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Title: White Collars & Horny Hands Author: Max Nomad Date: First published in The Modern Quarterly (Fall, 1932) Language: en Topics: intellectuals, Max Nomad, Waclaw Machajski, working class Source: Transcribed from a pamphlet published by Black Cat Press, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (1983)
Jan Waclaw Machajski (1866–1926) belongs to the first generation of
Marxists to question the teachings of their master. But while other
contemporary revisionists were shifting Marxism to the right, towards
social reform and class collaboration, Machajski moved to the left,
becoming the first to apply Marxism to itself.
Machajski’s ideas about a “new class” of technocrats is familiar today
in both left and right wing variants. But his concept of Marxism, of
socialism in general, as the ideology of a rising managerial elite, has
never received the consideration it deserves.
In his writings Machajski stressed that the suppression of private
capitalism does not imply the disappearance of the working class as an
underclass. The socialization of the means of production through the
action of the State merely leads to the creation of a new parasitic
layer to consume the surplus value generated by the workers.
Despite his Marxist training, Machajski rejected historicist thinking
about “laws of development” of society. Every ruling class – retrograde
or progressive – tries to maximize its consumption at the expense of the
toilers, he taught, and can only be overthrown through the conscious
acts of the oppressed.
Machajski’s relation to anarchism is ambiguous. He regarded anarchism as
going back to the roots of socialism, before it became corrupted by
social scientists. Certainly he owed an unacknowledged debt to Bakunin,
who published a critique of State socialism of the Stalinist variety as
early as 1873. From anarchosyndicalism he borrowed the concept of the
General Strike. But he did not propose the immediate destruction of the
State and even went so far as to suggest that the particular form of the
State was of no great interest for the working class.
More important than the prefiguring of Machajski’s ideas in earlier
thinkers is the real phenomenon of anti-intellectualism in working class
history. Distrust and hatred of intellectuals can be traced from the
origins of the modern proletariat and first took a violent turn during
the June days in Paris, 1848, an event which made a great impression on
Machajski.
Machajski’s theory of the socialist intelligentsia allowed him to
understand why socialism had not become strong in the United States. He
noted that socialists always struggled harder against absolutism than
against capitalist regimes, which they proposed to make more efficient
rather than abolish. Since absolutism had never existed in America and
there were ample opportunities for aspiring intellectuals, the basis for
militant socialism did not exist.
One can also use Machajski’s ideas to explain the growth of
Marxist-Leninist movements in Third World countries which often have a
negligible working class but sizeable numbers of underemployed
intellectuals.
In the U.S.S.R. itself, where his ideas were anathema to the ruling
circles, his direst predictions came to pass. In fact the evolution of
the Soviet Union has seen a faster rate of growth for the intelligentsia
than for the working class. According to official figures, the
intellectual workers in the U.S.S.R. grew from one million in 1917 to 37
million in 1977. The manual working class increased from 8 million to 73
million over the same period.
A Pole who published his works in Russian in tiny editions, Machajski’s
writings have never been readily available. In English he is mainly
known through the writings of Max Nomad (1881–1973). In the years just
before World War I Nomad (his real name was Max Nacht) was one of
Machajski’s most active followers. (For Nomad’s early career, see his
delightful memoirs, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, New York,
1964.)
The essay reproduced here originally appeared in The Modern Quarterly
(Fall, 1932) after Nomad had emigrated to the United States. In 1934,
following a visit to Machajski’s widow, he revised his views somewhat
about his former mentor whom he now accused of having dictatorial
aspirations. In Machajski’s defense it should be noted there is no trace
of lusting after power in his writings or in his activities as a
revolutionary.
Nomad long outlived the heroic period of his youth although he always
retained his sympathy for the “underdogs” along with a cynical view of
their self-appointed leaders. His isolated position on the left
eventually led to his association with academic social democrats. Thus
he ended being patronized by the very elements Machajski so ably
exposed.
Machajski By Max Nomad
New revolutionary theories are hatched daily in the brains of political
malcontents and “cranks.” In times propitious for their dissemination
these new gospels, if backed by a fascinating personality, occasionally
find larger or smaller groups of faithful communicants. Particularly is
this so when the old, time-honored, standardized parties or movements of
protest show no progress in the way of fulfilling their promises. But
more often than not these newer theories find a quiet grave in unread
books and pamphlets. As historical curiosities, they are mentioned
casually in learned conversation, but no longer seriously discussed. Yet
the failure of an idea to get recognition during the lifetime of its
originator is not always a proof that there was no inherent merit in it.
For it might share the fate of certain purely scientific theories which,
having lain hopelessly buried among unread “papers,” are sometimes
discovered and acclaimed after several decades.
The Russian revolutionary movement of the last two generations has
likewise had its nonconformists and heretics. They went their own way
outside the beaten paths of the recognized, “legitimate” currents of the
native “Populism” (in its various successive forms) of the
peasant-loving intelligentsia and of the western Marxism of the educated
malcontents, who saw in the industrial workers the lever for
over-throwing Tsarism and Europeanizing Russia. Among those “legitimate”
currents might also be mentioned the orthodox, “official”
communist-anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, which viewed the coming Russian
Revolution as nothing but a replica of the great French Revolution.
Those heresies sprang from various sources. Some were the offshoots of
the defunct anarchism of Bakunin; another grew out of the Populism of
the Social Revolutionaries, and became known as “Maximalism;” and others
had their roots in the theories of Karl Marx.
All of these heretics, although speaking theoretically entirely
different languages, had one thing in common: they refused to accept the
official dictum as to the character of the coming Russian upheaval. In
referring to that impending event, both Marxian Social-Democrats and
Populist Social-Revolutionists had in mind exclusively the
bourgeois-democratic revolution. If the Social-Democrats sometimes spoke
of the “revolution of the proletariat” or the “proletarian revolution,”
they meant it in a somewhat Pickwickian sense: the fighters of the
revolution were to be “proletarians,” but the goal was to be democratic,
a term which sounded better than “bourgeois.” The native “Populists,”
although chiefly interested in the peasantry, likewise acknowledged the
importance of the manual workers in the approaching upheaval. In a
discussion between Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, and
Tikhomirov, then still the most important mouthpiece of the terrorist
“People’s Will,” there were coined the notable sentences which, almost
in a nutshell, reveal the stand taken by the unsophisticated Populists
and their more subtle Marxian rivals. Tikhomirov said, “I admit that the
proletariat is very important for the revolution.” To which Plekhanov
replied, “No, the revolution is very important for the proletariat.”
That was very sharp. But basically the two opponents were in agreement.
Only the later Populist deserter to the camp of the Tsarists was more
cynical in his readiness to use the workers frankly as a tool for his,
the bourgeois revolution; while the later Marxist deserter to the camp
of the Russian “bitter-enders,” more circumspect, meant to say that the
bourgeois revolution was of paramount necessity to the workers
themselves. The workers might make their choice …
The dissenters went beyond the idea of a mere bourgeois revolution. The
unorthodox Anarchists urged a merciless terrorist struggle against the
bourgeoisie as well as against the government, with the lofty ideal of
“Anarchy” as their immediate aim, incredible as this may sound. They
were the romantics of the revolution. The no less heroic, but more
reasonable “Maximalists” – the illegitimate sons of the great
Social-Revolutionary Party – demanded nationalization of industries
immediately after the conquest of power. And so did Trotsky, the
ex-Menshevik Marxist who went far beyond the Bolsheviks during the first
revolution of 1905.
But prior to all of these heresies which sprang up about the time of the
first Russian Revolution (1905), there had appeared in the field another
champion of dissent – hailing originally from Marx – who was soon to
impress his own name upon an entirely new revolutionary theory. His name
was Waclaw Machajski (pronounced Vatzlav Makhayski) – now an almost
legendary figure. In the circles of the Russian intelligentsia he has
chiefly been known as the bad man “Makhayev” who had tried to arouse and
to prejudice the manual workers against their educated liberators. And
even to this day, more than two decades after the movement connected
with his name has disappeared as an organized affair, the term
“Makhayevstchina” (the Machajski ideology) is used in a deprecatory
sense to designate all those tendencies or even moods within the
socialist and labor movement which in one way or another denote a
certain antagonism between manual workers and intellectuals.
Waclaw Machajski, a native of Russian Poland, had started his
revolutionary career as a Polish nationalist student with a slight
socialist tinge. But he was soon to wash off that stain with five years
imprisonment in Warsaw and Moscow and six years of exile in one of the
sub-Arctic corners of northeastern-most Siberia. A few years before his
imprisonment he had shaken off the last vestiges of his youthful
nationalism and become a revolutionary Marxist. In 1892, impressed by a
violent uprising among the workers of Lodz – the Polish Manchester – a
group of Polish and Russian revolutionary students in Switzerland issued
a manifesto to the workers in revolt. Machajski undertook to smuggle the
literature across the border. He was arrested at the start, and during
his years of sub-Arctic retirement, where by an incredible stroke of
luck a large sociological library had been smuggled over by one of his
fellow-sufferers, he developed his own point of view.
The starting point of his personal evolution began with a strange
observation. All the socialist parties of the world, even long before
the appearance of the “revisionist” heresy of Bernstein, had begun to
turn into respectable law-abiding progressive parties, constituting
practically little more than the extreme wing of the Liberal
bourgeoisie. While flaunting revolutionary-sounding, proletarian
slogans, promising the overthrow of the capitalist system, they actually
aspired to hardly anything more than the broadest possible extension of
democratic institutions. Radical or revolutionary methods they
recognized wherever it was necessary for them to obtain political
rights. But these methods were not deemed applicable when the workers
declared their own bread-and-butter demands. In the nineties the
Austrian socialists seriously contemplated the General Strike as a means
of winning universal suffrage. But they just as earnestly declined the
idea of using that same General Strike for demanding the eight-hour day.
In 1896, a few years before his death, old Wilhelm Liebknecht, founder
of the German Social-Democratic Party, friend and orthodox disciple of
Marx, found it possible to say that “the State which has honestly
established universal suffrage was secured against revolution” and that
“we are the only party of order in Germany.” This was a year after the
death of the great teacher, Engels, who himself, in 1895, had written
approvingly of the “red cheeks and strong muscles” which the
Social-Democratic Party was acquiring through its law-abiding tactics.
Similar evidence of left-wing bourgeois-democratic tendencies, Machajski
detected also in the development of Polish and Russian socialism, whose
representatives employed all the underground activities, all the
revolutionary energies of the workers, for directing the struggle
exclusively towards the attainment of the common aim of all layers of
the progressive middle classes: the overthrow of absolutism and the
establishment of an orderly capitalist system, Western style, under
which the socialist parties would inevitably develop along the same
lines as their opportunist counterparts in the rest of Europe.
All these observations Machajski embodied in his Evolution of
Social-Democracy, which became the first part of his Intellectual
Worker. In those years a small number of copies of the Evolution, which
was completed in 1898–99, were prepared with the help of a primitive
hectograph – and the first victim of its distribution was the author
himself. In 1900, when his term was up, he started on his trip to
European Russia, but was arrested on the way. His own illegal literature
having been found in his possession, he was condemned to an extension of
his Siberian exile for another five years. In 1903 his friends and
followers succeeded in organizing his escape to Western Europe.
During the time that Machajski was elaborating his point of view, his
reply to the opportunism of the Socialist parties, whether in its
frankly cynical “revisionist” or in its pseudo-revolutionary “orthodox”
form, pointed to “a world organization of the working class, its
international conspiracy and concerted action” as the “only way to its
rule, to its revolutionary dictatorship, to the organization of the
conquest of political power” (Evolution of Social-Democracy, p. 30). In
taking this stand, he made a bold attempt to overcome not only the
opportunism of the socialist parties of the various countries, but also
the “elements of opportunism,” which he traced to the very Teachers
themselves. In his opinion, Marx and Engels “showed an incomplete
understanding of the class antagonism in modern society.” An antagonism
whose depth was fully revealed during the Paris insurrection of June,
1848, when the workers were opposed “not only by the monarchist
plutocracy, by the oppositionist ‘progressive’ industrial bourgeoisie,
by the ‘revolutionary’ lower middle classes, but also by the whole mass
of privileged employees of the capitalist State – lawyers, journalists,
scholars – even by those who, not long before, had sung to them songs
about ‘organization of labor’ and ‘workers’ associations.’” The depth of
this antagonism was ignored by Marx and Engels who, in their Communist
Manifesto, held it possible for Communists to “work everywhere to
promote mutual understanding among the democratic parties of all lands”
and to confound “democracy” with “working-class rule” by asserting that
“the first step in the workers’ revolution is to make the proletariat
the ruling class, to establish democracy,” and who, during the German
Revolution of 1848 (after the publication of the Manifesto), actually
identified themselves with the cause of the liberal bourgeoisie to an
extent scarcely exceeded by their later followers and epigones.
Machajski’s point of view, declining collaboration with the various
strata of the middle classes, and calling for an international secret
organization and a concerted action for “the conquest of political
power,” was only a transitional phase in his development. In the further
pursuit of his analysis, he began to realize that what he considered a
mere “mistake” on the part of Marx, a mere underestimation of the depth
of the class antagonisms by the teacher and his followers, was something
quite different. It was in fact the conscious or unconscious
manifestation of “a social force carefully hiding in the socialist
movement for which the reconciliation of socialism with the existing
order is not a mistake, but a natural interest, an inevitable urge.”
That social force was “the growing army of intellectual workers, the new
middle class, which with the progress of civilization absorbs in itself
the middle strata of society,” and “the formula of last century’s
socialism was worked out in accordance with the class interests and the
plans of this class.” In other words, the intellectual workers, a
rising, privileged bourgeois stratum, whose income was derived from the
“national surplus product” extracted from the manual workers, were using
the struggles of the latter for furthering their own bourgeois class
interests. Their inclusion in the “proletariat” jointly with the manual
workers was a deceptive device, just as the term “people” or “third
estate” was used by the rising capitalist class for covering up the
antagonism between the latter and the exploited strata of the
population.
The assistance given to the workers by the malcontent section of the
intelligentsia in the early struggles against the capitalists thus
appears not as an act of class solidarity and selfless devotion, but as
a means of gaining the confidence and gratitude of the horny-handed
underdog and his support of the intellectuals striving for domination.
The fight for more democracy within the private capitalist system, with
its concomitant acquisition of more jobs and other opportunities for the
impecunious, lower-middle class intellectual, is the first step in that
struggle. Next comes the striving for a gradual[1] transition to state
capitalism (or state socialism, which is the same) – the coming form of
exploitation, under which the private capitalists will have given way to
the bureaucracy, the latter to include the former capitalists, the
intellectuals, and the self-taught, upstart ex-workers. A “socialism,”
in short, in which classes have not disappeared, and in which the
technicians, organizers, administrators, educators, journalists, i.e.
the intellectuals, constitute the great joint stock corporation owning
collectively – through the State – all the riches of the country, and in
which the “haves” have expanded to embrace all the “knows,” while the
“know-nots” are the self-perpetuating, low-waged robots for their
educated masters.
Once Machajski had come to that point, the conquest of power by the
working class lost all meaning. For there simply could not be such a
thing as a “workers’ government.” The new incumbents of political power,
even assuming that originally they harbored the most altruistic feelings
with regard to the horny-handed underdog, once in possession of power,
would inevitably and inexorably assert their own class interests of
educated organizers of a socialist state, or in other words: they would
yield to their natural urge to establish themselves as a ruling class
enjoying the concomitant advantages expressed in higher incomes and the
opportunity of handing down these advantages and the opportunities for
higher education to their own offspring only. And under the new system,
as under the old, the manual workers would have to continue their
struggle for higher wages until economic equality was attained.
By dropping the struggle for power, Machajski automatically placed
himself in very bad company. He was now classified as an “Anarchist” or
“Anarcho-Syndicalist” and bore with this label all the implications of
utopianism, impractical idealism, and everything else that the term
connotes. In fact, however, his conception was tainted with none of
these attributes of “anarchist protestantism,” as he called the
instinctive protest of the more impatient elements of the working class,
which, unfortunately, found expression only in extremely naïve
formulations.
Machajski preached no lofty “ideal” as do the anarchists and their
syndicalist cousins, who presuppose a long – or, rather, never-ending –
period of preliminary “education” before that ideal could be attained.
He did not demand the “abolition of the State on the morrow after the
revolution,” as is implied in the old utopian formula of the Anarchists.
Nor did he indulge in their innocent pastime of “negating,” or “refusing
recognition to,” the State, which, according to them, should be
“ignored.” His language was the very opposite of all such Gandhist talk.
Having taken the position of the manual worker, who is interested in a
better share right now, and not in the pie-in-the-sky of a distant
future, he spoke exclusively in terms of wages or cold cash. Basing his
argument upon the example of the numerous spontaneous uprisings of the
hungry masses, he showed that the workers were ready to take any risk
for an immediate improvement of their lot, as expressed in concrete
terms – wages, food, jobs. And he charged that what the Socialists of
the various denominations did was either to let those uprisings fizzle
out, or to side-track them into a political struggle for more bourgeois
democracy, a political struggle which, in a world ruled by economics,
was in reality an economic struggle for all kinds of soft jobs for their
educated, “white-handed” leaders …
An “Anarchist” in the opinion of some, because he rejected the political
struggle for power, Machajski was sometimes dubbed by the Anarchists as
merely a revolutionary trade-unionist because he rejected all talk of
the “ideal.” It is the same line of argument which was likewise followed
by the writer of the item on Machajski (or rather, on A. Volski, which
was his literary pen-name) in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia. There it
is said that Machajski’s activity was “essentially directed against the
revolutionary movement of the workers, against their struggle for the
overthrow of capitalism and for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Instead of the revolution it advocated the struggle for minor, partial
demands.” With all due respect to the Soviet Encyclopaedia, it almost
seems that the severe author of that article protested too much. In
those early years of the twentieth century there was no “struggle for
the overthrow of capitalism and for the dictatorship of the proletariat”
in Russia. What the radical intelligentsia were out for was merely a
struggle for western democracy, for those political liberties which, in
the present Communist conception, are not supposed to be the acme of
proletarian aspirations. On the other hand, the “revolutionary movement
of the workers” had expressed itself on an enormous scale in the
spontaneous economic general strike of Southern Russia (1903) – a mass
movement for “minor, partial demands” – which had been entirely ignored
by the radical intelligentsia, and which – if given the support of a
revolutionary organization – would have developed into an irresistible
revolt against the entire bourgeois system and not merely against the
Tsarist regime.
In fact, these despised “minor, partial demands” for higher wages and
shorter hours were, in Machajski’s conception, the Archimedean point of
support from which he visualized the overthrow of the bourgeois system.
At bottom, his theory runs, every economic strike for higher wages is an
embryonic revolt against the parasitism of the privileged classes, but
it remains mostly ineffectual because of its embryonic character.
Developed to the extent of widespread general strikes, the economic
strike for better wages, jointly with the struggle of the unemployed for
work, challenges the very bases of the bourgeois system which is based
upon economic inequality and not merely upon the private ownership of
the means of production. Unable to meet the sweeping wage demands
presented to them in the course of a general economic struggle which is
bound to assume the aspect of a mass uprising of all the disinherited,
the private capitalists will be forced to close their plants altogether.
As a result the State will be compelled to take over their management,
thus becoming the only employer of labor – the great supertrust
representing a system called either “State Capitalism,” or “State
Socialism.” [2]
Under the system of government ownership, the workers, in Machajski’s
opinion, would still continue their revolutionary struggle. Not in order
to “abolish the State,” which would be childish, for the State as an
instrument of class domination will exist as long as there is a separate
class of educated managers and organizers of all branches of economic
and public life, as opposed to the mass of uneducated manual workers.
Neither would that struggle have to aim at changing the government,
which would be an idle pastime and only lead to the substitution of a
new set of intellectuals, or self-taught ex-workers, for the old ones.
The only aim of the workers’ struggle would be to force the State to
raise wages until the manual workers had equalized their standard of
living with that of their educated masters. Equality of incomes would
create equal educational opportunities for the offspring of technician
and menial alike, thus ushering in a classless, and consequently
stateless, society.
So much for Machajski’s “anarchism.” He himself called his theory
neither anarchism nor socialism. One of his followers suggested for it
the name of “equalitarianism.” However, the movement and theory remained
known under the name of “Makhayevstchina,” derived from his name,
thought the official name of his organization was “Rabochi Zagovor”
(Workers’ Conspiracy). This was perhaps a distant echo of Babeuf’s
“Conspiracy of the Equals”; but aside from the emphasis upon equality of
incomes, rejected by the later socialist schools, there is little
similarity between “Babouvism” and “Makhayevstchina.”
After his flight to western Europe in 1903, Machajski stayed chiefly in
Switzerland, where he prepared the printed edition of the three parts of
his Intellectual Worker, his Bankruptcy of Nineteenth Century Socialism,
and the more popular propaganda pamphlet The Bourgeois Revolution and
the Cause of the Workers. All of these writings are in Russian, and many
of them he set up himself.
No sooner had the last sheet been turned off the press than he shook
Geneva’s dust from his feet and returned to Russia, where the Revolution
of 1905 was already in its defeated stage. With some of his old friends
from the Siberian exile, he began his underground activity among the
workers and unemployed in Petersburg. His followers (called
“Makhayevtzi”) attacked the tendency of the revolutionary intelligentsia
to direct the dissatisfaction of the workers toward the struggle for
bourgeois democracy. In spite of a very violent counter-activity on the
part of the socialist agitators of all denominations the “Makhayevtzi”
succeeded at the meetings of the unemployed in putting across their
resolutions demanding immediate relief for the unemployed and wide
organization of public works. They believed that a general economic
struggle for higher wages would constitute an irresistible revolutionary
front against the bourgeoisie and spell the beginning of the workers’
revolution the world over.
The group of militants, however, was soon broken up by arrests, and late
in 1907 Machajski had to flee again. He stayed abroad until the
Revolution of 1917, when he returned to Russia.
The name of his group “Workers’ Conspiracy,” and the identical title of
the publication which he issued in 1908, were expressive of the method
of organization which he advocated. Even before Lenin had taken his
famous stand in favor of a strict conspirative organization of active
militants and “professional revolutionists” [3] – for Tsarist Russia
alone to be sure – Machajski had come out with the idea of a
conspirative organization the world over, whether the countries enjoyed
political democracy or not. He believed that the legal form of
organization of the various radical parties and movements was an
evidence of their law-abiding, peaceful intentions with regard to the
existing status quo, or at least, the first step towards assuming such
an attitude. Their socialism, he claimed, was nothing short of a
“religion for the slaves of manual toil,” an idle promise of a
terrestrial heaven in a distant future altogether remote from the living
generation, while the preachers of that religion were trying to get as
comfortable places as they could in the capitalist hell of the present.
To Machajski the working class revolution was an ever-present
possibility, which, for its fruition, needed a well-knit world-wide
secret organization engaged exclusively in unifying and extending the
scope of the scattered, spontaneous uprisings. These were to be directed
against the bourgeoisie and its State in behalf of the masses of the
manual workers, particularly of the semi-skilled and unskilled, with the
demand for higher wages and work for the unemployed to be paid for at
the rate demanded by the striking workers. This struggle, carried on in
the form of general strikes and uprisings, including seizure of
factories and supplies by the workers, was to be continued until the
higher incomes of all the privileged classes had disappeared and
economic equality had been established.
The attempts made by Waclaw Machajski and his followers in St.
Petersburg, Odessa, Warsaw and other places, to create a movement
inspired by his ideas, did not succeed in attracting large numbers of
leading militants. This was indeed a difficult task in Tsarist Russia,
where all the followers of the various currents of revolutionary thought
were chiefly interested in throwing off absolutism and in tasting the
delights of political liberty enjoyed by Western Europe. In such an
atmosphere, the argument to the effect that civil liberties and
political democracy meant nothing to the great mass, and particularly,
to the unskilled and unemployed workers, who were being starved
regardless of the form of government; that the workers were interested
exclusively in the mass struggle for higher wages and work for the
unemployed, and that the only beneficiaries of the fight for democracy
were the job-hungry intellectuals – was interpreted by the opposing camp
as an apology for the existing absolutist system. With their eyes fixed
upon the Tsarist oppressor and the capitalist parasite, few of the
revolutionary militants could afford so much detachment as to see the
hidden bourgeois and anti-working-class character of the struggling
socialist intelligentsia. In the same way, it would have been equally
difficult under the ancien regime in France to enroll a large number of
fighters against bourgeois capitalist privilege at a time when the
growing bourgeoisie, the potential master of the coming period, was
still fighting the nobility and the clergy. This in a way explains the
futility of the revolutionary endeavours of the first followers of
Machajski. Discouraged, some of his adherents came to believe that
perhaps only after a long sequel of betrayals, deceptions, and
disappointments would modern socialism, in its various forms, be
generally understood as the ideology of the discontented intellectual
workers in their struggle for taking over the inheritance of the
parasitic private capitalist.
It will only be then, in their opinion, that the masses, by their
refusal to follow the old slogans and by their revolts for their own
bread-and-butter demands, will force part of their old leaders to take a
new course, and win over some of the adventurous, romantic intellectuals
and self-taught workers who will then lead them forward in a victorious
struggle for economic equality.
Machajski was often confronted with the apparent contradiction that the
class struggle of the manual workers may be championed by men not of
their own class, or by such of its members who might have the
opportunity of rising above it. He replied that there was a manifest and
fundamental difference between the purely material causes of the class
struggle of an emerging social group – whether it be manual workers in
their struggle for economic equality or the intelligentsia in its
struggle for power and privilege – and the purely personal motives
prompting the altogether disinterested stand of those who play an heroic
part in it. These personalities, though, as a rule, motivated by the
wrongs or aspirations of their own group, are not urged by the prosaic
desire for comforts or the more common aspects of power. Their
will-to-power often takes on the aspects of personal self-denial and
sacrifice for the sake of fame or immortality. And some of them, for a
multiplicity of motives – once the more crude form of egoism is
eliminated – occasionally may assume the leadership of social groups
below their own.
In the November Revolution of 1917, Machajski saw the “great revolt
against the old world of exploitation and of savage wars.” However, he
did not hesitate, even during the first months of 1918, to attack the
weakness which, in his opinion, the Bolsheviks began to manifest in the
conduct of the great upheaval. He saw them wavering and hesitating to
take the last, most energetic steps against the counter-revolutionary
bourgeoisie, which had not been expropriated immediately and had been
left in the possession of its factories and its privileged incomes. In a
monthly called Rabochaya Revolutsia (Workers’ Revolution) which he
published in July, 1918, he laid down his point of view.
“The workers,” he wrote, “will not have their ‘workers’ government’ even
after the capitalists have disappeared. As long as the working class is
condemned to ignorance, the intelligentsia will rule through the
workers’ deputies. The intelligentsia … defends its own interests, not
those of the workers … After the expropriation of the capitalists, the
workers will have to equalize their incomes with those of the
intellectuals, otherwise they are doomed to manual labor, ignorance, and
inability to manage the life of the country. Thus, even after the
downfall of the capitalist system, the workers will not be in possession
of power, they will not have an obedient government apparatus in their
hands.
“When the working class strives for its own rule, it means that it
strives for revolutionary domination over the government. Through its
revolutionary pressure, through the expression of the will of the
toiling millions, the working class ought to dictate the law to the
government.
“… The workers have become so confused, and afterwards so disappointed,
that any counter-revolutionist, any Menshevik, may easily pull them back
and dare to enjoin them to restore to the exploiters their former
rights.
“The task of the working masses is not to overthrow the Soviet
Government to the delight of all conciliators and
counter-revolutionists, but to push it forward through their economic
working-class demands, which after the seizure of power by the Soviets,
should not have ceased, but, on the contrary, should have risen to the
point of demanding the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in the interests
of the working class.”
Thus Machajski called for the complete elimination of the private
capitalists and the reduction of the higher incomes of the
intellectuals. Only one issue of this publication appeared.
During the civil war and intervention which for a long time engaged all
the militant, revolutionary elements of the country in a life and death
struggle for the prevention of the return of the landlords and
capitalists, and during the subsequent years, Machajski, an aged man,
worked as the technical editor on an economic magazine published by the
Supreme Economic Council. In the further development of the Soviet
Republic, through its many zigzags of policy in the direction of State
Capitalism, he saw a confirmation of his early predictions.
Machajski died in Moscow in 1926, at the age of sixty. An
uncompromising, unbending personality guided by a vision extending far
ahead of that of his contemporaries, he lives in the memory of his
friends, disciples and admirers as one of the great pioneers of
revolutionary thought. In time, his followers are convinced, his name
will attain its deserved place as one of the prophetic champions of
working-class emancipation.
[1] “Maximalist” tendencies, aiming at an immediate revolution, were
practically non-existent ever since the establishment of democratic
institutions in Western Europe had to a large extent taken care of the
great mass of desperate, déclassé intellectuals of a previous period
ready to challenge violently the existing system. A recurrent wave of
overproduction of intellectual workers, caused by the later development
of capitalism, and particularly intensified since the Great War, has
given rise to revolutionary tendencies aiming at the immediate
introduction of state capitalism, through the dictatorship of a section
of the intelligentsia.
[2] The two terms are practically interchangeable, the only distinction
being that State Socialism is a “socialism” maintaining the capitalist
feature of inequality of incomes, while State Capitalism is a capitalism
which has adopted the “socialist” feature of government ownership. Both
are derogatory terms in socialist terminology and are used only if
attempts at socialization are being made by old-time politicians or
competitors in the radical camp. For that would involve the controlling
jobs of the government machine staying in, or passing into, the hands of
the other fellow, whether he be a regular bourgeois or an erring brother
of the pink or red denomination. Socialists – whether extremely moderate
or radical – are very human, and any reorganization scheme in which
their particular group plays no leading part is damned by them as State
Capitalism or worse. Thus the Soviet system of government ownership and
economic inequality, which by its defenders is called the “first phase
of Communism,” applying an old term used by Karl Marx, has been
repeatedly dubbed as State Capitalist by its Marxist opponents from the
Right and from the Left.
[3] This term is not applied in the derogatory sense which, for various
reasons, it has acquired at present.