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Part 1 of 2

The "nihilists" began as the open embrace of an insult or a malicious parody of themselves. Stop for a minute and think about it. "Nihilists" - people who believe in nothing... How is that possible?

To understand the "joke", you have to understand the context. The Russian autocracy should have died with the other remnants of the absolute monarchies of Europe, but it didn't. The democratic ideals of the European revolutions met with complete rejection and ever increasing repression in the most backward of European empires. But, while Russia was certainly the most backward of European states, the implications of that backwardness were uneven. In the cities, the same ferment, the same ideas, the same demands, and the same democratic yearnings as in the rest of Europe, increasingly utopian and "socialistic" in their expression, began to crest. In Russia, however, the wave broke on the rocks of an intransigent autocracy unwilling to entertain "reforms", and on a state apparatus, modern and feudal, increasingly efficient in its suppression of any challenge. More, the countryside was dominated by 50 million "serfs", a form of rural slavery whose continued existence negated even the possibility of all other advances (and, in this way alone, was not unlike slavery in the U.S.).

The story of the rise and fall of Russian liberalism from the great outcry at the time of the Decembrists, to its utter defeat and humiliation by the 1850s, is a historian's project. Only the side effects matter to us. The ascent with absurdly overblown claims, of the Russian liberals, was matched only by their utter collapse, at the first "whiff of grapeshot", and by their subsequent wholesale abandonment of all that they had previously held true, now traded in for mysticism, nationalism and every other manner of slavish abandonment of previously held "principles". The Russian liberals strode boldly off of the historical stage for nearly a century... and, perhaps, even to today.

On reflection, one of the most prominent outlets for this roller-coaster ride was in the realm of literature. Russia was one country in which, for a time, politics was literally a “morality play”. Literature briefly became the quintessential expression of popular unrest.

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Why literature? The revolutionary democrat and literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote that the only sphere where “true freedom” existed during the rule of Nicholas I was in the realm of literature. Perhaps the cause was greater than that, but the result was indisputable. In the most backward of European countries, the most advanced of literary cultures, uniquely concentrated in time and space, was born: Alexander Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, and two dozen others, all within the first rank of human treasures and all, initially at least, focused on the misery of “the people” and the travesties of the social institutions which prolonged their misery. Alongside this literature itself, a literature about literature, also emerged, in dozens of journals of literary criticism which wandered, predictably, into social criticism, even as they lectured the rising writers on their obligation to humanity. The people, are “always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book, but never for a pernicious one”, wrote Belinsky to Gogol, when the latter produced a volume that failed to “awaken in the people a sense of their human dignity, trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.”

In 1845, one year after leaving the Army, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote his novel Poor Folk to the acclaim and approval of Nekrasov, Belinsky, and many others. By 1848, Dostoyevsky was part of the liberal literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle. In April of 1849, he was arrested along with others of that group and he was sentenced to death in November. After a “mock execution” (see http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... a&start=15 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=91&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=tania&start=15) ), his sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, followed by 5 years of service as a private in a Siberian Regiment. The shock to the spirit of the young liberal could not have been greater: “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...We were packed like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs...Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel.”

The result was as the Tsar’s police had intended. Entering prison as a “radical” liberal, Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, reborn into the Eastern Orthodox faith and a dedicated spiritualist and ardent foe of radicalism and socialism. The remainder of his ascendant career would focus on themes of redemption and “awakening”, but in so alienated a form as to rip him out of his own historical setting and allow him to make a quantum leap of over a century to become the “father” of that most angst-ridden and isolating of 20th century “schools”, existentialism.

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Like dominos, they fell one by one. In 1842, Nikolai Gogol had published Dead Souls to the astonished gasps of the literary intelligentsia. The epic poem was considered the greatest satirical work of its age and, through it, Gogol became the young Homer. In 1849, came the second part of Gogol’s trilogy, patterned on The Divine Comedy, and entitled Purgatory. The young Homer had, in seven short years, transformed himself into the mystical promoter of uninspired religious platitudes, presented in support of the church, the autocracy, serfdom… in a phrase, in defense of all that he had so thoroughly savaged shortly before.

By way of “Pan-Slavism”, patriotism, mysticism, anti-Westernism, religiosity, conspiracy-theory, conservatism, and personal pre-occupation, the greatest generation of Russian writers deserted the field of battle. They were, of course, archetypical of Russian liberals as a whole, the main body of whom were neither as talented nor as noble as the wielders of the pen. Liberalism had had its say and receiving a stern “no” in reply from the patriarch, that was all there was to it. Something had to give and it was Russian liberalism that “gave”.

And there things would have remained if the very greatness of Russian literature had not pulled up alongside itself a superstructure of equivalent stature. Two distinct generations of writers about writers now rose to the task. The older generation of these, the émigré socialist and literary critic, Alexander Herzen, the radical poet and literary critic, Nikolai Nekrasov, the revolutionary democrat and literary critic, Victor Belinsky, and several others took up the mission. Where once they had heaped the most honeyed praise on the Russian giants, now they criticized the delinquent social artists, alternately lampooning, cajoling, lecturing, and finally, replacing, the sword that had been sheathed. One aspect of that transformation was the return of the debate which had taken place in the clouds, back to earth, to become interwoven with actual Russian conditions. Herzen’s journal, The Bell, now simply turned to social commentary. Built around the drumbeat demand for “Freedom for the Serfs”, it became the most widely read magazine in all of Russia. Even the tsar was rumored to read it, often responding with titanic rages.

Yet, even these voices had to look over their shoulders. In the next generation of young intellectuals, a distinct hardening had occurred. The time had passed for talk of appeals, reforms and dependency on the more “humane” characteristics of this or that Tsar or police commissioner. Leading the way was the journal, Sovremennik ("Contemporary") and it’s editor-in-chief, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Sovremennik’s literary focus increasingly was for the censors alone. Instead, direct social criticism, a form of what would later be called, “muck-raking”, was interspersed with commentary on materialist philosophy, science, economics, and the revolutionary politics of Western Europe. Nikolai Dobrolyubov was an early writer for the journal, while the immensely talented principle of another journal, Russkoye Slovo, Dimitri Pisarev, walked in virtual lock-step with the more senior Chernyshevsky. Commenting on the relationship, the radical democrat Shelgunov wrote that Pisarev “went hand in hand with Chernyshevsky on political and economic questions”.

The audience for the new journals was also “new”. In the youthful intelligentsia of Russia, the young materialists found a willing public, infinitely disgusted with the cowardice, bankruptcy and mystical idealism of the Russian liberals. Even after the radical journals had been officially banned and their editors arrested, they were devoured eagerly by hard young “negativists” reading torn pages by candlelight.

In 1862, the great Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, wrote Fathers and Sons, the epic work that from then on would be associated with a society that feared its own children. The novel was a work of intense ambiguity, coming just one year after the anti-climatic and largely meaningless abolition of serfdom by decree . The unintended hero, Yevgeny Bazarov, was a lampoon: intelligent, coldly skeptical, scientific, and revolutionary, he was also amoral, and shockingly unsentimental. He was immediately adopted as a “model” by students and young intellectuals, who now proudly began to call themselves “nihilists”.

The same year that Fathers and Sons was published, Chernyshevsky was arrested. From within the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Chernyshevsky would complete his turn from literary criticism to literature itself. In 678 days of solitary confinement, he penned What is to be Done, perhaps simultaneously the most poorly written, and the most important political novel ever produced. Acknowledging his lack of writing talent, Chernyshevsky nevertheless claimed in his prologue that it was “not less important” than the works of the previous literary giants. That turned out to be a vast understatement. With his hero, Rakhemtov, Chernyshevsky responded to Turgenev and expressed not an ounce of the ambiguity that had characterized Bazarov. Writing much later, the literary critic, Jen Marder, would say, “This book has the general appearance of a novel but is really more a handbook of radicalism. The tenuous plot serves primarily to link one monologue of conversation on a point of radical policy with the next. The "revolutionary youth" of the time used What is to be Done as a guide to behavior and ideology for the next twenty years. Rakhemtov, the hero of the novel, became the prototype of hard-headed materialism and pragmatism, of total dissatisfaction with the government, and of the self-sacrificing nobility of spirit that was the ideal of many of the radical intelligentsia.”

The real influence of the novel was felt for more than a century. An entire generation of Russian revolutionaries were moved by the work, not least of whom was V.I. Lenin himself, who wrote his own, What is to be Done” in 1901, in open acknowledgement of Chernyshevsky. In a letter to A. N. Potresov dated January 26, 1899, from exile in Siberia, Lenin conceded to Chernyshevsky, the “heritage” of the Russian revolutionary movement.

In vain did the literary giants counterattack. “They believe in NOTHING!”, shouted Tolstoy in one of his most backward moments, before penning his own What is to be Done about “moral responsibility”. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was written as a direct polemic against Chernyshevsky, as was, in part, his tract against “nihilist extremism” and Nechayev, The Possessed.

It was all too late, as it turned out, for such gestures. The history of Russian literary opposition to oppression was already coming to a close. In it’s place, an actual opposition was forming.

The extended quotations by Alan Woods which follow are from a so-so chapter in a book that is even less than that. Woods has entirely too many modern fish to fry, though that criticism is probably fair for any chronicler of the Russian Revolution. The book, however, has two great advantages which recommend it here: It is full of stories and anecdotes which are often missing from other, drier, presentations, and it is reprinted, in its entirety, on the web.

http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part1-1.html


The phenomenon of the Russian Narodniks (“populists”, men of the people) was a consequence of the extreme belatedness of Russian capitalism. The decay of feudal society proceeded faster than the formation of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions, sections of the intelligentsia, especially the youth, broke away from the nobility, bureaucracy and clergy and began to look for a way out of the social impasse. However, when they looked around for a point of support within society, they could not be attracted by the crude, backward and underdeveloped bourgeoisie, whilst the proletariat was still in its infancy, unorganized, politically untutored and small in numbers, particularly in comparison with the many millions of peasants who made up the dumb, oppressed and crushed majority of Russian society.

It was therefore understandable that the revolutionary intelligentsia should look to the “people” in the person of the peasantry as the main potential revolutionary force within society. This movement had its roots in the great turning-point in Russian history in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs that took place in that year was by no means, as has been frequently suggested, the result of the enlightened benevolence of Alexander II. It flowed from the fear of a social explosion after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the disastrous Crimean War of 1853-56, which, like the later war with Japan, served to cruelly expose the tsarist regime. Not for the first, nor the last time, military defeat revealed the bankruptcy of the autocracy, providing a powerful impetus to social change. But the Edict of Emancipation solved none of the problems and, indeed, made the lot of the mass of the peasants considerably worse. The landlords naturally made off with the best plots of land, leaving the most barren areas to the peasants. Strategic points such as water and mills were usually in the hands of the landlords who forced the peasants to pay for access. Worse still, the “free” peasants were legally tied to the village commune or mir which had collective responsibility for collecting taxes. No peasant could leave the mir without permission. Freedom of movement was hampered by the system of internal passports. The village commune, in effect, was transformed into “the lowest rung of the local police system”.

To make matters worse, the reform allowed the landlords to cut off and appropriate one-fifth (in some cases, two-fifths) of the lands formerly cultivated by the peasants. They invariably chose the best and most profitable parts —woods, meadows, watering places, grazing grounds, mills, etc.—which gave them a stranglehold over the “emancipated” peasant. Year after year, a greater number of peasant families sunk hopelessly into debt and impoverishment as a result of this swindle.

The emancipation of the serfs was an attempt to carry through reform from the top to prevent revolution from below. Like all important reforms, it was a by-product of revolution. The Russian countryside had been shaken by peasant uprisings. In the last decade of the reign of Nicholas I, there were 400 peasant disturbances and an equal number in the following six years (1855-60). In a space of 20 years, 1835-54, 230 landowners and bailiffs had been killed, and a further 53 in the three years before 1861. The announcement of the emancipation was met by a further wave of disorders and uprisings, brutally suppressed. The hopes placed by an entire generation of progressive thinkers on the ideas of reform were cruelly betrayed by the results of the emancipation, which turned out to be a gigantic fraud. The peasants, who believed that the land was rightfully theirs, were cheated in all directions. They had to accept only those allotments laid down by the law (by agreement with the landlord) and had to pay a redemption fee over a period of 49 years at 6 per cent interest. As a result, the landlords retained approximately 71,500,000 desyatins of land, and the peasants, representing the overwhelming majority of society, only 33,700,000 desyatins.

In the years after 1861, the peasantry, hemmed in by repressive legislation on “poverty lots” and impoverished by the weight of debt, staged a series of desperate local uprisings. But the peasantry, throughout history, has always been incapable of playing an independent role in society. Capable of great revolutionary courage and sacrifice, its efforts to shake off the rule of the oppressor have only succeeded where leadership of the revolutionary movement has been taken up by a stronger, more homogeneous and conscious class based in the towns. In the absence of this factor, the peasant “jacqueries”, from the middle ages onwards, have inevitably suffered the cruelest defeats. The result of the scattered nature of the peasantry, its lack of social cohesion and lack of class consciousness.

In Russia, where capitalist forms of production were still at the embryonic phase, no such revolutionary class existed in the towns. Yet a class, or more accurately caste, of largely impoverished students and intellectuals, the raznochintsy (those without rank) or “intellectual proletariat” proved exceptionally sensitive to the subterranean mood of discontent which lay deep within the recesses of Russian life. Years later, the terrorist Myshkin declared at his trial that “the movement of the intelligentsia was not artificially created, but was the echo of popular unrest.” As always, the ability of the intelligentsia to play an independent social role was no greater than that of the peasantry. Nevertheless it can act as quite an accurate barometer of the moods and tensions developing within society.

In 1861, the very year of the Emancipation, the great Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote from exile in London in the pages of his journal Kolokol (The Bell) urging the youth of Russia to go “to the people!” The arrest of prominent publicists like Chernyshevsky (whose writings were influenced by Marx and who had a big impact on Lenin and his generation) and Dimitri Pisarev, demonstrated the impossibility of peaceful liberal reform. By the end of the decade of the 1860s, the basis of a mass revolutionary movement of populist youth had been laid.

The appalling conditions of the masses in post-reform Russia moved the best sections of the intelligentsia to anger and indignation. The arrest of the most radical of the democratic wing, Pisarev and Chernyshevsky, only served to deepen the alienation of the intellectuals and push them further to the left. While the older generation of liberals accommodated themselves to the reaction, a new breed of young radicals was emerging in the universities, immortalized in the figure of Bazarov in Turgenyev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The hallmark of this new generation was impatience with the fumbling of the liberals, whom they treated with contempt. They believed fervently in the ideas of a complete revolutionary overturn and a radical reconstruction of society from top to bottom.

Within 12 months of the Emancipation, the “reforming tsar” had moved towards reaction. There was a clamp-down on intellectuals. The universities were placed under the oppressive vigilance of the reactionary Minister of Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who imposed an educational system designed to crush independent spirits and stifle imagination and creativity. The schools were forced to teach 47 hours of Latin a week and 36 hours of Greek, with a heavy emphasis on grammar. Natural science and history were excluded from the curriculum as potentially subversive subjects—and the system of policing the mind was rigidly enforced under the baleful eye of the school inspector. The heady days of “reform” gave way to the bleak years of police surveillance and grey conformity. The move to reaction was intensified after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1863. The revolution was drowned in blood. Thousands of Poles were killed in battle; hundreds were hanged in the repression that followed. The brutal Count Muravyov personally hanged 128 Poles and transported 9,423 men and women. The total exiled to Russia was twice that number. Peter Kropotkin, the future anarchist theoretician, witnessed the sufferings of the Polish exiles in Siberia where he was stationed as a young captain of the Imperial Guard: “I saw some of [them] on the Lena, standing half naked in a shanty, around an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gate of the shanty was wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work, these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.”

But, beneath the permafrost of reaction, the seeds of a new revolutionary revival were swiftly germinating. The case of Prince Kropotkin is a striking example of how the wind blows the tops of the trees first. Born into an aristocratic family, this one-time member of the Imperial Corps of Pages was, like many of his contemporaries, affected by the terrible suffering of the masses and driven to draw revolutionary conclusions. A keen scientist, Kropotkin, vividly describes in his memoirs the political evolution of an entire generation: “But what right had I to these higher joys,” he asked himself, “when all around was nothing but misery and the struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotion must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?”

The cold cruelty towards the Poles showed the other face of the “reforming tsar”, a man who, in Kropotkin words, “merrily signed the most reactionary decrees and then afterwards became despondent about them”. The corrupt and degenerate system of autocratic rule, the dead hand of bureaucracy, the all-pervasive whiff of religious mysticism and obscurantism roused all the living forces of society to revolt. “It is bitter,” wrote the poet Nekrasov, “the bread that has been made by slaves.” The revolt against slavery spurred the revolutionary student youth to search for a way out. Echoing Herzen, their watchword became: “V Narod!” (To the people!). To these courageous and dedicated youth, the words uttered by Herzen made an indelible impression: “Go to the people… That is our place… Demonstrate… that from among you will emerge not new bureaucrats, but soldiers of the Russian people.”

‘Going to the People’

This movement of mainly upper-class youth was naive and confused, but also courageous and utterly selfless, and left behind a priceless heritage for the future. While criticizing the utopian character of their program, Lenin always paid warm tribute to the revolutionary valor of the early Narodniks. He understood that the Marxist movement in Russia was raised on the bones of these martyrs, who cheerfully gave up wealth and worldly comforts to face death, prison and exile for the sake of the fight for a better world. Theoretical confusion was only to be expected in a movement as yet in its infancy. The absence of a strong working class, the lack of any clear traditions or model from the past to light their path, the dark night of censorship which prevented them from having access to most of the writings of Marx, all this deprived the young Russian revolutionaries of the chance to understand the real nature of the processes at work in society.

To most of the youth, Marx was seen as “just an economist”, whereas Bakunin’s doctrine of “implacable destruction”, and his calls for direct action, seemed to be more in tune with the spirit of a generation tired of words and impatient for results. Pavel Axelrod, in his memoirs, recalls how the theories of Bakunin gripped the minds of the radicalized youth with its striking simplicity. The “people”, according to Bakunin, were revolutionary and socialist by instinct—going right back to the Middle Ages—as shown by peasant revolts, the Pugachov uprising, and even brigands, who were held up as a good example to follow! All that was required to ignite a universal revolt, he maintained, was for the students to go to the villages and raise the standard of revolution. Local uprisings would soon provoke a general conflagration, bringing the whole existing order crashing down.

In a striking passage, Trotsky graphically recaptures the spirit of these youthful pioneers: “Young men and women, most of them former students numbering about a thousand in all, carried socialist propaganda to all corners of the country, especially to the lower reaches of the Volga, where they sought the legacy of Pugachov and Razin. This movement, remarkable in its scope and youthful idealism, the true cradle of the Russian revolution, was distinguished—as is proper to a cradle—by extreme naiveté. The propagandists had neither a guiding organization nor a clear program; they had no conspiratorial experience. And why should they have? These young people, having broken with their families and schools, without profession, personal ties, or obligations, and without fear either of earthly or heavenly powers, seemed to themselves the living crystallization of a popular uprising. A constitution? Parliamentarianism? Political liberty? No, they would not be swerved from the path by these western decoys. What they wanted was a complete revolution, without abridgement or intermediate stages.”

In the summer of 1874, hundreds of young people from upper or middle class backgrounds went out to the villages, burning with the idea of rousing the peasantry to revolution. Pavel Axelrod, one of the future founders of Russian Marxism, recalls the radical break which these young revolutionaries had made with their class: “Whoever wished to work for the people had to give up university, renounce his privileged condition and his family, turn his back even upon science and art. They had to cut all the bonds which linked them to the highest social classes, burn their bridges behind them. In one word, they had to voluntarily forget about any possible road of retreat. The propagandist, so to speak, had to effect a complete transformation of his inner essence, so that he would feel at one with the lower strata of the people, not only ideologically, but also in his habitual everyday behavior.”

These courageous young men and women had no definite program, other than to find a road to “the people”. Dressed in old working clothes bought from second-hand stalls in markets, clutching false passports, they traveled to the villages hoping to learn a trade which would enable them to live and work undetected. The wearing of peasants’ clothes was not the theatrical gesture it might appear at first sight. Kropotkin points out that: “The gap between the peasant and the educated people is great in Russia, and contact between them is so rare that not only does the appearance in a village of a man who wears the town dress awaken general attention, but even in town, if one whose talk and dress reveals that he is not a worker is seen to go about with workers, the suspicion of the police is aroused at once.”

Unfortunately, this admirable revolutionary spirit was founded upon theories which were fundamentally unsound. The mystical idea of a “special Russian road to socialism” which could somehow leap from feudal barbarism to a classless society, skipping the phase of capitalism, was the source of an endless series of errors and tragedies. A false theory inevitably leads to a disaster in practice. The Narodniks were motivated by revolutionary voluntarism—the idea that the success of the revolution can be guaranteed by the iron will and determination of a small group of dedicated men and women. The subjective factor, of course, is decisive in human history. Karl Marx explained that men and women make their own history, but added that they do not make it outside of the context of social and economic relationships established independently of their will.

The attempts of the Narodnik theoreticians to establish a “special historical path” for Russia, differently from that of Western Europe inevitably led them down the road of philosophical idealism and a mystical view of the peasantry. The theoretical confusion of Bakunin—a reflection of the very underdeveloped and inchoate class relations in Russia—found a ready audience among the Narodniks, seeking an ideological justification for their vague revolutionary aspirations.

Standing reality on its head, Bakunin portrayed the mir—the basic unit of the tsarist regime in the village—as the enemy of the state. All that was necessary was for the revolutionaries to go to the village and rouse the “instinctively revolutionary” Russian peasants against the state and the problem would be solved, without recourse to “politics” or any particular form of party organization. The task was not to fight for democratic demands (since democracy also represented a form of state and therefore another expression of tyranny) but to overthrow the state “in general” and replace it with a voluntary federation of local communities, based on the mir, purged of its reactionary features.

The contradictory elements of this theory rapidly became evident when the Narodnik youth attempted to put it into practice. The revolutionary exhortations of the students were met with sullen suspicion or outright hostility by the peasants, who frequently handed over the newcomers to the authorities.

Zhelyabov, one of the future leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party (People’s Will), graphically described the Narodnik youth’s desperate efforts to win over the peasants “like fish beating their heads against the ice”. Despite the terrible conditions of oppression and exploitation, the Russian peasant, who believed that “the body belongs to the tsar, the soul to God and the back to the squire”, proved impervious to the revolutionary ideas of the Narodniks. The shock and disappointment of the intelligentsia is echoed in the words of a participant:

“We ourselves were too blindly assured of the imminence of the revolution to notice that the peasants had not nearly as much of the revolutionary spirit as we wanted them to have. But we did notice that they all wanted the land to be divided up among them. They expected the Emperor would give an order and the land would be divided up … most of them imagined he would have had it carried through long ago if he had not been prevented by the big landowners and the officials—the two arch-enemies of both the Emperor and the peasants.”

The naive attempt to pass for peasants frequently had its tragi-comical side, as one of the participants, Debogori-Mokrievich, recalls: “The peasants did not want to let us stay the night in their cottages: quite obviously they did not like the look of our dirty, ragged clothing. This was the last thing we expected when we first dressed up as workmen.”

Sleeping out in the open, hungry, cold and tired, their feet bleeding from long marches in cheap boots, the spirits of the Narodniks were dashed against the solid wall of peasant indifference. Gradually, inexorably, those who had not been arrested drifted back, disillusioned and exhausted, to the towns. The movement of “going to the people” was swiftly broken by a wave of arrests—more than 700 in 1874 alone. It was an expensive defeat. But the heroic and spirited speeches of defiance hurled from the dock by the arrested revolutionists served to kindle a new movement which began almost immediately.

The Narodniks swore by “the people” in every other sentence. Yet they remained completely isolated from the peasant masses they idolized. In reality, the entire movement was concentrated into the hands of the intelligentsia: “The Populists’ worship of the peasant and his commune was but the mirror image,” wrote Trotsky, “of the grandiose pretensions of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ to the role of chief, if not indeed sole, instrument of progress. The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia develops between these two poles of pride and self-abnegation—which are the short and long shadows of its social weakness.”

But this social weakness of the intelligentsia merely reflected the underdeveloped state of class relations in Russian society. The rapid development of industry and the creation of a powerful urban working class which was to be brought about by a massive influx of foreign capital in the 1890s was still the music of an apparently remote future. Thrust back upon their own resources, the revolutionary intelligentsia sought salvation in the theory of a “special Russian road to socialism”, based upon the element of common ownership which existed in the mir.

The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike.

By contrast, the first principle of every other social class is the individualism of the property owner and exploiter of labor, both big and small. Leaving aside the bourgeoisie, whose hostility to socialism is the first condition of its existence, we have the middle class, including the peasantry. The latter is the social class least able to acquire a socialist consciousness. In its upper reaches, the wealthy peasant, lawyer, doctor, parliamentarian, stand close to the bourgeoisie. However, even the poor landless peasant in Russia, although formally a rural proletarian, had a consciousness very far removed from his brothers in the cities. The one desire of the landless peasant was to possess land, i.e. to become transformed into a small proprietor. Individual terrorism and “guerrillaism” in all its multiplicity of forms, are the methods of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the peasantry, but also the students, intellectuals and lumpenproletariat. It is true that under certain conditions—particularly in the present epoch—the mass of the poor peasants can be won over to the idea of collective ownership, as we saw in Spain in 1936. But the prior condition for such a development is the revolutionary movement of the working class in the towns. In Russia, the working class came to power by mobilizing the poor peasants, not on the basis of socialist slogans, but on the basis of “land to the tillers!” This fact, in itself, shows how far the mass of Russian peasants stood from a socialist consciousness even in 1917.

To the Narodniks, lacking in a sound theoretical basis, and setting out with a confused and amorphous concept of class relations (“the people”), the Marxist argument of the leading role of the proletariat sounded like so much hair-splitting. What did the working class have to do with it? Clearly Marx and Engels had not understood the special situation in Russia! The Narodniks, in as much as they considered the role of the workers in the towns, regarded them as an aberration—as “peasants in factories”, capable of playing only the role of auxiliaries to the peasantry in the revolution—precisely the opposite to the real relationship of revolutionary class forces, as subsequent events demonstrated.

As a crowning paradox, despite all the prejudice of the Narodnik theoreticians, almost the only area where the revolutionary appeals got an echo was among the despised “town peasants” as they called the factory workers. Like the modern guerrillas, the supporters of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) adopted the policy of taking revolutionary workers out of the factories and sending them to the countryside. Plekhanov, before he became a Marxist, participated in this kind of activity and was able to see the consequences: “The factory worker who has worked in the city for several years,” he wrote, “feels ill at ease in the country and goes back to it reluctantly… Rural customs and institutions become unendurable for a person whose personality has begun evolving a little…

“These were experienced people, sincerely devoted to and profoundly imbued with Populist views. But their attempts to set themselves up in the countryside led to nothing. After roving about the villages with the intention of looking for a suitable place to settle down (at which some of them were taken to be foreigners), they shrugged their shoulders at the whole business and finished by returning to Saratov where they established contacts among the local workers. No matter how astounded we were by this alienation from the ‘people’ of its urban children, the fact was evident, and we had to abandon the idea of involving workers in a purely peasant business.”

According to the Narodnik theory, the town worker was further away from socialism than the peasant. Thus, a Narodnik organizer in charge of work amongst the workers of Odessa complained that “the men in the workshops, spoilt by urban life and unable to recognize their links with the peasants, were less open to socialist propaganda”.

Nevertheless, the Narodniks did conduct work amongst the workers and obtained important results. The initiator of this pioneer work was Nikolai Vasilevich Chaikovsky. His group established propaganda circles in the workers’ districts of Petersburg, where Kropotkin was one of his propagandists. Reality forced sections of the Narodniks to come face to face for the first time with the “worker question” which, expelled by Bakuninist theories by the front door, persistently flew back through the window. Even at this very early period, the Russian working class, despite the extreme smallness of its numbers, was beginning to set its stamp upon the revolutionary movement.

The attitude of the workers to the “young gentlemen” was instructive. The Petersburg worker I.A. Bachkin recommended to his fellow workers: “You must take the books from the students, but when they begin to teach you nonsense, you must knock them down.” It was possibly Bachkin of whom Plekhanov was thinking when he passed the remark about the unwillingness of the workers to go to the villages to work. Bachkin was arrested in September 1874 and, upon his release in 1876, he told Plekhanov that he was “ready, as before, to work for revolutionary propaganda, but only among the workers… ‘I don’t want to go into the country on any account’ he argued. ‘The peasants are sheep, they will never understand revolution’.”

While the Narodnik intelligentsia wrestled with the theoretical problems of the future revolution, the first stirrings of class consciousness were emerging in the urban centers. The emancipation of the serfs represented a collective act of violence against the peasantry in the interests of the development of capitalism in agriculture. The landlords were, in effect, “clearing the estates” for capitalism, as Lenin explained, accelerating the process of inner differentiation of the peasantry through the crystallization of a class of rich peasants (kulaks) at the top and a mass of impoverished peasants at the bottom. In order to escape the grinding poverty of village life, the poor peasants migrated in massive numbers to the towns, in search of jobs. In the period 1865-90, the number of factory workers increased by 65 per cent, with those employed in mining increasing by 106 per cent. A.G. Rashin gives the figures of the number of workers in European Russia (in 1,000s) as follows:

Year Factories and workshops Mining Total
1865 509 165 674
1890 840 340 1,180

The development of industry experienced a particularly powerful impetus during the 1870s. The population of St Petersburg grew from 668,000 in 1869 to 928,000 in 1881. Torn from their peasant backgrounds and hurled into the seething cauldron of factory life, the workers’ consciousness underwent a rapid transformation. Police reports chartered the growing discontent and audacity of the workforce: “The crude, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers,” complains one such report. “They have obviously realized that a factory is not conceivable without their labor.” Tsar Alexander read the reports and penciled in the margin: “Very bad.”

The growth of this labor unrest permitted the establishment of the first organized workers’ groups. The Southern Workers’ Union was set up by E. Zaslavsky (1844-78 ). Son of a noble but impecunious family, he went “to the people” in 1872-73, became convinced of the uselessness of this tactic and began propaganda work amongst the workers of Odessa. Out of these worker-circles, with weekly meetings and a small subscription, the Union was born. Its program started from the premise that “the workers can get their rights recognized only by means of a violent revolution capable of destroying all privileges and inequality by making work the foundation of private and public welfare”. The Union’s influence grew rapidly until it was smashed by arrests in December 1875. The leaders were sentenced to hard labor. Zaslavsky himself got ten years. His health undermined by the harsh conditions of imprisonment, he became deranged and died of tuberculosis in prison.

A more substantial development was the Northern Union of Russian Workers, set up illegally in the autumn of 1877 under the leadership of Khalturin and Obnorsky. Victor Obnorsky, son of a retired NCO, was a blacksmith, then a mechanic. While working at different factories in St Petersburg, he became involved in workers’ study circles, and had to flee to avoid arrest to Odessa, where he came into contact with Zaslavsky’s Union. He traveled abroad as a sailor, where he was influenced by the ideas of the German Social Democracy. Returning to St Petersburg, he met P.L. Lavrov and P. Axelrod, the leading lights in the Narodnik movement. Stepan Khalturin was an important figure in the revolutionary movement of the late seventies. Like Obnorsky, a blacksmith and a mechanic by trade, he began his activity in the Chaikovsky group, where he worked as a propagandist. In his series of pen portraits of Russian worker militants, Plekhanov has left an enduring picture of this working-class revolutionary:

“When his [Khalturin’s] activities were still on the right side of the law, he willingly met students and tried to make their acquaintance, getting every kind of information from them and borrowing books. He often stayed with them until midnight, but he very rarely gave his own opinions. His host would grow excited, delighted at the chance to enlighten an ignorant workman, and would speak at great length, theorizing in the most ‘popular’ way possible. Stepan would gaze carefully, looking up at the speaker. Every now and then his intelligent eyes would reflect an amiable irony. There was always an element of irony in his relations with the students… with the workers, he behaved in a very different way… he looked upon them as more solid and, so to speak, more natural revolutionaries and he looked after them like a loving nurse. He taught them, he sought books and work for them, he made peace with them when they quarreled and he scolded the guilty. His comrades loved him dearly: he knew this, and in return gave them even greater love. But I do not believe that even in his relations with them, Khalturin ever gave up his customary restraint… In the groups he spoke only rarely and unwillingly. Among the workers of Petersburg, there were people just as educated and competent as he was: there were men who had seen another world, who had lived abroad. The secret of the enormous influence of what can be called Stepan’s dictatorship lay in the tireless attention which he devoted to every single thing. Even before the meeting began, he spoke with everyone to find out the general state of mind, he considered all sides of a question, and so naturally he was the most prepared of all. He expressed the general state of mind.” Khalturin was an outstanding representative of a type: the worker-propagandist active in the circles in the first period of the Russian labor movement. Yet even he was drawn into terrorist activities in the subsequent period, organizing a spectacular attempt on the tsar’s life.


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Part 2 of 2

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‘Land and Freedom’

In the meantime, the remnants of the Narodnik movement were attempting to regroup their forces in the towns under a new banner. In 1876, Zemlya i Volya was set up by the Natansons, Alexander Mikhailov and George Plekhanov. The new underground organization was headed by a General Council with a smaller elected Executive Committee (or Administrative Centre). Subordinate to these bodies were a Peasants’ Section, a Workers’ Section, a Youth (Students’) Section and, a new development, a “Disorganization Section”, an armed wing for “protection against the arbitrary conduct of officials”. The program of Zemlya i Volya was based on a confused idea of “peasant socialism”—all land was to be transferred to the peasants and self-determination was to be granted to all parts of the Russian empire. Russia was to be run on the basis of self-governing peasant communes. However, all this was subordinate to the central objective of the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, which was to be carried out “as speedily as possible”—the extreme haste being due to the idea of preventing the undermining of the peasant commune (the Mir) by capitalist development! Thus, the real originators of “socialism in one country” were the Narodniks, who sought to deliver society from the horrors of capitalism by espousing the idea of a “special path of historical development” for Russia, based on the supposed uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its social institutions.

On 6 December 1876, an illegal demonstration of anything up to 500— mainly students—assembled on the steps of Kazan Cathedral, with cries of “land and freedom” and “long live the socialist revolution!” The demonstration was addressed by a 21-year old student called George Plekhanov, whose revolutionary appeal led to the beginning of years of exile and underground life. Born in 1855, the son of an aristocratic family from Tambov, Plekhanov, like many of his generation, cut his teeth on the writings of the great school of Russian democratic authors—Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and, above all, Chernyshevsky. While still an adolescent, he joined the Narodnik movement, participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur. Arrested several times, he always succeeded in escaping from his tsarist captors.

Following his daring speech, Plekhanov was forced to flee abroad, but his prestige was such that he was elected, in his absence, as a member of the “basic circle” of Zemlya i Volya. Returning to Russia in 1877, the future founder of Russian Marxism led a precarious underground existence. Armed with a knuckleduster and a pistol which he kept under his pillow at night, he went first to Saratov, on the lower Volga, where he was subsequently put in charge of the “worker section” of Zemlya i Volya. The young man’s first-hand experience of work with factory workers had a profound effect on his thinking, which undoubtedly helped him to break with Narodnik prejudices and find a road to Marxism.

In December 1877, an explosion in the gunpowder store at an arms factory on Vasilevsky Island killed six workers and injured many more. The workers’ funeral turned into a demonstration. Plekhanov wrote a manifesto which ended with the words: “Workers! Now is the time to understand reason. You must not expect help from anyone. And do not expect it from the gentry! The peasants have long been expecting help from the gentry, and all they have got is worse land and heavier taxes, even greater than before… Will you too, the workers in towns, put up with this for ever?”

The author got his reply far sooner than he, or anyone else, expected. The economic boom which arose from the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78 ) created the conditions for an unprecedented explosion of strikes, spearheaded by the most downtrodden and exploited section of the class, the textile workers. Not for the last time, the more oppressed and volatile textile workers moved into action far more quickly than the big battalions in the metal industries. The workers went to ask for help from “the students”, through the agency of a number of individual worker-revolutionaries.

Plekhanov, as head of the worker section of Zemlya i Volya, found himself virtually in control of the movement. Unfortunately, the Narodniks had no idea what to do with a workers’ movement which did not really enter into their scheme of the universe. In the space of two years, St Petersburg saw 26 strikes. Not until the massive strike wave of the 1890s was this to be equaled. The members of the Northern Union played a prominent part in these strikes, and, by the first months of 1879, it reached its high-water mark, with 200 organized workers and another 200 in reserve, carefully distributed in different factories. They were all linked to a central body. The workers’ circles even had a library, also carefully split up between different underground groups and widely used even by workers outside the Union. The resourceful Khalturin set up an underground print-shop. Obnorsky entered into agreements with a workers’ group in Warsaw, “the first example of friendly relations between Russian and Polish workers”, as Plekhanov observed with satisfaction.

But within months of the appearance of the first issue of its illegal journal, Rabochaya Zarya (Workers’ Dawn), the police smashed the Union’s print-shop and the bulk of its membership was swept away by a wave of arrests into hard labor, imprisonment and exile. The result of the break up of this first solid organization of the working class was catastrophic. Khalturin and others drew pessimistic conclusions and went over to terrorism. It took ten years and countless unnecessary sacrifices for the movement to get the terrorist bug out of its system.

From its very outset, the revolutionary movement in Russia was divided by the polemics between “educators” and “insurrectionists”, the two lines being broadly identified with the respective positions of Lavrov and Bakunin. The failure of the movement “to the people” brought this disagreement to the point of an open split. In the period 1874-75, there were thousands of political prisoners in Russia, youngsters who had paid the price of their defiance with the loss of their freedom. Some were later released on bail and kept under surveillance. Others were exiled to Siberia by administrative order. The rest merely rotted in gaol awaiting trial. Of those who remained active and at liberty, some decided to return to the villages, but this time as school teachers or doctors, devoting their time and energies to humble educational work and waiting for better days. But for others, the realization that Bakunin’s theory of an “instinctively revolutionary peasantry” was false meant that an entirely different road had to be found.

Zemlya i Volya was never a mass organization. A few dozen, mainly students and intellectuals in their 20s and 30s, made up its active membership. But the seeds of dissolution were present from the outset. Lavrov’s supporters looked to “open the people’s eyes” by peaceful propaganda. “We must not arouse emotion in the people, but self-awareness,” he argued. The frustrated attempts to provoke a mass movement of the peasantry by means of propaganda gave rise to a new theory whereby Bakuninism was stood upon its head. From “denying politics” and especially political organization, a section of the Narodniks effected a 180 degree turn and set up a secret, highly centralized terrorist organization—the Narodnaya Volya—designed to provoke a revolutionary movement of the masses by means of the “propaganda of the deed”.

The latest military humiliation of tsarist Russia in the Russo-Turkish War revealed anew the bankruptcy of the regime and gave fresh heart to the opposition. The leaders of Narodnaya Volya were determined to wage a war against the autocracy in a kind of terrorist single combat which would encourage “from above” the flame of revolt. A section of the youth was now burning with impatience. The words of Zhelyabov, future leader of Narodnaya Volya, sum the whole thing up: “History,” said Zhelyabov, “moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.”

“‘What about a constitution?’

“‘All to the good’.

“‘Well, what do you want—to work for a constitution or give history a push?’

“‘I’m not joking, just now we want to give history a push’.”

These four lines show up starkly the relation between terrorism and liberalism. The terrorists had no independent program of their own. They borrowed their ideas from the liberals, who leaned upon them to give emphasis to their demands.

In the autumn of 1877, nearly 200 young men and women were brought to trial for the crime of “going to the people”. They had already spent three years in gaol without trial and there were numerous cases of ill-treatment meted out to the prisoners by brutal warders and officials. For the revolutionaries the systematic ill-treatment, torture and humiliation suffered by the prisoners was the last straw. One particularly atrocious case caused widespread indignation in July 1877. When General Trepov, the notorious Petersburg police chief, had visited the Preliminary Detention Centre, a young “political” called Bogolyubov refused to stand up. He was sentenced to 100 lashes on Trepov’s orders. A decisive turning point was passed in January 1878 when a young girl by the name of Vera Zasulich fired a shot at Trepov. This action, which Zasulich had planned and executed all on her own, was intended as a reprisal for the ill-treatment of political prisoners. After the Zasulich affair, the swing towards the “propaganda of the deed” became irresistible, particularly since, against all expectations, the jury had found her not guilty.

Initially, the use of terror was conceived as a limited tactic for freeing imprisoned comrades, eliminating police spies, and for self-defense against the repressive actions of the authorities. But terrorism has a logic of its own. In a short space of time, the terrorist mania took possession of the organization. From the outset, there were doubts about the “new tactics”. In the pages of the official party journal critical voices were raised: “We must remember,” says one article, “that the liberation of the laboring masses will not be achieved by this (terrorist) path. Terrorism has nothing in common with the struggle against the foundations of the social order. Only a class can resist against a class. Therefore, the main bulk of our forces must work among the people.”

The adoption of the new tactics caused an open split in the movement, between the terrorists and the followers of Lavrov who argued in favor of a prolonged period of preparation and propaganda among the masses. In practice, the latter trend was moving away from revolutionism, advocating the politics of “small deeds” and a “little by little” gradualist approach. The right wing of Narodnism was becoming indistinguishable from liberalism, while its more radical section prepared to stake everything on the force of the bullet and the “revolutionary chemistry” of nitro-glycerin.

In the recent period, attempts have been made by the modern terrorists to distinguish themselves from their Russian forebears. The Narodnik terrorists, it is asserted, believed in individual terrorism, substituting themselves for the movement of the masses, whereas modern proponents of “armed struggle” or “urban guerrillaism” see themselves only as an armed wing of the mass struggle, whose purpose is to detonate the masses into action. Yet the supporters of Narodnaya Volya never claimed to be acting as a self-sufficient movement. Their stated objective was to initiate a mass movement, based on the peasantry, which would overthrow the state and institute socialism. Their aim was also supposed to be the “detonation” of the mass movement by giving a courageous example.

However politics has a logic of its own. All the appeals of the Narodnaya Volya in the name of the masses, merely served as a smoke-screen to reveal a deep-seated distrust in the revolutionary capacity of those same masses. The arguments advanced more than a century ago in Russia to justify terrorism have a strikingly similar ring to the arguments of “urban guerrilla” groups in more recent times: “We are in favor of the mass movement, but the state is too strong,” and so on and so forth. Thus, the terrorist Morozov affirmed:

“Observing contemporary social life in Russia the conclusion is reached that, because of the arbitrary conduct and violence of the government, no activity at all is possible on behalf of the people. Neither freedom of expression, nor freedom of the press exists to work by means of persuasion. In consequence, for every vanguard activist it is necessary, first and foremost, to put an end to the present system of government, and to struggle against it there is no other means than to do it with arms in hand. As a consequence, we will fight against it in the style of William Tell, until we reach the moment when we win free institutions under which it will be possible for us to discuss without obstacles in the press and in public meetings all the political and social questions, and decide upon them by means of the free representation of the people.”

The Narodniks were courageous, but misguided, idealists who confined their targets to notorious torturers, police-chiefs guilty of repressive acts and the like. More often than not, they subsequently gave themselves up to the police in order to use their trials as a platform for the indictment of existing society. They did not plant bombs to slaughter women and children, or even to murder ordinary soldiers. On the rare occasions that they killed individual policemen, it was to get hold of weapons. Yet, despite this, their methods were completely incorrect and counterproductive, and were roundly condemned by the Marxists.

The allegedly “modern” theories of urban guerrillaism only repeat in caricature form the old pre-Marxist ideas of the Russian terrorists. It is quite ironic that these people, who frequently lay claim to be “Marxist-Leninists”, have not the vaguest idea that Russian Marxism was born out of an implacable struggle against individual terrorism. The Russian Marxists scornfully described the terrorist as “a liberal with a bomb”. The liberal fathers spoke in the name of “the People”, but considered the latter too ignorant to be trusted with the responsible work of reforming society. Their role was to be reduced to passively casting a vote every few years and looking on while the liberals in Parliament got on with their business. The sons and daughters of the liberals had nothing but contempt for Parliament. They stood for the revolution, and, of course, “the People”. Except that the latter, in their ignorance, were unable to understand them. Therefore, they would resort to the “revolutionary chemistry” of the bomb and the revolver. But, just as before, the role of the masses was reduced to that of passive spectators. Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role. From this point of view, the role of individual terrorism is a wholly reactionary one. Thus, the policy of individual terrorism is most harmful to the cause of the masses precisely when it succeeds. The attempt to find short-cuts in politics frequently leads to disaster. What conclusions are the workers supposed to draw from a spectacularly successful act of individual terrorism? Only this: that it is possible to attain their ends without any necessity for the long and arduous preparatory work of organizing trade unions, participating in strikes and other mass actions, agitation, propaganda and education. All that would be seen as an unnecessary diversion, when all that is needed is to get hold of a bomb and a gun, and the problem is solved...

A section of the old Zemlya i Volya movement attempted to resist the trend towards terrorism, but was swept aside. An attempt to reach a compromise at the Voronezh Congress of June 1879 failed to stop the split which finally took place in October of that year with a formal agreement of both sides to dissolve the organization. The funds were divided and both sides agreed not to use the old name. The terrorist faction adopted the name of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), while the remnants of the old school “village” Narodniks took the name of the Cherny Peredel (Black Redistribution), echoing the old Narodnik idea of an agrarian revolution. It was from the latter organization, led by Plekhanov, that the first forces of Russian Marxism were to emerge.


Epilogue

Woods sees entirely too much of the targets of his own polemics in Narodnaya Volya. That short-lived organization contributed at least two elements to the future of all Russian Revolutionary movements. First, Narodnaya Volya. established the methods for surviving within the Autocracy’s police state. The survivability of a dedicated group of “professional revolutionaries”, trained in covert methods, and focused on a single task was amply demonstrated in the war that the People’s Will waged with the police. That Narodnaya Volya was isolated and later destroyed was due more to its program and tactics, and to its increasing isolation, than to its methodology. This dispute would reappear, later on, in the great schism of Russian Marxism between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Though it would be expressed in Marxist terminology (“vanguard of the proletariat”, and so on), the split was very much based on the same issues of organization and survival.

The second legacy of Narodnaya Volya was in the formal articulation of “direct” revolutionary action, which in this case meant a final abandonment of the Russian liberals who were declared to be too weak, too cowardly, too corrupt, and too bought into the autocracy to ever lead a democratic revolution. This idea, too, would reappear in the schism of Russian Marxism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, once again expressed in Marxist terminology (“dictatorship of the proletariat”, and so on). In fact, it was as much an outgrowth of the very real but sorry history of Russia in which the children were sent off to class war while the liberals cringed.

The final verdict on Narodnaya Volya was delivered by history. After the organization was crushed, the executions ended and the prisoners slowly filtered out of jail or exile, a new political party was the beneficiary. A series of groups, merging into the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1902, maintained the Narodnik “principles” of agrarian reform, and land redistribution. Oddly, the SRs maintained a “Combat Organization” (SR-CO, i.e. terrorist branch – responsible for political assassinations) until 1908 when the head of the SR-CO, Yevno Azef, was revealed to be a secret police spy. That aspect of the party’s “work” had become irrelevant in any case. By WWI, the party was the largest underground party in Russia but so quickly had the revolution moved leftward that it was, by then, the right-wing of the Russian revolutionary movement. It fell out of that movement altogether when the Socialist-Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky, became the head of government, after the revolution of February, 1917. It was this government, by then a stand-in for the failed Russian liberals of bygone days, which the Bolsheviks overthrew in October, 1917.


But, what of “Black Redistribution”? If the People’s Will had set out to revamp the tactics of the populist children’s crusade, Black Redistribution set out to rethink the thinking. In contrast to the action program of the Narodniks, Plekhanov above all others, returned to the materialist critics – Chernyshevsky and Pisarev – who had set the wheels in motion even if their ideas had little to do with the Narodnik program as it evolved. To these, were now added the ideas of Marx. In 1883 Plekhanov formed the "Emancipation of Labor" group with Vera Zasulich and Lev Deutsch. Later, they were joined by Pavel Axelrod. The objectives of the group were to develop an understanding of Marxism appropriate to Russian conditions, to connect that thinking to the previous history and experience of the Russian revolutionary movement and to reopen the “theoretical debate” that had long since lapsed.

It was not just a very modest but also a very odd group for undertaking that task:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Georgi_Plekhanov.jpg/200px-Georgi_Plekhanov.jpg
Georgi Plekhanov

-- Plekhanov, the 21 year old strike leader and jail-escape artist with a revolver under his pillow who was known for “participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur.”

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/z/pics/zasulich.jpg
Vera Zasulich

-- Zasulich who had gone to see General Trepov, now appointed Governor of St. Petersburg, only to pull out a gun and shoot him in the chest; who then calmly dropped the gun to the floor and awaited arrest; who was so moving and articulate at her trial that she was acquitted, despite her open admission of guilt, and who then fled Russia in an epic escape, with the secret police on her tail under the Tsar’s order for re-arrest, despite her acquittal.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Lev_deich.jpg
Lev Deutsch

-- Deutsch who only a year after the founding of the Emancipation of Labor group, was arrested again for “terrorist offences”, sentenced to 13 years of prison but escaped once again in seven.

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/a/pics/axelrod-pavel.gif
Pavel Axelrod

-- Axelrod, the former Bakuninist, the romanticizer of “brigands”, and the author of the personal code that demanded the “burning of all bridges”.

Why review these biographies? The answer is merely to give contrast. The Emancipation of Labor group returned essentially to where Chernyshevsky had left off, now with a Marxist elaboration on the dry materialist tracts that had begun the entire process. The idea of the recently “bookish” Plekhanov, focused exclusively on “theoretical” pursuits and writing about philosophy and economics must have initially delighted the secret police.

But the police would have been wrong. The entire spectrum of Russian revolutionaries were, by now, of a type that ate ground glass for breakfast and mashed carburetors for lunch. Almost none had escaped prison or worse and each biography included a litany of personal tragedy. These were not abstract philosophical discussions, nor silly debates about “direct democracy” that were at issue, any more than Chernyshevsky or Pisarev really wrote about literature. This was, once again, “philosophy with a purpose”.

The direct result of the “return to theory” of the Emancipation of the Labor group was the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. With this, the old Narodnik revolutionaries, armed with new theoretical weapons, handed over the reins to an even newer generation of even harder young men and women. Two of the leading lights of the new party were V.I. Ulyanov, whose brother Alexander had been a member of Narodnaya Volya, executed for an attempt on the life of Alexander III, and Y. O. Zederbaum. Ulyanov, eventually to lead the Bolsheviks, would adopt the nom du guerre, Lenin, in the style of the old Narodnaya Volya, just as Zederbaum, his closet friend, would become Martov and one day head the Mensheviks.

To this new group, Plekhanov and his companions played the role of teachers and mentors, much as Belinsky and Herzen had played their roles for a previous generation. They taught, not only theory but the skills of survival which had been so dearly bought. Yet, they themselves were not immune. The leftward drift of the revolutionary movement also opened up new fissures, much like those which they had opened up with their Narodnik past. By the time of the Russian revolution, all of those above had also drifted to the right of the Menshevik stage, and eventually fell off of it completely.

But, that is yet another story, best saved for a different day…


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So thats how they took it step-by-step. Holy fuck, I'm starting to get some of your earlier posts in this vein.

You asked me to tell you what I think..heh..I guess you were just being gracious and facetious at the same time :) Stunning, clear-eyed, brutal persecpective. Throw this together with Mike's comments on the Sicko thread and you've got political consciousness in spades

Its a goddamn war of attrition like U S Grant wouldn't fucking believe.

So thats how they took it step-by-step. Holy fuck, I'm starting to get some of your earlier posts in this vein.

You asked me to tell you what I think..heh..I guess you were just being gracious and facetious at the same time :) Stunning, clear-eyed, brutal persecpective. Throw this together with Mike's comments on the Sicko thread and you've got political consciousness in spades

Its a goddamn war of attrition like U S Grant wouldn't fucking believe.

"Pound them", said Grant.

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G.V. Plekhanov
Socialism and the Political Struggle
(1883)

This short pamphlet reviewing the events above, was published at about the same time as the creation of the Emancipation of Labor Group

http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhan ... /index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/struggle/index.htm)



Introduction

The present pamphlet may be an occasion for much misunderstanding and even dissatisfaction. People who sympathise with the trend of Zemlya i Volya and Chorny Peredel (publications in the editing of which I used to take part) may reproach me with having diverged from the theory of what is called Narodism. The supporters of other factions of our revolutionary party may be displeased with my criticism of outlooks which are dear to them. That is why I consider a short preliminary explanation necessary.

The desire to work among the people and for the people, the certitude that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” – this practical tendency of our Narodism is just as dear to me as it used to be. But its theoretical propositions seem to me, indeed, erroneous in many respects. Years of life abroad and attentive study of the social question have convinced me that the triumph of a spontaneous popular movement similar to Stepan Razin’s revolt or the Peasant Wars in Germany cannot satisfy the social and political needs of modern Russia, that the old forms of our national life carried within them many germs of their disintegration and that they cannot “develop into a higher communist form” except under the immediate influence of a strong and well-organised workers’ socialist party. For that reason I think that besides fighting absolutism the Russian revolutionaries must strive at least to work out the elements for the establishment of such a party in the future. In this creative work they will necessarily have to pass on to the basis of modern socialism, for the ideals of Zemlya i Volya do not correspond to the condition of the industrial workers. And that will be very opportune now that the theory of Russian exceptionalism is becoming synonymous with stagnation and reaction and that the progressive elements of Russian society are grouping under the banner of judicious “Occidentalism”.

I go on to another point of my explanation. Here I will first of all say in my defence that I have been concerned not with persons but with opinions, and that my personal differences with this or that socialist group do not in the least diminish my respect for all who sincerely fight for the emancipation of the people.

Moreover, the so-called terrorist movement has opened a new epoch in the development of our revolutionary party – the epoch of conscious political struggle against the government. This change in the direction of our revolutionaries’ work makes it necessary for them to reconsider all views that they inherited from the preceding period. Life demands that we attentively reconsider all our intellectual stock-in-trade when we step on to new ground, and I consider my pamphlet as a contribution which I can make to this matter of criticism which started long ago in our revolutionary literature. The reader has probably not yet forgotten the biography of Andrei Ivanovich Zhelyabov which contained a severe and frequently very correct critical appraisal of the programme and activity of the Zemlya i Volya group. It is quite possible that my attempts at criticism will be less successful, but it would hardly be fair to consider them less timely.

G.P.
Geneva.
October 25, 1883


G.V. Plekhanov
Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group
(1883)

Very short...

http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhan ... sdelg1.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm)

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The fiction that uses words like empire, world domination, socialism, fascism, tyranny, get filtered out just like the protest songs on the airwaves. It will take the fiction of realists to beat the fiction of the Wealthy Rulers.

What we see in the Thomas Friedman pundits is a display of wit without wisdom. People have a natural way of thinking displays of wit must have a nugget of wisdom. The politicians have to try to be witty because they in no way can approach wisdom which resides in the land of reality and has no place in the land of American illusion.

I say that because of the book starting it all; badmouthed for lack of wit and later praised as a continual flow of wisdom. Maybe we should be looking for wisdoms instead of displays of wit. Where we need education we get bumper stickers and slogans. Reagan's "War on Terrorism" becomes "War on Terror" and it makes no difference inside the American illusion. It is a prettier slogan. We even accept witless wit and cannot reject it first for lack of wisdom.

The post is a little long to read at one time, but so far I think it is great stuff.

Can anyone tell me what the hell hes talking about here? Or maybe which mushroom I need to lick before I can understand it?

So thats how they took it step-by-step. Holy fuck, I'm starting to get some of your earlier posts in this vein.

You asked me to tell you what I think..heh..I guess you were just being gracious and facetious at the same time :) Stunning, clear-eyed, brutal persecpective. Throw this together with Mike's comments on the Sicko thread and you've got political consciousness in spades

Its a goddamn war of attrition like U S Grant wouldn't fucking believe.

on edit – Sorry kid. I thought I could come up with a brief and clear thought here, but as I write I can see that it is going to be long and wordy as usual. If I had more time I could write a lot less. If I manage to come up with a brief clear statement, I will bold it.

Here is the key:

You know about all of that mule-headed stubbornness we run into everywhere from the supposed "political" people, whether on the boards or offline. There is a block-headed denseness that is impenetrable. Chlamor referenced a thread today where people are talking like 12 year olds. How can you talk to people like that? Criticizing the idiotic Gravel ad is not permitted? I was in junior high school the last time people talked that way. All of that crap - from the most "radical" to the Dem party loyalists and defenders - is motivated and informed by one thing and one thing only: fear of loss of privilege and status, such as they are. It is all about playing it safe and clinging to what they have - in their own personal lives. None of it has anything to do with ideology or political philosophy. I don't care if they call themselves "socialists," they will not lift a finger in resistance or step out of line in any way - they will not permit any discussion around them that could lead in that direction. They will risk nothing.

Look out, look out, look out, is what they are saying. Be very cautious and careful. Look out! Your identity will be stolen. Look out! you won't make your mortgage payment. Look out! You'll lose your health insurance. Look out! you'll get a ticket. Look out! You'll buy the wrong thing. Look out! You'll get ripped off. Look out! You'll lose your job. Look out! You won't graduate. Look out!! You will get sick. They are completely dominated by fear. Their “politics” is all about personal strategies for handling the stress that comes from living your life in total abject fear.

People who won't bow to this relentless pressure to get in line and submit are the enemy, and they would as soon advocate that people with expired driver's licenses are locked up as a gun owner, as a farmer who isn't “organic” or who “hires illegals” or a person with bad credit or a mass murderer, or a person who is “mentally ill” and refuses “treatment.” Losers!! All of them! “I am playing by the rules, and those who aren't deserve whatever consequences happen to them.”

Even talking naughty – questioning this prissy little goody two shoes bullshit – as Chlamor does, might as well be advocating mass murder. If they could push a button and eliminate Chlamor, they would. He is a naughty boy who won't play nice with the other children, so he must be scolded. And children is what they are - cowering fearful children – they fucking talk like pre-adolescents and reason at the same level. The answers to many of Chlamor's posts – scolding little outraged hissy fits – are the reaction a day care nanny would give to a child who intentionally shit on the floor.

Get where I am going? We are trying to talk about revolution, about a massive overhaul of society, to people who would not risk being a day late on a car payment. They have no sympathy for renters, for the eccentric, for the poorly educated, for single mothers, for the infirm, for the naughty little squirrels who did not properly obey the rules and who did not bury all of their little nuts safely to see them through the winter. They are living examples that you CAN be a “radical” and prosper and thrive and make your socially responsible investments. I dare you to even vaguely hint that they could be part of the problem in any way.

In their minds, playing the game – insurance, credit, investments, career advancement, status – is completely separate from politics. No connection. But insurance, credit, investments, career advancement, status defines their entire existence. Therefore, there is no connection between life and politics.

BUT there are lost of people who have already missed plenty of car payments, who know that “personal choices” is a bunch of rot, who can't get health care, who couldn't or wouldn't get on the fast track, who know there are worse things then death, who would rather booze it up than not, who know that the credit industry is a hustle and a trap. Millions. They are already radical in the way that matters. They already are at a place that the “political” people will never get – They are saying fuck the system. Throw all of the bums out! March on Washington! I hear it everyday. There are a hundred people ready to overthrow the system for every person at PI and the likes calling themselves a “radical” or a ”Leftist.”

The noose is tightening everyday. The activists are trying to tell us that it isn't. But we all know that it is. We all know that there is great danger in stepping out of line. We all know that there is no avoiding that, too. Fear is omnipresent in our lives – every waking moment, every thought, every decision. The activists are all deeply reactionary, deeply conservative. The “radical” and “Leftist” talk is a thin smearing of frosting on a big fat corporate capitalist aristocratic cake. They are fighting to the death to protect their positions, perks, and privileges as house Negroes – and their main job is to betray the field Negroes.

What is between us and what needs to be done is not theory (forgive me anax I know that we need theory, and I am counting on you for that, but I am going for momentum, not perfection. You steer and navigate, I am going to row like mad and recruit other oarsmen. People are all fearfully huddled on the shore cringing and cowering. We ain't goin' anywhere so long as that is true. ) and it is not access to the media, or the right candidate or the right organization – all of those will easily come in their time.

The barrier is fear. You can call it “clever” or “smart” to comply with the game in hundreds of ways everyday, but it is not. The game is completely rigged. You pay heavily, but not some day -you pay right now, with your soul, with your inspiration, with your creativity, with your freedom, with your sanity.

We have had 30 years now of “Leftist” and “counter-cultural” people saying “first I will become successful and secure, and then I can work for radical change. Hey don't get me wrong I agree with you about everything, but people will take you a lot more seriously once you have your degree, and before you can help other people – and I want to do that too - you first have to help yourself. Then you will be able to help other people.” We have had 30 years of people “creating alternatives.”

We are living in a fucking prison. I don't mean that as allegory or as an “interesting way of looking at things – hypothetically speaking.” The political intellectuals are the trustees – not might as well be the trustees, not sort of like trustees – they are keeping us in line, being rewarded for that, and are working hard at it all the time. They will be the first to scream for you having your privileges withdrawn by the warden the moment you step put of line – and telling the truth about this is sufficient to put you at risk. We all know that is true. We all know the subtle and not so subtle ways that things start going wrong in our lives at the hands of those with the power over us to affect us the moment we start talking “crazy” like this. And being accuse of talking “crazy” is code language for “look out! We may have to punish you if you keep it up, and whatever happens it will be your own fault. We tried to help you, but you insulted us.”

Bashing of gun nuts, losers, crazy people, people who made bad choices, the debtors, the imprisoned, druggies, immigrants, farmers, rednecks, NASCAR dads, small business people, blue collar workers - that can go on and on, but heaven forbid that you should utter one word that will cause tlc to feel even the slightest little affront to her delicate sensibilities - "why how DARE you? You brute!!! After all she has done! Why, the intolerance and hatred! The anger! I am shocked! I am outraged! You are bumming us all out and discouraging us with this talk!"

You can't play the game and overthrow the system at the same time. The system IS people playing the game. That is all that it is. The activists are all defending the game.

Chlamor knows this. Anax knows this. Newswolf knows this. After this weekend I suspect that Moore knows this. And millions and millions of everyday people know this, but they aren't the successful, beautiful, striving, think positive, self-actualizing, connected, "adjusted," "reality based," healthy ones.

You can't play the game and overthrow the system at the same time. The system IS people playing the game. That is all that it is. The activists are all defending the game.

Chlamor knows this. Anax knows this. Newswolf knows this. After this weekend I suspect that Moore knows this. And millions of people know this, but they aren't the successful, beautiful, striving, think positive, self-actualizing, connected ones.

So Mike, to connect to the theme of the thread, would you say there are similarities between bankrupt American liberals and bankrupt Russian liberals of a century and a half ago? Would you say that has tactical implications as well?

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So Mike, to connect to the theme of the thread, would you say there are similarities between bankrupt American liberals and bankrupt Russian liberals of a century and a half ago? Would you say that has tactical implications as well?

.

Great questions. While all of the details and circumstances are different, the bankrupt American liberals are playing the same political role now that the bankrupt Russian liberals did then. The workers are not to be trusted, and the liberals are superior. Options for action range from gradualism to consciousness raising to bomb throwing, but all three share the same assumption - that liberals are separate from the working class and are doing for the working class that which the working class cannot be trusted to do for itself. Of course that means that whether you are enlightening the workers, setting a courageous example for them by throwing bombs, or acting as do-gooders chipping away to improve their lot, in all cases the working class is being weakened and not strengthened.

The tactical implications are twofold. First, any tactical compromise with the liberal approach is doomed. Tactics are all that there is to liberalism. Liberals will say "yes, yes revolution, I agree, but could we be polite?" The tactics liberals recommend are not tactics - they are the liberal program. They are not methods to achieve a goal - they are the goal.

Secondly, the role of intellectuals is as intellectuals, and not as gentry. We must humbly serve our class, and not expect all people in our class to become like us nor to follow us, and just as the carpenter brings needed skills to the movement, so too the writer and speaker and thinker. While the skills of writing, thinking and speaking are needed, they do not confer upon us a superior status. Liberalism is a movement with only thinkers, writers, and speakers. The consistent failures of liberalism show us that writers, thinkers and speakers provide but one component to the advancement and triumph of ther working class.

"A genuine revolutionary party does not set itself up as a group of self-appointed saviors of the masses, but strives to give an organized and conscious expression to the movement of the workers themselves. Only the conscious self-movement of the proletariat can lead to the socialist transformation of society."

The ruling class elevates the intellectuals to a privileged status to buy them off, co-opt them, and neuter them so as to deprive the working class of its voice. The ruling class flatters the intellectuals, telling them they are special and not at all like those sweaty grunting manual laborers. When intellectuals come to think that they therefore are something special, they become liberals when they become political. The the special people, having decided that the suffering of the poor is intolerable, argue among themselves about gradualism, bombs, or education.

But notice what is possible when we shrug off the trap of liberalism and sense of specialness and superiority - now the way is open for "collective mass action: organizing trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike, agitation, propaganda and education."

...understanding how different we are in this culture.

What I learned form this is that those committed to change made huge efforts in behalf of their various theories. The use of terror by those opposed to the Tsar and the aristocracy were context bound. I don't see how that would follow in every case. But the willingness to fight, flee, return and return to the fight was amazing.

Clearly we're in a situation where all of the people are failed all of the time by those who rule in the name of the people. In the so-called digitized Western democracies we face a crisis of epic proportions. You don't like to talk about this but it's the one trend that will lead to a major collapse of trust and structures.

There is no doubt that we are headed for mega catastrophes according to the best science rendered in the hardest of times for science in this country. The Bush administration hires ersatz commissars to stand next to hghly competent scientists and yet the scientists tell the truth, at critical points. What's the truth, climate change exist; it is accelerating at a rate three times that previously known; and one of the impacts is this - we're headed for a 1 meter (3 foot) rise in sea level not by 2090 but, likely, much earlier.

Look at the images for the 1 meter rise. This will cause dislocations, chaos, and hardship never seen. Don't even talk about the 'dust bowl,' this pure chaos.

East coast
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v474/autorank/SeaLevelEastCoast.gif

Gulf Coast-Louisiana
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v474/autorank/SeaLevelLA.gif

Florida
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v474/autorank/SealevelFL.gif

Do people understand that this is headed their way? NO

How will people respond when they find out that even this humble poster knew about it far in advance of them?

What advantage will those in power try to grab with this, just as the Russian aristocracy grabbed advantage through land reform?

How will people respond?

I find this tragic in the extreme, particularly since the best science says we're past the tipping point of prevention. We can only mitigate now.

The ultimate kicker here is the tin film of pollution surrounding the globe. It actually serves the function of cooling the earth from pollution. Once we make real efforts, or if we make real efforts to curb pollution, the paradoxical effect will take place - the earth will warm for a period, accelerating all of this.

The level of betrayal by the leaders against the entire population is truly staggering. It will have an impact in every country. People will awaken to the most massive lies and distortions imaginable.

What will happen? What should happen prior to that?

This is THE event of this century, it will seem like the only event as these changes accelerate and impact incrementally.

What's the best way to develop a useful theor to accommodate this?

Truly outstanding and imprtant in terms of understanding how different we are in this culture.

We're not different at all and culture barely enters into it. All of this happened just a minute ago, just as the Civil War in America did. It wasn't time that changed but our perception of time.

http://www.gma.org/surfing/satellites/clocks.gif

Do people understand that this is headed their way? NO

The natural catastrophes are not what we should be worrying about. Trying to alarm people about them is reactionary.

I overstated that a little. Let me explain what I mean.

Our sickness is political, social, cultural and spiritual.

Many people, when warned of impending doom, think "Good! If that is what it takes to break things up and give us a chance at escaping slavery."

There are worse things than dying. There are worse things than losing everything in the material world. People are enslaved. Fuck a globe, a natural order, and environment within which they have no place, no say, no purpose, no power. That is not because of environmental factors, it is because of political factors.

See what I mean? Do we want to stop global warming because it threatens the existing social and political structure? Think about that. Is not Gore saying "be very afraid. We need to make some changes if we want to preserve our way of life."

But do we want to preserve "our" way of life? Is more fear-mongering helpful? People are already terrorized. I am very sorry that suburbanites and upscale people are now fearful as well, but I can't make them a priority or a concern. Too many other people - most people by far, so much so that we could leave the American educated prosperous elite out of consideration and still call what remains "all people" and be pretty close - have already been suffering terribly.

The unfolding global catastrophe that has inundated most of the people in the world and is destroying their lives is now lapping at the shores of white American suburbia. Tough shit. I am sorry that kissing up to, profiting from, enjoying privilege and status, and building their lives around a system that is a rapacious and evil Juggernaut of global destruction and devastation hasn't "worked out for them" - to borrow one of the smarmy little phrases that they use against us. "How's that third party idea working out?" they say, and "how's that socialism working out for you?"

Global environmental collapse? No surprise to most of the people in the world. It seems to be coming as big shocking news to a few - the activists - mostly well off, mostly privileged, mostly white, mostly American.

Global environmental collapse is a symptom.

Do people understand that this is headed their way? NO

The natural catastrophes are not what we should be worrying about. Trying to alarm people about them is reactionary.

I overstated that a little. Let me explain what I mean.

Our sickness is political, social, cultural and spiritual.

Many people, when warned of impending doom, think "Good! If that is what it takes to break things up and give us a chance at escaping slavery."

There are worse things than dying. There are worse things than losing everything in the material world. People are enslaved. Fuck a globe, a natural order, and environment within which they have no place, no say, no purpose, no power. That is not because of environmental factors, it is because of political factors.

See what I mean? Do we want to stop global warming because it threatens the existing social and political structure? Think about that. Is not Gore saying "be very afraid. We need to make some changes if we want to preserve our way of life."

But do we want to preserve "our" way of life? Is more fear-mongering helpful? People are already terrorized. I am very sorry that suburbanites and upscale people are now fearful as well, but I can't make them a priority or a concern. Too many other people - most people by far, so much so that we could leave the American educated prosperous elite out of consideration and still call what remains "all people" and be pretty close - have already been suffering terribly.

The unfolding global catastrophe that has inundated most of the people in the world and is destroying their lives is now lapping at the shores of white American suburbia. Tough shit. I am sorry that kissing up to, profiting from, enjoying privilege and status, and building their lives around a system that is a rapacious and evil Juggernaut of global destruction and devastation hasn't "worked out for them" - to borrow one of the smarmy little phrases that they use against us. "How's that third party idea working out?" they say, and "how's that socialism working out for you?"

Global environmental collapse? No surprise to most of the people in the world. It seems to be coming as big shocking news to a few - the activists - mostly well off, mostly privileged, mostly white, mostly American.

Global environmental collapse is a symptom.

You've been on one helluva roll recently Mike, its weird how I've gone months thinking I "get it" and then belatedly realize what was really being said. Huh.

The unfolding global catastrophe that has inundated most of the people in the world and is destroying their lives is now lapping at the shores of white American suburbia. Tough shit.

You've been on one helluva roll recently Mike, its weird how I've gone months thinking I "get it" and then belatedly realize what was really being said. Huh.

Yes, Bravo Mike. I was thinking it was maybe just because my you have a case of my potty-mouth contagion, but KOBH is right. You have been, umm, makin' your points purty clearly of late.

I am sorry to all for being less of a participant lately. There are several things all competing for my time, but I am all caught up on reading (minus a few older post still on the To Do list.

One short point vis the OP and Mike's point above and general illiberal rants: how ticklish it is to read on the role of liberals in the (not so) way back and to see that my inquiry as to why this history and theory stuff is important for us while also seeing how it informs and is informed by Mike's many points on the matter of liberalism today.

http://www.emich.edu/public/history/moss/

http://www.join2day.com/abc/K/kramskoy/kramskoy61.JPG


Chapter 15: NEKRASOV AND MURAVIEV THE HANGMAN

On a Saturday less than two weeks after the attempted assassination, the stoop-shouldered, goateed Nicholas Nekrasov approached the fat, bull-dog faced Count Michael Muraviev and asked if he could read him a poem. The scene was the exclusive English Club along the Neva, not far from the Winter Palace.

The previous five years had been difficult ones for Nekrasov. Due to differing ideologies and Nekrasov's contradictory personality, he had lost a number of old friends including Turgenev. Herzen was not the only one who came to think of him a hypocrite and swindler. How could he be a radical and sympathizer with the poor and at the same time ride in his carriage to the English Club and eat gourmet meals and gamble with the ministers and advisers of the Tsar? The fact that he was usually successful at cards and relieved such individuals as Alexander Abaza, a future Minister of Finance, of enormous sums of money did not seem to mitigate his guilt in the eyes of his critics.

Avdotya Panaeva was also no longer in his life. Perhaps she had hoped that after her husband's death in 1862, Nekrasov would marry her. Perhaps she grew tired of his sexual encounters with other women and his gambling. At any rate, she had moved out of the apartment they shared on the Liteiny Prospect. And two years after the death of her husband, she married someone else.

Then there were the losses by death and imprisonment. First was the death in 1861 of the young Dobrolyubov, of whom Nekrasov was very fond. For about a month in their apartment Nekrasov and Avdotya had watched this twenty-five-year-old slowly die from consumption. (See this link for a photo of the room in Nekrasov's apartment, where he often met with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.) Then there were the arrests of several of the contributors to The Contemporary, most importantly that of Chernyshevsky in 1862. When he was sentenced to Siberia for life, even the moderate Professor Soloviev was incensed at the injustice of the sentence. How could the government allow him to preach his views for a decade and then suddenly send him to Siberia even though he had apparently committed no crime?

Although Nekrasov's journal was shut down shortly before Chernyshevsky's arrest, when it appeared again the following year it was clear that Nekrasov's radical sympathies were still intact. In the March, April, and May issues he printed a novel which Chernyshevsky had written while in the Peter and Paul Fortress and which, incredibly enough, government censors permitted.

The novel was What Is to Be Done? It was not great literature, but it summarized Chernyshevsky's views, at least to the extent he could state them and still hope to get them through the censor. In it he portrayed characters he thought more appealing than the "sons" of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The novel preached enlightened, rational self-interest and radical views on love and marriage, and it hinted at the desirability of a socialist order by having its heroine establish dressmaking co-operatives. It also introduced Rakhmetov, an almost superhuman figure, a completely rational ascetic who trained himself by such feats as sleeping on a bed of nails. Chernyshevsky was confident his readers would realize that Rakhmetov was preparing himself for revolutionary activity. What Is to Be Done? soon helped to inspire a whole generation of radicals.

Nekrasov also continued writing his poetry, some of which appeared in The Contemporary and in new editions of his poems which appeared in the early sixties. At times he wrote satirical poems, critical of government policies and the behavior of society's elite, or poems expressing his own inadequacies, such as his "Knight for an Hour." But increasingly he wrote of the peasants and other poor suffering people such as Volga boat haulers and children in factories. (See this link for Repin's famous picture of.the early 1870s, the Volga Boatmen.) In 1864 his journal earned an official warning for printing his poem "The Railroad," which deplored the oppression and suffering inflicted upon the railway workers who had built the St. Petersburg-Moscow line. (See this link for an 1874 portrait of railway workers.) At times he even wrote for the literate poor. And some of his poems or parts of them became popular folk songs. Like many intellectuals, he became increasingly interested in peasant folklore and tales. Although tending to idealize the poor, he also strove to picture them as they really were: often victims, but also at times victimizers; usually suffering, but also at times light and happy.

Less than a year after the emancipation of the serfs, Nekrasov bought a fourteen-hundred-acre estate, Karabikha, near the city of Yaroslavl, and not far from where he had spent most of his boyhood years. It became his summer retreat. His brother ran the estate for him, and it contained all the natural loveliness of a typical large estate: woods, ponds, parks, a wild-orange grove, and greenhouses. A large central house with a belvedere atop and two wings, all of two stories, looked down on the lower park and woods and beyond them on the little Kotorosl River, which emptied into the great Volga. At Karabikha Nekrasov loved to hunt and swim, as well as write.

Both at Karabikha and at his apartment on the Liteiny Prospect he spent time with his new mistress, Celine Lefresne, a French actress from a St. Petersburg acting company. While not a great beauty, she was attractive, dressed well, and possessed a lively disposition. Nekrasov loved to hear the French songs she would sing to him as she accompanied herself on the piano.

The man approached by Nekrasov at the English Club on that April day in 1866 was not only one of the "hanging Muravievs," he was "the hangman." He had earned this sobriquet by hanging Poles during the Polish rebellion. Although as a youth he had belonged to one of the secret societies which helped to produce the Decembrists, he soon got over such liberal inclinations. In the early years of Alexander's reign he acted as the Minister of State Properties and was one of the chief opponents of the proposed emancipation settlement. As the Polish revolt spread to the province of Lithuania, where Polish landowners predominated, Muraviev was appointed governor-general there. He soon unleashed a reign of terror on rebellious and suspected nobles and Catholic priests, restricted the use of Polish language and culture, and readjusted the land settlements between landowners and peasants in favor of the Lithuanian peasants. In addition to hanging a few hundred Poles, he also sent many thousands more into Siberian exile. Furthermore, Muraviev's methods were soon applied in Warsaw and other parts of Poland outside of his jurisdiction and gained in 1815 as a result of the war against Napoleon. (See this link for a photo of "the Gate of Execution" of the Citadel, a major Russian fortress in northern Warsaw where Polish rebels were imprisoned and sometimes executed.)

Angered by British and French popular and diplomatic support for the rebellious Poles and seeing the rebellion as part of a centuries old conflict between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, the Russian public, led by the journalist Katkov, cheered Muraviev on. They sent him letters, dispatches, deputations, flowers, icons, and flags. He was met at trains by cheering crowds. Bells were rung in his honor. The Moscow publicist Michael Pogodin wrote: "Muraviev is a good man! He's hanging and shooting [the suspected rebels]. May God give him health!"1

Once the rebellion was firmly crushed and Muraviev's new policies enacted, the Tsar replaced him and he went into retirement. Alexander and his good friends and advisers in the capital did not care for Muraviev, even though the Tsar thought that under the circumstances Muraviev's extreme tactics were unfortunately necessary. Muraviev reciprocated the dislike of many of the Tsar's advisers. He believed they were too cosmopolitan, too influenced by European ideas.

In the relationship between Muraviev and Alexander one again sees that the Tsar was less a Russian nationalist than some of his subjects. In an age in which Bismarck in Germany and the Meiji leaders in Japan were skillfully orchestrating nationalist aspirations in order to better unite and modernize their nations, Alexander seemed little inclined to do likewise, for such a purpose. Perhaps he realized that as the ruler of a multinational empire, he could not rely on nationalism as a unifying force to the extent the rulers of more homogeneous populations could. He also distrusted any nationalist agitators, such as the editor Katkov, who might try to influence his thinking.

During the early stages of the Polish revolt, as Katkov and others beat the drums of Russian nationalism, even moderates such as Nikitenko criticized Alexander's government for being too pusillanimous and conciliatory towards the Polish rebels. Muraviev's bloodier tactics were more to the liking of an aroused Russian public.

Immediately following the attempted assassination of Alexander II, Russians once again reacted with a display of feverish emotion, only this time out of gratitude that their Tsar had not been harmed. Despite dissatisfactions over conditions and government policies in Russia, many had still refused to place major blame on the Tsar. A British memorandum of the previous year had noted that "there is, perhaps, no country where the Sovereign is held by his people less responsible for the acts of his Ministers."2 In St. Petersburg crowds rushed along the streets yelling "hurrah" and headed for Palace Square, where they waited for the Tsar to appear on a Winter Palace balcony overlooking the square. In the days which followed cities, ethnic groups, professional and workers' organizations, students, and even prisoners, poured forth telegrams and prayers of thanksgiving. Crowds on the streets and at concerts sang "God Save the Tsar." The man who supposedly had saved the Tsar's life became an instant hero. The Tsar made this capmaker, Komissarov, a noble; and his picture, along with that of the Tsar, appeared on the streets.

Accompanying the outpouring of thanksgiving was another feeling, not nearly as intense, but yet present and disturbing. Who was this Karakozov who tried to kill the Tsar? Was he a Pole? A nihilist? Part of a larger conspiracy, possibly aided by revolutionaries abroad? An investigation was obviously needed and a tough investigator to head it. The Tsar called Michael Muraviev, now nearly seventy, out of retirement.

Many conservatives, such as Muraviev and Katkov, thought that the Tsar had listened too much to some of his more liberal St. Petersburg advisers and that their liberal policies and permissiveness were partly responsible for such acts as Karakozov's. By mid April, Alexander had replaced a number of these "liberals" with more conservative-minded men. Thus, Alexander appointed a new Minister of Education, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, a new Director of the Third Division (security police), Count Peter Shuvalov, and a new St. Petersburg police chief, General Fedor Trepov. Alexander's behavior indicated, neither for the first nor the last time, that events and public opinion could strongly affect his policies and appointments.

The news of the new appointments helped to create a climate of fear among liberals and radicals in the capital. What would the "Hangman" do? Or the new police chief, Trepov, who had previously dealt severely with the Poles while holding a similar position in Warsaw? People became suspect if they seemed to lack enthusiasm when hurrahs were shouted for the Tsar or failed to remove their hats when passing a picture of Komissarov. Also suspect were women who wore no crinolines, but cut their hair short and wore dark glasses--later that year one governor ordered that such women were to be taken to police stations and given the choice of putting on crinolines or leaving his province. Those with scores to settle revenged themselves by denouncing their enemies. Arrests multiplied. So did rumors. One of the contributors to Nekrasov's journal later recalled that "all of these rumors, the constantly growing apprehension and the sleepless nights had so enervated me and brought me so near the point of complete prostration that I considered going and asking them to lock me up in the fortress."3

Amidst this reaction and fear, Nekrasov and his journal seemed destined to suffer. Despite his friendship and support for the likes of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, despite his own subversive poetry, he had up to now somehow avoided arrest. Meanwhile The Contemporary, according to conservatives, had continued to spew forth its poison. But then there was that other side of Nekrasov: he was a member of the English Club, where he ate, drank, and gambled with Tsarist ministers. He also was conniving and had displayed an ability to do whatever was necessary to keep his journal running. Perhaps he could once again avoid the seemingly inevitable.

When the governor of the English Club asked him to prepare a poem for Komissarov at a banquet in the capemaker's honor, Nekrasov agreed. On Saturday, April 9th, a week before he approached Muraviev with a poem, he stood up and recited his verse in his whispering, but husky voice. It was not his finest effort. He repeated a number of trite phrases that had already been attached to Komissarov's name in the press. Nekrasov called him "Son of the folk" and "the instrument of God."4

During the week that followed, Nekrasov heard that his poem had made a good impression on some high officials, but that his journal was nevertheless due to be shut down. He also was approached again by the governor of the English Club, who suggested he write another poem to be read at another dinner in honor of still another hero, Muraviev. Nekrasov now faced a terrible dilemma. If he said no, it would look like a protest against Muraviev and support for the would-be assassin, Karakozov. The Contemporary would then without doubt be terminated. But how could he who had exhorted the youth to "Go into the flames," "Go and perish," who had told them "You shall not die in vain: the cause is sure with your blood flowing under it,"5 how could he, this same poet, now write a poem in honor of "the Hangman"?

The dinner for Muraviev was held the following Saturday. One can imagine the members and guests consuming in hearty Russian style the usual large quantities of food and drink that were served at such clubs. After dinner, coffee was served in the gallery near the entrance to the dining room. Muraviev sat in an armchair, the center of a small group. While he had the face of a bulldog, his bloated face and body also called to mind a hippopotamus. After another versifier had approached and read Muraviev a poem in his honor, Nekrasov walked up and asked permission to recite one. Muraviev continued smoking his pipe and contemptuously indicated his approval. The short poem was a shameless glorification of "the Hangman," who was now investigating the attempted assassination. It apparently concluded with the line "spare not the guilty ones."6 Nekrasov had decided to degrade himself. His action and the reaction to it would scar him for the rest of his life.

.

Sometimes you can almost take some of the scenes you describe in Nineteenth Century Russia and apply them directly to what we are seeing today. Well in fact it would not be directly in the strictly descriptive sense but there are certainly so many comparisons as to be haunting.


By way of “Pan-Slavism”, patriotism, mysticism, anti-Westernism, religiosity, conspiracy-theory, conservatism, and personal pre-occupation, the greatest generation of Russian writers deserted the field of battle. They were, of course, archetypical of Russian liberals as a whole, the main body of whom were neither as talented nor as noble as the wielders of the pen. Liberalism had had its say and receiving a stern “no” in reply from the patriarch, that was all there was to it. Something had to give and it was Russian liberalism that “gave”.

Among other things.

I've got a few questions to throw around and shall put those up in the next few days. Thanx for this it's pretty damn interesting and useful to the present.

Sometimes you can almost take some of the scenes you describe in Nineteenth Century Russia and apply them directly to what we are seeing today. Well in fact it would not be directly in the strictly descriptive sense but there are certainly so many comparisons as to be haunting.


By way of “Pan-Slavism”, patriotism, mysticism, anti-Westernism, religiosity, conspiracy-theory, conservatism, and personal pre-occupation, the greatest generation of Russian writers deserted the field of battle. They were, of course, archetypical of Russian liberals as a whole, the main body of whom were neither as talented nor as noble as the wielders of the pen. Liberalism had had its say and receiving a stern “no” in reply from the patriarch, that was all there was to it. Something had to give and it was Russian liberalism that “gave”.

Among other things.

I've got a few questions to throw around and shall put those up in the next few days. Thanx for this it's pretty damn interesting and useful to the present.

In one way, it couldn't be more different: the autocracy, serfs, capitalism just emerging, etc. In another way, though, it is identical to our circumstances. I have a few undeveloped ideas on why that is as well.

It certainly tells the story of how movements are made through successive generations of "practice" and also how "theory" is made and remade and becomes decisive. In contrast, I see not a trace of the debates that modern "radicals" layer onto this history, much as "the silly lives of catholic saints are written over the classical works of ancient heathendom".

On a personal point, I was part of a much more recent, much less important and formal but nevertheless similar movement to "Go to the People". I relate to this stuff for that reason alone. It is not uncommon among historians to compare the Narodniks to the Freedom Riders of the 1960s, though the titanic differences might make that comparison trite.

I'd love to talk about it. I hadn't intended to but I guess I'm gonna have to write this up - a big task. I'm already unhappy with Woods. Please do shoot the shit with me on this. It will help me immensely.

.

In contrast, I see not a trace of the debates that modern "radicals" layer onto this history, much as "the silly lives of catholic saints are written over the classical works of ancient heathendom"

Will you elucidate a bit further? What debates are you referring to? And is this then to say that those doing the theorizing then had a clearer view of things than today's politically activated folk?

It almost seemed backwards to me, your statement above. My auto-pilot was thinking you meant that there is little relevant debate going on today whereas then the debates were very much of the rubber meets the road variety as opposed to the 'consumer choice' politics of the here and now (hat tip to Mike).

In contrast, I see not a trace of the debates that modern "radicals" layer onto this history, much as "the silly lives of catholic saints are written over the classical works of ancient heathendom"

Will you elucidate a bit further? What debates are you referring to? And is this then to say that those doing the theorizing then had a clearer view of things than today's politically activated folk?

It almost seemed backwards to me, your statement above. My auto-pilot was thinking you meant that there is little relevant debate going on today whereas then the debates were very much of the rubber meets the road variety as opposed to the 'consumer choice' politics of the here and now (hat tip to Mike).

Consider Woods... he throws in everything but the kitchen sink ("guerillaism", "degenerate workers state... blah, blah, blah", "Terrorists are just liberals with a bomb",....). He should know better because otherwise he writes a fine history. It gets much worse than that. People claim to see "democracy and authoritarianism", "anarchism and socialism"... all kinds of shit. In truth, the real world offers an infinite diversity which diverges 180 degrees from this sort of modern fiction. That is exactly why the history matters and why it won't help you at all if you know what it says before you read word one.

Your auto-pilot was right. I was saying that what many modern writers think the issues were and what they actually were are actually two different things (remember the bolshie/menshie thing on PI?). I also think the reasons are as you have said.

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Do people understand that this is headed their way? NO

The natural catastrophes are not what we should be worrying about. Trying to alarm people about them is reactionary.

I overstated that a little. Let me explain what I mean.

Our sickness is political, social, cultural and spiritual.

Many people, when warned of impending doom, think "Good! If that is what it takes to break things up and give us a chance at escaping slavery."

There are worse things than dying. There are worse things than losing everything in the material world. People are enslaved. Fuck a globe, a natural order, and environment within which they have no place, no say, no purpose, no power. That is not because of environmental factors, it is because of political factors.

See what I mean? Do we want to stop global warming because it threatens the existing social and political structure? Think about that. Is not Gore saying "be very afraid. We need to make some changes if we want to preserve our way of life."

But do we want to preserve "our" way of life? Is more fear-mongering helpful? People are already terrorized. I am very sorry that suburbanites and upscale people are now fearful as well, but I can't make them a priority or a concern. Too many other people - most people by far, so much so that we could leave the American educated prosperous elite out of consideration and still call what remains "all people" and be pretty close - have already been suffering terribly.

The unfolding global catastrophe that has inundated most of the people in the world and is destroying their lives is now lapping at the shores of white American suburbia. Tough shit. I am sorry that kissing up to, profiting from, enjoying privilege and status, and building their lives around a system that is a rapacious and evil Juggernaut of global destruction and devastation hasn't "worked out for them" - to borrow one of the smarmy little phrases that they use against us. "How's that third party idea working out?" they say, and "how's that socialism working out for you?"

Global environmental collapse? No surprise to most of the people in the world. It seems to be coming as big shocking news to a few - the activists - mostly well off, mostly privileged, mostly white, mostly American.

Global environmental collapse is a symptom.

Well, that's an interesting way of putting it but I'll disagree on two points.

First, I disagree that we disagree on preserving the current order. I suggested that we need to be highly vigilant about attempts to dilute and manipulate this vital and clear issue by the powers that be. It's already happening. The buy a light bulb that lasts forever campaign is one example. Of course, the bulb contains mercury and if it breaks in your house good luck because a) you probably don't know it has mercury and b) there are no instructions on how to clean it up. That's a micro version of what we're facing. The other dodge for maintenance of failed power and policies is the coverage of adaptations without covering why we're here. The Washington Post has articles about tropical plants for DC due to the impending changes. Vile isn't it. Why are the changes coming. So I'm clear that there's a power grab by the perpetrators to purloin the truth.

Second, changing the system does no good if we're all dead. There are viable scenarios where the air is simply no good to us, a vital requirement for life. There are worse things than death but a massive die off, including our children, etc., due to absurd greed and stupidity is totally unacceptable to me.

I see the wide spread awareness of this problem and the one-trick-pony response of 'management' as an inevitable opening for a sudden shift in consciousness, the type that would cast those who crated the problem in the light that they deserve - incompetents who are a danger to us both individually and collectively. With that assumption as a beginning point, there are many directions this impending crisis can take, some of them very positive.

So it's real, it's hear, get used to it. The changes will be enormous. Those maps are not speculation, they're the future. The 1 meter rise is the lowest scenario we're dealing with. This ain't no Frank Capra film, it's real and the ending is likely to be deadly, even in the best case scenario.

This is brand new territory - what will the responses of people be when the major changes come?

Clearly, we have no ideology that pushes people to awareness right now. Since these eco catastrophes are on the way (unless the mother ship returns in time;), we need to think through the impact and hope that they jolt us to a new level of community and caring.

Do people understand that this is headed their way? NO

The natural catastrophes are not what we should be worrying about. Trying to alarm people about them is reactionary.

I overstated that a little. Let me explain what I mean.

Our sickness is political, social, cultural and spiritual.

Many people, when warned of impending doom, think "Good! If that is what it takes to break things up and give us a chance at escaping slavery."

There are worse things than dying. There are worse things than losing everything in the material world. People are enslaved. Fuck a globe, a natural order, and environment within which they have no place, no say, no purpose, no power. That is not because of environmental factors, it is because of political factors.

See what I mean? Do we want to stop global warming because it threatens the existing social and political structure? Think about that. Is not Gore saying "be very afraid. We need to make some changes if we want to preserve our way of life."

But do we want to preserve "our" way of life? Is more fear-mongering helpful? People are already terrorized. I am very sorry that suburbanites and upscale people are now fearful as well, but I can't make them a priority or a concern. Too many other people - most people by far, so much so that we could leave the American educated prosperous elite out of consideration and still call what remains "all people" and be pretty close - have already been suffering terribly.

The unfolding global catastrophe that has inundated most of the people in the world and is destroying their lives is now lapping at the shores of white American suburbia. Tough shit. I am sorry that kissing up to, profiting from, enjoying privilege and status, and building their lives around a system that is a rapacious and evil Juggernaut of global destruction and devastation hasn't "worked out for them" - to borrow one of the smarmy little phrases that they use against us. "How's that third party idea working out?" they say, and "how's that socialism working out for you?"

Global environmental collapse? No surprise to most of the people in the world. It seems to be coming as big shocking news to a few - the activists - mostly well off, mostly privileged, mostly white, mostly American.

Global environmental collapse is a symptom.

Well, that's an interesting way of putting it but I'll disagree on two points.

First, I disagree that we disagree on preserving the current order. I suggested that we need to be highly vigilant about attempts to dilute and manipulate this vital and clear issue by the powers that be. It's already happening. The buy a light bulb that lasts forever campaign is one example. Of course, the bulb contains mercury and if it breaks in your house good luck because a) you probably don't know it has mercury and b) there are no instructions on how to clean it up. That's a micro version of what we're facing. The other dodge for maintenance of failed power and policies is the coverage of adaptations without covering why we're here. The Washington Post has articles about tropical plants for DC due to the impending changes. Vile isn't it. Why are the changes coming. So I'm clear that there's a power grab by the perpetrators to purloin the truth.

Second, changing the system does no good if we're all dead. There are viable scenarios where the air is simply no good to us, a vital requirement for life. There are worse things than death but a massive die off, including our children, etc., due to absurd greed and stupidity is totally unacceptable to me.

I see the wide spread awareness of this problem and the one-trick-pony response of 'management' as an inevitable opening for a sudden shift in consciousness, the type that would cast those who crated the problem in the light that they deserve - incompetents who are a danger to us both individually and collectively. With that assumption as a beginning point, there are many directions this impending crisis can take, some of them very positive.

So it's real, it's hear, get used to it. The changes will be enormous. Those maps are not speculation, they're the future. The 1 meter rise is the lowest scenario we're dealing with. This ain't no Frank Capra film, it's real and the ending is likely to be deadly, even in the best case scenario.

This is brand new territory - what will the responses of people be when the major changes come?

Clearly, we have no ideology that pushes people to awareness right now. Since these eco catastrophes are on the way (unless the mother ship returns in time;), we need to think through the impact and hope that they jolt us to a new level of community and caring.

Anaxarchos' 3 step plan to personal enlightenment:

1) Go read the thread on "You are a Slave" on PI. You can also read some additional rancid eastern-religions shit in the same place about how people deserve what they get and yadda, yadda. Notice how it is designed to derail any chance of a common set of ideas, let alone actions, by presenting a "certainty" which is known and can only be known, "personally", by those who present the innate knowledge.

2) Consider this in light of "political discussion" in America as a whole, and specifically in light of what you have written above.

3) Shaddup. Listen to your personal silence. Read some radical shit on its own terms and form your opinions at the end.

Rinse... repeat...

I personally guarentee prosperity, inner tranquility, and a small jail cell within 5 years.

.

Well, that's an interesting way of putting it but I'll disagree on two points.

First, I disagree that we disagree on preserving the current order. I suggested that we need to be highly vigilant about attempts to dilute and manipulate this vital and clear issue by the powers that be. It's already happening. The buy a light bulb that lasts forever campaign is one example. Of course, the bulb contains mercury and if it breaks in your house good luck because a) you probably don't know it has mercury and b) there are no instructions on how to clean it up. That's a micro version of what we're facing. The other dodge for maintenance of failed power and policies is the coverage of adaptations without covering why we're here. The Washington Post has articles about tropical plants for DC due to the impending changes. Vile isn't it. Why are the changes coming. So I'm clear that there's a power grab by the perpetrators to purloin the truth.

Second, changing the system does no good if we're all dead. There are viable scenarios where the air is simply no good to us, a vital requirement for life. There are worse things than death but a massive die off, including our children, etc., due to absurd greed and stupidity is totally unacceptable to me.

I see the wide spread awareness of this problem and the one-trick-pony response of 'management' as an inevitable opening for a sudden shift in consciousness, the type that would cast those who crated the problem in the light that they deserve - incompetents who are a danger to us both individually and collectively. With that assumption as a beginning point, there are many directions this impending crisis can take, some of them very positive.

So it's real, it's hear, get used to it. The changes will be enormous. Those maps are not speculation, they're the future. The 1 meter rise is the lowest scenario we're dealing with. This ain't no Frank Capra film, it's real and the ending is likely to be deadly, even in the best case scenario.

This is brand new territory - what will the responses of people be when the major changes come?

Clearly, we have no ideology that pushes people to awareness right now. Since these eco catastrophes are on the way (unless the mother ship returns in time;), we need to think through the impact and hope that they jolt us to a new level of community and caring.

I was wondering this morning why we have such a different point of view - "point of view" - the two different places from which we are each viewing the same things - as I was walking the orchard and looking at the cherry crop. We don't so much have different opinions, rather we are looking at things from a different point of view. The two points of view influence everything about the way that we look at the world and everything in it.

From the point of view of most humans, in most places, throughout all time – so overwhelmingly so that we could safely say “all” - food, including farming, hunting and gathering, and also water, were central and foundational, and all villages, settlements, tools, commerce, social organization were secondary and subservient to those. From that point of view, the catastrophe has already arrived and has been unfolding and accelerating for a while.

Even in my lifetime the city was still seen as an adjunct to the farm, and not the other way around. The city was an office and loading dock for agriculture. The story of human beings is one of living in villages and settlements organized around food, whether it was farming, or hunting and gathering. Tools, customs, politics, and commerce were all seen as secondary to and supportive of food. Today we have a new point of view that sees farms as an adjunct to cities – actually an adjunct and secondary to suburbs - and tools, customs, politics, commerce are all organized to support suburbia with food being just one among many “inputs” necessary to support suburbia.

How else do we explain any sane person seriously advocating growing crops to burn as fuel?

An all out global war is being waged, and has been for a while, against what we once thought of as “human beings” - in their cooperative and communal settlements, self-sufficient, engaged in agriculture or hunting and gathering. Driven from the land and herded into slums where they are exploitable as slave labor, the land is also cleared of humans so there are no obstacles to exploiting the resources.

Cities were once the point where crops were gathered, processed, shipped, stored. Cities were dependent on the farms, or gathering and hunting, not the other way around and that was universally understood.

We have a clash between two points of view. The world of whatever it is that is happening in suburbia, that we need to “save” - the paper-shuffling, the wheeling and dealing, the speculating, the brokering, the manipulation of play money, the “lifestyles,” the exploitation, the sprawl, the consumerism, the waste, the idea of “away” that we “throw” things to, progress, growth, development - informs and dictates one point of view. The traditional way that human beings have always lived – in self-sufficient, communal, cooperative communities- informs and dictates an oppositional point of view. Anything that “saves” the first, inevitably destroys the second (that is the whole reason for the existence of the first point of view). Destroy the first, and the second “solves” all of our “problems.” The first will self-destruct in any case.

No need to convert people, no need for a new awareness or consciousness, no need to alarm people, no need to change human nature. All of that is impossible anyway.

http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2.jpg
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2b.jpg
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2c.jpg
http://www.ebooks-library.com/images/Authors/RLTX.jpg
http://www.edinformatics.com/great_thinkers/LeoTolstoy.jpg
http://www.linguadex.com/tolstoy/album/tolstoyroad.jpg

Russian Peasants:
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/7.GR/SCMEDIA/7.%20pl.242.gif

There seems to be no copy of What is to be Done on the web either (except in Russian). Sounds like a job for this crew of pirates... arrrrrrgh.

http://www.trikinggames.com/download/Blackbeard_800x600.jpg

June 6, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Najib Manalai is an adviser to Afghanistan's minister of culture and youth affairs and a frequent commentator on the Taliban and, more broadly, militancy in Afghanistan. Manalai spoke recently with RFE/RL correspondent Muhammad Tahir. He discussed the Taliban and its subgroups, the current insurgency and its roots, and possible solutions to the ongoing violence.

RFE/RL: Who are the current Taliban?

Najib Manalai: Well, the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students -- Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan -- they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests -- foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. "The Taliban" is a composite of these components.

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/20 ... 3E3BE.html (http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/06/5ADA452B-10C1-4C09-B5B7-7C62AD23E3BE.html)

Thanks, anax.

Much to think about here, some of which has been touched on by others on this thread already.

Reading through this history has certainly clarified some things for me - not only about Russia's history but about Marxist theory itself and how it compares/contrasts with other schools of thought - this is all very good and I much appreciate it.

I have a couple thoughts/questions based on the following excerpts.

From Part I:

.

...The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike. ....

From Part II:



...Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role....

.

I guess the first question is whether or not this is a fair representation of the history and of Marxism - I've erroneously made that assumption once before about something posted here, LOL, so I ask this as a bit of a disclaimer before I go asking dumb questions..

Okay, assuming it is fair/accurate - I understand what I have read here about the peasants in Russia not being able to sort of substitute for the working class in a revolutionary socialist movement - you can't skip out on the capitalism phase and go straight to socialism for reasons that seem to make sense both in theory and in the context of this history.

The above excerpts point toward the importance specifically of large-scale manufacturing/production type of work under a capitalist system, to create the conditions that can lead to a working-class socialist movement/revolution.

Now as I apply it to the present, I feel like the cube rats need a little thought.

In the Rust Belt and the rest of the US (and I am speaking specifically about the US not because we are special but because this is where I live and work and talk to people) we have a little manufacturing left and a fair amount of manual labor, but we have this huge, weird semi-professional class of people - paper pushers, number crunchers, administrative assistants,data entry, 'support', etc, doing abstract work that certainly doesn't qualify as large-scale industrial production, yet based on low wages and thier relationship to the ruling class seem to me to be part of the working class. So, given the statement I bolded in the first excerpt above, where do these people fit?

I ask this because I see what Mike has been posting about the people he talks to in his area, in his field (or should I say 'orchard') and how they are reacting politically/socially, how he sees this consciousness developing and that what needs work is forging relationships between this part of the working class and the intellectuals (minus the liberal/establishment crap addiction). And while I agree with what he says and I get much-needed hope from what he says, I see something very different in the people around me (not the bourgie ann arbor liberals who are *thrilled* that a second Whole Foods store is being built here, btw, but the actual low-income normal working people of Ann Arbor and it's working-class sister-city, Ypsilanti).

Up north with the farms and the orchards, on farms all around and in factories where real things are made, or at least assembled, the idea that this consciousness can develop and that workers can become aware of their own strength, their power and ability to affect serious change, that all makes sense to me. Those workers know what their role is in a functioning society or community - it is a vital, fundamental role providing an essential part of life. Although many are doing their work for the benefit of the capitalist class, it is the type of work that will occur under any system.

But the cube rats? There is no strength in what they do. Fluorescent lights and repetitive tasks and bad pay and bad benefits and monotony and at the end of the day they can't even tell you what they accomplished because it is intangible. I can see power in the factory, power in the land, but not in the cube farm (my apologies to Billy Bragg).

Just some thoughts. I know on a global scale of a socialist/worker's revolution this category of workers may not be that substantial, but in my little realm they are significant.

Thanks, anax.

Much to think about here, some of which has been touched on by others on this thread already.

Reading through this history has certainly clarified some things for me - not only about Russia's history but about Marxist theory itself and how it compares/contrasts with other schools of thought - this is all very good and I much appreciate it.

I have a couple thoughts/questions based on the following excerpts.

From Part I:
[quote].

...The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike. ....

From Part II:



...Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role....

.

I guess the first question is whether or not this is a fair representation of the history and of Marxism - I've erroneously made that assumption once before about something posted here, LOL, so I ask this as a bit of a disclaimer before I go asking dumb questions..

Okay, assuming it is fair/accurate - I understand what I have read here about the peasants in Russia not being able to sort of substitute for the working class in a revolutionary socialist movement - you can't skip out on the capitalism phase and go straight to socialism for reasons that seem to make sense both in theory and in the context of this history.

The above excerpts point toward the importance specifically of large-scale manufacturing/production type of work under a capitalist system, to create the conditions that can lead to a working-class socialist movement/revolution.

Now as I apply it to the present, I feel like the cube rats need a little thought.

In the Rust Belt and the rest of the US (and I am speaking specifically about the US not because we are special but because this is where I live and work and talk to people) we have a little manufacturing left and a fair amount of manual labor, but we have this huge, weird semi-professional class of people - paper pushers, number crunchers, administrative assistants,data entry, 'support', etc, doing abstract work that certainly doesn't qualify as large-scale industrial production, yet based on low wages and thier relationship to the ruling class seem to me to be part of the working class. So, given the statement I bolded in the first excerpt above, where do these people fit?

I ask this because I see what Mike has been posting about the people he talks to in his area, in his field (or should I say 'orchard') and how they are reacting politically/socially, how he sees this consciousness developing and that what needs work is forging relationships between this part of the working class and the intellectuals (minus the liberal/establishment crap addiction). And while I agree with what he says and I get much-needed hope from what he says, I see something very different in the people around me (not the bourgie ann arbor liberals who are *thrilled* that a second Whole Foods store is being built here, btw, but the actual low-income normal working people of Ann Arbor and it's working-class sister-city, Ypsilanti).

Up north with the farms and the orchards, on farms all around and in factories where real things are made, or at least assembled, the idea that this consciousness can develop and that workers can become aware of their own strength, their power and ability to affect serious change, that all makes sense to me. Those workers know what their role is in a functioning society or community - it is a vital, fundamental role providing an essential part of life. Although many are doing their work for the benefit of the capitalist class, it is the type of work that will occur under any system.

But the cube rats? There is no strength in what they do. Fluorescent lights and repetitive tasks and bad pay and bad benefits and monotony and at the end of the day they can't even tell you what they accomplished because it is intangible. I can see power in the factory, power in the land, but not in the cube farm (my apologies to Billy Bragg).

Just some thoughts. I know on a global scale of a socialist/worker's revolution this category of workers may not be that substantial, but in my little realm they are significant.[/quote:28oax8lx]

Well MM, I'm not crazy about Woods. I was sort of ambivalent about him in the piece, as I said, and just upthread, I wrote this:

"Consider Woods... he throws in everything but the kitchen sink ("guerillaism", "degenerate workers state... blah, blah, blah", "Terrorists are just liberals with a bomb",....). He should know better because otherwise he writes a fine history. It gets much worse than that. People claim to see "democracy and authoritarianism", "anarchism and socialism"... all kinds of shit. In truth, the real world offers an infinite diversity which diverges 180 degrees from this sort of modern fiction. That is exactly why the history matters and why it won't help you at all if you know what it says before you read word one. "

Some of that criticism is apparent in the quotes you chose... which is too bad because the history tells itself. Having said that though, the points you've chosen to emphasize are pretty accurate. It's my own personal experience as well. I have never been as comfortable in my politics as when I have waded into the sea of "industrial labor"... it's what's made every factory job I have ever held tolerable and it beats "leftists" hands down.

Which brings us to your 64 thousand dollar question: what about cube rats? I don't have a definite answer. Lot's of people have thought about it and worked on it. There is no debate that almost the entirety of the segment are workers and in many cases they are subject to lower pay, lesser security, and the pettiest of industrial dictatorships. Still, that little bit of air conditioning seems to make a difference.

The issue is certainly two edged. Consider the union movement. In the 1960s and 70s, some of the most militant expressions of trade unionism came from the non-industrial parts of American labor. District 1199 (known universally as the "Noyces Union" - i.e. healthcare workers) comes to mind as do various public employee, teachers, and retail units. One of the wildest bargaining units I ever worked with was a group of town librarians, every one of whom was a born "red". In some cases, organizing such trades into industrial unions rather than as independent trades, helped a lot. It brought an immediate change of "perspective" as well as a rising militancy on both sides of the cubicle wall. But, I've seen it go the other way as well. The Teamsters tried endlessly to organize employers like J.C.Penny (the pioneers of the WalMart "strategy") and found that even if they approached them by trades, even the trades which were our natural audience, such as warehousemen, were heavily influenced by calling people "associates" and promoting the worst rats to the positions of unpaid auxiliary foremen. European experience with all this is also mixed, although they have gotten much further than we have.

If I were to guess, I would guess that part of the problem has been the changing nature of this kind of labor, with the "steno pools" of the 1950s as much more obviously "industrial" than the regional sales offices of today (although, it is anything but clear where all this will end up). Part of the problem has been a certain amount of social mobility at the other end of the cubicular ghetto (much of this may have ended). Part of the problem has been the huge regional migration of such jobs from North to South, alongside industrial labor. Part of it has been in the decline of the industrial unions just as service and office unions were getting going. Part of the problem is the lack of working class organizations and even "institutions" which would support such development of newer and isolated spheres of work. Part of the issue is in labor legislation, which in this segment is downright strategic (and may be the most important of legislative programs, totally ignored by even "left" political parties). Finally, part of the problem is in the politics of the United States and its lack of working class perspectives, such perspectives being amplified in this labor segment perhaps more than in any other. In this last regard, it's worth closing the circle with 1199. More than anything else, that union was a direct product of 1960's militancy and the Civil Rights Movement.

Put up a thread and let's talk about it. Even the bare statistics of the "cube rats" are enlightening...

http://www.dice.com/content/images/careerResources/cube_slave.jpg

Now as I apply it to the present, I feel like the cube rats need a little thought.

In the Rust Belt and the rest of the US (and I am speaking specifically about the US not because we are special but because this is where I live and work and talk to people) we have a little manufacturing left and a fair amount of manual labor, but we have this huge, weird semi-professional class of people - paper pushers, number crunchers, administrative assistants,data entry, 'support', etc, doing abstract work that certainly doesn't qualify as large-scale industrial production, yet based on low wages and thier relationship to the ruling class seem to me to be part of the working class. So, given the statement I bolded in the first excerpt above, where do these people fit?

I ask this because I see what Mike has been posting about the people he talks to in his area, in his field (or should I say 'orchard') and how they are reacting politically/socially, how he sees this consciousness developing and that what needs work is forging relationships between this part of the working class and the intellectuals (minus the liberal/establishment crap addiction). And while I agree with what he says and I get much-needed hope from what he says, I see something very different in the people around me (not the bourgie ann arbor liberals who are *thrilled* that a second Whole Foods store is being built here, btw, but the actual low-income normal working people of Ann Arbor and it's working-class sister-city, Ypsilanti).

Up north with the farms and the orchards, on farms all around and in factories where real things are made, or at least assembled, the idea that this consciousness can develop and that workers can become aware of their own strength, their power and ability to affect serious change, that all makes sense to me. Those workers know what their role is in a functioning society or community - it is a vital, fundamental role providing an essential part of life. Although many are doing their work for the benefit of the capitalist class, it is the type of work that will occur under any system.

But the cube rats? There is no strength in what they do. Fluorescent lights and repetitive tasks and bad pay and bad benefits and monotony and at the end of the day they can't even tell you what they accomplished because it is intangible. I can see power in the factory, power in the land, but not in the cube farm (my apologies to Billy Bragg).

Just some thoughts. I know on a global scale of a socialist/worker's revolution this category of workers may not be that substantial, but in my little realm they are significant.
Great point about the cube rats.

A couple of observations - as more and more women have entered the workforce and more and more people now have college degrees, and less and less real work is going on, we have all sorts of new white collar jobs that pay much worse than factory manual labor jobs did when I was in the plant 30 years ago or so. It is almost as though make-work jobs are being created, or menial and lower rung jobs are being fancied up and given superficial white collar trappings. The names of the jobs are even changed to fool people into thinking they have more prestige and importance than they actually do - "salesman" has become "executive account representative," for example. Now both mom and dad (do those actually exist anymore?) have to work to maintain the same standard of living that one income afforded 30 years ago. That picture is distorted by the absurd boom in real estate speculation and easy credit. People work for the bank, paying off the mortgage, and homes are seen as investments rather than places to live and raise a family.

I have a friend who works the drive-thru, I call him a "communications director" ;)


The names of the jobs are even changed to fool people into thinking they have more prestige and importance than they actually do - "salesman" has become "executive account representative," for example.

Another growing group like the cube rats that's gotten little consideration. I'm talking about the down-sized, off-shored, industrial workers, around here that means textiles, desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Might be where I work and spend most of my waking day but there's more and more people in this situation. Cutting grass, "landscaping" is a big, crowded field these days,what with the well off having more lawn than they can comfortably handle and the population getting older. "Good money" is seen there and competition is fierce, there're people getting in and out of it every day. You need at least a few grand to get started and given weather and season it's feast and famine, no way to keep a household up. "Car detailing" was hot until a couple years ago, as the economy slides into the gutter keeping one's ride pimped up has become a secondary concern, so that's one less option. Some try to make a living hustling at the flea market, small engine repair, anything to keep from putting in an application at Walmart. These people are invisible to labor statistics, the reserve labor force.

In similar straits are the tradesmen, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. These guys are independent only in the sense that they are free of knowledge of where their income will be coming from next month. If not doing small jobs for regular folks, for which many do not charge the going rate because they know that people can't afford it and will forego their services, then they're subbing to contractors who treat them like borrowed mules and pay them at their convience, like after that trip to Cabo.

That's a whole bunch of folks in these parts, I suppose they qualify for the term lumpen prolitaraite, but they would sure as hell resent it. They are certainly suseptable to the slick blandishments of the reactionaries.

Another growing group like the cube rats that's gotten little consideration. I'm talking about the down-sized, off-shored, industrial workers, around here that means textiles, desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Might be where I work and spend most of my waking day but there's more and more people in this situation. Cutting grass, "landscaping" is a big, crowded field these days,what with the well off having more lawn than they can comfortably handle and the population getting older. "Good money" is seen there and competition is fierce, there're people getting in and out of it every day. You need at least a few grand to get started and given weather and season it's feast and famine, no way to keep a household up. "Car detailing" was hot until a couple years ago, as the economy slides into the gutter keeping one's ride pimped up has become a secondary concern, so that's one less option. Some try to make a living hustling at the flea market, small engine repair, anything to keep from putting in an application at Walmart. These people are invisible to labor statistics, the reserve labor force.

In similar straits are the tradesmen, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. These guys are independent only in the sense that they are free of knowledge of where their income will be coming from next month. If not doing small jobs for regular folks, for which many do not charge the going rate because they know that people can't afford it and will forego their services, then they're subbing to contractors who treat them like borrowed mules and pay them at their convience, like after that trip to Cabo.

That's a whole bunch of folks in these parts, I suppose they qualify for the term lumpen prolitaraite, but they would sure as hell resent it. They are certainly suseptable to the slick blandishments of the reactionaries.

I spent a summer doing "lawn care" for some old hag because gramps (mine) was trying to get in her pants (and also her pocketbook). She was too discriminating for him -- he was fond of Mike's terminology trick. He billed himself as a medical professional. In fact he was an x-ray tech in the army once upon a time. Anyway, it really fucking sucks as work and the bitch would whine and complain about something (oh the hedges aren't even) EVERY fucking time. And remember, we were doing this for the monied-up old bag for free. In the sweltering summer heat of Florida (forget the temperature, its the humidity..even when its 100 degrees)

One thing that sucks is if you don't have power is you need a gasoline trimmer. Hate, hate, hate those, too damn heavy.

I'd rather buy a pressure washer for like $500, there's always a use for that even if its washing people's cars in some parking lot.

http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2.jpg
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2b.jpg
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biot2/tols2/tols2c.jpg
http://www.ebooks-library.com/images/Authors/RLTX.jpg
http://www.edinformatics.com/great_thinkers/LeoTolstoy.jpg
http://www.linguadex.com/tolstoy/album/tolstoyroad.jpg

Mere waste or more of a chickenshit fraud in your estimation?

Mere waste or more of a chickenshit fraud in your estimation?

It's hard to read Tolstoy and not conclude that he was a huge talent and that he loved the Russian people. In the end , as great as he was, he could not rise above the accident of his birth. It must have felt like his head was caught in a vice. I don't think he was a fraud at all... but I do think that the ones who "Burned all bridges" (and they were more than a few), were greater still.

.

The Narodniks were courageous, but misguided, idealists who confined their targets to notorious torturers, police-chiefs guilty of repressive acts and the like. More often than not, they subsequently gave themselves up to the police in order to use their trials as a platform for the indictment of existing society. They did not plant bombs to slaughter women and children, or even to murder ordinary soldiers. On the rare occasions they killed individual policemen, it was to get hold of weapons. Yet, despite this, their methods were completely incorrect and counterproductive, and were roundly condemned by the Marxists.

The allegedly “modern” theories of urban guerrillaism only repeat in caricature form the old pre-Marxist ideas of the Russian terrorists. It is quite ironic that these people, who frequently lay claim to be “Marxist-Leninists”, have not the vaguest idea that Russian Marxism was born out of an implacable struggle against individual terrorism. The Russian Marxists scornfully described the terrorist as “a liberal with a bomb”. The liberal fathers spoke in the name of “the People”, but considered the latter too ignorant to be trusted with the responsible work of reforming society. Their role was to be reduced to passively casting a vote every few years and looking on while the liberals in Parliament got on with their business. The sons and daughters of the liberals had nothing but contempt for Parliament. They stood for the revolution, and, of course, “the People”. Except that the latter, in their ignorance, were unable to understand them. Therefore, they would resort to the “revolutionary chemistry” of the bomb and the revolver. But, just as before, the role of the masses was reduced to that of passive spectators. Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role. From this point of view, the role of individual terrorism is a wholly reactionary one. Thus, the policy of individual terrorism is most harmful to the cause of the masses precisely when it succeeds.
http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part1-1.html

In “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” Trotsky had pointed out that the experience of the labour movement demonstrated how false and unscientific it was to divorce politics from Marxist sociology and the dialectical method.

You seem to consider apparently that by refusing to discuss dialectic materialism and the class nature of the Soviet state and by sticking to “concrete” questions you are acting the part of a realistic politician. This self-deception is a result of your inadequate acquaintance with the history of the past 50 years of factional struggles in the labour movement. In every principled conflict, without a single exception, the Marxists sought to face the party squarely with the fundamental problems of doctrine and program, considering that only under this condition could the “concrete” questions find their proper place and proportion.[3]

On the other hand, opportunists and revisionists of every shade avoided discussion of principles and counterposed superficial and misleading episodic appraisals of events to the revolutionary class analysis of the scientific socialists. Trotsky cited examples from the history of the German social-democracy and from the disputes of the Russian Marxists with the “Economists”, the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. The Narodnik terrorists, bomb in hand, used to argue: “Iskra [Lenin’s paper] wants to found a school of dialectic materialism while we want to overthrow tsarist autocracy — It is historical experience”, Trotsky observed with characteristic irony, “that the greatest revolution in all history was not led by the party which started out with bombs but by the party which started out with dialectic materialism.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/ ... y/ch14.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch14.htm)

I'll tell ya, in light of shit like this http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... g_id=73045 (http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=32650&mesg_id=73045)

combined with the still-to-be-explored air-conditioning effect on the working class, I have a harder and harder time seeing what was wrong with the Narodniks' desire to bomb a few deserving motherfuckers.

I see "Comrade Lenin stands, as it were, on the borderland between the old generation of Narodnik [Populist] revolutionists and the new school of Marxist revolutionists. Comrade Lenin himself took part in the student Narodnik circle, but already, even at that time, he stood with one foot in the camp of the Marxists."
http://marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/ ... n/ch01.htm (http://marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/1918/lenin/ch01.htm)

which may finally give me some incentive to get him on my reading list. For now, a little listening:
http://www.radio-rouge.org/Users/resist ... irchal.mp3 (http://www.radio-rouge.org/Users/resistancemp3/lenin_-_ian_birchal.mp3)

On the other hand, opportunists and revisionists of every shade avoided discussion of principles and counterposed superficial and misleading episodic appraisals of events to the revolutionary class analysis of the scientific socialists. Trotsky cited examples from the history of the German social-democracy and from the disputes of the Russian Marxists with the “Economists”, the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. The Narodnik terrorists, bomb in hand, used to argue: “Iskra [Lenin’s paper] wants to found a school of dialectic materialism while we want to overthrow tsarist autocracy — It is historical experience”, Trotsky observed with characteristic irony, “that the greatest revolution in all history was not led by the party which started out with bombs but by the party which started out with dialectic materialism.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/ ... y/ch14.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch14.htm)

I'll tell ya, in light of shit like this http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... g_id=73045 (http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=32650&mesg_id=73045)

combined with the still-to-be-explored air-conditioning effect on the working class, I have a harder and harder time seeing what was wrong with the Narodniks' desire to bomb a few deserving motherfuckers.

I see "Comrade Lenin stands, as it were, on the borderland between the old generation of Narodnik [Populist] revolutionists and the new school of Marxist revolutionists. Comrade Lenin himself took part in the student Narodnik circle, but already, even at that time, he stood with one foot in the camp of the Marxists."
http://marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/ ... n/ch01.htm (http://marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/1918/lenin/ch01.htm)

which may finally give me some incentive to get him on my reading list. For now, a little listening:
http://www.radio-rouge.org/Users/resist ... irchal.mp3 (http://www.radio-rouge.org/Users/resistancemp3/lenin_-_ian_birchal.mp3)

Nothing wrong with the "Narodniks' desire"... it was the actual doin' that was the problem. There is a certain conflation in what you quoted (between the "original" Narodniks and the later Peoples Will) and I have no idea what Trotsky is talking about. The key ironies in the above are not in this or that "mistake" but in the whole movement taken as a simple evolution. Read Plekhanov (and to a lesser extent, the others like Zasulich) on why they transformed themselves. The biggest criticism is that the actual physical struggle became, not a "People's War" but a spectacle to which the people were invited as spectators. Yet, some of that was unavoidable.

People's Will probably was the highest possible expression of the "secret society", but it also targeted individuals for attacks in the same way that the old Liberals had targeted them in order to influence them. The contest was uneven as well as "wrong". The destruction of the "People's Will" was only a matter of time. When it was "reborn", it was equally inevitable that it would eventually be infiltrated to the point of becoming an organ of the secret police. The romantic and nostalgic aspects of it all are also on display (not unlike the history of the IRA). Retrospectively, it is easy to argue that this idea was PB and the other proletarian but the actual distinction of these was anything but clear.

Consider "Comrade Lenin" in all this... The current story on him is that he was the "authoritarian", yadda yadda... but at the time you have him being attacked for being an anarco-adventurist who refuses to disassociate himself from the "heritage" of the "terrorists", and yet is also absolutely dedicated to writing in his newpaper and founding "a school of dialectic materialism", rather than engaging in any such "contests" himself. The Zinoviev story you produce is very typical (and forgotten). On the other hand, the generic criticism that all the Marxists wanted to do was write academic tracts also turned out to be true among a section of the Mensheviks.

What we really have here are ideas changing as circumstances change... At first, everybody (among the radicals) is in on it and later distinct class partisanship emerges. At first the revolutionary ideas (materialism first among them) matter, then they are swept up by "action", and then they return to centrality. At first the men and women of the revolution turn to "combat" merely to survive in their isolation. With the spread of revolutionary ideas among the people, the continuation of any such "combat" becomes counter-productive as well as futile. The answer to, "Waddya think?" is "When?"

As far as reading Lenin, he's a blast - he's everybody all rolled up into one... Amazing guy.

.

I started to post here what I have since decided to start as a new thread with the same title as above: "Relevant Revisionism re: Anaxarchos on Nihilists etc." I'm doing this NOT to upstage Anaxarchos (to whom in any case I apologize for the apparent intrusion) but because the more I consider it, the more I suspect my remarks might be the starting point of a new discussion on potentiality -- all the more relevant given the recent spate of ousters from Tinoire's PI.

I started to post here what I have since decided to start as a new thread with the same title as above: "Relevant Revisionism re: Anaxarchos on Nihilists etc." I'm doing this NOT to upstage Anaxarchos (to whom in any case I apologize for the apparent intrusion) but because the more I consider it, the more I suspect my remarks might be the starting point of a new discussion on potentiality -- all the more relevant given the recent spate of ousters from Tinoire's PI.

Do you remember the "Menshevik/Bolshevik" comment during your ouster, Wolf?

The Bolshies were "authoritarians" ya see, just like those bad class-war people we are purging cause we are "democratic" just like them Menshies... dontcha see? We identify with those "menshies' because they were worthless philistine dilitantes... exactly like us.

Trouble is, if they ever ran into a "Menshie", he would chew their leg off...
.

Anaxarchos wrote:


Trouble is, if they ever ran into a "Menshie", he would chew their leg off...

Likewise all the old Commies I knew, several of whom fought in Spain. (One of the great fantasies of Tinoire and her disciples seems to be that of making lap-dogs out of wolves -- perhaps the hot-tub female radical's version of making a dutifully obedient husband out of a former outlaw-biker lothario. Hence PI: "progressive ineffectuality.")

I started to post here what I have since decided to start as a new thread with the same title as above: "Relevant Revisionism re: Anaxarchos on Nihilists etc." I'm doing this NOT to upstage Anaxarchos (to whom in any case I apologize for the apparent intrusion) but because the more I consider it, the more I suspect my remarks might be the starting point of a new discussion on potentiality -- all the more relevant given the recent spate of ousters from Tinoire's PI.

Do you remember the "Menshevik/Bolshevik" comment during your ouster, Wolf?

The Bolshies were "authoritarians" ya see, just like those bad class-war people we are purging cause we are "democratic" just like them Menshies... dontcha see? We identify with those "menshies' because they were worthless philistine dilitantes... exactly like us.

Trouble is, if they ever ran into a "Menshie", he would chew their leg off...
.

Dude, tell me you *meant* to cross miltant and dilettante there..whether you did that on purpose or not we need to use it :)

Dude, tell me you *meant* to cross miltant and dilettante there..whether you did that on purpose or not we need to use it :)

Fortuitous accident...

.

KoBH wrote:


Dude, tell me you *meant* to cross miltant and dilettante there..whether you did that on purpose or not we need to use it :)

Does that mean a "milettante" is somebody who postures dramatically about activism but always manages to be elsewhere when the pepper gas starts flying?

KoBH wrote:


Dude, tell me you *meant* to cross miltant and dilettante there..whether you did that on purpose or not we need to use it :)

Does that mean a "milettante" is somebody who postures dramatically about activism but always manages to be elsewhere when the pepper gas starts flying?

That would be a yes...

"Web Activism"
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2309218/2/istockphoto_2309218_hiding_behind_laptop.jpg

KoBH wrote:


Dude, tell me you *meant* to cross miltant and dilettante there..whether you did that on purpose or not we need to use it :)

Does that mean a "milettante" is somebody who postures dramatically about activism but always manages to be elsewhere when the pepper gas starts flying?

That would be a yes...

"Web Activism"
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2309218/2/istockphoto_2309218_hiding_behind_laptop.jpg

Whacktivism

KoBH wrote:


Whacktivism

Which -- just as we have seen on PeeEye -- deteriorates all too quickly into wackotism. :twisted:

Mere waste or more of a chickenshit fraud in your estimation?

It's hard to read Tolstoy and not conclude that he was a huge talent and that he loved the Russian people. In the end , as great as he was, he could not rise above the accident of his birth. It must have felt like his head was caught in a vice. I don't think he was a fraud at all... but I do think that the ones who "Burned all bridges" (and they were more than a few), were greater still.

.

An extremely intense young man, McCandless had been captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy. He particularly admired the fact that the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. For several years he had been emulating the count's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that astonished and occasionally alarmed those who knew him well. When he took leave of James Gallien, McCandless entertained no illusions that he was trekking into Club Med; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were what he was seeking. And that is precisely what he found on the Stampede Trail, in spades.
http://outside.away.com/magazine/0193/9301fdea.html

Into the Wild (1996) by Jon Krakauer is a best-selling non-fiction book about the life and the death of Christopher McCandless. It is an expansion of Krakauer's 9,000-word article, "Death of an Innocent", which appeared in the January 1993 issue of Outside.[1] Krakauer intersperses McCandless's story with a discussion of the wilderness experiences of people such as John Muir and John Menlove Edwards, as well as some of his own adventures.

The book has been adapted into a movie of the same name directed by Sean Penn with Emile Hirsch starring as Chris McCandless. The film's U.S. release date is September 21, 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild

The book was good, but not until hearing about this movie for the first time today had I recalled the Tolstoy connection.

http://www.collider.com/uploads/imageGallery/Into_the_Wild/into_the_wild_movie_poster.jpg

That would be a yes...

"Web Activism"
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2309218/2/istockphoto_2309218_hiding_behind_laptop.jpg

Whacktivism[/quote]

Which leads us to the following question : Which is the more effective of the two ? Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

While you might argue that most of the American people know the official story of 9/11 is a fraud,is this the result of the many demonstrations,and "truth actions",or is it a result of millions of people sitting down to watch videos,and read stuff on the internet ?Randi Rhodes was saying how the Kerry tasering incident,is a very good explanation of why there is no antiwar/social change movement on campuses today. I have personally witnessed numerous incidents of police crackdown on antiwar dissent at UNM in the past few years.The campus is always crawling with police on bicycles.and there are surveillence cameras on many of the lampposts.This ain't the 60s anymore. Hell,it's not even Eastern Europe in the 80s.This is a brave new world,baby,and yesterday's tactics don't work anymore.Marching in the streets,and waiving signs are as passe as the eight-track tape.

The trouble is,we have yet to come up with any effective tactics,for this new millennium.This ought to be a number one priority for the left.

That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.And that's what the internet,and especially boards like this should be used for.

That would be a yes...

"Web Activism"
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2309218/2/istockphoto_2309218_hiding_behind_laptop.jpg

Whacktivism

Which leads us to the following question : Which is the more effective of the two ? Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

While you might argue that most of the American people know the official story of 9/11 is a fraud,is this the result of the many demonstrations,and "truth actions",or is it a result of millions of people sitting down to watch videos,and read stuff on the internet ?Randi Rhodes was saying how the Kerry tasering incident,is a very good explanation of why there is no antiwar/social change movement on campuses today. I have personally witnessed numerous incidents of police crackdown on antiwar dissent at UNM in the past few years.The campus is always crawling with police on bicycles.and there are surveillence cameras on many of the lampposts.This ain't the 60s anymore. Hell,it's not even Eastern Europe in the 80s.This is a brave new world,baby,and yesterday's tactics don't work anymore.Marching in the streets,and waiving signs are as passe as the eight-track tape.

The trouble is,we have yet to come up with any effective tactics,for this new millennium.This ought to be a number one priority for the left.

That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.And that's what the internet,and especially boards like this should be used for.

I'm with you on this but I think there are some real issues:

1. I don't think anyone on the "Left" actually understands economics, especially not in its starkest form of capital. And I'm not talking about Democrats, either. You might think otherwise since commie-types are pretty much the only ones who do speak in terms of capital and class. But do they actually get it? How many "Marxists" are nodding there head in agreement (in spite of themselves they might claim) when Alan Greenspan says Iraq was/is about oil? And yet that statement couldn't be more profoundly misleading.

I don't know if it was on here, but some made the comment "Oil companies don't care about oil. They care about profit".

To me, this fundamental failure explains alot of the End Times dross that even the "experts" who should know better fall for. Take Peak Oil -- has anybody stopped to ask the obvious question: "the earth is finite. EVERY natural resource is finite. so why do we only talk about oil in terms of peak? why not copper, rubber, timber, or any of a thousand other things?"

Now it could be that its because of all those things, only oil is running out. So..do the numbers bear that out? Ummm..no. Does a sudden spike in the price of oil from dirt cheap to insane highs mean that everyone all the sudden figured out the stuff is running out? Or does it have to do with the Iraq, which it happens to exactly coincide with?

Same story with global warming. There is alot more than "objective" facts to consider. For starters, what are the proposed solutions? Well, they seem to be cutback efforts that for all the world look and sound like a massive austerity program. For all but a privileged few, naturally. In fact, from just about any perspective the "solutions" could lead to more wide-spread immiseration than global warming projects to.

The same is true of the ever-impending collapse of the US Dollar. Probably everybody on here has heard the same spiel over and over for God knows how long..25 years? Longer? The end is always just around the corner. But the end of what? For how many? That we are even taking a worry like that seriously reflects the paucity of critical thinking emanating from the so-called Left.

Subprime mortage fallout..? Did Enron bring down the economy? The Dot Com bubble? The answer, of course, is Depends on who you ask.

On another site, someone tried to explain this all away by saying that revolutionaries following in the footsteps of Lenin didn't need traditional schooling and they certainly didn't need to learn bourgeosie economics. I agree with him to the extent that it seems that most are following that model to a T. But it also serves as little more than a (lame) rationale for why the left is full of mainly suckers, buttheads, and assholes.

Its all ideology on parade as keen insight and pointed analysis. And its all bullshit.

From a theoretic standpoint, I don't see how you are going to marginalize the Right, or the stranglehold it has on people until you exorcise some of the ideological babble on continual display within the reputed Left itself. Buncha good we can do when half of us are fretting that world might end tomorrow or the next day.


That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.

This sounds a little like telling blacks in America to secede. I'm not exactly following how that would work or what it would accomplish. The rest is undeniable though.

Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

The online "antiwar" effort has been spectacularly effective - given there isn't really a "war." I don't know but a few people in the real world who ever mention Iraq. And then it's generally to bitch about how much money they're blowing on it. Yet, the lib/left online community would have you believe it's "the most important issue!" as they continue to generate blogs, editorials, forums, anti-Republican slogans and donations.

Once you see it for what it is, it's quite ridiculous.

On another site, someone tried to explain this all away by saying that revolutionaries following in the footsteps of Lenin didn't need traditional schooling and they certainly didn't need to learn bourgeosie economics.

Not only is this incomparable bullshit but it would also mean that Lenin was not a "Leninist"...
.

On another site, someone tried to explain this all away by saying that revolutionaries following in the footsteps of Lenin didn't need traditional schooling and they certainly didn't need to learn bourgeosie economics.

Not only is this incomparable bullshit but it would also mean that Lenin was not a "Leninist"...
.

Just to be fair to the dickhead, he was mainly talking about classroom education at the university level. I don't think he was against all book-learnin'..

Anyway, its a more common perception than I would've imagined.

[quote]That would be a yes...

"Web Activism"
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2309218/2/istockphoto_2309218_hiding_behind_laptop.jpg

Whacktivism

Which leads us to the following question : Which is the more effective of the two ? Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

While you might argue that most of the American people know the official story of 9/11 is a fraud,is this the result of the many demonstrations,and "truth actions",or is it a result of millions of people sitting down to watch videos,and read stuff on the internet ?Randi Rhodes was saying how the Kerry tasering incident,is a very good explanation of why there is no antiwar/social change movement on campuses today. I have personally witnessed numerous incidents of police crackdown on antiwar dissent at UNM in the past few years.The campus is always crawling with police on bicycles.and there are surveillence cameras on many of the lampposts.This ain't the 60s anymore. Hell,it's not even Eastern Europe in the 80s.This is a brave new world,baby,and yesterday's tactics don't work anymore.Marching in the streets,and waiving signs are as passe as the eight-track tape.

The trouble is,we have yet to come up with any effective tactics,for this new millennium.This ought to be a number one priority for the left.

That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.And that's what the internet,and especially boards like this should be used for.

I'm with you on this but I think there are some real issues:

1. I don't think anyone on the "Left" actually understands economics, especially not in its starkest form of capital. And I'm not talking about Democrats, either. You might think otherwise since commie-types are pretty much the only ones who do speak in terms of capital and class. But do they actually get it? How many "Marxists" are nodding there head in agreement (in spite of themselves they might claim) when Alan Greenspan says Iraq was/is about oil? And yet that statement couldn't be more profoundly misleading.

I don't know if it was on here, but some made the comment "Oil companies don't care about oil. They care about profit".

To me, this fundamental failure explains alot of the End Times dross that even the "experts" who should know better fall for. Take Peak Oil -- has anybody stopped to ask the obvious question: "the earth is finite. EVERY natural resource is finite. so why do we only talk about oil in terms of peak? why not copper, rubber, timber, or any of a thousand other things?"

Now it could be that its because of all those things, only oil is running out. So..do the numbers bear that out? Ummm..no. Does a sudden spike in the price of oil from dirt cheap to insane highs mean that everyone all the sudden figured out the stuff is running out? Or does it have to do with the Iraq, which it happens to exactly coincide with?

Same story with global warming. There is alot more than "objective" facts to consider. For starters, what are the proposed solutions? Well, they seem to be cutback efforts that for all the world look and sound like a massive austerity program. For all but a privileged few, naturally. In fact, from just about any perspective the "solutions" could lead to more wide-spread immiseration than global warming projects to.

The same is true of the ever-impending collapse of the US Dollar. Probably everybody on here has heard the same spiel over and over for God knows how long..25 years? Longer? The end is always just around the corner. But the end of what? For how many? That we are even taking a worry like that seriously reflects the paucity of critical thinking emanating from the so-called Left.

Subprime mortage fallout..? Did Enron bring down the economy? The Dot Com bubble? The answer, of course, is Depends on who you ask.

On another site, someone tried to explain this all away by saying that revolutionaries following in the footsteps of Lenin didn't need traditional schooling and they certainly didn't need to learn bourgeosie economics. I agree with him to the extent that it seems that most are following that model to a T. But it also serves as little more than a (lame) rationale for why the left is full of mainly suckers, buttheads, and assholes.

Its all ideology on parade as keen insight and pointed analysis. And its all bullshit.

From a theoretic standpoint, I don't see how you are going to marginalize the Right, or the stranglehold it has on people until you exorcise some of the ideological babble on continual display within the reputed Left itself. Buncha good we can do when half of us are fretting that world might end tomorrow or the next day.


That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.

This sounds a little like telling blacks in America to secede. I'm not exactly following how that would work or what it would accomplish. The rest is undeniable though.[/quote:li935abu]

Very Nihilists of you, no accepted wisdom. I cannot say for certain that any of those popular bugaboos are for true, conspiracy(mundane or tin foil) or societal conditioned science could mean that any or all are a scam, or maybe the science is good and the conclusions or proposed solutions are determined by the elite. I lean towards the latter. In any case all of the proposed solutions are within the realm of acceptability for the uber class and the hell with the rest of us whereas all might be at least significantly affected by ending the capitalists system. So it's misdirection, piecemeal approachs with embedded agendas when a political solution is required.

Of all of the bad-bads which flood our mail there is only one of which I am certain, loss of biodiversity. A lifetime of observation including a fair bit of travel make me certain that plants and critters are neither as numerous nor as various as in the past. This may not be of paramount concern from a strictly humanists view, perhaps I am nothing but sentimental, but I cannot help but believe that such loss is wrong and to humankinds detriment. In any case, ya don't bring a pocket knife to a gun fight. Let's get this show on the road.

There seems to be no copy of What is to be Done on the web either (except in Russian). Sounds like a job for this crew of pirates... arrrrrrgh.

http://www.trikinggames.com/download/Blackbeard_800x600.jpg

Anarchy is the ultimate goal,and should be the ultimate goal of all enlightened people.But not anarchy that has any tolerance for corporate crony capitalism.Anarchocapitalism only leads to a "libertarian paradise" run by the likes of KBR,and Blackwater.

Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

The online "antiwar" effort has been spectacularly effective - given there isn't really a "war." I don't know but a few people in the real world who ever mention Iraq. And then it's generally to bitch about how much money they're blowing on it. Yet, the lib/left online community would have you believe it's "the most important issue!" as they continue to generate blogs, editorials, forums, anti-Republican slogans and donations.

Once you see it for what it is, it's quite ridiculous.So you're saying that since more people are more concerned with who won on "America's Next top Model",than can tell you who al-Maliki is,that there is no war going on.Perception is reality,and all that extetential bullshit. No war in the real world?So it's all a sort of online fantasy game ?


Well http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/85/gomer_shazam.jpg then those 4000 Americans,and million and a half Iraqis aren't dead after all.They're just in hiding somewhere,with all those people who were on them empty robot planes that crashed into the twin towers.Who knows,maybe the gubmint spirited them all off to the dark side of the moon,in order to populate the secret cities they've been building for the past fifty years.

Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

The online "antiwar" effort has been spectacularly effective - given there isn't really a "war." I don't know but a few people in the real world who ever mention Iraq. And then it's generally to bitch about how much money they're blowing on it. Yet, the lib/left online community would have you believe it's "the most important issue!" as they continue to generate blogs, editorials, forums, anti-Republican slogans and donations.

Once you see it for what it is, it's quite ridiculous.So you're saying that since more people are more concerned with who won on "America's Next top Model",than can tell you who al-Maliki is,that there is no war going on.Perception is reality,and all that extetential bullshit. No war in the real world?So it's all a sort of online fantasy game ?


Well http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/85/gomer_shazam.jpg then those 4000 Americans,and million and a half Iraqis aren't dead after all.They're just in hiding somewhere,with all those people who were on them empty robot planes that crashed into the twin towers.Who knows,maybe the gubmint spirited them all off to the dark side of the moon,in order to populate the secret cities they've been building for the past fifty years.

Thats not it, though. Was there a war going on under Clinton with Oil For Food? If the answer is "de facto yes" then the question becomes where were all the antiwar protesters? Surely a change in semantics (it wasn't technically a "war" like it is now) can't have that pronounced an effect? (ie lotsa tough typing keyboard kommando protestors now, very few then)

The point isn't that there is NO war in the real world, but that war is all there is. Including right here and now. So protesting Iraq or screaming to Save Darfur is a sort of myopia that is too oblivious to even be charitably termed 'myopia' at all. If any of these protestors were serious, they would have alot more substance to their program than simply wanting the troops out of Iraq. They don't and the reason is transparently obvious. Thats why no one cares what they say or bothers to listen to them and why they are completely irrelevent.

Its not existentialism unless you intend that to mean "recognizing that our very existence is at stake".

So you're saying that since more people are more concerned with who won on "America's Next top Model",than can tell you who al-Maliki is,that there is no war going on.Perception is reality,and all that extetential bullshit. No war in the real world?So it's all a sort of online fantasy game ?

Well then those 4000 Americans,and million and a half Iraqis aren't dead after all.They're just in hiding somewhere,with all those people who were on them empty robot planes that crashed into the twin towers.Who knows,maybe the gubmint spirited them all off to the dark side of the moon,in order to populate the secret cities they've been building for the past fifty years.

There is no war. "We are at war" is propaganda to whip up public support.

The United States is not at war. There is no enemy. There is no opposing army.

It is all a ruse.

So you're saying that since more people are more concerned with who won on "America's Next top Model",than can tell you who al-Maliki is,that there is no war going on.Perception is reality,and all that extetential bullshit. No war in the real world?So it's all a sort of online fantasy game ?

Well http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/85/gomer_shazam.jpg then those 4000 Americans,and million and a half Iraqis aren't dead after all.They're just in hiding somewhere,with all those people who were on them empty robot planes that crashed into the twin towers.Who knows,maybe the gubmint spirited them all off to the dark side of the moon,in order to populate the secret cities they've been building for the past fifty years.

Uh, no I didn't say that. The US is occupying Iraq. Occupying, not at war with. It'd be more correct to say it's a matter of "perception" that drives today's antiwar movement.

And Kid is right, war is essentially everywhere.



The point isn't that there is NO war in the real world, but that war is all there is. Including right here and now. So protesting Iraq or screaming to Save Darfur is a sort of myopia that is too oblivious to even be charitably termed 'myopia' at all. If any of these protestors were serious, they would have alot more substance to their program than simply wanting the troops out of Iraq. They don't and the reason is transparently obvious. Thats why no one cares what they say or bothers to listen to them and why they are completely irrelevent.

Yep.

There seems to be no copy of What is to be Done on the web either (except in Russian). Sounds like a job for this crew of pirates... arrrrrrgh.

Anarchy is the ultimate goal,and should be the ultimate goal of all enlightened people.But not anarchy that has any tolerance for corporate crony capitalism.Anarchocapitalism only leads to a "libertarian paradise" run by the likes of KBR,and Blackwater.
Sorry... I only meant piracy in the modern copyright-piracy sense.

As far as "anarchy" goes, I'm the local authoritarian.

Boo.
.

Which leads us to the following question : Which is the more effective of the two ? Most of the activism,in recent years has been eaten up by Iraq.Has this been a success ? Has there been any results ? Is it time to get off the streets,in regards to Iraq,and concentrate our efforts elsewhere.Five years of antiwar protests have only gotten us a Congress of corporate-owned quislings to the right.

The various organizations involved in anti-war activity have been amazingly successful, especially since their cause is built on illusion. They have managed to strengthen their own organizations and the positions of their leaders - the true goals - by creating a feel good upper middle class cause that is completely divorced from class struggle, not to mention reality. There is built-in stability in that, and the ongoing success and survival of the organizations absolutely demands that nothing changes.


While you might argue that most of the American people know the official story of 9/11 is a fraud,is this the result of the many demonstrations,and "truth actions",or is it a result of millions of people sitting down to watch videos,and read stuff on the internet ?

The truth movement works against the public's understanding of events. The general public is disillusioned with the administration in spite of the truth movement.


Randi Rhodes was saying how the Kerry tasering incident,is a very good explanation of why there is no antiwar/social change movement on campuses today.

That is backwards, in my opinion. The taser incident does not explain why there is no movement - except in the minds of a relatively small number of people - the lack of a movement explains the taser incident. Those few who think that tasers is what is stopping the movement merely reveal their own cowardice and lack of commitment. They are saying that if only the state didn't have power and a willingness to use it, that then a movement would be easier. What sort of movement would that be? A strawberry social? A Green party meeting?


I have personally witnessed numerous incidents of police crackdown on antiwar dissent at UNM in the past few years.The campus is always crawling with police on bicycles.and there are surveillence cameras on many of the lampposts.This ain't the 60s anymore. Hell,it's not even Eastern Europe in the 80s.This is a brave new world,baby,and yesterday's tactics don't work anymore.Marching in the streets,and waiving signs are as passe as the eight-track tape.

That may be true and is just as well. People who would resist provided that it was socially acceptable or in fashion are not of much use in any case. You cannot really blame the people, though. They have been brainwashed by liberalism for 30 plus years that activism is a fun feel-good hobby activity, and that fun and games is all it takes to "change the world" la ti da.


The trouble is,we have yet to come up with any effective tactics,for this new millennium.This ought to be a number one priority for the left.

I don't think the problem is how to implement the program, or how to get the message out. I think the problem is that there is no program and there is no message that are worth a hill of beans.


That and finding a way to marginalize the right.Because unless we convince enough people on the left,to secede into our own country/entity, we will just continue down the same path.

That is what people have been doing for the last 30 years. Gathering together with like-minded people and writing of the blue collar working class makes for a nice social club, but very bad politics.


It's high time we realize the right,both conservatives,neoliberals,and libertarians,are indeed our enemy.We don't build bridges,coalitions,or look for common ground.It is time,to retrench,and plan new tactics,because the ones we have are worse than useless.

That is a recipe for disaster. We are being led down a path of ever diminishing relevancy and power with that "like minded people" and "no compromise" mechanism of steering us. Again, the tactics are not the problem, the direction is the problem. Progressive Independent is a great example of this - more and more fine tuning of the identity of who "we" are, based on a bunch of meaningless drivel, and calls for more purity and more antagonism toward those who are not perfectly "like minded." We are being steered into a dead end by that. The idea that Progressive Independent is somehow more the right direction than DU which is more the right direction than the Democratic party is all an illusion.

Meanwhile, millions are organizing and marching, resisting and fighting, and that is completely ignored by the "like-minded" activists, and the general public is far to the Left and more radical than Progressive Independent, the Green party, Code Pink, the Truth Movement and almost all of the liberal activist groups.

The frustration that people experience with liberalism is because it requires one to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time - wanting "change" and resisting "change." The more serious you are about change at Progressive Independent, for example, the more resistance you will feel. You can't go in two directions at the same time. So they cast about for various personal enlightenment doctrines in an attempt to reconcile the contradiction. That allows them to fool themselves into thinking that they are for change - "the only way to change the world is to change yourself" so if they are changing themselves, than they think they are changing the world. But why is there never any change? one might still ask. Well, the explanation you will be given for that is because of all of the un-enlightened numbskulls out there who are not "like minded." All that can presumably be done with them is to try to convert them to be "like-minded."

So we perfect ourselves and retreat and gather together only with the most like-minded of the like-minded, and attack all of those who are not like-minded. Only that way are we able to convince ourselves that we are for change, while at the same time fighting like tigers against change.

Very Nihilists of you, no accepted wisdom.

Congratulations bp. That is the first proper usage of the term, "Nihilist", in America in over a century.

As attractive as the views of the kid below may be, he ain't one...

http://loop.smorgasblog.com/archives/mohawk.JPG

Thats not it, though. Was there a war going on under Clinton with Oil For Food? If the answer is "de facto yes" then the question becomes where were all the antiwar protesters? Surely a change in semantics (it wasn't technically a "war" like it is now) can't have that pronounced an effect? (ie lotsa tough typing keyboard kommando protestors now, very few then)

The point isn't that there is NO war in the real world, but that war is all there is. Including right here and now. So protesting Iraq or screaming to Save Darfur is a sort of myopia that is too oblivious to even be charitably termed 'myopia' at all. If any of these protestors were serious, they would have alot more substance to their program than simply wanting the troops out of Iraq. They don't and the reason is transparently obvious. Thats why no one cares what they say or bothers to listen to them and why they are completely irrelevent.

Its not existentialism unless you intend that to mean "recognizing that our very existence is at stake".
iAs long as there is an empire the size of the US,and one with a military as big as the one it has,it will always be at war with someone in order to justify its existence as an empire,and to keep its military complex going.If there are no enemies we will have to create them.

This is something both wings of the US Corporate Party are equally guilty of.

The same thing is true,for China.These are the two nations that pose the greatest threat to humanity as a whole,and China,by and large,is a US corporate/state creation.

I see the big picture.That's why I am an anarchist.I realize there will be no peace in the world,so long as there are borders,nation-states,and corporations who gobble up resources like Pac-Man.I would have thought humanity,or a goodly per centage of it,would have evolved to this point by now.Wars,like corporate greed, are just a symptom of an underlying disease,one that we may never see addressed in our lifetimes. And no,concentrating on one narrow issue like Iraq isn't going to solve anything.Clinton 41 and Clinton 44 are both right wing warmongers.I think most of the left now realizes this,on one level or another,even those like Randi Rhodes,who say they will support her,just to elect Democrats.Chris Wallace nailed Hillary this morning,when he compared her to Reagan.I have been calling her a right-winger all along over at PI.Now I hear Mike Malloy doing it.The Clintons only fool the dumbest elements of the right into thinking they are "liburals".Nobody else is buying into their charade,But she has so much corporate,so much establishment backing,she is going to win.She will be our margaret Thatcher,our Golda Mier,and that's not a good thing.

The problem is,we need a new tactic,and a new movement for societal change,and we need to use forums like this,as a means to formulate new stratagies.

Thats not it, though. Was there a war going on under Clinton with Oil For Food? If the answer is "de facto yes" then the question becomes where were all the antiwar protesters? Surely a change in semantics (it wasn't technically a "war" like it is now) can't have that pronounced an effect? (ie lotsa tough typing keyboard kommando protestors now, very few then)

The point isn't that there is NO war in the real world, but that war is all there is. Including right here and now. So protesting Iraq or screaming to Save Darfur is a sort of myopia that is too oblivious to even be charitably termed 'myopia' at all. If any of these protestors were serious, they would have alot more substance to their program than simply wanting the troops out of Iraq. They don't and the reason is transparently obvious. Thats why no one cares what they say or bothers to listen to them and why they are completely irrelevent.

Its not existentialism unless you intend that to mean "recognizing that our very existence is at stake".
iAs long as there is an empire the size of the US,and one with a military as big as the one it has,it will always be at war with someone in order to justify its existence as an empire,and to keep its military complex going.If there are no enemies we will have to create them.

This is something both wings of the US Corporate Party are equally guilty of.

The same thing is true,for China.These are the two nations that pose the greatest threat to humanity as a whole,and China,by and large,is a US corporate/state creation.

I see the big picture.That's why I am an anarchist.I realize there will be no peace in the world,so long as there are borders,nation-states,and corporations who gobble up resources like Pac-Man.I would have thought humanity,or a goodly per centage of it,would have evolved to this point by now.Wars,like corporate greed, are just a symptom of an underlying disease,one that we may never see addressed in our lifetimes. And no,concentrating on one narrow issue like Iraq isn't going to solve anything.Clinton 41 and Clinton 44 are both right wing warmongers.I think most of the left now realizes this,on one level or another,even those like Randi Rhodes,who say they will support her,just to elect Democrats.Chris Wallace nailed Hillary this morning,when he compared her to Reagan.I have been calling her a right-winger all along over at PI.Now I hear Mike Malloy doing it.The Clintons only fool the dumbest elements of the right into thinking they are "liburals".Nobody else is buying into their charade,But she has so much corporate,so much establishment backing,she is going to win.She will be our margaret Thatcher,our Golda Mier,and that's not a good thing.

The problem is,we need a new tactic,and a new movement for societal change,and we need to use forums like this,as a means to formulate new stratagies.

Hmmm..I'm pretty sure we're getting signals crossed bc we're using "war" to simultaneously mean two different things -- military conflict and class struggle. And on top of that, Mike is jumping in to point out that even "military conflict" is problematic and misleading.

I don't really agree with you about China -- 800 million rural peasants is the most pressing, dangerous issue in the world today?

I read an article that predicts Tancredo will be a surprise factor, although things are so controlled this time around that might be less likely. About Tancredo -- he talks about Unions and the working class and says hes against big corps, and hes a Republican. How can he lose? (half joke, half serious)

Very Nihilists of you, no accepted wisdom.

Congratulations bp. That is the first proper usage of the term, "Nihilist", in America in over a century.

As attractive as the views of the kid below may be, he ain't one...

http://loop.smorgasblog.com/archives/mohawk.JPG

Thanks, ya ol' commie, that comes of me reading on Bakunin. :D

Hmmm..I'm pretty sure we're getting signals crossed bc we're using "war" to simultaneously mean two different things -- military conflict and class struggle. And on top of that, Mike is jumping in to point out that even "military conflict" is problematic and misleading.

I don't really agree with you about China -- 800 million rural peasants is the most pressing, dangerous issue in the world today?

I read an article that predicts Tancredo will be a surprise factor, although things are so controlled this time around that might be less likely. About Tancredo -- he talks about Unions and the working class and says hes against big corps, and hes a Republican. How can he lose? (half joke, half serious)China wants to challenge the US as the next big military power.That's why.

BTW,your average kid with the rainbow colored mohawk,spray painting circle As,has never read Bakunin.I have. :mrgreen:

Hmmm..I'm pretty sure we're getting signals crossed bc we're using "war" to simultaneously mean two different things -- military conflict and class struggle. And on top of that, Mike is jumping in to point out that even "military conflict" is problematic and misleading.

I don't really agree with you about China -- 800 million rural peasants is the most pressing, dangerous issue in the world today?

I read an article that predicts Tancredo will be a surprise factor, although things are so controlled this time around that might be less likely. About Tancredo -- he talks about Unions and the working class and says hes against big corps, and hes a Republican. How can he lose? (half joke, half serious)China wants to challenge the US as the next big military power.That's why.

Well, my idea is to take all the hyper-speculative, Tom Clancy intrigue stuff and set it aside and instead look at how things actually are *right now*. Maybe that's naive but from this perspective, even when you consider historical precedent as a means of hedging on future likelihoods, you couldn't possibly come to the conclusion that China is the greatest threat to ending capitalism or even the greatest threat to forwarding socialist ideas.

Even if you narrow it down to the (putative) Chinese ruling class only, its a tough sell.

Maybe if you consider one big military power overtaking another to be a "great threat" you could arrive at that particular conclusion.

China wants to challenge the US as the next big military power.That's why.

How do you know what China "wants"?

Why, assuming for a moment you're right, does it matter?

Do you think coninued American ascendancy is an issue people on the left should advocate?

Personally, I think the world's people would be a lot better off if the terrorist states of America and Israel were wiped off the map, to use a favorite right wing imperialist propaganda phrase in service to our next fake war, but then I am a liitle fired up having just watched Iran's eminently more sane, reasonable, intelligent and legitimate president than our own giving his now famous interview to 60 Minutes...

http://www.geocities.com/daveclarkecb/Graphs/USvsWorld2002.jpg

China ain't no military threat.

The figures in above chart are not quite accurate. Take that US monolith and double it's size and your gettin' there.

If one wants to go blow by blow on spending and places of occupation comparing China and America it would be quite easy.

Carry on then...

The figures in above chart are not quite accurate.

What's represented on the y-axis?

The figures in above chart are not quite accurate.

What's represented on the y-axis?

Cash is on that axis... Sorry, took awile.
.

http://www.geocities.com/daveclarkecb/Graphs/USvsWorld2002.jpg

China ain't no military threat.

The figures in above chart are not quite accurate. Take that US monolith and double it's size and your gettin' there.

If one wants to go blow by blow on spending and places of occupation comparing China and America it would be quite easy.

Carry on then...

Don't conflate military expenditures with military effectiveness. The US military budget is a black hole of every sort of vice. Even having the greatest military machine in history, the US taxpayer is getting a very bad return for the dollar(if that's the sort of thing you want). Just as the Russians could build a handful of T34/85's for every PzkfMkVg(Panther) that the Germans built the Chinese can or soon will be able to build a scad of good enough fighters for every first line fighter that the US can produce. Air superiority being decisive in conventional warfare, they will be able to challenge the US whenever it suits them.

kick

Kick to Copy...