling

minority whose capital’, so to speak, was education.

In evolving his anti-Marxist theories, Machajski was strongly influenced

by Mikhail Bakunin and by the economists of the 1890s. A generation

before the appearance of Umstvenny rabochi, Bakunin had denounced Marx

and his followers as narrow intellectuals who, living in an unreal world

of musty books and thick journals, understood nothing of human

suffering. Although Bakunin believed that intellectuals would play an

important part in the revolutionary struggle, he warned that his Marxist

rivals had an insatiable lust for power. In 1872, four years before his

death, Bakunin speculated on the shape the Marxist ‘dictatorship of the

proletariat’ would assume if ever inaugurated:

That would be the rule of scientific intellect, the most autocratic, the

most despotic, the most arrogant, and the most insolent of all regimes.

There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of genuine or sham savants,

and the world will be divided into a dominant minority in the name of

science, and an immense ignorant majority.

In one of his most important works, Gosudarstvennost i anarkhiya,

published the following year, Bakunin elaborated upon this dire prophecy

in a most striking passage:

According to the theory of Mr. Marx, the people not only must not

destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete

disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers the leaders of

the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends, who will proceed

to liberate [mankind] in their own way. They will concentrate the reigns

of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require an

exceedingly firm guardianship; they will establish a single state bank,

concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and

even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies —

industrial and agricultural — under the direct command of state

engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political

estate.

According to Bakunin, the followers of Karl Marx and of Auguste Comte as

well were ‘priests of science’, ordained in a new privileged church of

the mind and superior education’. They disdainfully informed the common

man: ‘You know nothing, you understand nothing, you are a blockhead, and

a man of intelligence must put a saddle and bridle on you and lead you’.

Bakunin maintained that education was as great an instrument of

domination as private property. So long as learning was preempted by a

minority of the population, he wrote in 1869 in an essay entitled

Integral Instruction, it could effectively be used to exploit the

majority. ‘The one who knows more’, he wrote, ‘will naturally dominate

the one who knows less.’ Even if the landlords and capitalists were

eliminated, there was a danger that the world ‘would be divided once

again into a mass of slaves and a small number of rulers, the former

working for the latter as they do today’. Bakunin’s answer was to wrest

education from the monopolistic grasp of the privileged classes and make

it available equally to everyone; like capital, education must cease to

be ‘the patrimony of one or of several classes’ and become ‘the common

property of all’. An integrated education in science and handicrafts

(but not in the jejune abstractions of religion, metaphysics and

sociology) would enable all citizens to engage in both manual and mental

pursuits, thereby eliminating a major source of inequality. ‘Everyone

must work, and everyone must be educated’, Bakunin averred, so that in

the good society of the future there would be ‘neither workers nor

scientists, but only men’.

The gulf between the educated classes and the ‘dark people’ of Russia

was broader than anywhere else in Europe, During the 1870s, when the

young Populist students from Petersburg and Moscow went to the people in

the countryside, they ran into an invisible barrier that separated them

from the ignorant narod. Their pitiful failure to communicate with the

rural folk led some disillusioned Populists to abandon the education

which they thought was dividing them from the masses. Others wondered

whether the education gap could be bridged at all, whether the Populist

philosopher Nikolai Mikhailovski was not right when he observed that the

literate few must ‘inevitably enslave’ the toiling majority.

Nor was the situation really improved when the peasants came to the city

to work in the factories, for they brought their suspicion of the

intellectuals with them. One labourer in St. Petersburg complained that

‘the intelligentsia had usurped the position of the worker’. It was all

right to accept books from the students, he said, but when they begin to

teach you nonsense you must knock them down. ‘They should be made to

understand that the workers’ cause ought to be placed entirely in the

hands of the workers themselves.’ Although these remarks were aimed at

the Populist Chaikovski circle in the 1870s, the same attitude persisted

in succeeding decades towards both the Populists and the Marxists, who

were competing for the allegiance of the emerging class of industrial

workers. In 1883, Georgi Plekhanov, the ‘father’ of Russian Social

Democracy, felt constrained to pledge that the Marxist dictatorship of

the proletariat would be ‘as far removed from the dictatorship of a

group of raznochintsy revolutionists as heaven is from earth’. He

assured the workers that Marx’s disciples were selfless men, whose

mission was to raise the class-consciousness of the proletariat so that

it could become ‘an independent figure in the arena of historical life,

and not pass eternally from one guardian to another’.

Notwithstanding repeated reassurances of this sort, many factory workers

eschewed the doctrinaire revolutionism of Plekhanov and his associates

and bent their efforts to the task of economic and educational

self-improvement. They began to manifest a tendency (in which they were

joined by a number of sympathetic intellectuals) which later acquired

the label of ‘economism’. The average Russian workman was more

interested in raising his material level than in agitating for political

objectives; he was wary of the revolutionary slogans floated by party

leaders who seemed bent on pushing him into political adventures that

might satisfy their own ambitions while leaving the situation of the

workers essentially unchanged. Political programmes, wrote a leading

spokesman of the ‘economist’ point of view, ‘are suitable for

intellectuals going “to the people”, but not for the workers

themselves.... And it is the defence of the workers’ interests ... that

is the whole content of the labour movement’. The intelligentsia, he

added, quoting Marx’s celebrated preamble to the bylaws of the First

International, tended to forget that ‘the liberation of the working

class must be the task of the workers themselves’.

Underlying the anti-intellectualism of the ‘economists’ was the

conviction that the intelligentsia looked upon the working class simply

as the means to a higher goal, as an abstract mass predestined to carry

out the immutable will of history. According to the ‘economists’, the

intellectuals, instead of bringing their knowledge to bear on the

concrete problems of factory life, were inclined to lose themselves in

ideologies that had no relation to the true needs of the workers.

Emboldened by the Petersburg textile strikes of 1896 and 1897, which

were organized and directed by local workmen, the ‘economists’ urged the

Russian labouring class to remain self-sufficient and reject the

leadership of self-centred professional agitators. As one bench worker

in the capital wrote in an ‘economist’ journal in 1897, ‘the improvement

of our working conditions depends on ourselves alone’.

The anti-political and anti-intellectual arguments of Bakunin and the

economists’ made an indelible impression on Machajski. While in Siberia,

he came to believe that the radical intelligentsia aimed not at the

achievement of a classless society, but merely to establish itself as a

privileged stratum. It was no wonder that Marxism, rather than

advocating an immediate revolt against the capitalist system, postponed

its ‘collapse until a future time when economic conditions had

sufficiently ‘matured’. With the further development of capitalism and

its increasingly sophisticated technology, the ‘mental workers’ would

grow strong enough to establish their own rule. Even if the new

technocracy were then to abolish private ownership of the means of

production, Machajski said, the ‘professional intelligentsia’ would

still maintain its position of mastery by taking over the management of

production and by establishing a monopoly over the special knowledge

needed to operate a complex industrial economy. The managers, engineers

and political office-holders would use their Marxist ideology as a new

religious opiate to becloud the minds of the labouring masses,

perpetuating their ignorance and servitude.

Machajski suspected every left-wing competitor of seeking to establish a

social system in which the intellectuals would be the ruling class. He

even accused the anarchists of Kropotkin’s Khleb i volya group of taking

a ‘gradualist’ approach to revolution no better than that of the Social

Democrats, for they expected the coming revolution in Russia not to go

further than the French revolution of 1789 or 1848. In Kropotkin’s

projected anarchist commune, Machajski held, ‘only the possessors of

civilization and knowledge’ would enjoy true freedom. The ‘social

revolution’ of the anarchists, he insisted, was not really meant to be a

purely ‘workers’ uprising’, but was in fact to be a revolution in the

‘interests of the intellectuals’. The anarchists were ‘the same

socialists as all the others, only more passionate ones’

What then was to be done to avoid this new enslavement? In Machaiski’s

view, as long as inequality of income persisted and the instruments of

production remained the private property of a capitalist minority, and

as long as scientific and technical knowledge remained the ‘property’ of

an intellectual minority, the multitudes would continue to toil for a

privileged few. Machajski’s solution assigned a key role to a secret

organization of revolutionaries called the Workers’ Conspiracy (Rabochi

zagovor), similar to Bakunin’s ‘secret society’ of revolutionary

conspirators. Presumably, Machajski himself was to be at the head. The

mission of the Workers’ Conspiracy was to stimulate the workers into

‘direct action’ — strikes, demonstrations, and the like — against the

capitalists with the immediate object of economic improvements and jobs

for the unemployed. The ‘direct action’ of the workers was to culminate

in a general strike which, in turn, would trigger off a world-wide

uprising, ushering in an era of equal income and educational

opportunity. In the end, the pernicious distinction between manual and

mental labour would be obliterated, together with all class divisions.

Machajski’s theories provoked passionate discussions within the various

groups of Russian radicals. In Siberia, where Machajski hectographed the

first part of Umstvenny rabochi in 1898, his critique of Social

Democracy ‘had a great effect upon the exiles’, as Trotsky, who was

among them, recalled in his autobiography. By 190l, copies of Umstvenny

rabochi were circulating in Odessa, where ‘Makhaevism’ was beginning to

attract a following. In 1905, a small group of Makhayesvsky calling

itself the Workers’ Conspiracy, was formed in St. Petersburg. Despite

Machajski’s criticism of the anarchists, a number of them were drawn to

his creed. For a time, Olga Taratuta and Vladimir Striga, leading

members of the largest anarchist organization in Russia, the Black

Banner (Chernoye znatnya) group, were associated with a society in

Odessa known as the Intransigents (Neprimirimiye),which included both

anarchists and Makhayevtsy and the principal anarchist circle in

Petersburg, Without Authority (Beznachaliye), contained a few disciples

of Machajski. If some anarchist writers took Machajski to task for

seeing everything as a clever plot of the intelligentsia, more than a

few, as one of Kropotkin’s followers admitted, found in the doctrines of

‘Makhaevism’ a ‘fresh and vivifying spirit in contrast to the ‘stifling

atmosphere of the socialist parties, saturated with political

chicanery’.

The foremost Anarcho-Syndicalist in Russia in 1905, Daniil Novomirski,

clearly echoed Machajski’s suspicions of the ‘mental workers’:

Which clan does contemporary socialism serve in fact and not in words?

We answer at once and without beating about the bush: Socialism is not

the expression of the interests of the working class, but of the

so-called raznochintsy, or declasse intelligentsia. The Social

Democratic party, said Novomirski, was infested with political crooks

... new exploiters, new deceivers of the people”. The long social

revolution would prove to be a farce he warned, should it fail to

annihilate, together with the state and private property yet a third

enemy of human liberty: “That new sworn enemy of ours is the monopoly of

knowledge; its bearer is the intelligentsia”. Although Novomirski

believed that a ‘conscious minority’ of farsighted ‘pathfinders’ was

needed to stir the labouring masses into action, he admonished the

workers not to look for outsiders to save them. Selfless men simply did

not exist – “not in the dark clouds of the empty sky, nor in the

luxurious palaces of the tsars, nor in the chambers of the wealthy, nor

in any parliament.

Machajski’s views influenced another ultra-radical group born of the

revolution of 1905, the SR-Maximalists. In fact, the chief animator of

‘Makhaevism’ next to Machajski himself, a man who barely acknowledged

his master’s existence, was a Maximalist named Yevgeni Yustinovich

Lozinski. In his most important book, What, after all, is the

Intelligentsia?, Lozinski paraphrased the central idea of Machajski’s

philosophy: ‘Socializing the means of production liberates the

intelligentsia from its subjugation by the capitalist state, but does

not liberate labour; it leads to the reinforcement of class slavery, to

the strengthening of the workers’ bondage’.

Similar echoes of Machajski’s writings were to be found in numerous

pamphlets and articles by anarchists, Maximalists, and other extreme

left-wing sectarians. But with the stern repressions of Stolypin in the

years following the revolution of 1905, these echoes rapidly faded away

and the men who produced them disappeared into prison or exile.

Machajski himself, who had returned to Russia in 1905, was compelled to

flee again two years later.

Russian radicalism, at a low ebb during the next decade, quickly revived

with the outbreak of the February revolution. Although neither the

Workers’ Conspiracy nor any other organization of Makhayevtsy reappeared

in 1917, the spirit of Makhaevism was much in evidence within the labour

movement. As in 1905, Machajski’s influence was particularly strong

among the anarchists and Maximalists. In September 1917, for example, in

phrases evoking Bakunin and Machajski, an anarchist workman exhorted the

delegates at a conference of Petrograd factory committees to launch an

immediate general strike. There were no ‘laws of history’ to hold the

people back, he declared, no predetermined revolutionary stages, as the

Social Democrats maintained. Marx’s disciples — both Mensheviks and

Bolsheviks — were deceiving the working class with ‘promises of God’s

reign on earth hundreds of years from now’. There was no reason to wait,

he cried. The workers must take direct action — not after more centuries

of painful historical development, but right now! ‘Hail the uprising of

the slaves and the equality of income!” At a factory committee gathering

the following month, another anarchist speaker opposed the approaching

Constituent Assembly on the grounds that it was certain to be

monopolized by ‘capitalists and intellectuals’. ‘The intellectuals’, he

warned, ‘in no case can represent the interests of the workers. They

know how to twist us around their fingers, and they will betray us. The

workers, he thundered, can triumph only through ‘direct combat’ with

their oppressors.

When Machajski returned to Russia in 1917, he made no effort to channel

these sentiments into a coherent movement. His heyday had passed with

the revolution of 1905, and now he was prematurely old and tired. After

the October revolution, he obtained a non-political job with the Soviet

government, serving as a technical editor for Narodnoye khozyaistvo

(later Sotsialisticheskoye khozyaistvo), the organ of the Supreme

Economic Council. He remained, however, sharply critical of Marxism and

its adherents. In the summer of 1918, he published a single issue of a

journal called Rabochaya revolyutsiya, in which he censured the

Bolsheviks for failing to order the total expropriation of the

bourgeoisie or to improve the economic situation of the working class.

After the February revolution, wrote Machajski, the workers had received

a rise in wages and an eight-hour day, but after October, their material

level had been raised ‘not one whit!’. The Bolshevik insurrection, he

continued, was nothing but ‘a counterrevolution of the intellectuals’.

Political power had been seized by the disciples of Marx, ‘the petty

bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia ... the possessors of the knowledge

necessary for the organization and administration of the whole life of

the country’. And the Marxists, in accordance with their prophet’s

religious gospel of economic determination, had chosen to preserve the

bourgeois order, obliging themselves only ‘to prepare’ the manual

workers for their future paradise. Machajski enjoined the working class

to press the Soviet government, to expropriate the factories, equalize

incomes and educational opportunity, and provide jobs for the

unemployed. Yet, as dissatisfied as he was with the new regime,

Machajski grudgingly accepted it, at least for the time being. Any

attempt to overthrow the government, he said, would benefit only the

Whites, who were a worse evil than the Bolsheviks.

Machajski remained at his editorial post until his death from a heart

attack in February 1926, at the age of sixty.

Paul Avrich, Queens College, New York