AHC: More Machajski-ism

Can anyone see Machajski-ism triumphant it Russia--or for that matter anywhere else? For what Machajski-ism was, see this explanation from S. V. Utechin in Russian Political Thought: A Concise History:

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"A systematic anti-intellectual syndicalist theory was worked out in 1898-1900 by J. W. Machajski (1867-1927), a former Polish Social Democrat who was at that time living in banishment in Siberia; his book The Brain Worker, in which the theory is elaborated, appeared in Geneva in 1905.

"Machajski's theory was an attempt, starting from the basic conceptions of orthodox Marxism, to find an answer to the question of the place occupied in the social organism by the intelligentsia. In Machajski's view, knowledge is a kind of means of production, and its possession by the intelligentsia means that the latter is a separate social class. In the process of production and distribution, the intelligentsia appropriates a part of the surplus value; hence it is an exploiting class. This is the main thesis of the Machajski-ist theory. The interests of the intelligentsia are therefore opposed to the interests of the proletariat, and the 'socialist' phraseology used by the intelligentsia is merely a device in the struggle for its own interests. It wants to use the proletariat for the socialization of the means of material production, which would then be managed by the intelligentsia without interference from the capitalists. But the intelligentsia does not want to 'socialize knowledge'— the means of intellectual production; rather, they want to preserve it in their own monopolistic possession. Thus socialism is the 'class ideal' of the intelligentsia, which wants to replace capitalists and to concentrate in its hands all means of domination over the proletariat. The proletariat, on the other hand, must strive to 'socialize knowledge' by removing the inequality of opportunity for acquiring it, and the practical way to this is the abolition of inheritance of any property. The proletariat must also make it impossible for the intelligentsia to appropriate surplus value—-by a leveling of incomes. Everybody must receive the same remuneration for his work.

"Machajski-ist views on the organization and tactics that the proletariat should adopt in order to achieve a revolution are basically syndicalist, with the general strike as the chief weapon. It is interesting to note that, until such a revolution, he expected the 'hungry masses' to be tempted to use every opportunity to destroy as much as possible of 'those cursed goods which they endlessly create and which are always taken away by the masters,' and approved of such destruction. And the seizure of power by the proletariat would be used for seizing the property of the educated society, of the "learned world."

"Syndicalist tendencies were very much in evidence during the 1905 revolution, and syndicalist-minded people were prominent in forming trade unions and Soviets of Workers' Deputies and in organizing the general strike in October that forced Emperor Nicholas II to grant a constitution. A specifically Machajski-ist organization was the Union of Unemployed in St. Petersburg. The flooding in 1917 and after of the ranks of the Bolshevik Party with large numbers of unskilled workers, soldiers, agricultural laborers, and urban declasses greatly strengthened Machajski-ism. Its ideas exercised influence on the thinking and behavior of a large section of the Bolshevik Party after 1917, though it is not easy to disentangle the purely Machajski-ist tendencies from the anarchist. Machajski-ism was at the root of all the "intellectual-baiting" tendencies. Moreover, it greatly influenced early Bolshevik legislation and party policy, whatever the explanations given at the time for various measures may have been. The first law on inheritance abolished inheritance altogether and merely provided (as a temporary measure until the full development of social-security schemes) for a limited use of an estate for the maintenance of the unemployed relatives of the deceased. The attempts to introduce a maximum salary for party members not exceeding the earnings of a skilled worker were also, at least partly, due to the influence of Machajski-ism, as was the policy of the resettlement of workers into the houses and flats of the bourgeoisie and intellectuals, and vice versa. The Machajski-ist cultural vandalism and nihilism were also characteristic of the outlook of many party members.

"The Machajski-ist trend was fashionable in the party, despite halfhearted reproofs from the party authorities, until 1936, when Stalin declared that the intellectual-baiting by the Machajski-ists must no longer be applied to the new Soviet intelligentsia."

https://archive.org/stream/russianpolitical00utec#page/160/mode/2up/

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BTW, there is as far as I know only one full-length biography of Machajski in English: Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1989) available online at https://libcom.org/history/jan-wacl...sian-intelligensia-socialism-marshall-s-shatz Shatz has to deal with the unpleasant fact that Machajski at times came close to being an apologist for the Black Hundreds:

"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 advocated was actually the best way to avoid them, for it united people of all races and nationalities in an act of working-class solidarity..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=dViVOLRmrPsC&pg=PA95
https://libcom.org/library/chapter-4-socialisation-knowledge

Anyway, even leaving aside this aspect of Machajski's thought, the obvious problem with a Machajski-ist nation is that it would very likely be defeated both economically and militarily by a state that recognized that experts were necessary, and that to get them to work efficiently you had to pay them more (something Soviet Russia soon realized)...

(Machajski died in Moscow in 1926; no doubt he would have been shot if he had lived a decade or so longer, thus sharing the fate of so much of the intelligentsia that he despised but was part of.)
 
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