Die Neue Zeit
3rd May 2009, 07:24
http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/jan-waclaw-machajsky-a-prophet-unhonoured-in-his-own-time-and-rightly-so/
The link above goes into extensive detail about pure, unadulterated Left Economism ("that curvet to the left," said Lenin) in the era of the Second International, and ends with ramifications for today.
Excerpts:
The rise of a new bureaucratic ruling class in Russia in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century has artificially inflated the stock of several opponents of the social democratic movement who attacked it on the grounds that it was preparing a dictatorship of ‘intellectuals’ or men of ‘science’ over the untutored working class.
The subject of this study - Jan Waclaw Machajsky - is one such figure.
What all of them have in common is :
1) They attacked the socialist movement from a ‘left’ or ‘libertarian’ perspective, accusing the socialists of betraying their goals and deceiving their followers;
2) they cannot be portrayed as pro‑capitalist apologists;
3) their writings and, therefore, the anti-democratic nature of their politics are inaccessible to the average reader.
[...]
What is more important, Machajsky’s theory was a closely argued defense of the proposition that the democratic state and its institutions, including especially a free trade union movement, were the instruments through which the ‘new class’ of intellectuals would rule. His whole polemic is directed at the pre‑World War I Social democracy and its tactic of using parliamentary and trade union activity as a means of organizing the working class in its struggle against capital. For Machajsky, as for Edward Bernstein whose revisionism first led Machajsky to question the Social Democracy’s commitment to revolution, political democracy and trade unionism were means of reforming capitalism and making it tolerable for a working class that could not hope to free itself.
[...]
In the late 1890’s, this new movement suffered two serious blows. One came from outside and the other was from within Russia itself.
In 1896, Edward Bernstein, a former pupil of Friedrich Engels and leading spokesman for the German Social Democratic Party, published a series of articles which proposed turning the SPD into the liberal reform party that the German bourgeoisie had been unable to create for itself. The gradual, piecemeal struggle would transform German society without a confrontation with the Prussian autocracy. Applied to Russia, Bernsteinism seemed to mean turning one’s back on the revolutionary tradition and attempt*ing to carry on whatever legal work Tsarist authorities would allow.
More threatening to the Russian movement than Bernstein’s ideological argument was the growth of the legal trade union movement under the auspices of Sergei Zubatov, chief of the Moscow secret police. This interesting and much misunderstood figure became the competition the Social Democrats had lacked. He organized a reformist but militant trade union movement which in a few years found itself the dominant force in a massive strike wave culminating in the Odessa general strike of 1903. Its successor organizations continued to be the most influential labor organizations in the country until the revolution of 1905 put an end to the trust of the Russian working class in the benevolence of the autocracy. It would be a digression here to go into detail about Zubatov and his peculiar brand of christian socialism or to investigate the social basis of this bizarre offspring of a medieval relic like tsarism.
[...]
Nevertheless, the Zubatov meeting rooms continued to provide a center of worker self‑education and organization (under the careful eye of the police) until 1905.
The success of the Zubatov experiment provoked a crisis - in some cases a real panic - in the social democratic organizations. The need to compete with this well‑organized, well‑financed movement was one of the driving forces in the debates of the 1901‑1903 period which are often treated as if they were abstract discussions on the nature of political organization. The possibility of a ‘British’ style trade union organization - his majesty’s loyal trade union federation - seemed real. The German model of a politicized labor movement leading the fight to modernize and democratize society as a whole might be side-tracked. And what role then for the revolutionary from the educated classes who had cut his or her ties to respectable society?
[...]
It is in the context of this debate that Machajsky’s theories of the class of ‘intellectuals’ arose and gained a hearing. Social democratic opponents then and soviet scholars subsequently have pointed to the similarities between Machajsky’s slogans and those of Zubatov.
Hostility towards the intellectuals - that is the social democratic revolutionaries - and emphasis on economic demands at the expense of political reform characterized both. Machajsky himself in his best known work Umstvennii Rabochii (The Intellectual Worker) takes the 1903 strike in Odessa as a model precisely because the Social Democrats were isolated at first when they attempted to raise political demands.
[...]
What social forces were to be the basis of this general strike? While a great deal of attention has been paid to Machajsky’s dissection of the ‘intellectuals’ including the workers corrupted by union organization, his critics, favorable and unfavorable, tend to pass quickly over this, the most important and distinctive, component in Machajsky’s work. The alternative to the organized, and therefore corrupted, working class was the raw recruit from the countryside, the unemployed and, especially, the criminal and semi‑criminal elements of the urban population. Bakunin had also looked to these strata as the counterweight to the ‘bourgeoisified’ worker. Today, the ‘secret’ writings in which he outlined his schemes for a tightly organized conspiratorial secret society which would control and manipulate this unorganized mass are well known.
[...]
One way of looking at Machajsky is as an intellectual reflection of the traditional Russian peasant’s distrust of people who could read, write, and count. Any time two such people got together they would undoubtedly conspire to cheat honest folk. Given the historical experience of the Russian peasant this distrust was not completely unfounded. But the practical consequence is that anything as complicated as a strike, let alone a union is out of the question.
In his 1908 pamphlet ‘The Workers’ Conspiracy’ , Machajsky outlined how this operation would work. He spelled out what the riot - the ‘bunt’ he advocated entailed.
In their own, bourgeois, revolution the socialists understand that the enemy must be taken by surprise, they scorn governmental bans and go underground, they set up secret conspiracies to bring down the autocracy. In the workers’ revolution, which is foreign to them, the socialists shun conspiracies, forbid underground activity, demand of the workers that they take even the smallest step in their struggle openly before the eyes of the enemy, the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the police, the government. In their revolution they are content to shed blood, the worse the atrocity, the better; in the workers’ fight they forbid force, argue for peaceful struggle, against the shedding of one drop of blood. In the intelligentsia’s riots they put a revolver in everyone’s hand, and a bomb; in the workers’ riots they strike from the workers’ hands even the rocks, which the latter, unarmed, pick up. When political riots are suppressed the socialists call the whole world to help, when workers’ riots are suppressed they counsel peace and quiet. Political murder and terror the socialists praise to the skies, economic terror ‑ they condemn. The murder of a bureaucrat who oppresses the intelligentsia - that is an heroic deed. The murder of a capitalist exploiter or a lily‑handed engineer - that is a monstrous evil, deserving immediate death and eternal obloquy.
[...]
There is another similarity between Machajsky’s argument and that of Bernstein. That is the theory of the declining working class. Common to both is the notion that modern society, contrary to Marx’s alleged view, is not breaking down into a small minority of exploiters and a vast majority of oppressed and miserable proletarians. Rather, a new middle class is growing at the expense of the extremes. This similarity of views is noted, even insisted upon, by Machajsky. It is his justification for his rejection of democracy.
[...]
For Bernstein the conclusion is: the organized working class must avoid isolation by moderating its demands to accommodate the middle classes. It must even merge, as a minority, into a larger reform movement. For Machajsky, the conclusion is: the working class, the starving masses, will be even more isolated in a democratic state. Even a section of the working class itself will be integrated into the democratic order. Only an underground conspiracy can carry out the kind of blackmail the oppressed minority must use to achieve its ends. Machajsky does not object to the demagogic and sham character of representative institutions under capitalism. Such objections were common in the social democracy. Instead, he objects to such institutions to the extent that they do represent more or less accurately the real sentiments of the majority.
[...]
Unlike Rosa Luxemburg and other supporters of the revolution who came out of the pre‑war Marxist tradition, unlike some members of the Communist party itself, unlike Lenin himself on some days; Machajsky had no criticism to make of the restrictions on democratic liberties that the regime had already begun to take. He takes it for granted that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries have been outlawed because they refused to proceed fast enough with the expropriation of the bourgeois. There is no mention of the argument made most frequently at the time by defenders of the Bolshevik government. That argument justified the outlawing of the opposition on the grounds that it had taken up arms against the elected soviet government. Such a charge, whatever the evidence for or against it, meant nothing to Machajsky. He wasn’t for democracy. The opposition he urges on the workers is the same as before. Not the defense of democratic rights within the revolution - what use would that be - but rather the bringing of pressure on the government through direct action.
[...]
Is there a similar bridge in the case of anarchism and Machajsky? Doesn’t the hostility to all forms of representative democracy provide such a bridge? The emphasis on the right of the ‘militant minority’ to act without regard not just for parliamentary majorities but for the majority opinion of the working class in whose name this minority presumed to speak, the cult of action for action’s sake, the hostility towards the ‘authority’ of the elected leaders of unions and workers’ parties all predisposed anarchists and Makhaevists to accept the antidemocratic demagogy of the fascist and Stalinist movements.
[...]
None of this is of purely academic interest. The political responses of Machajsky to the political backwardness of the labor movement are common today. That is the reason for the revival of interest in him. In the sixties the same hostility towards a conservative labor movement and representative democracy became the characteristic of the dominant political currents on the left. The same glorification of the ‘spontaneous’ semi‑insurrectional tendencies of the ‘underclass’ resurfaced. When the New Left gave birth to monstrosities like the Red Brigades or the one-hundred percent American Weatherman faction of the SDS more sober elements were as confused as our Machajsky experts are over the latter’s embrace of the Black Hundreds.
The link above goes into extensive detail about pure, unadulterated Left Economism ("that curvet to the left," said Lenin) in the era of the Second International, and ends with ramifications for today.
Excerpts:
The rise of a new bureaucratic ruling class in Russia in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century has artificially inflated the stock of several opponents of the social democratic movement who attacked it on the grounds that it was preparing a dictatorship of ‘intellectuals’ or men of ‘science’ over the untutored working class.
The subject of this study - Jan Waclaw Machajsky - is one such figure.
What all of them have in common is :
1) They attacked the socialist movement from a ‘left’ or ‘libertarian’ perspective, accusing the socialists of betraying their goals and deceiving their followers;
2) they cannot be portrayed as pro‑capitalist apologists;
3) their writings and, therefore, the anti-democratic nature of their politics are inaccessible to the average reader.
[...]
What is more important, Machajsky’s theory was a closely argued defense of the proposition that the democratic state and its institutions, including especially a free trade union movement, were the instruments through which the ‘new class’ of intellectuals would rule. His whole polemic is directed at the pre‑World War I Social democracy and its tactic of using parliamentary and trade union activity as a means of organizing the working class in its struggle against capital. For Machajsky, as for Edward Bernstein whose revisionism first led Machajsky to question the Social Democracy’s commitment to revolution, political democracy and trade unionism were means of reforming capitalism and making it tolerable for a working class that could not hope to free itself.
[...]
In the late 1890’s, this new movement suffered two serious blows. One came from outside and the other was from within Russia itself.
In 1896, Edward Bernstein, a former pupil of Friedrich Engels and leading spokesman for the German Social Democratic Party, published a series of articles which proposed turning the SPD into the liberal reform party that the German bourgeoisie had been unable to create for itself. The gradual, piecemeal struggle would transform German society without a confrontation with the Prussian autocracy. Applied to Russia, Bernsteinism seemed to mean turning one’s back on the revolutionary tradition and attempt*ing to carry on whatever legal work Tsarist authorities would allow.
More threatening to the Russian movement than Bernstein’s ideological argument was the growth of the legal trade union movement under the auspices of Sergei Zubatov, chief of the Moscow secret police. This interesting and much misunderstood figure became the competition the Social Democrats had lacked. He organized a reformist but militant trade union movement which in a few years found itself the dominant force in a massive strike wave culminating in the Odessa general strike of 1903. Its successor organizations continued to be the most influential labor organizations in the country until the revolution of 1905 put an end to the trust of the Russian working class in the benevolence of the autocracy. It would be a digression here to go into detail about Zubatov and his peculiar brand of christian socialism or to investigate the social basis of this bizarre offspring of a medieval relic like tsarism.
[...]
Nevertheless, the Zubatov meeting rooms continued to provide a center of worker self‑education and organization (under the careful eye of the police) until 1905.
The success of the Zubatov experiment provoked a crisis - in some cases a real panic - in the social democratic organizations. The need to compete with this well‑organized, well‑financed movement was one of the driving forces in the debates of the 1901‑1903 period which are often treated as if they were abstract discussions on the nature of political organization. The possibility of a ‘British’ style trade union organization - his majesty’s loyal trade union federation - seemed real. The German model of a politicized labor movement leading the fight to modernize and democratize society as a whole might be side-tracked. And what role then for the revolutionary from the educated classes who had cut his or her ties to respectable society?
[...]
It is in the context of this debate that Machajsky’s theories of the class of ‘intellectuals’ arose and gained a hearing. Social democratic opponents then and soviet scholars subsequently have pointed to the similarities between Machajsky’s slogans and those of Zubatov.
Hostility towards the intellectuals - that is the social democratic revolutionaries - and emphasis on economic demands at the expense of political reform characterized both. Machajsky himself in his best known work Umstvennii Rabochii (The Intellectual Worker) takes the 1903 strike in Odessa as a model precisely because the Social Democrats were isolated at first when they attempted to raise political demands.
[...]
What social forces were to be the basis of this general strike? While a great deal of attention has been paid to Machajsky’s dissection of the ‘intellectuals’ including the workers corrupted by union organization, his critics, favorable and unfavorable, tend to pass quickly over this, the most important and distinctive, component in Machajsky’s work. The alternative to the organized, and therefore corrupted, working class was the raw recruit from the countryside, the unemployed and, especially, the criminal and semi‑criminal elements of the urban population. Bakunin had also looked to these strata as the counterweight to the ‘bourgeoisified’ worker. Today, the ‘secret’ writings in which he outlined his schemes for a tightly organized conspiratorial secret society which would control and manipulate this unorganized mass are well known.
[...]
One way of looking at Machajsky is as an intellectual reflection of the traditional Russian peasant’s distrust of people who could read, write, and count. Any time two such people got together they would undoubtedly conspire to cheat honest folk. Given the historical experience of the Russian peasant this distrust was not completely unfounded. But the practical consequence is that anything as complicated as a strike, let alone a union is out of the question.
In his 1908 pamphlet ‘The Workers’ Conspiracy’ , Machajsky outlined how this operation would work. He spelled out what the riot - the ‘bunt’ he advocated entailed.
In their own, bourgeois, revolution the socialists understand that the enemy must be taken by surprise, they scorn governmental bans and go underground, they set up secret conspiracies to bring down the autocracy. In the workers’ revolution, which is foreign to them, the socialists shun conspiracies, forbid underground activity, demand of the workers that they take even the smallest step in their struggle openly before the eyes of the enemy, the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the police, the government. In their revolution they are content to shed blood, the worse the atrocity, the better; in the workers’ fight they forbid force, argue for peaceful struggle, against the shedding of one drop of blood. In the intelligentsia’s riots they put a revolver in everyone’s hand, and a bomb; in the workers’ riots they strike from the workers’ hands even the rocks, which the latter, unarmed, pick up. When political riots are suppressed the socialists call the whole world to help, when workers’ riots are suppressed they counsel peace and quiet. Political murder and terror the socialists praise to the skies, economic terror ‑ they condemn. The murder of a bureaucrat who oppresses the intelligentsia - that is an heroic deed. The murder of a capitalist exploiter or a lily‑handed engineer - that is a monstrous evil, deserving immediate death and eternal obloquy.
[...]
There is another similarity between Machajsky’s argument and that of Bernstein. That is the theory of the declining working class. Common to both is the notion that modern society, contrary to Marx’s alleged view, is not breaking down into a small minority of exploiters and a vast majority of oppressed and miserable proletarians. Rather, a new middle class is growing at the expense of the extremes. This similarity of views is noted, even insisted upon, by Machajsky. It is his justification for his rejection of democracy.
[...]
For Bernstein the conclusion is: the organized working class must avoid isolation by moderating its demands to accommodate the middle classes. It must even merge, as a minority, into a larger reform movement. For Machajsky, the conclusion is: the working class, the starving masses, will be even more isolated in a democratic state. Even a section of the working class itself will be integrated into the democratic order. Only an underground conspiracy can carry out the kind of blackmail the oppressed minority must use to achieve its ends. Machajsky does not object to the demagogic and sham character of representative institutions under capitalism. Such objections were common in the social democracy. Instead, he objects to such institutions to the extent that they do represent more or less accurately the real sentiments of the majority.
[...]
Unlike Rosa Luxemburg and other supporters of the revolution who came out of the pre‑war Marxist tradition, unlike some members of the Communist party itself, unlike Lenin himself on some days; Machajsky had no criticism to make of the restrictions on democratic liberties that the regime had already begun to take. He takes it for granted that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries have been outlawed because they refused to proceed fast enough with the expropriation of the bourgeois. There is no mention of the argument made most frequently at the time by defenders of the Bolshevik government. That argument justified the outlawing of the opposition on the grounds that it had taken up arms against the elected soviet government. Such a charge, whatever the evidence for or against it, meant nothing to Machajsky. He wasn’t for democracy. The opposition he urges on the workers is the same as before. Not the defense of democratic rights within the revolution - what use would that be - but rather the bringing of pressure on the government through direct action.
[...]
Is there a similar bridge in the case of anarchism and Machajsky? Doesn’t the hostility to all forms of representative democracy provide such a bridge? The emphasis on the right of the ‘militant minority’ to act without regard not just for parliamentary majorities but for the majority opinion of the working class in whose name this minority presumed to speak, the cult of action for action’s sake, the hostility towards the ‘authority’ of the elected leaders of unions and workers’ parties all predisposed anarchists and Makhaevists to accept the antidemocratic demagogy of the fascist and Stalinist movements.
[...]
None of this is of purely academic interest. The political responses of Machajsky to the political backwardness of the labor movement are common today. That is the reason for the revival of interest in him. In the sixties the same hostility towards a conservative labor movement and representative democracy became the characteristic of the dominant political currents on the left. The same glorification of the ‘spontaneous’ semi‑insurrectional tendencies of the ‘underclass’ resurfaced. When the New Left gave birth to monstrosities like the Red Brigades or the one-hundred percent American Weatherman faction of the SDS more sober elements were as confused as our Machajsky experts are over the latter’s embrace of the Black Hundreds.